THE MISSING IRVINE HEIRLOOM
CHAPTER FOUR
A pang of pain struck Olivia's chest and she squeezed her eyes tightly, forcing the tears back in. She couldn't wrap her head around any of it. That supernatural entities are real, that one was after basically all the employees of The Claw. That the same one killed her aunt, and now Olivia was being haunted by it too– maybe not physically, but the Aglaeca was horrifying enough mentally.
Olivia flinched at the sound of knocking, and she dropped her head back in exasperation. "Hey, you okay? You've been in there a while..." Ace's quiet voice sounded through the door.
Olivia sniffled and cleared her throat before she spoke. "Can't I pee in peace?"
"If it's taking you this long I'd get that checked out..." he said in complete seriousness, his voice firm with concern. Olivia rolled her eyes and stood up, before pulling the door open slowly. The blank expression on his face turned into a soft frown as he took in her appearance. "You look upset."
"Yeah? What gave that away?"
"I mean, your eye makeup's kinda messed up-" he paused once he saw Olivia's eyebrows raised and jaw clench in warning. "I mean, it's not that bad- you still look nice though," he quickly corrected himself, stuffing his hands in his jeans' front pocket. "Anyway, look I'm sorry we crowded you out there. We just don't wanna die, you know?" Ace leaned against the doorframe as he stared down at Olivia. She pursed her lips and nodded in understanding. Her eyes were glued to the floor momentarily as she tried to settle her previous thoughts. Ace frowned again and lowered his head slightly to try and grasp her attention. "You sure you're alright?"
"I'm fine." She avoided his eyes and looked over his shoulder for his friends. "Where are the others?"
"They went to look for Hannah Gruen to find the Sea Shanty that the mirror talks about." When Olivia scrunched up her face in confusion, Ace sighed and stood up straighter as if to get into deeper focus. She almost let out a laugh at his stoned-like behavior, but she forced herself to choke it back. "We think that Aglaeca was a person before she died."
"Yeah, that's pretty much how every ghost in every horror movie works," she replied sarcastically while arching an unamused eyebrow. "Anyways, what's this Sea Shanty?"
"We found this mirror the other day that talks about it; we think her life story's hidden in that."
"So you think by figuring out her problems you guys are free?" Ace nodded in response and Olivia let out a heavy breath, trying to soak all the information in. He and his friends appeared to be so used to this, almost unbothered, while Olivia could hardly stop her head from spinning at the very thought that supernatural creatures were real.
"It's okay. You don't have to understand all of this right away," Ace mentioned after noticing the deep frown and her downward-curved lips. "Right now we have to focus on your visions. Nancy said to look at any pictures you might have of your aunt."
"Why pictures?"
"For any clues, signs of the Agleaca." He shrugged suggestively.
Although reluctant, Olivia nodded. "Yeah, okay. I have a photo album at home."
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As Olivia drove through the opened gates and pulled up into her parking spot, Ace kept silent, his eyes scanning the large area of land around them. "This is where you live?" he asked, although it came off as more of a statement. He pushed the BMW's passenger door open and stepped out. He waited for Olivia to exit the car and take the lead up the porch steps, surrounded by rose bushes and separate pathways that led to different parts of the garden.
"Yep, me and my dad," she elaborated, motioning for him to follow her. While taking two steps at a time, she searched her jacket pocket for her house keys. "Looks like he's not home," she added after noticing through the several glass balcony windows that not even his office lights were on.
"Your mom's not in the picture?"
"Kind of; I see her every couple of months. She lives in Portland." She fumbled with the key before getting it through the hole. Pushing the white door open, she glanced at the boy. "How about you?" With the flick of her hand, she invited Ace in.
"Only child, like you," he paused briefly, almost as though tempted to add something to his statement, but he decided against it. "But my parents are still together." Olivia nodded attentively while she pulled her coat off and hung it on the rack.
She pursed her lips, trying to think of a way to divert the conversation. Whenever the topic of discussions turned family-related, she would find herself biting her lip or picking at the skin around her nails. As much as she loved her father, she had had too many losses between her mother leaving and her aunt passing away. And with her dad owning one of Horseshoe Bay's biggest industries, she learned the hard way that the only way to avoid bad press was for what happens at home to stay at home.
When she remembered the file Nancy gave her the previous night, Olivia turned to the small table and picked it up, passing it to Ace. "These are police records, pictures of my aunt when she was found dead." When Ace pulled out the pictures to take a look at them, Olivia looked away. She didn't want the traumatic images in her mind again after the pain they had punctured her heart with the first time she saw them. "Can you wait in my room while I grab the albums from my dad's bedroom?" She glanced back at Ace briefly as she led him up the wooden stairs. Her hand trailed along the railing until she reached the top. "It's the last room down the hall." She pointed and waited for Ace to start walking in her room's direction before making her way to the master bedroom.
Sighing, she placed her hands on the cashmere rug to support her body as she plopped down onto her knees. She reached blindly under the king-sized bed, grateful for their maid, Greta, for her superhero-like skills of cleaning an area that would have been otherwise coated with dust. Olivia was positive it had been years since her dad had even touched the box of Aunt Hillary's things. She couldn't imagine how hard it would have been for him to look at pictures of the two of them together when he could hardly even handle hearing her name.
