The Uninvited (4 page)

She tried the key. It didn’t fit.

She tried again. She pushed and pulled and jimmied without success. And then, when she looked closer, she realized that the key was a lot older than the lock. In fact, the lock looked new.

She stepped back from the door. She looked at the nearest window. She could not see inside, but she ­could see what she hadn’t thought to notice at first. Marc had said the windows would be boarded up. None of these windows was boarded up. She felt cold all over. The wrong house?

She backed down the steps, slipping and falling to one knee.

Ridiculous! There couldn’t be two enchanting little white gabled houses with keys hidden in secret drawers. Not unless she had entered a parallel universe. And Mimi
hated
parallel universes.

Then she remembered her contingency plan. The back door.

“Who knows what the weather will have done to the place,” her father had said in his e-mail. “The back door exits into a little shed. There are shelves along the back wall of that shed, and on the top shelf there are old cans of paint. Behind the green can, you’ll find the back-door key on a nail.”

Mimi scurried around the house to the shed. The shelf along the back wall was still there and so were the cans of paint. She lowered the one whose label was stained green and behind it there was, in fact, a key.

She was just reaching for it, when she heard a noise behind her and glanced back to see a man standing at the entrance to the shed.

“Can I help you?” he said in a voice that did not sound as if he had help in mind.

She turned to face him, pulling her shirt closed. There was no escape. But his voice was young, and Mimi was not easily intimidated.

“I asked you a question!” He had lowered his voice, not in volume, but in pitch, and it made Mimi think of someone who was trying to sound more menacing than he really was. A skinny someone. There were, after all, some skills a girl learned living in the big bad city.

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” she said, “I was looking for this can of paint.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You were looking for the key.”

“Got me,” she said. “And, by the way, who the hell are you? No wait, hold that thought. I have been driving all day, and if I don’t get to a bathroom pretty quick, we’re both going to regret it. Me more than you, obviously, but you get my point.”

He approached her, angrily, and she stepped out of his way, throwing up her hands, wondering if she had been mistaken about how harmless he was.

“I don’t have a cent on me,” she said.

He stopped directly in front of her, a head taller than she was but with eyes that while serious could hardly be called menacing. And what she saw hanging around his neck gave her hope.

“Well, actually I did dab on some Trouble by Boucheron, but I have no
money.
Honest!” He didn’t seem amused. “Bad joke,” she said, lowering her arms. “Sorry.”

Meanwhile, he slipped a key into the lock and opened the door.

Indignation rapidly replaced fear, but it would have to wait, for a more pressing problem needed to be addressed first. He faced her from just inside the kitchen door. He pointed to the right.

“It’s all yours,” he said.

“You bet it is!” she said.

His frown hardened. “Be my guest.”

She pushed by him. “We’ll see about that,” she said curtly. She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and locked it. Then, as she pulled down her shorts, she looked around for a weapon. A toilet plunger? It would have to do.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HE LOCK ON THE BATHROOM DOOR
was just a hook and eye. The kind guys in movies break down with one good shove. But she didn’t think her “host” looked beefy enough for that. Mimi steamed at the idea of it. She had thought squats were just a city thing. And what if he had been living here for years? Wasn’t there some kind of law about squatters’ rights?

She flushed the toilet and washed her hands. The tiny bathroom was spotless. A clean towel hung on a rack on the back of the door. Had
he
done this? Was he married? Was he gay?

She reentered the kitchen, without the plunger.

“Thanks,” she said. “Now I’d like to know what the hell you’re doing here!”

He was sitting at a little table by the window. In the light his hair appeared amber; his eyes looked amber, too, as she got closer. He was slim, all right. Not the breaking-down-the-door type at all. He sported a bit of fluff on his chin that didn’t look as if it would ever get a diploma as a full-fledged beard. He was older than her but not by much, she guessed. He didn’t look angry anymore, just clinically perturbed.

“Jackson Page,” he said, “but I go by Jay. Not that you asked. But a name gives us something to work with.”

She folded her arms across her chest. She had buttoned up her shirt in the bathroom. No need to inflame the locals. She noticed a kettle on the stove, a teapot waiting on the counter. The kitchen, like the bathroom, was Spartan, but in apple-pie order.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m Mimi. Nice to meet you, Jay. And now that we’ve got the intros out of the way, do you live here?” He shook his head. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Because this is private property.”

Jay pushed himself back from the table and stretched out his legs. He was wearing white jeans and an olive drab tee. And the memory stick around his neck. She didn’t think the average redneck carried a memory stick, but she didn’t know about the average psychopath. “So, you’re the one who’s been leaving the little messages?” he said.

Now it was her turn to look perplexed.

“Messages?”

“The bluebird. The snake skin. The cricket. The voice.”

Mimi backed up a step. “What?” Jay looked more or less normal—handsome, even. But he was clearly nuts.
In which case, gently does it, Mimi, and stay as close to the door as you can.

“Funny,” she said. “I was thinking about bluebirds only ten minutes ago, but the animated ones, you know? In
Snow White.
”

He didn’t speak, just stared at her, frowning, waiting. The muscles along his jawbone twitched.

