Worthington was in a state, now realizing that he had become a target, and immediately assumes it was Zoe on the end of the sniper rifle.
He considers calling John and telling him what just happened, but if Zoe was there with him…
No, better to attend to the problems at hand. Arabella wasn’t dead, but it had come very close. And, he suspected, it was because he had asked her to get a drink for him, and if she had not moved, the damage would be far less.
It was important then to go to the hospital with her and make sure he was then when she woke up to explain what just happened. If she would ever speak to him again, that is.
Meanwhile, John is ‘collected’ at his hotel, and taken to Olga. When he wakes up in a rather quaint bedroom or what seems to be a house in the countryside, he only remembers being in the hotel, then nothing.
When he is escorted to the meeting room, it is not the sort of interrogation he was expecting but is fascinated with the old Russian woman who claims to be Zoe’s mentor and teacher, and says that she has no interest in harming him, she only wants Zoe back.
John works out that the woman is in fact Alistair’s mother and presses her for more information about Zoe.
…
Today’s writing, with Zoe languishing in a dungeon waiting for a white knight, 1,771 words, for a total of 57,988..
This is countryside somewhere inside the Lamington National Park in Queensland. It was one of those days where the rain come and went…
We were spending a week there, in the middle of nowhere on a working macadamia farm in a cottage, one of four, recuperating from a long exhausting lockdown.
It was not cold, and we were able to sit out of the verandah for most of the day, watching the rain come and pass over on its way up the valley, listing to the gentle pitter-patter of the rain on the roof and nearby leaves.
But as for inspiration:
This would be the ideal setting for a story about life, failed romance, or a couple looking to find what it was they lost.
It could be a story about recovering from a breakdown, or a tragic loss, to be anywhere else but in the middle of dealing with the constant reminders of what they had.
It could be a safe house, and as we all know, safe houses in stories are rarely safe houses, where it is given away by someone inside the program, or the person who it’s assigned to give it away because they can’t do as they’re supposed to; lay low.
Then there’s camping, the great outdoors, for someone who absolutely hates being outdoors, or those who go hunting, and sometimes become the hunted.
Every time I went out with friends, no one ever asked my opinion about anything, and I never really ventured one, and it had been that way all my life.
It came from learning at a very young age that I should listen not prattle and speak only when spoken to.
All through school I spent most of my time studying alone, or with one or two others who wanted to help with their schoolwork, and I think that after a while I’d become a definitive nerd.
Things changed a little when I went to university and found there were quite a few just like me, and we sort of gravitated towards each other.
After that, getting a job, I still found myself more or less keeping my own company though from time to time one or other of my contemporaries would ask I’d I was going to the drinks after work on Friday night, which usually I avoided.
My contemporaries were a little too outgoing for a self-confessed boring person.
Then things changed, a promotion to a different branch in an office in the next state, with new people and a different atmosphere, fuelled a desire to break the mold I’d created for myself.
It was time to be more outgoing.
…
What kicked off the new attitude was a meeting of department heads. I found that the company had brought together a group of people, hovering in the middle management group, of which I was only one of about a dozen of similar age, experience, and qualifications.
It was an interesting meeting because it was addressed by the current CEO, a man who was rarely seen out of head office, on the other side of the country. We were, he said, the up-and-coming future of the company, and our time in this particular branch would determine our trajectory.
So much easier then to crash and burn.
I was last to leave the room, with much to ponder.
“You’re new, aren’t you?” One of the female attendees had been talking to several others, then turned her attention to me.
“Two weeks on Thursday, but yes.”
I’d see her at various times during the last week, in different parts of the building, leaving me to think she had some sort of managerial role. It was no surprise to learn she was in sales.
“Jennifer Eccles.”
‘Daniel Wells.”
We shook hands, which was a surprise.
“New to the city then?” She asked.
“I am. I’m still working on what I want to see, but there’s plenty of time for that. I have a mountain of reading to get through.”
“You know the saying, all work, and no play…”
She had a look about her that suggested she might be the life of the party, certainly if the meeting was anything to go by, the center of attention.
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
…
I had made our acquaintances in the first week, Oliver Birtwhistle, another introvert like myself, a candidate settling into research and development, right down to the white coat and pencil pack in the pocket.
He had also been at the meeting, and had Bern at the company for three months and had been giving me the drill, who to avoid, who had nuisance value, and how to get ahead if I was that way inclined.
