Page 35 of Giving Up The Ghost
I nodded. “Positive.”
Julian sighed, reaching over to pat my arm and lace our fingers together. “We went into Avesdale yesterday for Price’s funeral.”
I listened with faint annoyance as Ezra and Julian told me aboutabout Julian’s call with Heinrich. “That rat bastard,” I muttered. “He’s been hiding that from me. From us!”
“Because he’s afraid,” Julian said.
“When we got back here and I saw you on the floor,” Ezra murmured, “I thought maybe whoever had killed the others had gotten to you, too.”
“Shit. Ez, I’m so sorry. I?—”
“You didn’t know,” he said on a heavy exhale. “But now we do. And Julian and I… Well, we decided we need to look into the deaths. And Charlotte.”
A tiny part of me sprang to defend her. “Surely you don’t think she’s had anything to do with them!”
“No,” Julian assured me. “But we do think she’s acting strangely. She’s up to something and, well…”
“I need to do some more digging around but last night I found some weird stuff online, on the immigration databases She and Nadine have been back and forth to England about a dozen times in the past two years. There are records of their entry and departure at Heathrow, through customs, and in two cases via the ferry. But this most recent visit, she and Nadine arrived but Nadine has never left.”
“So?” I drawled. “She’s off visiting friends or something,” I offered, though even as I spoke, I remembered Charlotte’s words the other day.She had to work. “Or she’s working?”
Ezra tapped his fingers against the tabletop, regarding me solemnly. “Oscar, I need to know, right now, what you’ll do if it turns out Charlotte is lying to you. Maybe trying to use you or somehow benefit from your wealth and all of this is a scam.”
I’d scream. I’d cry like an infant. I’d be ashamed and want to die a little. “I don’t know,” I said evenly. “Let’s hope I don’t have to find out.”
* * *
The day was a whirlwind.I found myself wanting to pop into some old haunts, to show Julian places I loved, places Ezra and I had frequented and felt welcomed and at home. But we had priorities—Julian and Ezra had their list of names, names I recognized from people I’d interacted with, making the entire thing feel somewhat surreal. I’d been around death my entire life, in a sense, but very few people I’d known personally who had died. This past year had been hell on those numbers, I thought as Ezra maneuvered through traffic, finding a place to leave the car that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg for the day. Lucky for us (Julian, more than Ezra and I), the stops weren’t terribly far apart. Two had worked out of the same shop, one had a flat near that same shop, and the other two had been cousins, their only surviving relative just a mile or so more down the road from the flat.
She had been unwilling to speak with us but only after she realized we weren’t there to offer her a payout for her story about the tragic deaths of her “psychic aunties.”
“I blame theThe Sun,” Ezra muttered once we tromped down the steps from that last stop. “Setting a bad precedent, offering money for stories.”
“How much money would they pay for some unknown woman to tell the story of her unknown cousins dying of similar slip and falls down stairs?” Julian mused, leaning more heavily on his cane than he would usually allow us to see.
“Not a lot. But some people don’t care,” I muttered.
“Let’s stop somewhere and go over this shit,” Ezra suggested, waggling his phone where he’d tapped out notes from our visits. “I’m dying for a cuppa and a piss.”
“Charming as ever,” Julian muttered.
Glancing up and down the road, I sighed. I knew we weren’t far from the house, and not visiting didn’t feel like an option. We were so close…
“Hey,” I said quietly, interrupting their spat. “Ezra.”
He glanced at me, then in the direction I was pointing, down the way towards the intersection where he’d have to turn to get to the townhouse. He nodded once and then, after a brief pause, asked, “Are you sure? It’s been a while.”
“I’m sure.”
* * *
My hands shookas I worked my old key into the lock, unchanged since before I was born. “When I was little, Grandfather had wanted to put some electronic lock on the thing,” I murmured as I wiggled the key to and fro, an old rhythm that I’d never forgotten, jiggling the sticky lock into submission. “Grandmere declared it tacky, and he threw up his hands at the whole thing. Ah!” The lock gave way with a loud click and, with the briefest of hesitations, I pushed the door open.
The slightly musty scent of an unaired house hit me first, then it was overwhelmed by old wood, dried lavender and mint, ancient wool rugs, and the faintest tinge of orange wax. Decades of coffee and tea and toast were there, ghosts of breakfasts past still caught in the drapery and wall hangings.
A twisting vine of Grandfather’s pipe smoke chased it all, my eyes burning with tears as I kept my back to Ezra and Julian. “Well. Come in, then. Let’s have a look around.”
Ezra knew the place nearly as well as me, but he trotted along with us as I pointed out rooms to Julian. Upstairs, the soft footfalls of servants long past and relatives who wouldn’t know me from Adam moved back and forth. Cold spots familiar as the back of my hand lingered, shuddering when we passed through them.
