One
There are two kinds of people in the world:
those who believe in magic
and those who are wrong.
I pulled to a stop in front of a sprawling mansion, checked the address the lawyer gave me, then glanced at the mansion again, even more confused than I’d been when I first got the call. No way was this legit. I looked at the numbers on the massive white columns and compared them to the numbers I’d scribbled on a hot pink sticky note. Perfect match. It was one thing for a complete stranger to bequeath me a house. It was quite another for that house to look like a red brick version of Tara from Gone with the Wind.
I turned my head to look at the street sign one more time, making sure it said Chestnut, then I checked the address for a third time. Still a perfect match. Maybe I heard it wrong. Or wrote it down wrong. Or I’d entered the Twilight Zone. As I sat steeping in a light marinade of seasonal herbs and bewilderment, weighing my options—medication, electroshock therapy, exorcism—an urgent knock sounded on the window of my vintage mint green Volkswagen Beetle, a.k.a., the bug. I jumped in response, the movement quite possibly dislocating a rib.
A feminine voice shrieked at me as though the barrier between us was a concrete wall instead of a piece of glass. “Ms. Dayne?”
I put an arm around my ribcage to protect it from any further damage and turned to the panic-stricken woman enveloped from head to toe in neon purple.
“Hi!” she shouted.
Seriously, every article of clothing she wore—beret, scarf, wool coat, knitted mittens—were all a shade of purple so bright my pupils had to adjust.
“Are you Ms. Dayne?”
And I liked purple. Really, I did. Just not a shade so bright it watered my eyes. Not unlike pepper spray. Or napalm.
I cracked the window and gave a cautious, “Mrs. Richter?”
The woman shoved her mitted hand into the narrow opening I’d created. “So nice to meet you. What do you think?”
I took her hand a microsecond before she snatched it back and stepped to the side to allow me to exit.
Mrs. Richter, a woman only a couple of years older than my own forty-four years of hard labor with little reward, hurried to the hood of the bug and pulled a stack of papers from a manila envelope. A stack of papers that probably needed my signature.
A needlelike cramp tightened the muscles in my stomach. This was all happening too fast. Much like my life of late.
After the first wave of pain subsided—the same pain I’d been having for months now—I pushed a wind-blown lock of black hair over my ear and followed her.
“Mrs. Richter, I don’t understand any of this. Why would someone I don’t know leave me a house? Especially one that looks straight out of Architectural Digest.”
“What?” She glanced up from her task of wrangling the paperwork in the icy wind and let her gaze bounce from the house to me then back to the house. “Oh, heavens. I’m so sorry. Mrs. Goode didn’t leave you this house. I just wanted to meet here because her house is, well—” She cleared her throat and tried to tame a strand of blond hair that whipped across her forehead. “It’s persnickety.”
Relief flooded every cell in my body. Either that or the Adderall I’d had in lieu of breakfast was finally kicking in. Still, how in the Sam Spade could a house be persnickety?
Deciding that was a question for another day, I released a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “That’s actually a bit of a weight off my shoulders. There’s no way I could afford the taxes and insurance on this place, much less the upkeep.”
“Oh, well, that shouldn’t be a problem. Somehow the taxes on Percival are stuck in the fifties. Cheapest on the block, but you didn’t hear that from me. Also, there’s the money that Mrs. Goode—”
“Percival?”
She leaned into the bone-chilling breeze, and whispered, “The house.”
I whispered back, “The house is named Percival?”
“Yes.” She stopped as though startled, then said, “My goodness, your eyes are beautiful.”
“Thank you. Did you say the house is named—?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that shade of blue before.”
“Oh. Um, thanks?”
“You’re welcome. Can you sign here, please?” She recovered and pointed to a highlighted spot on the first of many, many pages, clearly in a hurry to get on with it.
I eyed the paper with a suspicion born of far too many deceptive relationships. “How about we go inside and talk about this?”
Her face, a face that had been rosy not thirty seconds earlier, paled at my suggestion. She backed away as though I’d just told her I was going to murder her and keep her heart in a jar on my desk.
I would never do such a thing. I’d keep it in a jar in the cupboard. I wasn’t morbid.
“Inside?” She clasped the papers to her chest and took another step back. “You mean, inside Percival?”
I lifted a shoulder. “Sure. Is he, maybe, around here somewhere?”
Her hazel irises glazed over despite the wind whipping her blond bob around her head, beret be damned, and her gaze traveled across the street to land on a structure there. Mine followed.
Towering between two gorgeous houses that were almost as majestic as the one I’d parked in front of sat a huge, crumbling abode. It was gorgeous and grotesque and mesmerizing and I was certain I’d seen it in a horror movie. Or five.
And I was lost.
Percival was gorgeous. Hauntingly beautiful with ivy-covered moss green brick and black trim so dark it looked like wet ink. It sat three stories high. The main section was round with six black gables that formed a circle. Two bay windows graced the front on either side of a massive black door. Another section, square but just as stunning, was attached on the right of it. A tall iron fence surrounded the property with a veritable forest from what I could see of the back.
I didn’t want to just live in Percival. I wanted to marry him and have his babies.
Mrs. Richter jerked her gaze away from my future ex-house and back to The Bug where she started fighting the wind to straighten the papers again.
Percival certainly left an impression. So had the lawyer who’d insisted over the phone that I drive all the way from Arizona—mostly because a last-minute plane ticket cost more than my car—to the infamous town of Salem, Massachusetts—a town I’d never visited—so that she could sign over a house that a woman—a woman I’d never met—left to me. And because I was recently divorced, utterly bankrupt, and just desperate enough to fall for even the most hairbrained scheme, I did it.
Thank God that nice Prince from Algiers who kept promising to send me a million dollars for a small processing fee hadn’t called again. I would probably have fallen for that as well.
Instead, I was standing in one of the most famous towns in history, in one of the most beautiful neighborhoods I’d ever seen, on one of the iciest days I’d ever felt, talking to one of the strangest women I’d ever met. And I’d met some strange ones. No shortage of those in the A-Z.
“Was it on fire at some point?” I noticed a section of the brick was darker as though it had once been covered in smoke. When I didn’t get an answer, I finally took note of Mrs. Richter’s pallor which, even in the frigid wind, was bluer than it should have been. “Mrs. Richter, are you okay?”