The thing is, he had said, you were sent to this place to prove your boss’s faith in your potential. Each manager of each branch hot to pick the brightest candidate. I had been my manager’s choice, odd because there were others who would have appreciated the opportunity more than me.
He had to go past my office to get to the laboratory and dropped in, flooding into the lounge chair along the sidewall, a remnant of the last office owner who used to sleep on it overnight while going through a messy divorce.
“I see you were ambushed by the incorrigible Jennifer Eccles.”
“You say it as if it’s a bad thing.’
“That’s because it is. You would be well advised to steer clear of her. The last three people like you she selected as work partners all left broken from the experience. She sucks novices dry of all their knowledge, claims it as her own, and moves up another rung.”
“She seems quite nice “
“So does a rattlesnake until it bites you.”
“Well, forewarned is forearmed. She doesn’t have anything to fear from me, I’m not the ambitious sort.”
“That’s not how it works here. You need to be competitive just to stay here. There are no free lunches. Next meeting you’ll be required to make a pitch, and if the boss doesn’t like it, you go back home.”
“You’re still here?”
“That’s more because I have an incompetent manager. It’s easy to create cost/benefit savings when his methods ate all last century. All I’m saying is watch your back.”
…
I never gave Oliver’s advice another thought, as the days passed, and Jennifer was just a shadow on the horizon.
Until she dropped into my office, on her way to somewhere else. Another person, also wary of her, had said she burned shoe soles faster than a spendthrift spent money.
“How are you settling in?”
She sat exactly where Oliver had been a month before.
“Feels like home.”
“See anything of the place?”
“I bought a car, moved into company-assisted accommodation, just haven’t had the time to get out and about.”
“OK. Tell you what, I’m free this weekend, come by my place and I’ll show you around. And, Friday night, drinks in the bar off the cafeteria. You should come, meet the competition.”
“Do I want to?”
“Of course, you do. You want to at least meet the people who are most likely going to stab you in the back.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Me, no. I’m a woman. We use poison. Much more efficient “
…
So, curiosity got the better of me, and on the way out, I had a last-minute change of heart, thinking about what the harm could be.
When I arrived most of the staff cafeteria was already there, and underway, and by the look of it, for some time.
As I’d surmised, Jennifer was the Queen bee surrounded by her drones. Crossing the room, I tried to pick of the ones she had picked up and spat out. Probably all of them, hence her interest in me.
She stopped mid-sentence when she saw me, and then abandoned the group, to come over and give me a kiss on the cheek, and a hug. It did not go unnoticed.
Then we went back to the group with several new faces, and she introduced me. I was ‘the new guy in marketing’ who was ‘working on a huge new concept’. Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about, but let it ride. It was a close approximation of the truth.
This informal get-together was much like a brainstorming session, but to me, with one purpose in mind. Run, clearly, by Jennifer, for the purpose of mining their ideas.
I was encouraged to talk about my huge ideas, but in reality, they were just pie in the sky clouds, there was nothing to talk about. And that seemed to annoy her. It wasn’t for the want of gentle prodding, down to outright asking me, but I generally ignored her, and it was noticed.
Then she manicured us to be alone at the bar. Was this going to be the big push?
“Haven’t forgotten about tomorrow, have you?” She said, sliding a Millers across to me.
She was a beer drinker, a tick in a box if I was ticking boxes.
“No. Looking forward to not talking shop.”
“Oh, you never stop living a breathing work at this level. It can be all-consuming for some. Just as a matter on interest, had any of the orders spoken about me?”
There was that fraction of a second hesitation that could be construed in a dozen different ways. I tried covering it, but she knew, so I tried walking carefully through the mindfully.”
“I suspect that most of the guys I’ve spoken to consider you just a little out of their league. I should be so lucky to be spoken of so highly.”
I had always dreamed of following my father into diplomacy, but there was little on offer these days. The old days had long since been replaced by the new generation who considered diplomats anachronisms of a colonial empire.
She smiled. She was smart enough to see what I was doing. But I was still treading water.
“So, what do you think of me?”
Direct.
“That’s a question of whether you want me to tell you what you want to hear, or tell you what I think, which is something entirely different.”
“What you really think, of course.”
I could see that she didn’t, but this was rapidly leading up a one-way street to the firing squad.
