A pain swam over me once we got back to the mansion, once I saw it with my own two eyes again. The pain of what had just happened and the aching in my feet - it all flooded onto me at once. I didn’t mind much. It was better to feel something, anything, than to be in a headlock and just seconds away from death like I was an hour ago.
Belphoebe apologized to me throughout the walk home. She told me that she was so, so sorry. She begged me to forgive her, and when I told her that I did, she begged me to stop lying to her. She was right. I didn’t forgive her for doing what she did. Not yet. The anger still remained, and probably would remain until after the pain in my neck ceased itself.
But I knew I would forgive her when I cooled down. Sure, she used my compassion for her almost-death experience to drag me out to help her with her murder mission and didn’t even have the common courtesy to tell me anything about it, but we were friends at the end of the day. I couldn’t break our friendship over something so small as my life almost being taken away from me.
“I forgive you.” I told her, with the hugest grin I could manage.
“That’s more like it,” She smiled. “That’s more believable.” Belphoebe kissed my cheek softly and skipped into the house, leaving me behind the threshold wondering why I was cursed to receive kisses from the women around me.
I followed her inside. Drake clearly wasn’t home yet, if he ever was going to come home, because the servants were still treating me like a god. Even the tall one who yelled at me in the mini-mansion refilled my orange juice and added two extra blocks of ice. The house was empty besides Jessie, the servants, Belphoebe and I. Keziah and the other newbies went out to some kind of club, and Haley told me that I shouldn’t feel left out since the club seemed to be poor in the first place. I told her that I wouldn’t have felt left out if it were the top club in the city. Nothing really mattered to me in that moment, at least not the little things.
I sat on the couch in the living room for a long time. The sun had already set, but something I didn’t get to see often was the moonrise. To see the sky get darker and darker, until finally there was nothing but blackness and stars and that big, beautiful moon. I learned that I liked it better than the sunrise. Night time was better than day, under any and all circumstances. I fell asleep on that couch, dreaming of the moon and what it would be like if it was night time all the time.
It was bliss.
* * *
“Good morning, Master Aubrey.”
Thirty-two times. I heard that line thirty-two times since I woke up ten minutes ago.
The other new tenants of the mansion were still asleep, probably hungover from their wild clubbing last night. The only one awake, of course, was Belphoebe. She was always the first to wake. I waited for my three-minute interval before going into her room that morning, unannounced and uninvited. I closed the door behind me before she could protest.
“Hey,” She smiled, covering her bare legs with her sheets.
“Good morning.” I paused. I didn’t exactly know how to ask for what I wanted, or what it was that I came for. But I needed it soon. Now. “How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been fine, which you already knew.” Belphoebe laughed. I did my best to copy her chuckle.
“Yeah...I knew that.” I murmured. “Hey, can I ask you a favor?”
“What is it?”
“Can you share with me whatever you know?”
Belphoebe sat up straighter in her bed. “What do you mean?”
“When I first came here,” I sat down across from her, “you told me a lot of things. Well, you hinted at a lot of things. Secrets of the house. You told me Drake mixed up Jeffie’s medication, you said that there was fishy information up in the attic, and then I find out you planted a camera up there. Why? Tell me all the secrets you know. Both of our lives have been on the line, twice, and I think I at least deserve to be in on whatever you’re in on.”
She sighed, massaged her temples slowly and calmly for a few moments, and then took a sip of tea. “There’s a lot to tell.”
“I can wait.”
“See, but that’s it Aubrey,” Bell began. “You can’t. There’s generations of information that I learned through studying, and all the information that I told you was in the attic is gone. I can’t even give it to you verbatim because someone took it. Of course, it’s all in my brain. But if the time ever came to use it against Drake in court, I couldn’t. I have no evidence. I don’t even remember a lot of the specifics that would have gotten Drake thrown into jail in no time.”
“So you don’t remember anything?”
She opened her bedside drawer and pulled out a little phone book. She flipped through the pages at a pace slow enough to let the anxiety and my impatience grow. Soon enough, she dog-eared a page and handed the book to me, pointing to a phone number with an asterisk at each side.
“What’s this?” I asked, trying to figure out why it looked so familiar.
“It’s a phone number. One of the valuable pieces I had up in the attic, before they moved all my property, is a videotape. It was really taped-over and ruined, just messed up. But in the video, something kept flashing over and over, something that was taped over and was almost gone. The only thing that remained of that original video was Drake telling someone to get a pen and paper and write down the number. That number, the one I just showed you. When I called it, someone told me to come to some weird address but nobody was there. I did find a lot of dirt on Drake, though. That’s what taught me most of what I know. There were just papers lying around, waiting for me to claim them. Now, I don’t know where they are.”
