“My sympathies,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Let’s go throw everything in a great big pile in the living room.”
“I don’t acknowledge that any of this is happening,” proclaimed Josiah, but he did pull a key from his pocket and, with bad grace, head for the front door.
The house on Grosvenor Street didn’t look like any of the other houses in the neighbourhood. Mel, who liked to understand everything about everything, said this particular suburb had grown up in the 1940s and afterwards, and so the houses were mainly little one-family units: small bungalows, split-levels, the occasional duplex. There were newer houses, too, quite big, blocky ones covered in pink or yellow stucco and crammed into subdivided lots that seemed hardly large enough to hold them. This house fit neither the older style nor the newer one. It was three storeys high and what Mel described as “peaky,” which seemed to mean that the architect had been in love with gables and had crammed in as many as he could. Three were visible from the front, one on top of the other, getting smaller the higher they went; there were two more small ones in the back and one on the southern side, the side facing onto the vacant lot adjoining. Freddy had always thought the gables made the house look like a fancy layer cake. The roof was steep and startlingly red; the walls were white, with red trim around the window frames. Ivy climbed the southern wall of the house, and tendrils of it sneaked around the corner to the front, striving towards the windows and door.
The northern wall of the house had no gables because it bulged out into a sort of miniature circular tower. The tower didn’t rise any higher than the rest of the house, but it looked as if it wanted to. There was ivy here as well, almost obscuring the tiny window near the top. It was the almost-tower that tended to charm the various people who bought the house, and it was the almost-tower that, in the end, drove them away.
Freddy had been inside twice when the Wongs had lived there, before she’d realised the money was not worth the mental and physical pain of babysitting the little Wong hellions. At that time, the interior of the house had looked like a furniture showroom that had been hit by a violent hurricane. The Wongs’ tasteful, expensive furnishings hadn’t been able to stand up against the destructive force that was their five sons. It was different now. Josiah, scowling, let them into an empty house. Their feet echoed on the tiles of the front hall and the hardwood floor of the living room. Someone had been keeping the place relatively dust-free; the living room looked huge and clean as Freddy and the others dumped their burdens in a corner. Light streamed through the bay windows, dancing in patterns on the floor as it filtered through the leaves of the cherry tree in the front yard. The room was blank, without personality, waiting for someone to mould it into shape.
“That’s right,” said Cuerva Lachance, poking her head into the room. “Just throw them anywhere. Josiah will sort them out later.”
“Obviously,” said Josiah, injecting so much sarcasm into the word that Mel eyed him with respect.
Freddy asked Josiah as they all trooped back out to the van, “You don’t get along with your mum, then?”
Josiah stopped dead in the middle of the lawn and stared at her. He hadn’t yet bothered to wipe the blood from his face. “My what?”
“She’s not your mum?” said Mel.
“How could anyone think that?” snarled Josiah. “Don’t make that mistake again. It drives me completely up the wall.” He flung his arms out dramatically, then turned on his heel and continued towards the van.
Mel bounced after him. Freddy could see her sister sliding into investigative mode. “You have an accent.”
“What? I do not,” said Josiah.
“You do,” said Freddy. The funny thing was that though she was pretty good with accents, she couldn’t tell where it was from. It was very slight. His words simply seemed to pop more than theirs, and some of his expressions were a little bit off.
Roland said, “Are you going to clean off the blood at all?”
“Stop badgering me,” said Josiah. “We’ve only just met. Do you do this to all your new neighbours? Why has no one tried to kill you yet?”
Freddy, Mel, and Roland exchanged wary glances. Freddy wondered if the other two were feeling the same thing she was. She didn’t know why she was treating Josiah like this. It was part of the general strangeness surrounding him; it encouraged obnoxious comments.
Mel had been helpfully signing translations to Roland, and Cuerva Lachance had noticed. “Deaf?” she said as she handed Roland a lamp. “Profoundly or partially? Read lips?”
“Profoundly,” said Roland. “I do read lips.”
She nodded. “Keep reminding me so I don’t forget to face you when I talk. I have the attention span of a pair of scissors.”
Freddy was surprised to find she was enjoying herself. She hadn’t really been enjoying all that much lately. The constant anger had leached into everything she did. This felt almost like a break from the real world. She even quirked an eyebrow at Roland as she passed him in the hall, and she could have sworn he nearly smiled in return.
“Why are we doing this, exactly?” said Mel as they balanced a kitchen table between them and manoeuvred it through the front door. “I ask out of curiosity.”
Freddy gave as much of a shrug as she could with her hands full of table.
Mel pursed her lips. “There’s something unnatural about these guys.”
“You always want there to be something unnatural about everybody new you meet,” Freddy pointed out.
“Yeah,” said Mel, “except we’ve known them for ten minutes, and they’ve got us lugging around all their worldly belongings. We didn’t even protest. And it’s not like they’re being nice to us. But here we are, at their beck and call. I don’t even feel indignant about it.”
“That’s because you’re making it into a mystery story in your head,” said Freddy.
“Life’s more interesting that way,” Mel explained.
The sound of a slamming door made them both look up, startled. A few seconds later, Josiah appeared at the head of the stairs and bounded down them with what Freddy was already sure was unaccustomed energy.
“You’re not to go upstairs. No one is to go upstairs ever,” he said, glaring out from beneath quivering eyebrows. “That table doesn’t belong upstairs. Take it that way.”
“We are taking it that way,” said Freddy.
Mel said, “What’s wrong with upstairs? I don’t have to make this into a mystery story, Freddy; it is one.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Josiah, still staring ferociously at Freddy, “and don’t let Cuerva Lachance hear you say that. She’s a private investigator. If she knows you’re interested, she’ll manipulate you into working for her for free.”