“Here’s the thing. I learned a long time ago that opinions count for nothing, and more often they cause more grief than anything else. You don’t need other people’s opinions of you to validate who you are, and what you want to do with your life, especially not from me.
“I have no opinion. As for me, I am not ambitious, and truth be told I don’t belong here. If the powers that be thought I’d play the competition, there wrong. Actions speak louder than words, and I will do my job to the best of my ability, but I won’t depressive someone else of an opportunity because I think I’m better than them. I’m not.
“I like you, and I’m happy to be your friend or something else if it ever comes to that, but don’t expect me to play the game, or be something I’m not.”
There, I said it, and it was what I intended, and perhaps if she was to read the subtext, would realize I was subtlety telling he she didn’t need to screw everyone over to better herself, but the truth is, she was, and perhaps she didn’t really know it.
Judging by the look on her face, I was blindfolded up against the wall in front of the firing squad, and then we’d just received the ready, aim, and about to say fire.
“Friend, you say.”
“There’s a lot of wiggle room with a word like that. It’s all in the individual interpretation.”
“Wow. For not giving an opinion…”
“I’m sorry it was not what you were expecting.”
It was interesting if not strange in a way to watch her expression change with each new thought pr reaction. I wondered for a moment if any of the other men spoke to her in such a manner
Perhaps not, because they would not want to sully their chance of getting a date with what was a woman that had both brains and beauty. As for me, I hadn’t been thinking of her in that way, but only in terms of how we could work together.
Perhaps that would be regarded as strange also.
Then she smiled, or perhaps it was a smirk, I was not quite sure, but it seemed she had come to a conclusion.
“You do realize no one has ever spoken to me in that manner, especially the men here. I can see now that asking me on a date, or the preliminaries before that are not on your immediate agenda, and, in fact, I suspect you did that to some of the other women here, you’d get a very cold shoulder. I’ll admit now, that you intrigue me, and I want to know more about you. You still want to go touring tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“Then you can take me home, so you know where to pick me up. But, for now, we’d better get back to the others before we become the subject of tomorrow’s water cooler gossip.
My take: Perhaps I could refine what is and isn’t opinion before I actually did upset someone.
This is a spot behind a group of restaurants at Victoria Point, Queensland.
But it could be anywhere, like a spot we saw on a boat trip on a river in the Daintree, in far north Queensland
So, this could be a spot, not far inland from the ocean where smugglers, or drug runners come ashore, in a place so remote they would never get caught.
Unless an enterprising federal agent comes up with a plan to track them from the ocean side using satellite images, or reported sightings of suspicious activity.
My money is on a random sighting, a vague report files in a small town police station, and a body washed up in shore, apparently the victim of a crocodile attack. Or not a crocodile.
It cold be a fishing trip gone wrong in a backwater stream, a weekend away by a dialled group of friends, who are not really friends, which all comes to a head when one of the friends go missing.
Or, I’d you like the idea of historical drama, a story about the first expedition from the bottom of Australia to the very top, for the first time, with all the hazards of rivers to cross, paths to create though the bush, the heat, the animals, the local inhabitants who have yet to see Europeans.
To be honest, I would not want to be one of those early explorers, especially those who went inland and struck desert, or died just short of their goal.
Just as an aside, we did learn about these people, Hume and Hovell, Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, Burke and Wills, and others.
We were standing at the entrance of Aladdin’s cave. At least that was the name on the sign above the entrance.
Three days driving, the last 122 miles into the desert, or what was now desert, through three ghost towns, which looked like sets out of a movie, to what was once supposed to be a theme park.
In the middle of nowhere. Literally.
We’d parked in what was once a thousand car carpark now almost relatives by the sand, through a large gate that proclaimed the seven wonders of the world, through to a cliff face where there were several caves, where we were now.
“And remind me exactly why we are here?”
“We win the bidding war for this place. I mean, think of the potential.”
“I’m thinking, but not of the potential.”
Good thing then Lexie was not my wife or girlfriend, because if she was, she’d be questioning my sanity right about now.
She was a work friend, along for the ride.
Well, to begin either, this whole area was a storage facility for the nuclear weapons that were designated for destruction after the non-proliferation treaty. There are about a dozen caves around here, all with massive blast doors, of which Aladdin’s cave was the first. I can’t wait to see inside.”
