Chapter 3 - Unearthing the Past
The next morning, the house felt different. The cheerful pastel decorations from the birthday party now looked like mocking relics of a happiness that had never truly existed. Emily was quiet, hesitant to even walk into the kitchen, as if expecting the ghost of yesterday to reach out and grab her.
I sent her to stay with her aunt—my younger sister, Sarah, who lived across town and whom my mother had spent years alienating from our lives. It was time to rebuild those bridges.
With Emily safe, I sat at the kitchen table and opened my laptop.
My mother, Eleanor Vance, was a woman of terrifying efficiency. For decades, she had run local charities, sat on the town council, and maintained a pristine reputation as a pillar of the community. To the outside world, she was a selfless philanthropist. To me, she was a warden.
But wardens leave paper trails.
I started with the digital archives of the local newspaper. For hours, I scrolled through articles dating back twenty years, looking for anything unusual. I searched her maiden name, her organizations, and old property records.
Around noon, I found a curious anomaly.
It was a small obituary from twenty-five years ago. A woman named Beatrice Vance—my father’s mother, a woman I was told had died peacefully in a nursing home before I was born. But the address listed in the probate record wasn't a nursing home. It was an expensive legal firm downtown, and the executor of her estate wasn't my father.
It was Eleanor.
My mother had inherited a sprawling Victorian estate on the edge of town, a place known locally as Blackwood Manor. A house my mother always claimed had been sold off to pay medical debts long before I was born.
Why lie about owning a mansion?
I grabbed my car keys. It was time to pay a visit to the past.
The drive took forty minutes. Blackwood Manor sat at the end of a winding, overgrown gravel road, swallowed by ancient oak trees and thick briars. The iron gates were rusted shut, hanging crookedly on their hinges. The house itself loomed like a gothic skeleton against the gray sky, its wrap-around porch rotting, windows boarded up with weathered planks.
Parking my sedan in the shadow of the overgrown hedge, I walked up the cracked stone pathway. The air here smelled of damp earth and old memories.
I tested the front door. Locked.
Walking around to the side, I peered through a dusty side window. Inside, the grand foyer was remarkably intact. Dust motes danced in the sparse beams of light piercing through the cracks in the boards. Antiques draped in white sheets stood like ghostly sentinels.
Then, movement caught my eye.
A shadow shifted near the grand staircase.
My breath caught. Someone was inside.
I scrambled back from the window, heart pounding. Was it squatters? Or was it… my mother?
Before I could decide whether to run or investigate, the heavy side door creaked open with a slow, agonizing groan. A frail, elderly man stepped out onto the porch, squinting against the daylight. He wore a faded woolen cardigan and clutched a battered wooden cane.
He stared at me, his eyes clouded with age, yet piercingly sharp.
“You have her eyes,” the old man rasped, his voice sounding like dry leaves scraping across pavement. “The same stubborn green. But you’re too soft to be Eleanor.”
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I froze, my hand hovering over my phone. “Who are you?”
“Name’s Arthur,” he said, leaning heavily on his cane. “Caretaker of this forgotten tomb. Or at least, I was, before your mother locked me out and threw away the key. Tell me, child… what brings a sheep into the wolf’s den?”
