Fable: An Unfortunate Fairy Tale Book 3 (4 page)

“
Yoo-hoo, Sara! Over here,
darling!” Terry waved out the window, ignorant of the rain and the
funeral that she’d missed. “I’ve got the most glorious news, so
grab your things and hop in.”

Sara spoke a few words to the Wongs, grabbed
her purse out of the back of their car, and opened the front
passenger seat of the Happy Maids van. Mina followed suit and
opened the sliding door, only to be greeted by all their stuff. Or
at least, all the boxes of donated stuff that had been piling up in
Terry’s living room.

“
What’s going on, Terry?
Why did you move all of our stuff here?” Sara asked, confused. It
was obvious from her expression that she was a little offended that
they were being packed up and shuffled off without any
notice.

“
Shhh, I can’t ruin the
surprise yet. Just wait.” Terry waved her hands in the air and
directed Mina to a small flip-down seat with an old belt buckle.
She strapped herself in and felt odd when she looked at the boxes
of food, clothing, and essentials piled in the back. It was like
they were being uprooted all over again. She secretly wondered if
Terry was going to slow down around a curve and push them out of
the moving vehicle.

Mina turned to look out the window one last
time as they passed Charlie’s grave and saw a lone figure standing
by the grave, wearing a top hat. Mina craned her neck to see if she
recognized the man, who seemed ignorant of the coming downpour. The
man with the tall hat was more interested in watching them leave
than paying his respects to her brother.

“
Mom.” Mina pointed out
the windows, which were quickly fogging up with heat. “Do you know
that person?”

Sara looked in the direction she was
pointing, but by the time she turned in her seat, the man in the
rain was gone. “What person, Mina?”

“
Never mind. I just
thought I saw someone.”

Mina settled into her seat and listened to
the quiet chatter of the women in front and the annoying screeching
noise the old windshield wipers made against the glass. Bored, Mina
began to inspect the boxes of their belongings and gasped when she
saw a bag with her bathroom items in it and the Grimoire thrown in
haphazardly on top. She was angry. How dare this woman touch her
things and treat them with so much disrespect? Mina didn’t care
what stupid surprise Terry had in store. Touching a teenager’s
things was just not done. It was taboo. A giant no-no.

Terry drove away from the cemetery and onto
a turnpike. It felt surreal—they had just buried her brother, and
now they were getting evicted by their friend and moving on the
same day. Mina began to wonder if her mother’s boss had a screw
loose. After what felt like hours, but in reality probably was only
few minutes, they exited the highway and turned down an unfamiliar
road. They must be on the edge of town, because she didn’t
recognize the terrain.

They turned onto a barely discernable road,
and Mina wondered if Terry knew where they were going. Finally,
they followed the road up a winding hill, and Mina could see a
house in the distance, a very large house. Terry pulled up to a
wrought-iron gate, and stepped down from the van and fished around
in her wallet for a key card. Finally, she found the right one and
slipped it into the security box, and the gate opened. She slid
back into the car and drove up the driveway, lined with weeping
willows, and stopped in front of a large estate.

It was antiquated and hauntingly beautiful
at the same time, as if the architect couldn’t decide which era to
design the house after, so he merged all of them. Or, better yet,
as if the house had been there for centuries, and each century
something modern was added to it. It was in need of quite a bit of
work and a coat of paint. The outside shutters had fallen off and
needed to be fixed, the bushes were overgrown, and the front steps
were missing a board. A large greenhouse was attached to the house,
and even from this distance she could see that quite a few of the
glass windows were shattered and overrun with foliage.

“
Welcome home!” Terry
chimed happily as she put the van into park. “I made a few phone
calls and pulled a few strings, but it’s yours.”

“
What is?” Sara
asked.

