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CHAPTER TWO

S ebastian purred and wove himself around my legs as I walked back to the tiny two-person table in the corner that served as my combined dining room and breakfast nook.

He’s a gray Norwegian Forest cat and he’s big—almost twenty-five pounds.

He was my mom’s before she passed and I inherited him from her.

He was about the only thing I’d inherited, except for a few knick-knacks like her mirror.

Her house and everything in it had to be sold at the end—it went to pay for her hospital bills.

The cancer that killed her had been slow and painful and in the end it took everything—literally everything of any value.

I always felt like that was somehow unfair.

The hospital shouldn’t be able to charge so much when they hadn’t been able to save her.

I wouldn’t have minded giving them all that money if they’d just been able to give me back my Mom.

Instead they had failed and I’d barely had enough money left over to bury her.

Still, I had Sebastian and he was a good companion. My words never got stuck in my throat when I talked to him, since he was an animal, not a person, and he was an excellent foot-warmer at night.

“This is weird ,” I told him, showing him the envelope as though he could read. On the outside of it my Grandmother’s name was inscribed in thin, spidery handwriting that looked somehow familiar.

I didn’t just mean that getting my Grandmother’s last will and testament—five years late—was weird, though. I meant the fact that I had a Grandmother at all.

I mean, everyone has a Grandmother of course—it’s a fact of biology.

But until the strange little man mentioned my Grandmother’s name, I had completely forgotten her.

I mean, that flash of memory with her humming in the kitchen and stirring brownie batter was the first thought I’d ever had of her—that I could remember, anyway.

It was like there was a blank space in my mind where she ought to have been.

But honestly, a lot of my earliest childhood memories were like that—blank spots and gaping holes. My distant past was dark—a void I couldn’t see into.

My earliest recollections begin in elementary school—my first-grade teacher asking each of us to introduce ourselves to the class and say our names. That was the first time my words got stuck—I literally couldn’t get my name out.

The teacher got angry with me and sent me to the principal’s office where I cried miserably—and silently—as I waited to get punished.

I got a lecture about obeying the teacher and not being rude to my classmates—as though I had chosen to be unable to speak in front of a crowd of strangers like that!

Oh yes— that I remembered. But the grey-haired woman humming in the kitchen hadn’t existed in my mind or my memory until the little man had said her name.

My Mom had never mentioned her mother either. She talked about my father and how much she missed him—he had died not long after I was born. But we didn’t have any other relatives that I knew of—at least, she had never mentioned any to me.

I wondered now why she hadn’t said anything about my Grandmother. It would have been nice to know I had someone, somewhere after Mom had died. Maybe they had a falling out? I didn’t know and it seemed the only way to find anything out was to open the envelope.

But still, I hesitated. The thick, creamy paper seemed to make my fingertips tingle.

Was that some kind of static electricity thing?

I didn’t know but I did know that handling the envelope gave me a strange feeling—a feeling of inevitability.

I somehow knew that once I opened it, events would be set in motion and there would be no going back…

The next minute, I snapped out of it.

“What are you thinking?” I muttered to myself. “You’re being silly—just open it! Who knows, maybe she left you a million dollars or something amazing like that!”

Sebastian mewed his rusty “Mmmrow ,” as if in agreement and I smiled down at him.

“You’re right, Sebastian—whatever’s inside the envelope might be the answer to all our problems.”

Or it might be a whole new set of problems entirely. But I chose not to think about that. Without further ado, I ripped it open.

The paper inside was just as thick and creamy as the envelope and the initials EJP were embossed on the top right corner. Very elegant. There was only a single sheet of paper inside and it was short and to the point.

“I, Elvira Jocelyn Pruitt, being of sound mind and body do bequeath my house, Morris, to my granddaughter, Sarah Jocelyn Massey with the sole condition that she shall live in said house, (Morris) and not try to sell him or tear him down or change him in any way. He must be kept intact and passed on to the next generation of our bloodline. If he is treated well, he will take care of his owner, which will be my granddaughter, if she agrees to these terms.”

It was signed with the same spidery handwriting,

Elvira Jocelyn Pruitt

I stared at the will for a long time, reading and re-reading it—also noting that my Grandmother and I shared the same middle name. Had I been named after her? But that definitely wasn’t the strangest thing about the document in my hand.

“This is so weird,” I said aloud to Sebastian. She named her house.”

And apparently the house—Morris—was now mine, if I agreed to abide by her rules.

Well, who was I to say no to a free house?

The market being what it was, I could work my ass off for years and never get enough for a down-payment on a house of my own—which was one reason selling Mom’s house to pay her medical bills had hurt so much.

I grew up in that house and it had been completely paid off—it was hard to see it go.

Well maybe you grew up in this one too—at least a little, whispered a voice in my head.

The snapshot memory of the grey-haired lady making brownies in the sunny, old-fashioned kitchen jumped into my mind again.

I wondered if that kitchen was in Morris, my grandma’s house? And now my house, it turned out.

But where was it, exactly? I flipped the paper over and didn’t see any kind of directions on how to get to my late Grandmother’s place. Then I looked at the envelope again and frowned. The address simply read,

#1 Crooked Lane,

Hidden Hollow, MA.

Well, that wasn’t much to go on—there wasn’t even a zip code—but I supposed I could Google it.

But when I typed the address into my phone, nothing popped up. I couldn’t find a single town or county named Hidden Hollow anywhere in Massachusetts or anywhere in the US for that matter.

My heart sank. What good did it do me to have inherited a free house if I couldn’t find out where it was? I wished I could have made myself talk, so I could have asked the little delivery guy some questions. He’d said something about “seeing me around the Hollow” so presumably he knew where it was.

“How am I supposed to find this place?” I muttered, feeling frustrated. I flipped the paper over again and reread the will. I noticed that one line of it was underlined— “if she agrees to these terms.” Was there something else I was supposed to sign somewhere?

But another look in the envelope showed it was empty of any other sheets of paper. There was, however, something I hadn’t noticed before—a heavy, iron key with an intricate, swirling pattern at the top of it.

“What in the world?” I asked Sebastian, who had hopped up on the table to sniff the key as I turned it in my hands. “How did I miss this? I should have seen it earlier.”

But I hadn’t. Was it the key to my new house—to Morris? It must be, I decided, but how did I get to it? Or to him —if my Grandmother’s will was right, the house must be a guy. At least I assumed he was, with a name like “Morris.”

Again the words that were underlined in the will jumped out at me, “If she agrees to these conditions.”

“All right,” I said aloud, waving the key in one hand and the will in the other.

“I agree to all the terms and conditions. I won’t change the house, er, Morris, in any way.

He can stay just like he is as long as I can live in him for free.

I’m about to lose my apartment if I can’t pay the rent at the end of the month.

And then I don’t know what I’m going to d… ”

The words died in my mouth because something very strange was happening in the middle of my apartment. It looked like someone was using an invisible welding torch to draw a line of fire right in the middle of the air.

No, not just one line, I saw as the invisible torch made an abrupt ninety degree turn in midair and continued parallel to the floor for about three feet.

Then it took another turn and went straight downward.

When it reached the worn carpet on my floor, it stopped.

A moment later a smaller fiery line appeared—it drew a circle with a squiggly mark below it.

I recognized the shapes when I saw them—a knob and a keyhole.

After a minute, the fiery lines stopped glowing and became solid and there it was—standing right in the middle of my living room area.

Someone or some thing had drawn a door for me and now I had to decide if I wanted to go through it or not.