“Is there food?” said Freddy as she entered the living room. It already contained an extra chair, a carved wooden one with a faded orange cushion.
Josiah was flat against the wall beside the window, looking oddly like he had at Coleridge’s farmhouse. “Shut up and get out of sight. Your stepbrother is sneaking around outside.”
“Roland?” said Freddy. She ducked back out into the hall. “He’s supposed to be in school.”
“I’m aware. Did you actually see him at the morning assembly today?”
She tried to remember, but it had been far too long since she had been at that assembly. “Maybe not. He was in school in the afternoon. I saw him in math class. What’s he doing?”
“He was looking in the window earlier,” said Josiah. “He may have seen me. Now … no idea. I thought your sister was the detective.”
“Roland’s…” She trailed off and sputtered for a moment, then confessed, “I don’t know very much about Roland.”
“You live in a house with him.”
“I try to keep out of his way.”
“I’ve noticed that. You haven’t even bothered learning to talk like a baby in sign language, have you?”
Freddy shrugged.
“Well, he seems to be going all Hardy Boys on us now,” said Josiah, “so good luck with keeping out of his way.”
Cuerva Lachance poked her head through from the kitchen. “Is something exciting happening?”
“Roland,” they said together.
“Roland who?” said Cuerva Lachance.
“Big awkward one,” Josiah said.
“Oh, good,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I need muscles.”
Josiah said, “What? No!” But Cuerva Lachance was already heading for the front door. Freddy peered through into the living room again, shrugged at Josiah, and ran for the stairs.
She had gained the landing and hidden around the corner by the time Cuerva Lachance had opened the door and presumably caught Roland standing on the porch, snooping. “Big awkward one!” Freddy heard her cry happily. “How nice to see you nosing conveniently around our front door!”
“I wasn’t—” started Roland, but as Freddy knew from experience, having a conversation with Cuerva Lachance was mostly a matter of keeping up with her thought process as she completely failed to take in anything you said. “I could use your help,” she said. “The piano is in the wrong corner of the living room, and Josiah and I can’t shift it alone.”
As far as Freddy knew, the piano hadn’t turned up yet. It certainly wasn’t in the living room, or it hadn’t been fifteen seconds ago. Roland mumbled a reply, and Cuerva Lachance said, “Oh, I’m sure we don’t need anybody but you.”
Roland said something with the words “grand piano” in it. He seemed to be in the house now. Freddy suspected Cuerva Lachance had physically dragged him in.
“I know,” said Cuerva Lachance. “But I’m an optimist. We may not be able to lift it, but we can push it across the floor, leaving heartbreaking grooves in the hardwood. Josie, stop lurking and help us with this.”
After a pause, Roland said clearly, “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Aren’t you?” said Josiah.
“I thought I saw you crossing the park earlier.”
“I started across the park. Then I was overcome with ennui, and I came back to play moody New Age music and think about death.”
“Don’t trip over the chair,” said Cuerva Lachance, though Freddy could hardly hear her over the crash that presumably resulted from Roland tripping over the chair.
There were several more crashes and a couple of loud thumps. Freddy, cringing upstairs, strained to hear any conversation, but all she caught was an exclamation of “What a beautiful trail of destruction we have created!” from Cuerva Lachance. A few minutes later, after Roland had done some more mumbling, Cuerva Lachance said, “Be sure to come again when you should be in school, learning.” The front door closed. Cautiously, Freddy crept back down the stairs.
Cuerva Lachance and Josiah were standing beside the piano, having an argument. An argument between Cuerva Lachance and Josiah involved Josiah snarling viciously and Cuerva Lachance missing the point, conceivably on purpose. “He saw my ponytail,” hissed Josiah as Freddy looked into the room. “Don’t come in here, you fool; he could still be outside.” Freddy stopped in the doorway.
“Does it matter if he saw it, Josie, dear?” said Cuerva Lachance.
“It will, believe me,” said Josiah. “From what I gathered last time around, this is just the beginning of the weirdness. Why did you tell him I was here?”
“I don’t know. Did I? I was getting the piano,” said Cuerva Lachance vaguely.
“Yes, and what a good idea it was for you to do that practically in front of a civilian,” said Josiah.
“It just came,” said Cuerva Lachance. “This sort of thing is always happening to me.”
“Well, he’s going to be all suspicious of you guys now,” said Freddy. But … that wasn’t quite right, was it? Roland had been suspicious before Cuerva Lachance had invited him into the house. She tried to remember if anything had happened while they had been helping with the moving. Nothing came immediately to mind.
“I need to get the other me to cut off this bloody ponytail tonight,” said Josiah. He went storming off into the kitchen in a huff. Cuerva Lachance smiled brilliantly, then simply wasn’t there any more. It was, Freddy decided, going to be a very long three weeks.
*
First she had to get through a very long day. There was little to do. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah had some books, but they were all in Russian. “Well, we came here from Russia,” said Josiah when Freddy asked. “You know that. We were there for a few weeks in the 1960s.”
“If you even just had a computer,” said Freddy.
He shook his head at her. “You get bored more easily than I do. There’s a TV somewhere, likely broken. We have a laptop, but there’s no Internet yet. We just moved in, remember? The phone company’s coming by on Thursday.”
“Isn’t Cuerva Lachance supposed to be a private investigator?” said Freddy.
“That’s what she tells people,” said Josiah gloomily. “She’ll take a few jobs eventually because she thinks it’s amusing, then lose interest. But we’re really just investigating your family.”
“Oh,” said Freddy, “right.”
The TV was broken. It also seemed to be a refugee from the 1990s. Freddy gave up and went home.
It was a bad idea, but she knew there would be no one in the house until after three. She could at least grab some underwear and socks, plus maybe a few books no one would miss.