CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

They ate peanut butter and syrup sandwiches in silence, while Olivia texted away trying to find someone that spoke French to translate the papers. After roughly half an hour of sitting with only the sound of clicking phone keys and chewing, Mariah was ready to call it quits. Her original idea of foraging through the public library for help was looking like the better option right now. It was getting late and after the insanity of the day, she was tired and ready to get some sleep. Exhaustion was becoming a daily occurrence lately.

“You almost done?” Mariah inquired softly.

“Almost, promise doll, I’m going to find a translator.” Olivia stuffed some more food into her mouth and went back to texting.

Mariah waited until Olivia had finished eating, then she suggested that they call it a night. Olivia was clearly disappointed, but non-the-less she relented and prepared to leave. She looked tired as well, though she claimed she could stay up for days without getting sleepy. She asked Mariah if it would be okay if she came back over in a couple days to help some more. She explained her paramedic shifts were two days on, one day off and rotated throughout the month. Mariah was fine with that. She was all too happy to have some alone time and maybe a chance to visit with her mom.

After an awkward goodbye hug, something Mariah was not very good at, having not been a hugger growing up, to anyone except her mom and dad anyway; the two split ways. Olivia wandered into the night and Mariah closed the door, locking it behind her. If teenagers were pranking the new creepy house owner, she needed to make sure all the doors and windows were locked; for their safety and hers. No one else would fall from her roof to their death if she could help it.

Mariah walked room to room locking windows. She flipped the old-fashioned turn locks on each one and then she pulled up on the window to make sure it was sealed. There were a few windows that didn’t lock, even though she turned the lock every which way trying to latch it. For those windows, she went to the kitchen, got small glasses and set one on the top ledge of each unlockable window. If someone tried to open the window, at least she would be alerted to it by the sound of breaking glass.

After she felt sure the first floor was secure, she headed to the basement. There were a few windows down there and the servant’s door as well. The door was locked, that she was sure of. She had made sure as soon as she moved into the house to secure that creepy entrance. That would be the key place to sneak in if someone really wanted to. Now with the staircase exposed, Mariah wanted to be extra sure that the basement stayed secure.

The windows in the basement all locked without issue. Before heading back upstairs she stood and stared at the steps fitted up against the back wall of her basement. That would have been the only way she could think of for Johnny to get to the roof the other day, but it was still mostly covered at the time.

Mariah wandered around the room again, slowly feeling each wall and crevice. How did the young man end up on the roof when he was supposed to be looking at the basement? It made no sense.

The room in the attic was creepy, there was definitely a pull to go to it, but Johnny wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through a small opening and shuffle all the way up steps in complete darkness, much-less make it to the attic with no one noticing. Then there was him jumping, why jump? Did he see the girl too, with the bloody eyes and sad face? Sure, that scared her. She damn near puked at the site, but to kill himself? Mariah wasn’t sure what to think.

The walk around the basement turned up nothing new, no new doors or openings, no footprints, nothing that suggested that Johnny had been there at all. Mariah felt resolved that he must have used a ladder and kicked it over to make it look as though he had magically ended up on the roof. Maybe he was having relationship problems, or something else happened in his personal life that made him decide that it was time to end it. Suicide was running rampant through youth these days. If she was honest, she considered it for a short time after her father died. The thought of leaving her mom alone with no one to lean on was what helped her get over that hurdle. Maybe Johnny just didn’t have that kind of love for his own family.

Wiping some stray tears from her cheeks, Mariah headed back up the stairs. She was in need of some tea and a good night’s sleep. She heated her tea kettle as if on autopilot, poured some tea leaves into the bottom of her cup and let it set for a few moments before adding a little honey and walking to the stairs to bed. She made it up three steps before she remembered that she had left the mask on the counter. Hurrying back through the dark rooms to the kitchen, she snatched the mask into her arms and then headed to her room. Remembering on the way that her mattress had officially died, she went instead to the room with the daybed.

Resolving herself to do a window check before she called it a night, she circled the second floor just to make sure there was nothing out of place, and all the locks were secure. She went from room to room slowly checking. Even though Greg wouldn’t be out to do any work on the foundation didn’t mean other contractors wouldn’t still be out to work on other things and the house needed to be secure and picked up.

The pest control people should arrive tomorrow, and the asbestos inspector would be around as well this week, to see if the plaster on the walls could simply be repaired or if Mariah would be looking at completely redoing the walls with sheet rock. If that ended up being the case, she was looking at a small fortune in remediation alone much-less the installation of the new walls. Luckily, the ceilings were in decent enough shape that she should be able to paint over them and be okay.

With everything where it should be, Mariah headed into the bedroom stripping her clothes off as she went. A bath sounded amazing. She could relax and enjoy the rest of her tea while soaking. She also needed to invest in a good cleaning company to come in and give the whole house a good once over when it was more livable.

With the bath running and steam beginning to cover the mirror, Mariah pulled her thick curls into a messy clip on top her head so she wouldn’t get her hair too wet. She was not in the mood to deal with the mess of curls and knots that came with them. She climbed into the tub, closed her eyes and sank back into the hot water. The mirror, now completely covered in the remnants of the heat from her bath water was slowly dripping down into the sink. Unnoticed by Mariah, the word “HEL” was slowly disappearing as it began to fog over again.

Mariah bathed, finished her tea and padded back to the bedroom still slightly wet, but too tired to care. She flung a baggy shirt over her head, tied back her hair into a better position, climbed into the bed and fell right to sleep. Her phone lay beside the mask on the side table. It buzzed several times.

“Mariah, are you okay?”

“I have been trying to reach you all day.”

“Mariah, please call me back.”

All the messages were left unanswered because Mariah was sound asleep.