“
Why, the house, of
course! It’s one of the estates that my company has had a contract
with…well, forever. It has sat empty for most of those years, and
the owners have no desire to sell it and are hardly ever here,
either. So it continues to sit empty, which isn’t good for a house.
I contacted them and explained your situation and that you were one
of my most trusted employees and a dear friend, and they offered it
to you and your daughter…on one condition.”

Sara looked at the large house, her hand
jumping to her heart in fear and wonder.

“
You will have to live in
it and take care of it. I can recommend a great handyman to help
fix up the place, and soon it will be as good as new.” Terry’s head
bobbed in excitement. “Don’t get me wrong, I love having you two
live with me, but it’s about time for you to start anew. Especially
since Mina has to go back to school in a few days—”

Terry continued to relay her news to a
shocked Sara and unlocked the front door and walked them into a
spacious entrance hall. What the hey? A spiral staircase? The house
looked like it had come out of a movie, all right…a horror
movie.

Off the entrance hall was a sitting room
with a library with a very dusty grand piano, while to the right
was a formal dining room. In every room there were obvious blank
spots on the wall where pictures had been hung and looked like they
had been recently removed, because of a slight, barely noticeable
discoloration of the wall. They were all prime locations: above the
fireplace, in the library above a desk. Each newly discovered bare
spot made Mina irritated. Were these priceless portraits removed
because the owners thought they would steal them?

There were multiple wings of rooms to be
explored at a later date. They kept going and walked into the
largest kitchen she had ever seen. It was a chef’s dream, with
multiple islands and granite countertops, but things Mina didn’t
really care about. What she zoned in on first was, of course, the
dishwasher.

“
It’s all very nice,
Terry, but I don’t know how comfortable I am with this commitment.
I’ve never even met the owners. How do I know that they want us as
tenants?”

“
Pish-posh.” Terry frowned
at Sara. Mina had to hold back a grin; she didn’t think people
spoke like that anymore. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’m
telling you, I pulled a huge favor out of my hat, and I can tell
you there’s not going to be another offer out there like this. I
did this for you because I think of you like my own daughter. And
you deserve this.”

Just then a weird buzzing sound came from a
square box in the kitchen. Terry ran forward and pushed a button.
“Yes, who’s there?”

“
It’s meee. We bring
Sara’s car like you asked. Now push button and let us in.” It was
Mrs. Wong. Terry rolled her eyes before she pushed the button. Mina
assumed the big iron gates at the end of the drive were opening. A
few minutes later the Wongs entered through the front door,
carrying boxes from the Happy Maids van.

“
Eh, nice big house you
get, Terry. What ex-husband did you get this from? Maybe you can
give him my number.” Mrs. Wong’s broken English made her attempts
at being funny sound awkward.

Mei’s husband placed his hand over his heart
with dramatic flair. “Oh, Mei, you wound me. Now stop yammering,
and let’s help them settle in.”

With only a few more failed attempts to talk
themselves out of the house, Sara finally gave in and helped haul
the last cardboard boxes into the foyer. The Wongs and Terry tried
to keep some light chitchat going, but it was obvious from the
rings under Sara’s eyes that it was time for them to go. Once
everyone was gone, the house was eerily empty.

Sara stared at one of the blank walls
covered in striped wallpaper in puzzlement. “This house. There’s
something about this house.” She reached out a hand to touch the
wall and then shook her head as if to clear the troubled thought
from her mind. “I’m sorry, honey, I’m exhausted. Let’s find a room
and unpack and talk tomorrow. It’s been—” she started to sniffle
but held it back, “—a long day.”

Mina agreed. Was the funeral only a few
hours ago? The rain was still coming down outside, and the
occasional lightning illuminated the night sky. The second floor
was filled with more turns, wings, and darkened rooms. Sara found a
room to her liking and settled in by immediately crawling onto the
bed and not moving. Not wanting to leave her mother alone,
especially tonight, Mina crawled onto the large king-size bed and
lay next to her mom.

