Page 86 of Hard Heart

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, and then I turned for the entrance. The man in the overcoat watched me go, and I shivered even as the sun emerged from behind a cloud. This was Ruby’s eternity. I didn’t want it to be mine.

If the cemetery was a monument to death, then Blackstone House was a museum. Abandoned, preserved, a reminder of lives once lived. The inhabitants had left, but shadows of the past still remained—a vase of desiccated flowers in the hallway, shelves full of musty books in the den to the left of the front door, coats on a stand beside the stairs. Thanks to the Diamondback Devils, the electricity still worked, and a dehumidifier hummed in the background.

The house wasn’t dead. It was just on pause.

“This is bigger than I thought it would be,” Raelene said. “It’s more of a mansion.”

“It was beautiful once.”

“Twice. Once in its heyday, and again after the renovation. You can see those kids put a lot of work into the place.”

Many of the original features had been preserved or replaced—the hardwood panelling, the ornate plasterwork, the hand-carved mantels. Rainbows shone through stained glass and danced across the polished floor. Framed paintings hung from the old picture rail, adding a modern touch, and I suspected most of them were Levi’s work. When he’d taken his first step onto the property ladder, he’d done so in spectacular style. No wonder he couldn’t bear to think of this home rotting into the ground.

In my first year at uni, I’d lived in halls. My second year, I’d signed up for a house-share, nine of us living in a big old place that had once been owned by a disgraced banking executive, then bought by a skeevy landlord who’d earmarked it for future redevelopment. It was supposed to be an adventure, a celebration of adulthood. Instead, I’d spent ten months fighting for bathroom time, writing passive-aggressive notes on my food, and sleeping with a pillow over my head. One of my roommates had issues with gas, another thought clothing was optional, and a third had so many notches on her bedpost that her bed frame collapsed.

I’d sworn never to share with a big group again.

But for Blackstone House… I could be persuaded.

I followed Raelene through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Rather than try to cram in as many bedrooms as possible, Levi had stayed true to the original layout, and there was another sitting room to the rear, this one with an acoustic guitar leaning against the end of the couch and an empty space where a piano had once stood. Levi had told me the guitar belonged to Ruby, while the piano had been Greyson’s. Seemed he’d collected it at some point.

I felt like a voyeur, peeping into the lives of strangers, delaying my visit to the two rooms I’d particularly come to see: Levi’s studio and Ruby’s tower.

“The news articles made it sound like a bunch of misfits were living in a commune,” Raelene said. “A hovel. This is just a rather lovely house.”

“Understatement of the bloody century.”

“True. Ready to go upstairs?”

“No?”

The grand staircase was in the centre, the backbone of the house, and I followed Raelene reluctantly. I thought she’d stop on the first floor—second floor, if I had to speak American—but no, she carried on to the tower. There were only two doors off the landing at the top, and I knew they led to Greyson’s bedroom and Ruby’s.

“Wonder if they cleaned up the bloodstains?” she mused as she pushed open the door at the front.

“Ugh, I hope so.”

Someone had tried, but they hadn’t done a great job of it. With the light flooding in through the row of windows on the tower’s curved wall, faint stains showed on the pale pink paintwork, brownish splashes of dried blood preserved for the past decade. The wooden bed frame was still there, minus the mattress, and part of the carpet had been cut away. Ruby’s clothes still hung in the closet. Her paintings still graced the wall. It looked as if some of her belongings had been packed into boxes, but the boxes were stacked beside the desk, homeless without an owner.

“It’s frozen in time,” Raelene said, running a finger through the layer of dust on the nearest windowsill. “Kind of creepy.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Nothing specific right now. I just want to get a feel for the place.” She peered through the grimy window, looking down at the roof of the covered porch fifteen feet below. “It’s cold up here.”

“The heating’s set to the bare minimum. It’s cold everywhere.”

I opened one of the boxes and found it was full of beads. Beads and wire and coloured cord. Ruby had made her own jewellery? There were several finished necklaces too, colourful and intricate, shining like long-lost treasures.

The bathroom had a clawfoot tub and an old-fashioned pedestal sink, the type of fittings that one generation ripped out before the next paid a fortune in reclamation yards to replace them. Toiletries still sat by the sink, and the pink shower curtain was pushed back against one wall. No risk of a remake of Psycho, at least.

The door to Greyson’s room opened silently, the hinges still smooth despite the passage of time. His clothing was gone, and most of the personal items, but he’d left the furniture behind. Had everyone departed in that much of a hurry? Or had they just been reluctant to bring reminders of the past into their future lives? Blackstone House felt abandoned, forgotten, a bit like its owner.

“If we stay up here much longer, I’ll have to start taking Prozac,” Raelene said. “Do me a favour?”

“Sure.”

“Wait until I get to the second floor, and then start screaming. I want to find out what I can hear.”