“Well, my bluebird was not animated,” he said. “It was dead. It was lying right here on the table.”

She stared at the table, at his hands resting there, making a nest for an invisible dead bird. His hands were long and slender but strong looking. He wore a yellow bangle around a slim but muscled wrist.
Stay on task,
she told herself.

“Could it have gotten in somehow—the bluebird, I mean—and then tried to escape through the window?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “You tell me.”

“Well, I just did. Except it was only a guess.”

“And the snake skin?”

Mimi rolled her eyes. “Listen, the only snakeskin I’ve ever seen was on a really nice pair of boots at Bloomingdale’s.”

His frown lessened. Or at least his forehead uncreased a little.

“I couldn’t afford the boots. And seriously, I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“This snake skin was curled on the pillow on my bed,” he said.

“Eeuw! But I thought you said you didn’t live here.”

“I don’t. I crash sometimes. I have a mattress in case I end up working late.”

“‘Working late’?”

“We were talking about the snake skin,” he said.

“Right.” Mimi shuddered. “That is gross!”

“Yes, it is.”

Her arms were still crossed, and she hugged herself a little tighter at the thought of what he was saying. Then the kettle whistled and he got up to attend to it.

She backed out of his way, but from the way his head was hanging, she didn’t think he was much of a threat anymore. Kind of sweet, really.

“So, Jay,” she said, her voice upbeat, “what is it you do here? Which is not the same as what are you
doing
here—a question you still haven’t answered.”

He grinned a little. He was still clearly pissed, but just maybe she could win him over. She had a habit of shooting first and asking later, but she did not want this to get messy.

“You want some tea?” he asked, good manners winning out over smoldering resentment.

“Thanks,” she said. “Tea would be good.”

“There’s no milk,” he said.

“And no lemon, I guess.”

He shook his head. “No fridge.” Then, with the tea steeping in a Brown Betty teapot, he resumed his seat at the little table. She pulled out the chair across from him. It was a bright yellow chair that might have seemed cheery under different circumstances.

“I’m still waiting,” she said.

But he stirred his tea and wouldn’t look at her.

“Listen,” she said, “whatever’s been happening here, it wasn’t me. I left New York yesterday and crossed the Peace Bridge at around two this afternoon, entering Canada for the first time in my life.”

He looked at her candidly.

“And I hate snakes,” she said. “Except in expensive boots.”

He smiled. What a treat! Maybe she’d keep him around—as a maid. Then the smile wilted. He sighed and lowered his head. He knitted his fingers together.

Shit,
she thought.
He’s going to say grace.

But he was just sad. Sad and drained.

“This stuff has really gotten to you, huh?”

He looked up at her and nodded. “You could say that. Somebody obviously doesn’t love me being here.”

It was the perfect segue. But some instinct made Mimi hold her fire. She knew she’d have to burst this guy’s bubble sooner or later, but she was intrigued. And she wasn’t stupid, either. If somebody didn’t want Jay here, was that somebody going to take kindly to her?

“It’s not what you’d call an all-out terror campaign,” she said. “I mean you haven’t found any dolls that look like you with pins stuck in them or pentagrams written in blood on the door, right?”

He chuckled. But then he looked hard at her, and his shiny brown-gold eyes glowed so strongly she had to look away. That wasn’t something she did very often.

He poured their tea at the counter. “In a way, it’s worse,” he said, handing her a mug. “Come on.”

He led her from the kitchen into a front room that was empty except for a vacuum cleaner standing guard in one corner and a beanbag chair by the east-side window with a few books and magazines strewn around it. Through a door she saw a mattress on a bare floor in the only other room. The bed was covered with a bright blue comforter.

There was a stairway with light cascading down it like a warm yellow carpet. She followed him up to the second level, and this was another story altogether. She had heard about this from her father, but he had been vague about the details, either because he’d forgotten or preferred to keep it a surprise. And what a surprise!

There had been interior walls up here, a bedroom or two, but they were gone now. The space was wide open—a loft—with posts and beams to take the weight of the missing walls. The room was naturally lit by a gable window in the front and one in the back. There was also a window at the east end and two smaller windows to either side of the chimney stack on the west wall. The floor was stained with colorful spots and dribbles, courtesy of her father. A large carpet of industrial gray twill covered most of the central space, and on the carpet sat a couple of Ikea-type trestle tables, upon one of which sat an impressive Mac connected by all sorts of cables and adapters and who knows what to a couple of synthesizers and an array of black boxes stacked in a rack behind what she guessed had to be some kind of mixing board. There was a ratty-looking Yamaha keyboard and several other electronic thingies strewn on the floor, their little LED lights glowing in readiness. Guitars were arrayed on stands around Action Central. So was what she thought must be an electronic drum kit. There were mikes on stands, speakers and headphones, and a music stand and…

“Shit!” she said. “It’s a recording studio.”

He laughed. “Well, sort of,” he said modestly. Then once again his face fell and he looked sad, defeated. She carefully put down her mug of tea on the floor by the stairs.

“I have bad luck with liquids and computers,” she said. “I fried my laptop with a double latte.”

“Bummer,” he said. But his mind was elsewhere. “I want you to hear something.”