December
Lucy's Age: 16
The nightmares are back. They started back up again with a vengeance the first time I tried to sleep after Renworst was gone. They're a lot worse than they were before too. There's a lot of blood in them now, and for all that I'm pretty sure that none of it is mine, I spend the whole nightmare scared that I'm going to die.
It means that I'm not getting much rest lately.
So in other news, it looks like Geoffrey did even worse than usual when it came to picking my latest babysitter. Mrs. Phelps is a terrible person. Honestly, I spent the first few days that she was living here wondering how she even ended up in this line of work.
She barely spoke three words to me during the first twenty-four hours, and after that when she did talk to me she mostly was just laying down the law. Sitting there and taking orders from a self-important granny who'd just spent her first three days of 'work' watching some trashy soap opera while she made a complete mess of the apartment was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
I could have broken her like a stick and then left the apartment to go find Renworst myself except for the fact that Geoffrey had left his overgrown gorillas outside our door. Apparently he wasn't any surer of my long-term ability to control myself around Mrs. Phelps than I was, so he gave her some muscle to make sure that I toe the line.
The other little benefit, from Mrs. Phelps' perspective at least, to having the two muscle-heads just outside our door was that she could go out shopping and just leave me back at the apartment because it wasn't like there was anywhere I could go.
Apparently Mrs. Phelps was used to working with younger kids though because she made a major mistake last week. She came back from shopping wearing a new pair of earrings that I'm pretty sure cost more than she makes in an entire year, even considering how much she probably gets paid to take care of the kind of self-absorbed, spoiled brats that she seems to prefer to tend.
It was one of those head-scratcher moments until I overheard her talking to Geoffrey yesterday. She told him that we'd had a rogue power spike fry a bunch of electrical equipment in the apartment and that the hospital was asking for damages on some of the equipment that had been hooked up to Renworst before he died.
It was a plausible kind of thing for her to be telling him except for the tiny fact that she'd had all of the equipment boxed up and sent back to the hospital within a few days of moving in. Everything came together for me a second later when she told Geoffrey that paying the reparations to the hospital had nearly depleted the store of cash that he'd provided her when she signed up for the job.
Renworst never really talked money with me, but I knew that Geoffrey left a large supply of cash in the safe inside Renworst's room. Apparently Mrs. Phelps hadn't been able to avoid the allure of all of that wealth and she'd splurged on a new set of earrings and then come up with a decent cover story to explain why she needed more cash.
I don't know what I'm going to do with this information, but it feels like a big deal. It feels like freedom.