“If it truly is Aladdin’s cave then should it not be riches beyond avarice. I want the lamp.”
There was only one small problem. I needed the code to open the doors, and that was only available once we had arrived. Once there, I was to give a person on the end of the phone a code, one that changed every day, once I proved my identity. It was a crazy system, but I had to admit, it made the cave secure.”
I made the call, once I could see the code. It was on the screen, behind a nuclear blast-proof window, rather apt considering. It was a code that changed every hour.
“The voice on the other end of the phone simply said, “Code please?”
I read it to them. As soon as the call was disconnected, the doors began to open.
Then behind me, another voice. “Thank you for that. Now, step away, or your friend here dies.”
I turned. I thought I recognized the voice of Joe Santiago, crime boss, a man who’d served his ten years, but never divulged where he had hidden the loot.
Another six months with guns were standing in a semi-circle, cutting off any exit I might try.
“So, this is where you hid the money, and key evidence.”
“And, as they say, it’s where the bodies are buried. This really wasn’t going to be a theme park.”
“O rather guessed that. I was expecting someone else, a lackey, but you did say one, you couldn’t trust any of those you worked with.”
With that said, six shots, six men down, and a seventh, at that moment when Santiago was disorientated by the first six shots. Not to kill but disable.
A well-planned and executed operation to catch Santiago, who had never suspected we had turned one of his gang and had known all along where his loot was.
Then it was just a matter of waiting until he got out of jail, after advertising the fact I’d won the auction to buy the Theme Park site, outbidding all of his people.
A visibly shaken Lexie said, “and when were you going to tell me we were going to be bait?”
“None of us were sure this was going to work.”
A swarm of agents moved in to take away the seven, including a cursing Santiago, who swore he’d been set up.
The doors were now open, and we were looking into a dark abyss. The light only went so far. I stepped inside and used the torch on the side wall, looking for the light switch.
It was about ten feet away, a large lever that had to be pushed up. I gave it a moment, then pushed it into the on position, and the lights came on.
I heard a gasp from Lexie and turned around.
It was huge, a cavern gouged out of the small mountain, all but empty except for a shipping container sitting about fifty yards from the entrance.
Yet another new voice came from behind us.
“We’ll take it from here.”
It belonged to an FBI agent, who was with three others. No guns were drawn, but I suspect if I objected, they might.
“Did you not get the memo that I am in charge here,” I said.
He handed me a phone, “Your commander would like a word.”.
I took it. “Sir?”
“We’ve been trumped by jurisdiction, just let them take over, but stay and let me know when they’ve gone.”
“There’s a shipping container right bang in the middle of the cave.”
“Let them take it “
He disconnected the call, and I returned the phone.
“Do as you wish.”
A forklift went past, and we watched as it picked up the container and took it to a waiting truck.
The FBI agent saluted, and he left with his team.
Lexie had watched the whole proceedings with an amused expression on her face. This was obviously not news to her. “Couldn’t have predicted that could we.”
I pulled out my phone and called the boss. “They’ve gone.”
“They went for the big shiny object. I’m surprised they didn’t realize Santiago is all about the show. I’m sure they’ll soon discover it’s booby-trapped, but that’s fine, they’ll take a while to realize they’ve been had. Now, you two go to work. The real evidence is hidden in there somewhere. Call me when you find it.”
Lexie looked over at me. “What did he say?”
“The evidence is still here, not in the container.”
She looked around at the wide, deep, open space where, if it was going to be Aladdin’s cave, there would be treasure stacked everywhere.
“I’m guessing we need yo do a sweep. You start on the other side, I’ll start here, and we’ll meet at the middle of the rear.”
I waited until she was in position, and then we moved towards the rear, studying the wall for hidden doors. It was possible that rooms or passages ran off this cave.
A few minutes later Lexie let out a triumphant “Ah-ha!”
I stopped. “What is it?”
She held up a small object that looked like the proverbial lamp.
“Aladdin’s lamp. Perhaps if I polish it.” She did so, with a flourish.
“Sunday in New York” is ultimately a story about trust, and what happens when a marriage is stretched to its limits.
When Harry Steele attends a lunch with his manager, Barclay, to discuss a promotion that any junior executive would accept in a heartbeat, it is the fact his wife, Alison, who previously professed her reservations about Barclay, also agreed to attend, that casts a small element of doubt in his mind.
