Josiah could not have said anything that would have distracted Mel more effectively from whatever was wrong with upstairs. Mel dropped her end of the table on Freddy’s foot. “She’s a private investigator?” Mel said, ignoring her sister’s cry of pain. “For real? With the hat and the coat and everything?”
“I’ve told her to get rid of those,” said Josiah. “No one ever listens to me.”
“Nice going.” Freddy hopped over to lean against the wall. She had to escape Josiah’s gaze; her eyes were watering again. There was something slightly wrong about the intensity of his stare. “She’s going to be coming here all the time now.”
“Just what we need,” said Josiah. “Feral neighourhood children. Haven’t your parents warned you against talking to strangers?”
Freddy opened her mouth, then shut it again. She had a very old, very uncertain memory of her parents lecturing her on staying away from strangers; she didn’t think the issue had come up for years. But what had really silenced her was … well, she thought it was another memory, but she wasn’t sure of what. She could hear someone saying, “Your parents have told you never to talk to strangers.” There had been a crow somewhere nearby, and … that key. She had been crying …
The crazy lady in the woods. Freddy’s hand stole to her pocket and wrapped around her key ring. She could feel the key right away, smaller and more delicate than her house keys and her bike-lock key and the tiny flashlight she kept clipped to the ring. Well, it made sense that the memory should surface now. There was more to it than just Josiah’s mention of strangers, though. Something else about now was raising echoes from then.
Roland blundered through the door and knocked over the pile of boxes next to it. Mel and Freddy escaped through to the kitchen as Josiah let out a theatrical cry of despair. Thoughts of the encounter four years before slipped from Freddy’s mind.
*
“I should call the rental company,” said Cuerva Lachance later as she gazed mournfully out at the van, which had only just stopped smoking. They were all sitting on the front steps, passing around the strawberry rhubarb pie that really had been discovered lurking, only slightly battered, under the couch. Josiah had refused it altogether and now perched moodily on a railing, watching the rest of them break off squishy pieces with their fingers. He had, at long last, cleaned off the blood, but Freddy could still see flecks and streaks of it on his skin, as if he hadn’t cared enough to wash properly. His face had been revealed to be thin and brown, with a beak of a nose and a sharp little chin. The gash on his forehead was surprisingly small.
“Don’t be absurd,” said Josiah, his accent becoming briefly more pronounced. Freddy thought she had identified it for sure as English, but as he continued speaking, she changed her mind to Portuguese. “I’ll do it. I remember what happened the last time you tried to explain how you had wrecked someone’s car.”
Cuerva Lachance favoured him with her blinding smile. “I wrecked it for a good cause.”
“It’s never a good cause with you,” said Josiah. “It’s never a cause with you at all.” He sighed and yanked a smartphone from his pocket. “Oh, look, you didn’t break it by smashing us headfirst into a tree. Miracles never cease. Could you make the feral children go away while I’m on the phone?” He swung himself down onto the porch and stalked inside, fiddling with the touchscreen.
Mel had stuffed her hands against her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. Cuerva Lachance gave her an approving grin. “The problem with Josiah is that he was born without a sense of humour,” she said.
“Are you really a private investigator?” said Mel, who must have been wanting to ask this question all afternoon.
Cuerva Lachance tilted her head, an oddly birdlike gesture. “Mostly. Do you need a private investigator?”
“It’s just that you’re Mel’s hero now.” Roland had moved down onto the front walk so he could see everybody talking. “She reads mysteries.”
“Ah,” said Cuerva Lachance, “those. Not really my genre. It would be like taking my work home with me, and since I already work from home, that would cause a logic implosion, and Josiah would have a meltdown. Tell me, little fat one, do you read the mysteries with the spunky old British ladies solving crimes in country houses or the mysteries with the depressed alcoholics uncovering corruption in cities made of despair?”
“Both, and everything in between,” Freddy and Roland said together. Their eyes met, then flicked apart.
“The reality is much more boring,” Cuerva Lachance assured them. “There’s a lot of sitting around with cameras, waiting for people to slink out of skeezy motels. I’ve never even inadvertently taken down an international crime syndicate, though not for lack of trying. I did solve a country-house murder once, but that was an accident, and as it turned out, the butler had done it. Do your parents know where you are?”
Freddy was already getting used to Cuerva Lachance’s habit of changing topics at lightning speed. “No.”
“They went somewhere,” said Mel. “My name is Mel, you know, not ‘little fat one.’”
“I ask for names to be polite,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I don’t remember them. My head is full of other things, and names just bounce out.”
“Can I use your bathroom?” asked Freddy, who had been getting increasingly less comfortable for the past hour or so.
Cuerva Lachance waved a hand lazily at the house. “Mi casa es su casa. I haven’t the faintest idea where it is. There may not be toilet paper, but you never know. Try up the stairs, first on the left. Those directions generally work for bathrooms.”
Freddy rose and walked into the house. Behind her, she heard Mel say something about Sherlock Holmes.
Through the living room door, she could see the heap of boxes and furniture they had moved from the van. A stray thought—It’s not that much stuff for a house this size—blew across her mind. She paused for a moment to gaze at the pile. Couch, chairs, a couple of cabinets, some tables, two bookcases, a bed, a TV, assorted boxes … It looked like the contents of an apartment. Something was missing, too. Everything seemed present, if sparse. But she knew there should have been something more. She just didn’t know what. Freddy shook her head to clear it. It would come to her. At any rate, maybe Cuerva Lachance and Josiah were moving here from an apartment and would get more stuff later.