Sara’s eyes were shut, and Mina could see
the barest glimmer of tears sliding out of the corners. Her
mother’s long hair had fallen out of its bun, and a hint of gray
could be seen mixed in with the brown. Had this tragedy aged her
mother years in only a few days? Mina took a deep breath and
quivered with pain and sadness. She slid her hand into Sara’s hand
and squeezed gently, comforting her mother without words. Sara’s
breathing evened out, and she squeezed her daughter’s hand back. A
few minutes later, they were both asleep.

Chapter 5

A thudding noise woke Mina in the middle of
the night. She sat straight up in bed and looked around the
darkened room in fear. Nothing stirred, and nothing moved. The rain
still poured outside, and the night sky lit up, followed by the
delayed sound of thunder. The brief flash of light proved that
nothing was in their room.

She turned to look at her mom, who was still
curled up in a fetal position and was sleeping very deeply. She
knew that Sara had been worrying about their lack of housing
situation, and now she looked like she could sleep for days. Mina
lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling, then the walls. She
rolled over and tried to sleep on her stomach, but it was no use;
she was wide awake. Her mind kept trying to catalog all the
possibilities of what could have made the noise, and her paranoid
teenage brain wasn’t going to let her go back to sleep until she
found out what it was. She was still fully dressed, so she tiptoed
out of the room and closed the door with a soft click.

The hallway had never looked more foreboding
than it did in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm. Mina
didn’t care who owned the place or what the utilities would cost;
she was going to bring light to the darkened mansion. She felt
along the walls until she found a light switch and clicked it on.
The electric candelabras on the wall flickered on, and nothing
jumped out at her.

Phew
, she thought,
one down, only a
hundred more to go.

She turned the corner in the wing and was
once again greeted with another darkened hallway. She repeated the
process and almost panicked when she couldn’t find the switch,
because it was hidden behind the drapes. When the hallway was
illuminated, she didn’t move on to the rest of the house. Instead,
she decided to tackle every room. How could she sleep if she didn’t
know what lurked behind each of those ominous doors?

The first door she flung open wildly and
jumped back into the hallway, expecting something or someone to
jump out, like a bat. It was another empty bedroom. The next door
revealed another empty bedroom. The next door—a bathroom. The next
door—a game room, complete with foosball and a pool table. She was
becoming braver with each door and stopped turning on the lights
after the lights in the hallway illuminated the empty rooms.

The second-to-last door was a storage room,
filled with extra chairs, tables, fake plants, vases. One section
of the room had less clutter, as if all of the offending junk had
been pushed away from the central object. It was an easel, and on
the easel was a painting covered with a sheet. Leaning against the
wall were stacks of what looked like more paintings. Were these the
paintings that had been removed from each of the rooms? If so, and
they were removed because of fear of theft, then it was stupid for
the owners to place all these priceless paintings here in one room.
Or maybe they had forgotten to lock the door. Nevertheless, this
was what she’d been looking for…answers.

Maybe it was a Monet? Or a Picasso? How cool
would it be to actually see one in person? Or what if they were
moved into this room so the owners could say that Mina and her
mother had stolen the paintings after they’d moved in? She was
flooded with a host of different reasons why the owners might have
moved the paintings here…and all of them ended up with Mina and her
mom in jail.

She had no choice; she was going to have to
look at the paintings, and she would start with the one covered on
the easel. Just when she was about to remove the sheet, she had the
intense feeling that she was being watched. She dropped her hand to
stare around the room, and the barest reflection of movement in the
glass drew her attention to the large framed window. It was still
raining and dark, but she thought she saw something on the lawn
when the lighting flashed.

Being careful to not be seen, she crept to
the side of the big window and curtain, and took up a lookout. She
held her breath in anticipation and waited until the next burst of
lightning. There it was, a quick flash! And sure enough, there was
someone in the middle of the yard, staring at the house. It went
dark again, and she began to panic. What was that? Who was that?
She lay in wait for the next minute until the storm illuminated the
yard again.