The man did not seem inclined to help me, which made me continue to like him.
“Why would you think I’m lost?” I asked him.
He raised a brow, not replying, but looked pointedly from my car to me as I started pumping the gas.
“Fair enough,” I muttered.
He didn’t push conversation while we waited for the car to fill up. Just stood there, smoking his smoke, probably not at all a safe distance from someone pumping gas, not looking the least bit worried about social graces or the prospect of blowing us both up.
“I bought a cottage.” I offered the information about three quarters of the way into the tank. It was the first time in recent memory I’d done something like this. Gave a stranger a piece of information they didn’t need nor have the right to. In my opinion, strangers, or even people that shared blood with me, didn’t have any rights to get anything from me.
It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable in silence with a stranger. I preferred it. I enforced it.
But now, with this strange man endangering my life, I broke away from my shield of rudeness and cruelty. A little.
He took a long inhale. Long enough for the tank to fill.
“Ah, Emily’s place,” he said finally.
There was an edge to his husky voice. An edge I recognized. An edge of death. Of darkness.
I guessed the history of my new home wasn’t going to be a secret around here.
But secrets were still waiting for me.
They always were.
I glanced to the tank for the price of my gas, then regarded the small store behind the man. After fastening the nozzle back on to the rickety pump, I grabbed a wad of twenties from my car, crossed the distance between us, and handed them to him. He took them with oil-stained hands.
“You’re not gonna last long, New York,” he said finally. There wasn’t a hostility to his voice. No threat. Just knowing.
I smiled. “Ah, I’ll surprise you.”
The corner of his mouth ticked ever so slightly. “Women tend to do that.”
“Well, shit.”
I took in the cottage in front of me, the one I found thanks to the surprisingly detailed directions from “Just call me Ernie.” My GPS never would’ve found this place, thanks to the address being attached to the wrong fricking location on the map. I planned on penning a very strongly-worded email to my realtor.
Or, I had on the drive here. Which was not great. Unpaved, potholed, dirt road, overgrown enough for rogue branches to trail along the sides of my car, screeching and telling me they were ruining my paint job.
I’d cursed Sally in my head, deciding her charming email and phone demeanor was nothing but a ruse in order to sell me a piece of shit cabin in the middle of nowhere that was haunted by the ghost of a Victorian teenager who would possess me and ultimately kill me.
And that wasn’t really even Sally’s fault. I was the stupid idiot who bought a fucking cabin without even looking at it. Plus, it would make for great irony that a horror writer was murdered by a ghost when she made her living writing about them.
I was half-expecting this place to be a hovel, for me to have to either figure out how to do moderately complicated renovations or slink back to New York with my tail between my legs. I even had rough plans for both scenarios.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to find myself the character in a sitcom. A lumberjack to melt out of the woods to either murder me or save me from myself and the wild. A cliché. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have the strongly-worded email to that deceitful realtor drafted in my head.
As it turned out, I didn’t need that email. Or any kind of knowledge of construction. Or the tail between the legs return to New York.
At least not yet.
Because I was standing in front of a one-story cottage that couldn’t be described as anything less than idyllic. And, unlike many Tinder dates, exactly like its picture.
The A-frame structure was small, tucked in between the woods it backed on to. A welcoming cobbled path banished the unruly driveway, bordered with bright flowers and foliage this black thumb had no hope of identifying. There was a small front porch, complete with a freaking porch swing. Lights were left on, as Sally had promised when I’d called her a couple of hours ago to inform her I’d be arriving later tonight.
The key was under the mat—only in the middle of the woods, could you do something like that. Smells of dirt and nature chased away the woefully inadequate “fresh pine” scented air freshener in my car.
The key stuck a little in the lock and I decided not to think of that as some kind of an omen. Though it was hard. I was a writer, I conjured up all sorts of symbols, ghosts, demons, curses, murderous spirits as a part of my day job. I couldn’t help but let it leak out of that and into every day.
No, that was wrong. I had made a career out of that stuff that was already there. I was the girl who woke up every morning at precisely 3:33 a.m. convinced I was being haunted by a demon. That my dreams painted pictures of the future. That death was following me and would stalk me if I cheated it.
All dark thoughts scuttered back to their respectful places when I opened the door.
The interior of the cabin was not like the photos.
It was better.
Since the place was small, I walked right into the living area.
A fireplace, unlit but bursting with possibility, was at the back of the living area. Right beside a huge window boasting a view of a lake twinkling in the moonlight. Freaking twinkling.
The place was warm.
Inviting.
Cozy.
I wasn’t even a person who used the word cozy, let alone would want to be anywhere that personified it.
I’d been all about chic, functional and expensive in my former life.
I was one step inside this place and I was already thinking of New York as my former life. Which I guessed was accurate. I felt like it was leave with a chance of survival or stay and die. Inwardly, of course. But for someone as interior as me, inward death was as bad as the “real one.”
The floors were hardwood, covered in a mish mash of rugs that shouldn’t match but did. White sofas circled around the fireplace and a coffee table looked to be made out of an old ship door. The kitchen was tucked away into a corner; it looked nice, though it didn’t interest me overly. I was a shitty cook. Living in New York, I didn’t have to learn. And with my job, the social media image I’d perfected, food wasn’t something I deemed as important, apart from the fact I was obsessive over it.
I knew the bedroom was off to the right of the open plan living area so I made my way there, noting everything that had been done to this place. Or, more accurately, everything that had been left.
This place was sold completely furnished, on account of the previous owner being murdered. A woman not that much older than me. Living alone. Targeted by forces unknown, found outside her quaint little cottage in the middle of nowhere. The case remained unsolved with no leads.
Such a detail was something that brought the price of this place and the surrounding land way, way down. No one wanted to buy a murder house. Except a horror writer with a fascination for the morbid. That was what pushed me to buy it in the first place. Though I did not mention such a thing to my best friend. Katy was pretty crazy in a lot of ways. In very Katy ways, at least. Like rejecting a multi million-dollar contract at a cosmetic surgery practice in order to become a neurosurgeon kind of way.