Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “I don’t acknowledge that any of this is happening,” proclaimed Josiah, but he did pull a key from his pocket and, with bad grace, head for the front door.

  The house on Grosvenor Street didn’t look like any of the other houses in the neighbourhood. Mel, who liked to understand everything about everything, said this particular suburb had grown up in the 1940s and afterwards, and so the houses were mainly little one-family units: small bungalows, split-levels, the occasional duplex. There were newer houses, too, quite big, blocky ones covered in pink or yellow stucco and crammed into subdivided lots that seemed hardly large enough to hold them. This house fit neither the older style nor the newer one. It was three storeys high and what Mel described as “peaky,” which seemed to mean that the architect had been in love with gables and had crammed in as many as he could. Three were visible from the front, one on top of the other, getting smaller the higher they went; there were two more small ones in the back and one on the southern side, the side facing onto the vacant lot adjoining. Freddy had always thought the gables made the house look like a fancy layer cake. The roof was steep and startlingly red; the walls were white, with red trim around the window frames. Ivy climbed the southern wall of the house, and tendrils of it sneaked around the corner to the front, striving towards the windows and door.

  The northern wall of the house had no gables because it bulged out into a sort of miniature circular tower. The tower didn’t rise any higher than the rest of the house, but it looked as if it wanted to. There was ivy here as well, almost obscuring the tiny window near the top. It was the almost-tower that tended to charm the various people who bought the house, and it was the almost-tower that, in the end, drove them away.

  Freddy had been inside twice when the Wongs had lived there, before she’d realised the money was not worth the mental and physical pain of babysitting the little Wong hellions. At that time, the interior of the house had looked like a furniture showroom that had been hit by a violent hurricane. The Wongs’ tasteful, expensive furnishings hadn’t been able to stand up against the destructive force that was their five sons. It was different now. Josiah, scowling, let them into an empty house. Their feet echoed on the tiles of the front hall and the hardwood floor of the living room. Someone had been keeping the place relatively dust-free; the living room looked huge and clean as Freddy and the others dumped their burdens in a corner. Light streamed through the bay windows, dancing in patterns on the floor as it filtered through the leaves of the cherry tree in the front yard. The room was blank, without personality, waiting for someone to mould it into shape.

  “That’s right,” said Cuerva Lachance, poking her head into the room. “Just throw them anywhere. Josiah will sort them out later.”

  “Obviously,” said Josiah, injecting so much sarcasm into the word that Mel eyed him with respect.

  Freddy asked Josiah as they all trooped back out to the van, “You don’t get along with your mum, then?”

  Josiah stopped dead in the middle of the lawn and stared at her. He hadn’t yet bothered to wipe the blood from his face. “My what?”

  “She’s not your mum?” said Mel.

  “How could anyone think that?” snarled Josiah. “Don’t make that mistake again. It drives me completely up the wall.” He flung his arms out dramatically, then turned on his heel and continued towards the van.

  Mel bounced after him. Freddy could see her sister sliding into investigative mode. “You have an accent.”

  “What? I do not,” said Josiah.

  “You do,” said Freddy. The funny thing was that though she was pretty good with accents, she couldn’t tell where it was from. It was very slight. His words simply seemed to pop more than theirs, and some of his expressions were a little bit off.

  Roland said, “Are you going to clean off the blood at all?”

  “Stop badgering me,” said Josiah. “We’ve only just met. Do you do this to all your new neighbours? Why has no one tried to kill you yet?”

  Freddy, Mel, and Roland exchanged wary glances. Freddy wondered if the other two were feeling the same thing she was. She didn’t know why she was treating Josiah like this. It was part of the general strangeness surrounding him; it encouraged obnoxious comments.

  Mel had been helpfully signing translations to Roland, and Cuerva Lachance had noticed. “Deaf?” she said as she handed Roland a lamp. “Profoundly or partially? Read lips?”

  “Profoundly,” said Roland. “I do read lips.”