I didn’t exactly hear what Belphoebe was saying, not in full detail. I gazed at the phone number. While I didn’t know what to do with it, where it came from or why I felt like I knew it, I decided to use it. What other choice did I have? If I wanted answers, I had to take them, no matter how shady or prank-like they seemed.
So I thanked Belphoebe, got dressed, and left the house on a quest for the truth.
* * *
“Hello?”
No answer, just heavy breathing.
“Is anyone on the other line?”
Ten whole seconds of silence. Then, a deep male voice said: “Yes.”
“Okay...who are you?”
“This is Aubrey, isn’t it?”
I paused. “Yeah. But who are you?”
The man didn’t answer my question, only gave me an address and told me to be there in the next hour. Just like Belphoebe said. Maybe, when I went there, I’d see the exact same documents that she did, and I would bring them home, only for them to be taken away a few years later. Maybe this was a cycle. I was interested to find out.
I walked to the address as slowly as I possibly could, dragging me feet, skipping through blocks, looking into banks and restaurants. Anything to give myself enough time to change my mind, to realize how dangerous and irrational and impulsive this was. Every time I thought about walking back, I kept going. Only because of the fact that Bell had been through this before, probably had walked these exact steps, and was alive and well today. It couldn't be harmful.
Unless, of course, this was a set-up.
I reached the apartment building and stared at the grid of apartment doorbells to ring. The man hadn’t told me which one. Someone on the sixth floor answered when I randomly chose their bell to ring. When I pushed the door open, a Chinese food menu fell from the top of the door, reading in black ink pen: Aubrey, come to 4C.
I ripped up the menu.
4C’s door was already open when I got there. The inside was pitch black, no sound or soul to be found. I knocked on the door (maybe the person inside had left the door open accidentally and would still want me to announce myself?). All the other apartments on the third floor were just like this one, quiet and seemingly empty. I walked in and closed the door behind me.
There were no candles, no open windows, no source of light. I wanted to go back and open the door again to let in the light of the hallway, but I was too scared to turn back.
“Hello?” I called. Just what I expected - silence. I felt around for a light switch everywhere - the wall, the floor, as close to the ceiling as I could reach. But when I walked further into the apartment, down a long corridor that I thought would never end, I found a light switch. It illuminated the room behind me, only making it light enough for me to see a wooden chair in the middle of the room. I sat down in the chair and faced the boarded-up windows.
“Thank you for coming.” The same deep voice said. It seemed to be coming from an intercom.
“You’re welcome,” I yelled. “Where are you?”
“You don’t have to shout. I’m in the apartment above you, 5C. What is it that you want to know?”
I looked up at the ceiling, as if the man would suddenly fall through the ceiling. “Um, I want to know about my uncle. Drake.”
“And why do you think I have the answers?”
“Well honestly,” I swallowed, “I don’t. All I know is that friend of mine told me I could come here and find out what I need. Is there anything about Drake that I should know, something that makes him a criminal? Any dirty secrets?”
The man chuckled for a bit, maybe thirty seconds, and then cleared his throat. “There is so much about your uncle that fits the category you described, boy.” He said. “But I can’t tell you any of that now.”
I sighed. “Why not?”
“Because you aren’t ready. It will come to you, just later on. For now, what’s really urgent is that you know why Belphoebe did what she did yesterday.”
“How...how do you know about that?” My blood felt like it was running cold.
“You said you wanted to know something about your uncle, right? Well here’s something: he’s filthy rich. And he has a big, fat will with a selected list of names. Everyone in that mansion wants a piece, a reward from that will. They all know that Drake is richer than they think he is, and they will go to any lengths to get a slice of the pie.” The anonymous voice explained.
“What does that have to do with Belphoebe?”
He laughed. “She wants a piece too, Aubrey.”
“But how does she even know Drake?”
“Through family friends. He’s taken her as a granddaughter, but they hate each other behind closed doors. Actually, now that Drake found her secret documents and tried to kill her, it isn’t behind closed doors anymore. Anyway, despite their feud, she’s still been there for him through it all. All his sickness and down times. Through thick and thin. That’s why she wants to secure a spot in his will.”
“So what are you trying to say?”
The man sighed. “Aubrey, Belphoebe wanted to kill Cyrus. To knock him out of the will so she would be closer to the top, closer to the grand prize.”
The pause that came next wasn’t really just a ‘pause’, more of a stand-still. A hiatus. An intermission to our surreal and frightening discussion. When it was over, when I collected my thoughts and speech, I thanked the anonymous man for helping me and left the apartment. I hesitated in the hallway for a moment, considering the option of going up to 5C to meet the magic man. But the eeriness and darkness of the building alone made me just leave, just walk away with my head low and my finger still shaking.
Belphoebe wasn’t who I thought she was.