I was sliding the bureau back across the room when my phone started ringing again. I grabbed it out of the nightstand drawer and accepted the call without looking at the screen. There was only one person it could be. I wasn’t in the mood for a chat, but I knew she’d only keep calling if I didn’t answer. It wasn’t often that my mother felt like parenting, but when she did, there was no denying her.
“Mom,” I said.
“Bram! Where have you been?” she demanded. “I’ve been calling all morning.”
“It’s not even nine o’clock yet, and you’ve only called twice,” I corrected her. “The first time I was busy.”
Nothing I ever said, no matter how minor, was ever accepted without scrutiny. “Doing what?”
I wasn’t going to make something up just to suit her. Not anymore. “Moving my furniture back to where it should be. Someone rearranged my bedroom in the middle of the night.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, “Is this one of your jokes?”
The response was so utterly predictable that I didn’t see any point in getting pissed off. “Think what you want, Mom,” I told her. “You always do.”
“What’s going on up there? Have you started taking drugs again? Do I need to call your uncle?”
I’d planned to humor her, but my temper flared. “Go ahead and call him. Call a doctor. Call the sheriff. Call anyone you like. I’m one hundred percent clean and sober.” Then I turned the tables. “By the way, I’m glad you phoned. There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you. What did you do with Dad’s belongings?”
“Your father’s belongings?” She understood the question perfectly. She was just buying time. That made me even angrier. She must have known I’d ask at some point. She’d had five years to come up with an answer.
“After Dad died, seventy-two boxes were hauled away from our house. Where did they go? Did you put them in storage?”
I could imagine her sitting at the desk in her tasteful office where she spent her days talking to other rich women and swapping checks for their favorite charities. “The items of value were auctioned off. The rest was donated to worthy causes.”
A full minute passed before I could speak. Everything was really gone. I think I’d always known it was. That’s why I’d been afraid to ask. “Did it ever occur to you that I might want some of it?”
“Where is this all coming from, Bram?” my mother asked. “Why are you asking these things now?”
“Because I was twelve years old when my father died. I didn’t know what to ask. And for the last five years the only people who would talk to me about any of this were the therapists you paid to listen. What do you think they’d say if they knew you erased every last trace of my father two days after he died?”
“What was I supposed to do?” she snapped. She wasn’t used to being questioned. “Dwell on what happened? Let myself get mired in the past? I had to move on, Bram. I tried to help you move on, too. But you couldn’t accept what your father had done. It drove you to drugs. It drove you to crime.” She whispered the last word as if it were too shameful to say out loud.
“How did the leak in the basement start?” I asked. “No one ever told me.”
“The leak?”
“You know what I’m talking about. How did carbon monoxide leak into Sarah and James’s house? Answer the question!”
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that,” she hissed. “I’m not an engineer, Bram. I don’t know exactly how it happened.” She was desperate to get off the subject.
“Then tell me what you do know.” I wasn’t going to give in.
“There was something wrong with the furnace. Your uncle was supposed to have someone come take a look, but he hadn’t gotten around to it. James and Sarah had both been out of town for days. The house was sealed up tight. Sarah left her cat with a neighbor and gave the maid the week off. While everyone was gone, the gas must have built up in the house. The police said the carbon monoxide detectors probably went off, but there was no one around to hear them. The batteries ran down before Sarah got home. At that point, the carbon monoxide had built up to lethal levels.” She paused. “It’s not that unusual. These things are a lot more common than you’d think, Bram.”
Suddenly the air seemed to grow thicker. I couldn’t draw enough of it into my lungs.
“I have to go, Mom,” I said. “I’ll call you back later.”
I’d remembered something—the last thing my mother had said to James when she and I had paid our one and only visit to the manor together. After everything that’s happened, you really think you can run an inn? she’d demanded. How many guests will you kill with your negligence?
At the time, it had seemed needlessly cruel. Now it felt like a warning.
I threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs. Miriam greeted me on the landing, but I raced right past her. My coat was still unbuttoned and my boots unlaced when I sprinted down the drive toward the hardware store in town. I got there fifteen minutes before it opened and paced the sidewalk in front of the shop. A few townsfolk bundled up in thick down coats waddled by, eyes narrowed. Cars slowed as they passed, as if I were an accident on the side of the road. I kept my head down and tried not to look back.
At ten to nine, the store’s owner showed up and let me in. It must have been a bit odd to find a seventeen-year-old girl waiting in the cold to purchase carbon monoxide detectors. It probably seemed even weirder when he found out I’d forgotten to bring money.
“Everything okay up there at the manor?” The owner was a big, burly guy with a John Deere hat and a week’s worth of stubble. I wasn’t surprised that he knew who I was. I was shocked that he seemed to care.
“My uncle’s worried there might be a leak,” I said, praying James would never find out.
“Then don’t worry about the money. I’ll add these to the manor’s account,” the man said, putting the boxes into a thin plastic bag. “If one of those alarms goes off, you need to phone the fire department straightaway, all right? Carbon monoxide’s no joke. And call me if you need anything else. I’ll have one of the boys run it up to you.”
“Okay,” I said. I probably stood there for too long. He’d sounded just like my dad.
“Be careful up there, sweetie,” he told me.
I felt my eyes starting to well up. “I’ll try,” I told him.
I left the hardware store and stopped to wipe my eyes. When I looked up, I saw the sheriff parked across the street. She rolled down the passenger-side window and beckoned to me. I took a moment to collect myself before I crossed over to speak to her.