Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [32]
That or throw my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist and beg him to take me.
“Not a good move,” I whispered as I waved a hand in front of my face in the dusty, cobweb-ridden attic. If I made a move too quickly, the man was liable to toss me out on my butt. Subtlety was required. Though, to be honest, subtlety wasn’t one of my strong points. My brothers and sisters-in-law often accused me of having the tact of a tanker truck.
What can I say? I’m a modern woman. I have opinions. The fact that they’re usually correct and other people are so often wrong wasn’t my fault.
Since the attic revealed itself to be cavernous—covering the entire width and breadth of the house—I decided to explore it in sections. The overhead lights, just bare bulbs hanging from loose wires extended down the center of the room, weren’t providing much light. But some late afternoon sunshine had finally peeked out from behind the clouds, and a bit of it was drifting in under the eaves on the west side of the house.
That’s where I started. I kept my attention on the old, lidded boxes stacked along one rough, nail-studded wall, not even gazing through the shadows at the rest of the enormous space. And I didn’t really want to, either. My first, tentative exploration had been quite enough, thank you.
I had gotten over my initial case of the willies about Seaton House, but there was something a little creepy about being alone in a huge room full of dust, moth-ball scented air and secretive history. Simon had mentioned the dressmaker stands, so those didn’t freak me out too much when I first spotted them standing around in silent sentry over the room. But there were other odd things, such as a large, old-fashioned wooden rocking horse with only one eye and a cracked leather saddle. I felt as if I were being winked at by a crusty-skinned wolf fresh from eating Little Red Riding Hood’s granny.
Something that looked like it belonged in a torture chamber, but turned out to be one of those old belted fat-busting machines I’d only ever seen in movies, blocked part of the aisleway. So I hadn’t gone too far back. But even from twenty feet in the door, I saw endless sheet-draped objects in varying shapes and sizes.
I knew most of the graying sheets were covering nothing but old furniture. Still, the Scooby Doo fan in me couldn’t quite get over the idea that somebody was lurking under one of those things, ready to pop out and scare me to death.
“Stop being such a twit,” I muttered, since my nervousness was so out of character. I’d always been imaginative, but I’d never been a wimp.
Lottie the hard-ass, that was me. Had been that way since kindergarten when some rotten third grader had told me there was no Santa Claus. I’d been so pissed, I beat the hell out of him on the playground. But when my brothers confirmed it was true—begging me not to tell our parents the Santa secret was out of the bag for fear none of us would get any presents anymore—I’d felt genuinely betrayed. I’d been skeptical of all fantasies and fairy tales ever since. That was, perhaps, why I always tried to find plausible explanations for the things I experienced. Even if those plausible explanations involved bank robbers dropping dollar bills or secretive men hiding out after being brutally attacked.
It could have been an accident, a voice whispered in my head. But I knew it hadn’t been.
Anyway, my imagination might have been a little wild, but it was always grounded in reality. No supernatural stuff. Which made last night’s lapse into terrified dementia a little surprising. Still, I had to give myself a break. I’d been tired, bleary-eyed, my mind full of images of the awful things that had happened in this house. So I’d mistaken a hot guy for a ghostly serial killer. Sue me.
Wanting to take advantage of the remaining daylight, I got to work. Though I had fully expected to find more of the same boring stuff from the basement, to my surprise, I stumbled upon some older paperwork in the very first box I opened. The schematics and ancient blueprints