“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?”