  She nodded. “Keep reminding me so I don’t forget to face you when I talk. I have the attention span of a pair of scissors.”

  Freddy was surprised to find she was enjoying herself. She hadn’t really been enjoying all that much lately. The constant anger had leached into everything she did. This felt almost like a break from the real world. She even quirked an eyebrow at Roland as she passed him in the hall, and she could have sworn he nearly smiled in return.

  “Why are we doing this, exactly?” said Mel as they balanced a kitchen table between them and manoeuvred it through the front door. “I ask out of curiosity.”

  Freddy gave as much of a shrug as she could with her hands full of table.

  Mel pursed her lips. “There’s something unnatural about these guys.”

  “You always want there to be something unnatural about everybody new you meet,” Freddy pointed out.

  “Yeah,” said Mel, “except we’ve known them for ten minutes, and they’ve got us lugging around all their worldly belongings. We didn’t even protest. And it’s not like they’re being nice to us. But here we are, at their beck and call. I don’t even feel indignant about it.”

  “That’s because you’re making it into a mystery story in your head,” said Freddy.

  “Life’s more interesting that way,” Mel explained.

  The sound of a slamming door made them both look up, startled. A few seconds later, Josiah appeared at the head of the stairs and bounded down them with what Freddy was already sure was unaccustomed energy.

  “You’re not to go upstairs. No one is to go upstairs ever,” he said, glaring out from beneath quivering eyebrows. “That table doesn’t belong upstairs. Take it that way.”

  “We are taking it that way,” said Freddy.

  Mel said, “What’s wrong with upstairs? I don’t have to make this into a mystery story, Freddy; it is one.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Josiah, still staring ferociously at Freddy, “and don’t let Cuerva Lachance hear you say that. She’s a private investigator. If she knows you’re interested, she’ll manipulate you into working for her for free.”

  Josiah could not have said anything that would have distracted Mel more effectively from whatever was wrong with upstairs. Mel dropped her end of the table on Freddy’s foot. “She’s a private investigator?” Mel said, ignoring her sister’s cry of pain. “For real? With the hat and the coat and everything?”

  “I’ve told her to get rid of those,” said Josiah. “No one ever listens to me.”

  “Nice going.” Freddy hopped over to lean against the wall. She had to escape Josiah’s gaze; her eyes were watering again. There was something slightly wrong about the intensity of his stare. “She’s going to be coming here all the time now.”

  “Just what we need,” said Josiah. “Feral neighourhood children. Haven’t your parents warned you against talking to strangers?”

  Freddy opened her mouth, then shut it again. She had a very old, very uncertain memory of her parents lecturing her on staying away from strangers; she didn’t think the issue had come up for years. But what had really silenced her was … well, she thought it was another memory, but she wasn’t sure of what. She could hear someone saying, “Your parents have told you never to talk to strangers.” There had been a crow somewhere nearby, and … that key. She had been crying …

  The crazy lady in the woods. Freddy’s hand stole to her pocket and wrapped around her key ring. She could feel the key right away, smaller and more delicate than her hous
e keys and her bike-lock key and the tiny flashlight she kept clipped to the ring. Well, it made sense that the memory should surface now. There was more to it than just Josiah’s mention of strangers, though. Something else about now was raising echoes from then.

  Roland blundered through the door and knocked over the pile of boxes next to it. Mel and Freddy escaped through to the kitchen as Josiah let out a theatrical cry of despair. Thoughts of the encounter four years before slipped from Freddy’s mind.

  * * *

  “I should call the rental company,” said Cuerva Lachance later as she gazed mournfully out at the van, which had only just stopped smoking. They were all sitting on the front steps, passing around the strawberry rhubarb pie that really had been discovered lurking, only slightly battered, under the couch. Josiah had refused it altogether and now perched moodily on a railing, watching the rest of them break off squishy pieces with their fingers. He had, at long last, cleaned off the blood, but Freddy could still see flecks and streaks of it on his skin, as if he hadn’t cared enough to wash properly. His face had been revealed to be thin and brown, with a beak of a nose and a sharp little chin. The gash on his forehead was surprisingly small.

