A Study in Seduction

by Eva Chase

  It didn’t matter now. I was never wiping that image out of my head, and I wasn’t giving him a chance to repeat it. Melody might tease me about being a pushover, but I wasn’t that much of a doormat, thank you.

  My hand went to my purse to grab my phone. I could call my best friend right now, and she’d put this whole rotten day in perspective. Melody was good at that. Though she might have to stretch her skills beyond their usual limits today, given the catastrophe my life had turned into.

  I was just reaching my thumb to tap her name when my ringtone warbled. For a second, I thought my best friend had psychically picked up on my distress and decided to pre-emptively call me. But it wasn’t her number on the screen. It was my mom’s.

  Oh, no. Had Cameron gotten into even more trouble? It would figure if today’s nasty surprises weren’t over yet.

  I answered, gripping the edge of the sofa cushion with my other hand, preparing for news of my older brother’s latest exploits. “Hi, Mom. What’s up?”

  Mom’s hesitant voice traveled over the line. “Oh, well, not much with me, but— Is this a good time to talk, honey? I know you’re probably at work.”

  I bit my tongue against another rough laugh. “That’s not a problem. What is it?” She wasn’t talking with the obvious quaver I associated with Cameron problems. It could be he was still keeping his nose clean after all.

  “It’s all very unexpected,” Mom said. “You remember your grand-aunt—Aunt Alicia?”

  “Of course.” Aunt Alicia had been my dad’s aunt. When he’d gotten sick and for a while after he’d passed on, she’d come by the house to check in on Mom, Cam, and me. She’d always brought the best picture books and let me sit on her knee while she brought the stories to life with her bright voice. My clearest memory of her was us tucked together in Dad’s old armchair, her hair, always pinned neatly back, shining blond and silver in the light from the living room window.

  I hadn’t seen her since I was eight or nine, around fifteen years ago. She and Mom had gotten into a fight about something or other, and she’d stopped dropping in.

  “Well, it seems she’s no longer with us. And she left a will—she didn’t have any kids of her own, you know, and she never married—and… She’s left everything to you.”

  My grip on the phone loosened. I recovered myself at the last second before I dropped it. “What?”

  “I guess you were the person in the family she felt closest to,” Mom said with one of her faint twitters. “I’m not sure exactly what you’ll want to do with it. There’s a little money, not a lot, and then there’s the Tenniel property. It’s quite an old house… Your father grew up there, and his parents inherited it from his grandfather… I’m not sure what state it’s in after your grand-aunt was living there all that time alone.”

  Aunt Alicia was dead. A pang ran through me, but it was muted, both by the more direct blows I’d just taken today and by all those years since she’d shown any interest in me. She must have lived an awfully lonely life if her best choice to inherit was someone she’d only known when I was a little girl.

  A flutter of excitement rose up under the pang. I didn’t want to be here anymore, and now I didn’t have to be.

  “I’ll have to go take a look at it, right?” I said. “Who do I need to talk to?”

  “Oh my God, Lyss, this place is freaking amazing!” Melody leaned forward to peer through the windshield as I parked just outside Aunt Alicia’s house. Which was now, according to the deed stuffed in my suitcase, my house.

  My best friend had given the place an accurate assessment. I stepped out to get a better look at the building, and it took me a second to catch my breath.

  The old Victorian stood on a couple acres of overgrown fields tangled with wildflowers. Three stories of dusty pink clapboard and carved wooden lintels loomed over us. A covered porch stretched across the whole front, and a tower jutted from the middle of the house with gable roof that pointed toward the stark blue sky. The narrow windows gleamed, revealing nothing but darkness on the other side.

  So, this was the place where Dad had grown up. His parents had died in a car accident not long before I was born, so I guessed Aunt Alicia had inherited the property then. It was only a couple hours’ drive from the city. Why hadn’t she ever brought Cam and me out here?