From that moment, his life, in the company, in deciding what to do, his marriage, his very life, spirals out of control.
There is no one big factor that can prove Harry’s worst fears, that his marriage is over, just a number of small, interconnecting events, when piled on top of each other, points to a cataclysmic end to everything he had believed in.
Trust is lost firstly in his best friend and mentor, Andy, who only hints of impending disaster, Sasha, a woman whom he saved, and who appears to have motives of her own, and then in his wife, Alison, as he discovered piece by piece damning evidence she is about to leave him for another man.
Can we trust what we see with our eyes or trust what we hear?
Haven’t we all jumped to conclusions at least once in our lives?
Can Alison, a woman whose self-belief and confidence is about to be put to the ultimate test, find a way of proving their relationship is as strong as it has ever been?
John and Zoe are nowhere near Vienna, Zoe having gone to Bucharest and then Zurich on her way back to see John who was going to pick her up from the airport, then the both of them were going to Lucerne for a few days.
A reminiscing cruise on Lake Geneva had been on the cards, but there might not be time.
First, they had to do some work on charting who was trying to kill her, because she has finally come to the realization that there is more than one. Her visit to Bucharest yielded another name, quite possibly the person who was masquerading as Komarov.
Second, John was intending to introduce her to the new members of their team, the team he hasn’t quite got around to telling her about, who will be dedicated to research, investigation, and, via Isobel and the dark web, organizing the hits.
John had decided that she should not out there be distracted by finding work, just doing the work. He was going to take care of the rest.
Perhaps a good time would be over dinner?
Meanwhile, Sebastian and Rupert are on surveillance duties while Isobel is tracking down which hotel the lovebirds are staying in. As soon as she has the information, Rupert is on the job.
She then moved to track John, knowing Zoe will be with him because she has seen the passenger lists for flights from Bucharest to anywhere.
Both are thankful neither John nor Zoe was in Vienna, which then makes it a priority that neither Worthington of Arabella should leave, except to go back home. Although they hadn’t established it was the reason Worthington was in Vienna, it was too close to the bungled attempt on their lives for them not to draw the appropriate conclusion.
Sebastian has a plan B that no one was going to like, not even himself.
Plan A was yet to be formulated.
…
Today’s writing, with Zoe languishing in a dungeon waiting for a white knight, 1,566 words, for a total of 54,355.
This is rugged bushland not far from suburbia, though you wouldn’t know exactly where it is just by looking at the photograph
But, for the writer, this is an excellent setting.
For instance, once again we are out wandering in the bush, lost. It’s not hard to get lost, and stay lost if there are no recognizable landmarks, and given we all walk with a bias to one side or the other, and we have to avoid objects like trees, ravines, animals, and rocks, keeping a straight line is impossible.
But the question is, how did you get into the bush in the first place?
It’s not as if you would deliberately go there, just to if you can get lost.
No, my idea is that you have been kidnapped and drugged, then taken to a location either in the book of a car or just in the back seat with a hood, then dropped off and left to die
The criminals in this story are more efficient in getting rid of pesky witnesses.
Or maybe it’s something less sinister, like going out and counting the koalas in the bush, well, what’s left of the bush as the suburban spray takes more and more of the koala’s habitat.
And it could also be like the planet of the apes, the koalas start fighting back.
It could be said that of all the women one could meet, whether contrived or by sheer luck, what are the odds it would turn out to be the woman who was being paid a very large sum to kill you.
John Pennington is a man who may be lucky in business, but not so lucky in love. He has just broken up with Phillipa Sternhaven, the woman he thought was the one, but relatives and circumstances, and perhaps because she was a ‘princess’, may also have contributed to the end result.
So, what do you do when you are heartbroken?
That is a story that slowly unfolds, from the first meeting with his nemesis on Lake Geneva, all the way to a hotel room in Sorrento, where he learns the shattering truth.
What should have been a high turns out to be something else entirely, and from that point every thing goes to hell in a handbasket.
He suddenly realises his so-called friend Sebastian has not exactly told him the truth about a small job he asked him to do, the woman he is falling in love with is not quite who she says she is, and he is caught in the middle of a war between two men who consider people becoming collateral damage as part of their business.
The story paints the characters cleverly displaying all their flaws and weaknesses. The locations add to the story at times taking me back down memory lane, especially to Venice where in those back streets I confess it’s not all that hard to get lost.
