Tim Wynne-Jones: The Uninvited

For maybe the first time in her life, she blessed her father. He’d finally come through. He had abandoned her when she was scarcely two, and she had hated him for years before bothering to get to know him. And, yes, she was hungry and road weary and she needed desperately to find a bathroom, but for one moment she forgave her father everything.

The plinth under the left-hand column contained a secret drawer in which she found a little tin key box. Yes! Her father had not been here in over twenty years, and the key was just where he said it would be.

She carefully climbed the steps-what was left of them-to the front porch, which was slippery with rot. The flooring bent under her weight.

“All those potato chips,” she muttered. She’d work it all off. She imagined herself in a sky-blue do-rag and yellow Oshkosh overalls, with little Disney bluebirds circling her head as if she was some kind of Snow White, returning the cottage to its pristine comic-book self. She would whistle while she worked. Or not. She had never really gotten the hang of whistling.

She tried the key. It didn’t fit.

She tried again. She pushed and pulled and jimmied without success. And then, when she looked closer, she realized that the key was a lot older than the lock. In fact, the lock looked new.

She stepped back from the door. She looked at the nearest window. She could not see inside, but she could see what she hadn’t thought to notice at first. Marc had said the windows would be boarded up. None of these windows was boarded up. She felt cold all over. The wrong house?

She backed down the steps, slipping and falling to one knee.

Ridiculous! There couldn’t be two enchanting little white gabled houses with keys hidden in secret drawers. Not unless she had entered a parallel universe. And Mimi hated parallel universes.

Then she remembered her contingency plan. The back door.

“Who knows what the weather will have done to the place,” her father had said in his e-mail. “The back door exits into a little shed. There are shelves along the back wall of that shed, and on the top shelf there are old cans of paint. Behind the green can, you’ll find the back-door key on a nail.”

Mimi scurried around the house to the shed. The shelf along the back wall was still there and so were the cans of paint. She lowered the one whose label was stained green and behind it there was, in fact, a key.

She was just reaching for it, when she heard a noise behind her and glanced back to see a man standing at the entrance to the shed.

“Can I help you?” he said in a voice that did not sound as if he had help in mind.

She turned to face him, pulling her shirt closed. There was no escape. But his voice was young, and Mimi was not easily intimidated.

“I asked you a question!” He had lowered his voice, not in volume, but in pitch, and it made Mimi think of someone who was trying to sound more menacing than he really was. A skinny someone. There were, after all, some skills a girl learned living in the big bad city.

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” she said, “I was looking for this can of paint.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You were looking for the key.”

“Got me,” she said. “And, by the way, who the hell are you? No wait, hold that thought. I have been driving all day, and if I don’t get to a bathroom pretty quick, we’re both going to regret it. Me more than you, obviously, but you get my point.”

He approached her, angrily, and she stepped out of his way, throwing up her hands, wondering if she had been mistaken about how harmless he was.

“I don’t have a cent on me,” she said.

He stopped directly in front of her, a head taller than she was but with eyes that while serious could hardly be called menacing. And what she saw hanging around his neck gave her hope.

“Well, actually I did dab on some Trouble by Boucheron, but I have no money. Honest!” He didn’t seem amused. “Bad joke,” she said, lowering her arms. “Sorry.”

Meanwhile, he slipped a key into the lock and opened the door.

Indignation rapidly replaced fear, but it would have to wait, for a more pressing problem needed to be addressed first. He faced her from just inside the kitchen door. He pointed to the right.

“It’s all yours,” he said.

“You bet it is!” she said.

His frown hardened. “Be my guest.”

She pushed by him. “We’ll see about that,” she said curtly. She slammed the bathroom door shut behind her and locked it. Then, as she pulled down her shorts, she looked around for a weapon. A toilet plunger? It would have to do.

The lock on the bathroom door was just a hook and eye. The kind guys in movies break down with one good shove. But she didn’t think her “host” looked beefy enough for that. Mimi steamed at the idea of it. She had thought squats were just a city thing. And what if he had been living here for years? Wasn’t there some kind of law about squatters’ rights?

She flushed the toilet and washed her hands. The tiny bathroom was spotless. A clean towel hung on a rack on the back of the door. Had he done this? Was he married? Was he gay?

She reentered the kitchen, without the plunger.

“Thanks,” she said. “Now I’d like to know what the hell you’re doing here!”

He was sitting at a little table by the window. In the light his hair appeared amber; his eyes looked amber, too, as she got closer. He was slim, all right. Not the breaking-down-the-door type at all. He sported a bit of fluff on his chin that didn’t look as if it would ever get a diploma as a full-fledged beard. He was older than her but not by much, she guessed. He didn’t look angry anymore, just clinically perturbed.

“Jackson Page,” he said, “but I go by Jay. Not that you asked. But a name gives us something to work with.”

She folded her arms across her chest. She had buttoned up her shirt in the bathroom. No need to inflame the locals. She noticed a kettle on the stove, a teapot waiting on the counter. The kitchen, like the bathroom, was Spartan, but in apple-pie order.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m Mimi. Nice to meet you, Jay. And now that we’ve got the intros out of the way, do you live here?” He shook his head. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Because this is private property.”

Jay pushed himself back from the table and stretched out his legs. He was wearing white jeans and an olive drab tee. And the memory stick around his neck. She didn’t think the average redneck carried a memory stick, but she didn’t know about the average psychopath. “So, you’re the one who’s been leaving the little messages?” he said.

Now it was her turn to look perplexed.

“Messages?”

“The bluebird. The snake skin. The cricket. The voice.”

Mimi backed up a step. “What?” Jay looked more or less normal-handsome, even. But he was clearly nuts. In which case, gently does it, Mimi, and stay as close to the door as you can.

“Funny,” she said. “I was thinking about bluebirds only ten minutes ago, but the animated ones, you know? In Snow White. ”

He didn’t speak, just stared at her, frowning, waiting. The muscles along his jawbone twitched.

“Well, my bluebird was not animated,” he said. “It was dead. It was lying right here on the table.”

She stared at the table, at his hands resting there, making a nest for an invisible dead bird. His hands were long and slender but strong looking. He wore a yellow bangle around a slim but muscled wrist. Stay on task, she told herself.

“Could it have gotten in somehow-the bluebird, I mean-and then tried to escape through the window?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “You tell me.”