  Why had she given it to me now? There hadn’t been any explanation in the will, and her lawyer hadn’t been able to tell me anything useful. I was hoping the answer to that mystery lay somewhere inside. She wouldn’t toss me a house without some kind of personal message, right?

  We headed up the front steps to the double front doors. The key Aunt Alicia’s lawyer had passed on to me looked like something out of a museum. It must have been ages since they’d changed the locks. But it turned smoothly, the door opening with just a faint creak.

  We stepped inside onto the hall’s soft runner. A mahogany table with bowed legs squatted by one wall; a matching grandfather clock ticked by the other. Ahead of us, two arched doorways led into the main floor’s rooms before a grand staircase rose up to the second floor. At the flick of the light switch next to the doors, a brass chandelier blinked on high above our heads.

  Aunt Alicia had looked after the place right up until the end. Only a faint layer of dust had settled on the furniture from the several days she’d been in the hospital before her death last week. A delicate smell like dried lilac perfumed in the air. A few framed charcoal sketches hung on the walls—country landscapes and town scenes that I recognized as Aunt Alicia’s own work. I still had a sketch she’d done of me as a kid, tucked into a memento box somewhere.

  Melody glided from doorway to doorway, her eyes lighting up behind her chic glasses. “Holy crap. Can you imagine the photoshoots you could have in this place?” She clapped her hands with a wide grin.

  “You mean, the photoshoots you could have,” I said teasingly. My best friend was an aspiring fashion photographer-slash-designer. She’d just gotten her most recent collection accepted into one of the independent boutiques downtown for the first time. The dress she had on right now, a bold pattern of purples and golds that set off the black bob of her hair to amazing effect, was her own work. “If you want to set something up, you know I’ll be all for it.”

  She waggled a finger at me. “First I want you to agree to model some of my stuff. You’ll look great in it, Lyssa. I promise.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’ll look better on a professional model,” I said. “At least now I can help by providing the set.”

  We’d had this conversation about a gazillion times. My five-foot-five frame was hardly model height, and while, sure, I was thin, it was in an awkward way rather than gracefully slender. Melody maintained that gawky was “totally a thing” in the high fashion world these days. I didn’t have a complex about my body or anything—I was pretty happy with it, most of the time—but I didn’t see any need for it to be splashed across catalogue spreads for all kinds of strangers to evaluate.

  Like usual, Melody let out a playful huff. “I’ll convince you one of these days. You’ve got to let loose, girl! Especially now that you’re done with that drag of a job.”

  “It’s more like they were done with me,” I pointed out. “And it wasn’t that much of a drag. I don’t know why I was one of the ones who got laid off. Everyone else complained all the time, but I kind of liked it, helping people get the info they needed. There weren’t that many jerk customers. I was pretty good at it too, you know.”

  “Of course you were,” Melody said. “You never saw a problem you didn’t want to fix. Don’t you need a little break from taking care of everyone around you?”

  I wrinkled my nose at her. We’d had this conversation lots of times too. “I don’t have to take care of you.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Maybe there’d been a bit of that element to our friendship when we’d first clicked in ninth grade. Melody’s parents had just gotten into what she now called “The Shouting Era,” a five
-year lead-up to their eventual divorce. So I’d encouraged her to hang out at my place as much as she wanted, which ended up meaning nearly every evening. You’re always so together, she’d said to me once back then. Whenever I’m around you, I feel like anything that’s wrong, it’s got to be fixable.

  In return, I could thank her for introducing me to my first alcoholic beverage (wine coolers, which I still liked), my first joint (which had also been my last), and my first party make-out session (with Tommy Milton, who hadn’t stuck around, but he’d been a really good kisser). I grounded Melody, and she pushed me to spread my wings. The balance worked just fine.

  “Anyway,” Melody said now, as we wandered through the dining room and into the kitchen fitted with appliances that looked like antiques, “that’s not even getting into the real deadweight you just cut loose from your life. Adios, Brianito!”

  “I know you didn’t like Brian that much,” I said. “But you could pretend to be sad we broke up.”