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Josiah, his accent becoming briefly more pronounced. Freddy thought she had identified it for sure as English, but as he continued speaking, she changed her mind to Portuguese. “I’ll do it. I remember what happened the last time you tried to explain how you had wrecked someone’s car.”

  Cuerva Lachance favoured him with her blinding smile. “I wrecked it for a good cause.”

  “It’s never a good cause with you,” said Josiah. “It’s never a cause with you at all.” He sighed and yanked a smartphone from his pocket. “Oh, look, you didn’t break it by smashing us headfirst into a tree. Miracles never cease. Could you make the feral children go away while I’m on the phone?” He swung himself down onto the porch and stalked inside, fiddling with the touchscreen.

  Mel had stuffed her hands against her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. Cuerva Lachance gave her an approving grin. “The problem with Josiah is that he was born without a sense of humour,” she said.

  “Are you really a private investigator?” said Mel, who must have been wanting to ask this question all afternoon.

  Cuerva Lachance tilted her head, an oddly birdlike gesture. “Mostly. Do you need a private investigator?”

  “It’s just that you’re Mel’s hero now.” Roland had moved down onto the front walk so he could see everybody talking. “She reads mysteries.”

  “Ah,” said Cuerva Lachance, “those. Not really my genre. It would be like taking my work home with me, and since I already work from home, that would cause a logic implosion, and Josiah would have a meltdown. Tell me, little fat one, do you read the mysteries with the spunky old British ladies solving crimes in country houses or the mysteries with the depressed alcoholics uncovering corruption in cities made of despair?”

  “Both, and everything in between,” Freddy and Roland said together. Their eyes met, then flicked apart.

  “The reality is much more boring,” Cuerva Lachance assured them. “There’s a lot of sitting around with cameras, waiting for people to slink out of skeezy motels. I’ve never even inadvertently taken down an international crime syndicate, though not for lack of trying. I did solve a country-house murder once, but that was an accident, and as it turned out, the butler had done it. Do your parents know where you are?”

  Freddy was already getting used to Cuerva Lachance’s habit of changing topics at lightning speed. “No.”

  “They went somewhere,” said Mel. “My name is Mel, you know, not ‘little fat one.’”

  “I ask for names to be polite,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I don’t remember them. My head is full of other things, and names just bounce out.”

  “Can I use your bathroom?” asked Freddy, who had been getting increasingly less comfortable for the past hour or so.

  Cuerva Lachance waved a hand lazily at the house. “Mi casa es su casa. I haven’t the faintest idea where it is. There may not be toilet paper, but you never know. Try up the stairs, first on the left. Those directions generally work for bathrooms.”

  Freddy rose and walked into the house. Behind her, she heard Mel say something about Sherlock Holmes.

  Through the living room door, she could see the heap of boxes and furniture they had moved from the van. A stray thought—It’s not that much stuff for a house this size—blew across her mind. She paused for a moment to gaze at the pile. Couch, chairs, a couple of cabinets, some tables, two bookcases, a bed, a TV, assorted boxes … It looked like the contents of an apartment. Something was missing, too. Everything seemed present, if sparse. But she knew there should have been something more. She just didn’t know what. Freddy shook her head to clear it. It would come to her. At any rate, maybe Cuerva Lachance and Josiah were moving here from an apartment and would get more stuff later.

  As she moved up the stairs, her feet silent on the worn red runner, she wondered what her mum and Jordan would say if they knew she was walking calmly into a stranger’s house after spending hours helping her move. She tried to imagine Mum hearing the story and sitting straight up and crying, “What?” And then Jordan would say, “Explain yourself, young lady,” and there would be a long, stern conversation that would end with Mel in tears and Roland and Freddy humbly promising never to do anything so insane ever again. “We’ve learned our lesson,” they would say. “We shouldn’t talk to strangers.” There would be hugs and chocolate-chip cookies.