All in all a thoroughly entertaining story with, for once, a satisfying end.
One of the recurring memories I have of my childhood was the annual pilgrimage to Grand Marais, Minnesota, located on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
It was the place where my father grew up, along with three brothers and a sister, and where his parents had been born, lived, and eventually died.
The other memory, that his parents never came to visit us, we always had to go to them. That, and the fact my mother hated them, that animosity borne out of an event at their wedding that no one ever spoke about.
Not until a long, long time later, after my father had passed away.
We stopped going when I turned eighteen, though I don’t think that was the reason. Mt grandparents hadn’t died or gone anywhere, it was just the week before our pilgrimage was to begin, my father announced there would be no more visits.
You could see the relief on our mother’s face, much less ours because they were, to put it mildly, quirky. Steven, the youngest brother put it more succinctly, weird and creepy.
Perhaps it had been the house, a large sprawling two-story mansion that had been added to over the years, and reputed to have thirteen bedrooms. Thirteen.
They had a butler, a housekeeper, a chauffeur, and several housemaids. Odd, because I got the impression my grandfather didn’t work, and yet they were, reputedly, very wealthy. Equally odd, then, that wealth didn’t extend to my father.
Which, in the final analysis, was probably the reason why we stopped going. He had been cut out of the will.
…
Of course, none of this would have reached my consciousness if I had not received an email from one of the sones of my fathers, brother, and uncle who had never visited us, I’d seen probably three times in my life, and who had lived with his parents in the mansion.
I’d not seen, or heard of any children of any of the other brothers, or sisters, so this was a first, and aroused my curiosity. I had thought that our part of the family had been exorcised from all their collective memories.
Apparently not.
And, that curiosity would soon go into overdrive because with the email came an invitation to come and stay, and meet the other members of the family.
I had a sister, Molly, and called her once I got the email, and she said she had one too.
Was she going? Hell yes. It, for her, was going to be the unearthing of all the secrets.
What secrets, I asked, knowing full well there had been a few, but she had simply said I’d have to wait and see.
…
The drive brought back a lot of memories, and unconsciously I found myself listening to the same songs we did when Dad droves us.
Molly had come to my place, and we drove there together. In itself, it was a good reason for us to reunite after so long being apart. It was even more profound considering we did not live all that far apart, it was just life and family that got in the way.
She, like myself, found herself reliving the annual pilgrimages, her memories being hazier than mine, but that was because she was a lot younger.
She had been the one to leave home first, finding our restrictive parents unbearable. My departure took longer because my mother had implored me to stay, and not leave her with ‘that unbearable man’.
That final few miles from the outskirts of town, past the waterline, then inland was hushed with anticipation. I last remembered the house, although forbidding, as impeccably maintained, with gardens, I was sure, that featured in ‘Architectural Digest’.
This vision as we approached was so different than the last, in the last vestiges of the evening, a dark forbidding place still, only a lot more sinister. The gardens had been abandoned long ago, and everything was overgrown.
The fountain out front, the centerpiece of the gardens, was buried and gone.
The house had also fallen into disrepair, and I was surprised the local authorities hadn’t condemned it.
I parked the car in the driveway, and we sat there, staring at it.
“That motel back down the road is looking good,” Molly said.
The invitation also included staying in one of the thirteen rooms.
“Depends on how many ghosts there are.”
“The motel or here?”
I shrugged. “I guess we’d better get to the front door before it’s dark, just in case.”
Closer to the stairs leading up to a veranda, I could see the different shades of timber when rotten planks had been replaced. We made it to the front door, Molly hanging on to me just in case.
I pulled a ring dangling from a chain and heard a gong go off inside the house. A minute passed, two, then the door creaked open, and an old man in a dinner suit was standing there. “Mr. Garry, and Miss Molly, I presume.
He stood to one side before we answered, and we went in.
The inside was utterly different from the outside, having been renovated recently, much brighter than I remembered from the endless wood paneling. The old man ushered us into a large lounge room, on one side a huge log fire was burning, and around the walls, where there wasn’t a bookshelf full of books were family paintings.
“It’s like a mausoleum,” Molly said.
I recognized a lot of those faces in the paintings, including one of our father and mother together, probably not long after they were married. The men of that family all looked the same, except when it came to me, I looked more like my mother.