  “Why bother? He showed his true colors, didn’t he? Good riddance. I’m glad you know what an asshole he is so you can move on.”

  “I think I’m going to take a break from dating for a while.”

  She laughed. “Who said anything about dating? Have a fling, a one-night-stand or two. It’s about time you lived it up. You’ve got a place to live and money to last you a little while. Just this once, you don’t need to worry about anything except what you want—and then go for it.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “And what if what I want is to curl up on that velvet sofa over there with a steady supply of ice cream and binge-watch all of Netflix for a month?” I pointed toward the living room—or maybe that was the family room, or the sitting room. It was hard to keep track.

  Melody brushed past me and tugged on a strand of my hair. “I know you’ve got more wildness than that in you, Lyss. Sometime you’ve got to let it out, or else you’re going to explode from bottling it up so long. Come on, let’s see what’s what upstairs.”

  As we headed up the staircase, a small furry body tumbled onto the landing. A black kitten that couldn’t have been more than a few months old peered at us and meowed piteously. I clucked my tongue at him and scooped him up. Melody gave me a curious glance.

  “The house came with pets included in the deal,” I said. “There should be a tabby named Dinah around here somewhere and a couple other kittens. Aunt Alicia hadn’t named those yet.”

  “Are you going to keep them?” Melody asked.

  I rubbed the kitten’s head between his swiveling ears. There was something comforting about the warmth of his soft little body. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll see what I end up deciding to do with this place. My apartment has a two-pet limit. I could put them up for adoption if I have to—it’s only Dinah I had to agree to keep.”

  The second and third floors held a total of four bedrooms, a music room with a grand piano, a library, and a bathroom where the pipes hummed in a slightly unnerving way when I tried the sink faucet. If I decided to keep the whole house rather than sell it, I might want to invest in a few updates.

  Every room held new mysteries—a closed wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a secretary desk. My heart beat a little faster with each one, even though we were just doing a quick survey of the place. I could explore the house in more depth once I’d gotten my bearings. Even though I’d never seen Aunt Alicia here, I felt her presence in the elegance and the neatness of the place. She deserved to have her belongings handled with proper care, not rummaged through as if I were looting the place.

  So far I hadn’t come across any indication that she’d anticipated my arrival, though.

  In the middle of the third floor, a wrought-iron spiral staircase led up into the high tower I’d seen from outside. We scrambled up and emerged into a small room much messier and shabbier than the ones below.

  A couple of bookcases stood against the walls, the books on them strewn about haphazardly between dusty figurines. A few pieces of clothing had been flung over the rocking chair in the corner. Next to it stood a full-length mirror with a silver frame that was shaped like a leafy vine winding around the glass.

  Melody let out a low whistle. “I guess she didn’t make it up here very often. Maybe those stairs got to be a bit much for her.”

  “Yeah,” I said, only half listening. My gaze was stuck to the mirror. I stepped closer to it without thinking, and a quivering sensation raced over my skin. The hairs on the back of my neck twitched.

  I froze, hugging myself. “Did you feel that?”

  Melody cocked her head. “Feel what?”

  She didn’t look at all disturbed. I shook my head. Taking all this in must be starting to overwhelm me. My heart was still beating even faster than before, but almost… eagerly. At the same time, my body balked at the idea of staying in this room with Melody one moment longer.

  I turned toward the stairs. “That’s the whole house. I’d better get my grocery shopping done before the store closes. A town that small, they might not even stay open past five.”

  “Hmm,” Melody said, following me down. “One potential downside to getting to live in a fantastic old house—can you even get pizza delivery here?”

  We both laughed as we reached the bottom of the spiral stairs, and the tension inside me broke. But when I glanced back toward the tower, a faint tingling crept back up my neck that I couldn’t quite shake.

  2

  It felt strange having a huge house to myself after a few years in pokey apartments, dorms before that, and my childhood bungalow before even that. Even when I’d lived in that last apartment by myself for the first several months before Brian had moved in, I’d always been able to hear my neighbors around me, thumping across my ceiling or hollering to each other on the other side of the walls.

