The Devouring Gray(4)
“This is our house?” she asked, and maybe her mother said something, and maybe she didn’t. Violet was too focused on the house to care.
It looked the way things do in dreams, ragged and unpredictable and slightly askew. Walls of reddish-brown stone rose above the trees before dividing into three spires, each adorned with a point of corroding iron.
Violet wasn’t even sure if the car was parked as she grasped for the door handle and tumbled out onto the driveway. There had been a garden surrounding the house once, but it was hopelessly overgrown now. Violet reached the end of the driveway and clambered up the moss-encrusted stairs to the front porch.
“I’m amazed the place is still standing,” said Juniper. “It’s structurally unsound, you know.”
“It’s perfect.” Violet stared at the honest-to-goodness brass knocker hanging on the door. Her wonder abated as she considered how much Rosie would’ve loved this place. It was exactly the kind of house they’d dreamed of moving into. A creaky old manor where Rosie would paint murals on the walls and Violet would play piano all day, and the neighborhood kids would think they were witches. Violet tried to shake those thoughts away as she thumped the knocker against the door. But they stayed anyway, like the grief always did, like a thin film across her skin that left her cocooned in her own body.
The door swung open, revealing a white woman at least a head shorter than Violet, with frizzy hair and a dress knitted from crimson yarn. In her face Violet saw a funhouse-mirror version of her mother; a Juniper who let her gray streaks grow out, who would rather go barefoot than wear heels.
“Daria,” said Juniper. “It’s us.”
The woman—Aunt Daria—tilted her head. “Solicitors don’t get inside privileges.”
She slammed the door shut with an impressive amount of vigor for someone so small. Violet jolted back from the knocker, startled. When her mother told her Daria was sick, she’d pictured someone bedridden and frail. Not this.
“Daria!” Juniper yanked on the doorknob, to no avail. “This isn’t funny. Open up!”
“Is she all right?” said Violet softly, staring at a bit of red yarn stuck in the door hinges. There had been no spark of recognition in Daria’s eyes. Not even for her own sister.
Juniper turned, her hand still clenched around the doorknob. A bit of hair had sprung free from her bun and frizzed across her forehead.
“No, she’s not.” Her voice was sharp, coiled. “She has early-onset dementia. The doctors wanted to put her in a home. That’s why we’re here.”
The silver rose pressed on Violet’s wrist, cool and heavy against her rising pulse. “You didn’t think to explain that before we got here?”
Juniper frowned. “I told you she was sick.”
The vague puzzlement on her mother’s face was the same expression she’d worn at Rosie’s funeral. Juniper had handled the entire thing with careful, practiced ease; she’d even picked the coffin out on her lunch break at work, where she had neglected to take a single day off. Her mother sat through the services, her face slack with polite disinterest that didn’t go away even when they were standing beside the grave. Violet had fought the urge to push her into the ground along with the coffin, but ultimately, common sense had won. Besides, Rosie deserved better company.
As Violet stared at her now, she saw that trying to make Juniper realize she was hurt would be a waste of time. If Rosie’s death five months ago couldn’t make her pay attention to the daughter she had left, nothing ever would.
“Unbelievable,” Juniper muttered. She’d already moved her focus away from Violet, her heels clicking as she paced from pillar to pillar. “We came all this way…can’t just make us sit out here…”
“Can too!” called a hoarse voice, slightly muffled behind one of the house’s side windows.
Violet leaned off the edge of the porch. Daria’s wrinkled face was pressed against the glass. Which gave her an idea.
She was down the rotting steps in seconds, the slight heels on her boots sinking into the grass as she stomped through the garden.
“What are you doing?” Juniper called after her.
Violet ignored her mother and hurried to the backyard, where the grass sloped down into a tree-lined hill. From this vantage point, the topmost spire of the house impaled the sinking sun on its iron point.
The back door was much less ostentatious than the front. Violet wondered if it had been some kind of servants’ entrance. Although the doorknob didn’t give when she turned it, the dirty windowpane was already spiderwebbed with cracks. Violet gazed back out at the yard, considering it for a moment.
She’d only seen it for the first time minutes ago, yet she couldn’t deny that she felt a strange sort of kinship with the place.
Her whole life, it had only been her and Rosie and Juniper, her father a hazy half memory, pieced together from a few short anecdotes and precious pictures, the Saunders family nothing but a mystery.
This house was proof that there was more to her family than that.
Violet tore her eyes from the trees and checked the most common hiding places she could think of, until she unearthed a spare key under a planter full of dead flowers.
The key was rusted and filthy, but it fit the lock. A few seconds later, she was striding through the ground floor of her new home. It was a musty place, full of dark, echoing rooms that looked virtually unused. A row of taxidermies lined the walls of the main hallway. Violet shuddered as her hand accidentally brushed against a passel of mounted birds.