  Freddy felt her mouth twisting into an expression that wasn’t really a smile. She could imagine the scene, but the players were made of plastic, and they moved stiffly, doll-like and not at all alive. There had never been a scene like that in her house. She knew she wasn’t going to tell her mum about this afternoon.

  She’d reached the top of the stairs. As Cuerva Lachance had said, the bathroom was first on the left; she could see tiles through the half-closed door. Maybe those instructions did generally work for bathrooms. She moved to the door and was in the act of pushing it wide when she heard voices down the hall.

  Freddy paused. No one was in here but Josiah.

  Her hand was an inch from the door. She pulled it back and moved quietly down the hall, past two open doors and towards the closed one at the end.

  The voices were muffled. The door did partially block the sound, but the people in the room also sounded as if they were trying not to be heard. There were at least two. Josiah was one, she thought. The other was speaking in a whisper. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, even when she moved right up to the door. She cupped her ear in her hand. It didn’t help much. Josiah sounded … not angry, exactly, but forceful. The other person could have been angry or annoyed or frightened or something else entirely. Freddy shuddered. When she’d been younger, she’d lain awake and listened to furious, half-whispering voices rising and falling downstairs. Her parents’ fights were, in her memory, wordless, an angry booming buzz in the walls. She pushed the memory away.

  “… right on the other side of the door!” said the person who was not Josiah. They were the first audible words in the whole conversation.

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” snarled Josiah. Before Freddy could move—almost before she had time to draw breath—the door had been wrenched open.

  Josiah stood there, looking so ferocious that Freddy forgot to glance past him into the room. She took a step back. “Who—?”

  “No one,” Josiah barked. “I was practising my impressions. I plan to join the circus. I told you to stay downstairs!”

  He slammed the door behind him, seized Freddy by the wrist, and towed her back to the staircase. “I have to use the—” she started, but Josiah said, “No, you don’t,” and pulled her around the corner and down the stairs. She thought they were going to go straight out the door, but in the foyer, Josiah came to a jarring halt, shoved Freddy against the wall beside the door, pu
lled a pencil out of his pocket, and, before she had time to be surprised, marked her height on the frame. Then he latched on to her wrist again and yanked her out the door. “Out,” he said, planting himself firmly in the doorway. “Your inability to obey instructions does not impress me. Go away, all of you.”

  “But Josie,” said Cuerva Lachance, peeking past her hat, “we were having such a nice conversation, and I saw another squirrel.”

  “My lack of caring is palpable,” said Josiah. Freddy decided the accent might be Russian, or possibly from somewhere in Africa. Then again, maybe it was Swedish.

  “He’s going to have a tantrum,” said Cuerva Lachance. “In these situations, it’s best just to do what he says. I’m sure we’ll see each other around.”

  “It can hardly be avoided at this point,” muttered Josiah. “They’re like ducklings.”

  He gave Freddy a push, and she stumbled across the porch, narrowly avoiding tripping over Mel, who was just getting to her feet. “Scram, ducklings,” Josiah said.

  “It was bizarrely interesting to meet you,” Cuerva Lachance added. “Mind the broken glass.” She stood beaming and waving at them as they walked away across the lawn.

  * * *

  It was five to three. Todd and Marcus would be here soon, and the assault on the pleasure-dome would begin. Freddy, Roland, and Mel stood in their kitchen, looking at each other in a dazed sort of way. “There was something really weird there,” said Mel. “Our neighbours are really weird. I like them.”

  Freddy said, “There was someone else in the house. Upstairs. I heard them, and Josiah kicked us out.”

  “Good,” said Mel. “The more mysterious the better.” She turned to Roland. “You haven’t said much.”

  Roland shrugged. Mel was right; Roland had joined in on the discussions with Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, but he hadn’t said anything to Freddy or, Freddy presumed, Mel about them, whereas the girls had been whispering to each other throughout the afternoon. Freddy hadn’t noticed anything unusual because she and Roland rarely had anything resembling a civil conversation.