  Aunt Alicia’s house was out in the middle of nowhere. Other than the rumble of an occasional car passing by on the country road, I might as well have been the last person on Earth.

  The pipes hummed, and the floors creaked—sometimes even when I wasn’t walking on them. The kittens scampered around with the rasp of their little claws. But somehow the space still felt vastly quiet from the moment Melody headed home. Even when I tucked myself into bed in the smallest of the six bedrooms, snuggling under my beloved feather duvet that I’d brought with me, the emptiness of all the other rooms echoed around me.

  Maybe it’d been a little ridiculous, running right out here just a few days after I’d kicked Brian to the curb. I’d wanted a change in scenery, not to be hit over the head with my aloneness.

  When I woke up the next morning, sunlight was already streaming through the thin curtains on the bedroom window, and the black kitten was tumbling across my duvet. Noticing I was up, he gave me his usual plaintive meow. I ruffled his fur and pushed myself out of bed.

  Time to get into the deeper exploration. There had to be something there that would explain why Aunt Alicia had wanted me to have the house at all.

  The black kitten had definite ideas about where I should begin my survey. As soon as I walked out into the hall in my lounge-wear of lacy tank top and yoga pants, he darted toward the spiral staircase that led into the tower’s attic room. I hesitated, watching him hop from step to step.

  “Are you sure you don’t want some breakfast first?” I called.

  He paused, peered at me between the wrought-iron steps, and then kept bounding up.

  I would have liked some breakfast. A cup of coffee would clear some of the just-woke-up mugginess from my head, and my stomach pinched, empty as all these rooms. But something drew me to those stairs anyway. Maybe it was the kitten’s determination to see his mission through. Maybe it was curiosity driving me to sort through the contents of at least one room.

  Or maybe there was more to it, a tug on a level I wasn’t even conscious of.

  I walked up the spiral stairs, gripping the cool metal railing. The small room at the top of the tower looked the same as it had yesterday other than the ligh
t coming in the windows slanting at a different angle. The air tasted dry and a little stale, but not musty, at least. The general disorder still struck me as odd. Aunt Alicia had kept the rest of the house so tidy. Was Melody right and the climb up the stairs had just gotten too hard?

  I couldn’t help straightening out the books on the shelves, blowing the dust off them before setting them upright and in even rows. They were mostly children’s books, I realized: Narnia, Oz, Kipling, and more. My gaze fell on a wooden chest that I’d missed yesterday, tucked behind the railing at the top of the stairs. A toy box? Had Aunt Alicia stuck all the artifacts from her and Dad’s childhood up here?

  To reach the chest, I had to pass that tall standing mirror. The sunlight glimmered off both the glass and the silver frame. Not a streak of dust had settled on its surface. That was a little weird.

  The quivering sensation that had come over me yesterday crawled up my back. I couldn’t help glancing at my reflection as I walked past. That was some great bedhead I’d woken up with. I combed my fingers through my shoulder-length waves, walking on—and jerked to a stop.

  I’d disappeared from the mirror. I wasn’t standing right in front of it anymore, but I was close enough that I still should have been able to see myself. With one step, the whole reflection of the room had blurred, and I’d faded away completely.

  I stood stock still, staring harder. None of the shapes in the suddenly hazy glass would come into focus. None of them looked like me. What the hell was wrong with the thing?

  The quivering ran over my whole body. My heart thudded, but I eased closer to the mirror. The blurred shapes shivered and swirled before my eyes. All at once, the thump of my pulse felt exhilarated rather than nervous, as if I could sense I was on the verge of an incredible discovery. So close. If I just—

  My hand reached out of its own accord. My fingers grazed the slick glass. I leaned forward, peering at the blurred image, and my hand slipped right through that smooth surface. I only had time to let out a squeak of surprise before the rest of me toppled after it into the mirror.