“Much better than it used to be.”
“I don’t remember much.”
To one side there was a large staircase that you could go up one side and down the other, and as children, we used to run up and down, and generally be annoying. Sliding down the banister was strictly forbidden, until after everyone went to bed.
I was half expecting to see the old man come from the depths of the house, but instead, a man that I could easily mistake as my father came through from the rear, where, I remembered, there was a room before the kitchens.
“Garry, I presume. And Molly. My God, it’s been too long.”
A shake of the hand for me, and a hug for Molly.
“David, or Jerry?”
“David. You remember. We used to run amok in this place.” He grinned.
He was the wild one, and all I did was follow. There were about seven of us, in the end, before we stopped coming.
“The others will be here tomorrow, and they’re dying to meet you. My dad was the last man standing, and he left the place to me, not that it was much by that time. I’ve spent years doing it up, but there’s a long way to go before it returns to its former glory. By the way, there are no ghosts in the bedrooms, and they are modernized with their own bathroom. I saw you out in the car before, looking horrified. Just a word to the wise, that motel does have ghosts. The jury is out on whether grandfather still roams the hallways, but I guess that’s something you’ll find out tonight. He was a horrid man by all accounts. Sorry, my wife says I babble when I’m nervous.”
“He does.” A woman, a few years older than Molly came out from the back.”
“Angelina?”
“You remember me.” She smiled.
I remembered her, had for a long time because back then, she was the first girl I thought I was madly in love with. The fact she was a cousin didn’t seem to matter. She just ignored me anyway.
And her beauty had not diminished over the years. “How could anyone forget you?”
“Yes, I had that effect on boys, didn’t I? It’s good to see you again.”
We both scored a hug, and yes, being close to her again did increase my heart rate just a little.
“Come,” David said, “sit and we’ll have a drink. Have you eaten?”
“Not for a while.”
“Then we were about to have a bite, I’m sure there’s plenty for everyone. Sit, and we’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“No wife, husband?”
“Yes on both accounts, but we would never bring them here. This family is difficult enough for us let alone outsiders. The rest of the group, well, you’ll see, are just plain quirky relatives. If you ever saw the Addams Family, TV series or movies, well, they’d fit right in here. But you’ll see. More on that soon.”
He and Angelina disappeared outback and silence fell over the room.
“Why do I get the feeling we might be murdered in our beds tonight?”
It was beginning to look like that was a possibility.
…
When David returned with the old man, Angelina, and what looked to be a maid with food and drinks, we sat down again, turning our fears of being murdered into a severe frightening of ghosts.
The old man was enough to think ghosts were alive in the house. It couldn’t possibly be the butler from the last time I saw him because he would have to be about 120 years old.
When all of us were settled, David began.
“There is another reason why I asked both of you here, along with all the others, by the way, there are around ten of us. Your father never told you the truth, or perhaps anything, of the situation when he stopped coming to visit his parents, did he?”
“He just said it was a difference of opinion, that his father would never see reason, didn’t like my mother or her family and gave up trying to be civil.”
“It was worse than that, he told him that if he didn’t give up your mother, he would cut him off from the family fortune, which eventually he did. It’s probably why you found life a little tougher for a few years.”
That was one way of putting it, we were taken out of our private schools and had just about all our leisure activities curtailed, and the worst, no more holidays. Mother even had to get a job, which disappointed her family, but they were not as rich as my father’s family was, so couldn’t help us financially.
“It was difficult.”
“Well, the good news is, your grandmother, our grandmother, was not as quirky or pedantic as her husband and never forgot the service your father did for her when he could. In that regard, she has left a bequest to both you and your sister, Molly. It’s been a long, hard battle to get it through the system, but it’s finally sorted.”
“I liked grandmother more than grandfather,” Molly said.
“Most of us did. He was a rebel himself, going against his family, a very interesting bunch themselves. Our quirkiness probably came from them, the last of the relatively unknown banking and railroad tycoons more famous in the 19th century than today where we are relatively forgotten. It is of course a blessing in disguise. But you ask, what is that quirkiness worth?”
“Not much I would imagine, after all this time. Our father taught us the value of money, so it’ll be nice to have some extra.”
“Some extra.” He smiled. “It’s about 125 million dollars, each. Enough I would say that you can now afford some quirks of your own.”
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 