Olivia pulled the wooden box out and lifted the lid. A small smile crept onto her face as she picked up Hillary's small teddy bear. Its fur was matted together and stained, but the memories it flashed through Olivia's head were forever young, despite the toy's age. She pushed it aside and dug out the three full albums. Letting out a contented sigh, she closed the box and gently pushed it back under the bed before standing up.
A loud gasp escaped her lips when she turned around to see Ace standing in the doorway. "What the Hell, Ace?" she hissed, clutching her hand against her quickly beating heart. "Were you watching me?"
"What? No, no I wasn't," he said, his voice slightly higher and rushed. "You were just taking a while so I thought you needed help or something."
"I'm good, Ace," Olivia replied, her words coming out through a heavy breath as she tried to brush away the shock. "You're really impatient, you know?"
"Yeah, I mean, we kind of don't really have a lot of time on our hands..." He stared back at Olivia helplessly.
"Right," she mumbled, breaking her gaze from him and sliding past him through the door.
They began their walk across the cold marble grounds to Olivia's room. She shut the door behind them while Ace's attention traveled from corner to corner as he absorbed what was meant to be a reflection of Olivia. The bed was made neatly with a white comforter and a pink fluffy blanket at the end of it. The bay window was also decorated with plushy fabric and pink cushions, and on the white wall next to it, hung a small NSYNC poster. "This is... girly."
"Have you never been in a girl's room before?" she questioned, raising an eyebrow mockingly as she placed her bag by the dressing table beside her bathroom door.
"Huh? No, of course I have... numerous times," he stammered and plopped down onto Olivia's bed.
"Sure you have." She chuckled and handed him one of the picture albums before sitting on the floor across from where he was seated on the bed. While she began flicking through the pages, Ace joined her on the rug with a quiet grunt. "So what exactly are we looking for anyway?"
Ace shrugged, his eyes stuck on the laminated pictures. "I guess if not the Aglaeca then stuff like weird shadows or maybe bruises... I'm not really sure; Nancy's way better at this stuff."
"What? Because she's related to a ghost or something?" she scoffed. After seeing the blank expression on Ace's face and his prolonged silence, her sarcastic smirk dropped. "She is, isn't she?" Ace responded with a nod, leaving Olivia speechless. It felt as though her energy and typical spirit for sarcasm had been drained as the realization settled in of how real all of this was. If it weren't for her bad dreams correlating with Nancy's stories, or the evidence she and her friends had shown Olivia, she would have never believed for a minute that her nightmares were anything but nightmares. Most of all, the sinking feeling in her stomach every time she had one of her dreams or thought about the Aglaeca or supernatural existence pushed her to the edge. As much as she didn't want to believe it was true, the sick, eerie feeling in her gut made her want to.
She bit back a shudder and glanced at Ace who was already focussed on finding clues in the pictures. Olivia sighed and looked down at the book of pictures in her lap, bracing herself for the warmth and the coldness that were about to simultaneously hit. She peeled open the material baby-blue cover and took in the pictures, each fitted into one of the four laminated slots in the page. She smiled at the first one of Hillary and Mason on the pier of a beach. Hillary wore a blue beach hat with a pink bow– the same one she always brought with her to the beach cabin. Olivia would wear it often, although it barely fit her small head at the time.
"She looks so happy," she whispered to herself, "in all of them." Between the joy of seeing Hillary's vivacious smile and the thought at the back of Olivia's mind that she had died so young, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to cry or grin.
"Yeah... she does," Ace agreed. He looked up at the nineteen-year-old brunette before him, taking in her sadly furrowed brows and pursed lips.
"I remember when I was little, I used to dream of looking like her when I grew up. There was never a day she didn't dress nicely," Olivia reminisced through a soft chuckle. "And somehow, she always had a silk neck scarf that matched whatever outfit she was wearing. The only questionable thing, though, was her taste in jewelry." She chuckled, pointing at the sapphire ring on Hillary's finger. Ace leaned forward and squinted to get a closer look. The blue jewel was square-shaped and large, bulging out of the gold part.
"Did she always wear that?" Ace asked while his eyes were glued to the pages he was continuously flicking through.
"Yeah, I never saw her without it." She paused looking at her photo album when she noticed Ace's sudden silence. With her eyebrows knitted together, she stared at him in confusion, trying to figure out what he was looking for. "Why? Did you find something?" He didn't answer and only kept looking at the images.
"She would even sleep with it." His frown deepened as he pointed to a photo he found of Hillary asleep next to one of her friends, presumably at a sleepover. He continued looking through the book, almost as though he was in a trance and was unable to break his stare.
"So?"
He stopped at another page. "Look at this photo." Hillary's eyes were slightly sunken and faint dark rings circled them.
"What about it?" Olivia found herself suppressing groans and eye-rolls at Ace's vagueness. The anticipation, the fact that he seemed to know something and was taking his time to fill Olivia in on it was torturous, especially since it was related to her aunt.
