Page 30 of Freaks
The man, Richard, gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Psshhaaw. That place?Haunted. As. Fuck.” He hefted his considerable, bushy eye brows up toward his hairline. “Told you not to buy it. Told you I wan’t gon’ live in it. Might as well sell it again, you brat.”
The very last thing I expected to be doing at this end of the car ride we’d just taken was laughing, but I couldn’t help it. Fix? A brat? If anyone else had called him that, they’d have been nursing a broken jaw. Fix just scowled at the old man, and then he scowled at me for good measure.
“I done told you plain and simple I wan’t gon’ retire. I looked after this house since I was twenty-nine years old, an’ I’m gon’ look after it ’til I’m dead. That’s all there is to it.”
“Great,” Fix replied. “So you’re gonna die here and makethisplace haunted.”
Richard turned around, hobbling a little, and went back inside the house, crooking a bent finger behind him over his shoulder, clearly expecting us to follow. “Damn straight, I am. I’m gon’ haunt the shit outtayou, boy. ’Sides, I wouldn’t be the first shade to walk these halls.”
Fix loosed a weary sigh. “If this place is haunted, then what’s the big deal about the old Fallbrook villa?
Richard made an angry sound at the back of his throat. “Iknowthese ghosts. I don’t know none o’ they ghosts. I am eighty-nine years old. I shouldn’t have to be learnin’ no new ghosts. Have you forgotten all your damn manners, boy, or are you working up to an introduction?”
Richard’s gaze flittered pointedly to me.
“Richard, this is my friend Sera. Sera, this is Richard Montrose Jnr.”
“The third,” the old man emphasized, holding up three gnarled fingers for me to see. His hand then swooped down and snatched hold of mine, lifting it up to his face. He didn’t kiss the back of my hand. I thought he was about to, but he didn’t. He bowed his head in a show of deference and dipped a little arthritically at the knees, then he turned a broad smile on me, his skin creasing at the corners of his eyes.
“You are averypretty woman, Sera,” he informed me. “I am honored to make your esteemed acquaintance.”
I sought out Fix’s attention, unsure what to do.
“Don’t be asking him no questions with those fancy eyes o’ yours. That boy knows nothin,’” Richard chided. “You come on inside with Old Richard. You both look frightful, and I got a nice bottle of whiskey I been thinkin’ ’bout openin.’”
******
The interior of the house was much like the outside: sumptuous, grand and breathtakingly beautiful. For starters, the foyer was larger than my entire apartment back in Seattle. The polished floors were old fashioned parquet, but the woodwork looked brand new, as if it had just been laid yesterday. People didn’t make this kind of flooring anymore, though. It was a lost art, replaced by quick and easy solutions like the polished cement in Fix’s penthouse.
An imposing staircase arced around in a circle up to the first floor, at the foot of which a stunning grand piano sat with the fallboard open, as if it someone had been playing it moments ago and had only just stepped away. Antique sideboards, bookshelves, and sleek mahogany cabinets. Vases filled with sprays of colorful flowers, and cut crystal decanters resting on silver service trays. Massive, heavily gilded frames, and stately oil paintings. Everything inside the house screamed of money, decadence and luxury, but that wasn’t what I noticed first. The atmosphere was nothing like I would have expected it to be—austere and stiff. There was a worn quality to the place that made it feel lived in: the slightly worn pathway on the narrow rug that ran from the foyer into what looked like a formal sitting room; the stack of papers balanced behind a gold cast figurine of a slender woman holding a baby in her arms; the tasseled lamp on by the entranceway that looked like it belonged in a great-grandmother’s parlor; the large umbrella propped up against the wall, half fallen open where the fastener hadn’t been closed around it after its last use.
Strangely, despite the cost of such a residence, its contents weren’t wrapped in cotton wool and preserved like museum pieces. This was a home. It felt like a place that might have been a sanctuary to a happy family once upon a time.
Fix was watching me as I took everything in. He stood like a statue in the foyer, hands still stuffed into his pockets, his demeanor calm and still, but I could tell there was a tempest of emotion roiling under his unruffled façade. He most certainlywasruffled.
“You want ice in your whiskey, Lady Sera?” Richard called from the sitting room.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Fix. He was at war with himself, but why? What was troubling him so badly that he looked like he was going to turn on his heel and march right back down those stairs again? I had absolutely no idea what was going on in his head. “No. Thank you.”
When Richard came back, he handed me a tumbler containing a healthy pour of amber liquid. Fix was given the same. “Since youarehere, Richard, Monica’s in the car outside. She’s asleep. Can you make sure she gets to bed, please? Her usual room will be just fine.”
So, Monica had been here before. She had a usual room. I didn’t know why I found that surprising; the two of them had been through a lot together—Monica’s attack and subsequent recovery, Fix leaving the church, Monica leaving the church, not to mention their burgeoning assassin-for-hire business. “Sera and I are going upstairs. We’ll see you in the morning.”
Richard gave him a mock salute, winked at me, then trundled outside, presumably to show Monica to bed. Fix took me by the hand and started to lead me up the wide, carpeted staircase.
“I’m assuming you’re too tired for the nickel tour,” he said stiffly.
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “But maybe tomorrow…?”
“Yes. Tomorrow.” There was a frosty edge to his tone that I found less than heartening. What the hell was wrong with him?
At the top of the stairs, a broad hallway stretched to the left and right; Fix turned to the right and led me after him. After passing a number of closed doors, he stopped at the second door from the end and opened it. The room inside was nothing like his bedroom at the penthouse. Where that room was fairly sterile and spare, this room was overflowing with stuff. Baseball gear. A basketball, wedged between a row of books on a wall-mounted shelf. CDs and DVDs. A lovely brass telescope beneath the window, the lens pointed up toward the sky. This was the room he had grown up in, and, while all signs of his adolescence was gone, I could easily imagine the walls covered in posters of sports cars and woman in bikinis leaning over motorcycles as if they knew how to ride them.
Then again, maybe the original Father Marcosa hadn’t allowed such suggestive images on the walls of his home.
Fix dropped my hand and raised the tumbler to his lips, taking a sip as his eyes traveled around the room, as if seeing everything for the first time. “Maybe we’d be better off in one of the other rooms,” he said.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
