The next morning, I felt mentally nailed to the bed. I couldn’t get up—the terrible nightmare that I’d experienced last night about my mansion burning down and Amanda firing my maids contained me to the bed.
It was even more difficult for me to get up once I realized that it wasn’t a nightmare.
“Good morning, Master Aubrey. How did you sleep?” One of the maids, Haley, asked as she took some comforters out of the closet.
“I slept fine, for the most part. You?”
She chuckled lightly and said, “I assume you slept more than fine, for you’ve awaken three hours after we all do. But as for me, I slept well—as well as you can in the maid’s quarters. There are so many of us that it’s hard to sleep with all the noise and lack of space.”
I wondered how come the amount of maids in the house mattered; the mansion was so big that each maid could have her own room, or at least share rooms by two’s. Why was there a lack of space? Did they sleep in one room?
I made a mental message to visit the maid’s quarters, or at least ask Belphoebe about it. She seemed to know about all the questionable things in this house, and there were apparently many more than I was noticing.
Haley was right about my waking up three hours late: it was now twelve o’ clock in the afternoon. I had probably missed breakfast. Maybe Belphoebe was even looking for me.
“Don’t fret about your breakfast. Evidently, you and the other new guests woke up around the same time, so Master Drake is making provisions to have you fed right about now. You can go down there now and find out what time breakfast will be served, just to see if you have enough time to shower. If so, I’ll be waiting outside of the upstairs northwest bathroom to run a bath or shower for you.” Haley told me. She stood at the side of the bed, probably waiting for me to get up so she could make the bed.
“Sorry; you can go ahead,” I said, finally peeling myself from the comfortable mattress and slipping on a pair of my uncle’s borrowed slippers.
I left the bedroom, walked down the corridor and followed the sound of laughing and clashing forks. Obviously, they’d begun eating without me. Hopefully this was not everybody and just the new guests. That way, if I joined them now, I’d be able to meet a few of them without the overseeing of my uncle. He had a tendency to be really pushy, urging people to talk to each other and arranging parties and such. At my birthday party, he would introduce me to girls and say, “Oh, you two should talk about the new movie coming out this weekend. Maybe you guys should see it together?” or “You and this young man both watch baseball. You’d make great friends, you know? Baseball lovers unite!”
With a sigh, I walked into the dining room and smiled at everybody, content to see that Uncle Drake was not here. One of the butlers pulled out a chair for me at the very top of the table, a chair that I’d only seen my uncle sit in. I thanked him, sat in the chair, and then thanked the female worker who placed a plate of an array of breakfast foods before me.
“Good morning,” I greeted the new guests. Belphoebe was here, along with another tanned girl with long two-toned hair and a sexy, R&B aura about her. The others were three nerdy white boys with glasses or cardigans tied over their shoulders or braces, and a petite white girl with black hair draping over her face.
They all mumbled almost inaudible good morning’s to me except for Belphoebe and the long-haired girl. The one with the hair said good morning loud and clear, but Phoebe didn’t say anything at all.
“I’m Aubrey; Drake is my uncle.” I told them.
“We know that,” The white girl snapped.
“Oh, yeah…I should have known.” I murmured. “What are your names?”
Again, the long-haired girl was the one to speak up. “I’m Keziah. This is Bell, formerly Belphoebe. That girl over there is Alison, and these three gentlemen are Michael, Joshua and Isaac.”
I waved to all of them and they waved back weakly. This was how things went throughout the whole breakfast session: Belphoebe was silent, and Keziah held interesting conversation with me the whole time. She told me about where she was from and how she met my uncle (she worked at an office building he owned in New York, her hometown). We spoke about the normal things people who are just meeting would talk about, and I half-expected her to say something about Jeffie or about the hidden evidence in the attic, but instead she kept talking about regular things.
When we were finished eating I left the dining room, telling Keziah I would see her later and walking toward the little case of stairs. Haley was waiting to run me a bath upstairs. As soon as I took five or six steps, I felt someone nudge my shoulder roughly. It was Belphoebe.
She walked ahead of me quickly, so I took this as a sign to follow.
“Slow down, will you?” I called. She did slow to a stop in the middle of the corridor, but didn’t bother turning around to face me. I walked around her and forced her to look at me. “What did I do?”
“How did your house burn down?” She asked.
“I dropped a cigarette on a plant, the plant touched a wall, the fire spread.”
“Why were you smoking cigarettes?”
“Just stress.”
“Oh. Well, I’m going to the attic today. I need to see what else is up there to show me how fishy things are here.” Belphoebe said.
“Can I come along or no?”
“You can,” She replied, “but not now. You’d have to wait until evening time. It only makes sense. If I’m going, I have to leave right this minute. Otherwise things will get too crowded and someone will see me.”
“Wait, you’re not allowed in the attic?” I asked.
“No. It’s only accessible from the East Wing, and nobody is allowed in the East Wing.” Belphoebe said.
“Okay, so how do I get there?”
She sighed as if I was bothering her, or holding her back from doing something important—which I was doing, anyway. “Ask somebody to take you to the library. One of the workers will take you. The library is in the East Wing; it has the heaviest security in the whole mansion. Go to the very back of the library, look through books for about ten minutes, and then escape through a glass door to your right. Then you go up the stairs and into the room that you’re facing. You’ll see an attic door in that room. Go into it.”
“Thank you,” I said. She shrugged. “Why were you upset with me earlier?”
“Because you woke up too late. If you were up earlier, we would both be able to go up there at the same time. But now, you have to go much later to avoid suspicion.”
“It seems like everyone was mad at me just now,” I told her.
“They’re just jealous of you because you get better treatment since you’re Drake’s nephew. That’s all. Look, I’ve got to go. See you later.”
I didn’t even get to ask her about the maid’s quarters with how rapidly she marched down the corridor and made her way to the other side of the house, the east side. Now I knew that the maid’s quarters couldn’t be in the East Wing. I’d have to just ask one of them where they slept. The only places it could be were the West Wing and the mini-mansion below the house, embedded in the dirt. It wasn’t that mini—I’d been to it before as a child. It was just like one of the wings, which were as big as some other people’s mansions anyway.
“Aubrey boy! Good afternoon, kid,” Uncle said as he emerged from a hallway wearing a plum-colored velvet robe and slippers that matched my own.
“Hello, Uncle. I’m sorry I woke up too late to have breakfast with you.” I told him.
“Oh, it’s alright. We’ll be having lunch shortly, outside of the mansion. Go upstairs and notify all the new guests for me about the lunch plans, alright? I notified all of them except for you and Belphoebe, but I can’t seem to find her anywhere. I’ll be looking for her while you are.” He told me. Then he patted my back and walked off to talk to one of the workers about something.
I sighed and looked up at the ceiling, knowing that the attic wasn’t there but looking anyway—kind of like looking up at the ceiling or sky when we pray, knowing that God isn’t there but doing it anyway. Officially, this attic mission was going to be a disaster. I couldn’t go up to the attic to warn Bell now, anyway: she said it herself, that it would arouse suspicion. She’d just have to stay up there and wait until my arrival in the evening, if I would even make it then.
Until that time, I’d have to ask the questions I wanted answers for from down here.