"She looks exhausted, like you-"
"Great, Ace, thanks." Olivia rolled her eyes and folded her arms over her chest.
"Sorry," he muttered before proceeding with his explanation. "But look, she's not wearing the ring."
"That doesn't necessarily mean anything."
He used his hands to elevate his bottom from the ground so he could shift closer to Olivia. Once he was directly beside her, he held the album closer to her. "In the few pictures there are of her without the ring, she looks drained and almost..." he silenced himself before saying the last word, but Olivia finished his sentence for him.
"Dead." Once the word left Olivia's mouth, Ace's head darted around the room for the Hillary Irvine police record and death certificate. He snatched the brown folder from the edge of Olivia's bed and held it upright, allowing all the papers to pour out.
"She wasn't wearing it in these either," he declared as he traced over the gory pictures. Once he gathered all the papers back into a pile and shoved them into the file again, he looked up at the anxious girl. "Olivia, what if this ring protected your aunt from the spirit that killed her?"
Taken aback, Olivia placed the photo album on the floor and zoned out, staring at the carpet she was sitting on. Before she could think or consider Ace's words, her head darted up to the sound of the front door gently shutting and the gentle patting of her dad's leather shoes. "Livvie?" Mason called, his keys clattering in his hands as he climbed up the stairs.
"Uh, yep! Hey, Dad!" she yelled from behind her closed door. Olivia frantically scrambled across the floor to pick up the photo albums before jumping to her feet. "Get up. He's gonna get so suspicious if he sees these," she whisper-shouted to Ace, using her hands to move him up. He followed her instructions and stood up facing the door. Olivia slammed the three albums against Ace and spun around to press against them. She forced a smile and brushed the hair out of her face as the door opened to reveal her father. The smile on the man's face flickered like a weakened lightbulb but returned shortly.
"Oh, who's your boyfriend?" he asked Olivia.
"Uh, hi, Mr. Irvine, I'm Ace." He waved awkwardly from behind Olivia, shifting around to find a more comfortable position with her back awkwardly pressed against him.
"You must be special; Liv doesn't often bring boys around."
Olivia closed her eyes and shook her head, her nose flaring with frustration and embarrassment. She brought her hand to her forehead to try and process the shameful conversation going on. "Oh my God, Dad. Ace is just a friend," she hissed. She tilted her head slightly to look at Ace, "and for the record, I bring plenty of boys home," she whispered and Ace nodded slowly, though his eyes were narrowed as he didn't believe her.
"Are you sure about that?" Mason frowned, taking in the sight of the two of them so close to one another, almost like Ace was trying to hide something– and not the photo albums.
"Yes, Ace is just here to..." she paused, struggling to find a reasonable excuse.
"To fill her in on a job we're offering her at The Claw," Ace finished for her. Olivia let out a grateful sigh of relief.
"The seafood place?" Mason cocked an eyebrow up questioningly. "You hate seafood."
"Okay, you know what, Dad? Ace and I have to finish up... our conversation here. Do you mind?"
Her father raised his hands up in surrender and pulled away from the doorway. "Right. Will Ace be joining us for dinner?"
"Oh," Ace's eyes subconsciously darted down to the back of Olivia's head almost questioningly before returning to Mason Irvine. "No thank you, sir. I have plans." Mason nodded before giving a brief smile. He looked at the door, almost as though he was contemplating whether to close it or not but ended up walking away with it open.
Once Mason was out of frame, Olivia rushed to the door to push it closed. She leaned her against the wood and dropped her head back as she recomposed herself.
"You hate seafood? How does that even work when your dad owns the biggest fishing company?" Ace's words dripped with judgment and Olivia rolled her eyes as she looked at him. The albums were piled in his hands but he turned around slowly to drop them onto Olivia's bed.
"It makes me feel sick." She shrugged, trudging toward her bed and plopping down onto it.
Ace nodded although he disagreed. He sat on the bed beside Olivia, and the two were silent for a moment, lost in deep thought. "You never have boys over?" Ace broke the silence. "Does that mean you've never..."
"You've never been in a girl's room," she deadpanned. "Does that mean you've never?"
"Touché." A few seconds later, Ace patted his hands on his thighs before moving to his feet. "I better get going. I'll ask Hannah Gruen who works at the Historical Society about the ring and if we're right about it, we'll go there tomorrow." Olivia nodded, watching as the tall man made his way toward the door and pulled it open. "Oh, and it was an honor."
Olivia frowned at his awkwardness. "What was?"
"Being the first guy in your room." A teasing smirk formed on his face, completely antagonistic to Olivia's eye roll.
"Oh my God, you're not the first one!" She threw her head back in exasperation and grabbed at a pink cushion to throw at Ace. Ace pulled the door shut with a grin before the cushion could reach him. It hit the closed door and landed on the floor with a gentle thud. Olivia tried to suppress the laugh that tried to force its way out of her throat and she sighed, falling backward onto her bed.
And as the silence returned, so did Olivia's thoughts. She stared at the white ceiling, thinking back to the ring– the fact that it may have very well been what protected her aunt. But the only thing Olivia couldn't piece together was, why would she take it off?
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