Chapter One
When the house came into view, I was shocked at how big it was. I knew Dad had supposedly come from money (though we never saw a dime of it), but I never would have guessed my grandpa to be put up in a place like this. “It’s like, I dunno, stepping into a Jane Austen novel.” I mused as my mom and I pulled up the gravel drive.
It looked like the place had been remodeled a time or two, but I couldn’t deny the grandness, the age of it. I felt a bubble of excitement as I realized the house was actually ours now, even if it only was because my grandpa kicked the bucket and didn’t have any other offspring to give it to.
When we walked in, Mom immediately complained about the smell. “Smells like something’s rotten.” She wrinkled her nose, pulling her shirt up over the bottom half of her face.
I sniffed the air, catching a faint, coppery smell. I frowned. I mean, it wasn’t like, a clean smell—Grandpa John was ancient, I doubted he stayed on top of cleaning—but I was surprised to see how it made Mom react. “I don’t really smell anything,” I said, shrugging. She gave me an incredulous look, like she couldn’t believe me. I ignored her, venturing deeper into the house.
This was one of the things that was cool about having rich old relatives; when they died, you got to go through their stuff. Dad’s family was from England, too, so it was way more fun than those long drives to Mexico to visit my great grandparents on my mom’s side. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, I loved my family, but I’ve gone more times than I can count, and this was my first time going, as they say, “across the pond,” and I was excited that I got to say it, too. Though it was a little morbid, I thought of it more as a high school graduation trip than anything. Spending two weeks here already didn’t feel like enough time.
Mom wasn’t as thrilled about it as I was, and didn’t try hiding her disdain about making the trip. She never said anything to me directly, but from the snippets of conversation I overheard between her and Dad, it had to do with the way my granddad felt about my mom. Guess my dad marrying a brown girl, and having a brown girl for a daughter, didn’t sit well with the guy. I wasn’t gonna let some old white guy make me feel ashamed about who I was, but it really ticked off Mom.
Plus, we had to fly here. Mom hates planes, like she thinks she’s Ritchie Valens, or something. She’d have driven over the Atlantic if she could have. On top of everything else, Dad wasn’t even here. Even though it was his old man who died, he didn’t seem to fight too hard when his boss had work for him that prevented him from coming with us, though he promised he’d fly in next week. Mom was not happy when he dropped the bomb on us. “It’s his family; but of course I have to come out here and deal with it because I can make my own schedule.” She had told me in a huff right before tossing back a Benadryl that she hoped would keep her asleep the whole flight. Luckily, it did.
I made my way down some hallways, running my fingertips over the thick curtains as I passed them. When I came up on big, ornately decorated wooden doors, I grinned widely, rushing up to grab the handles. I pushed them open, not sure what to expect, but partially hoping to find myself in a fantastical place like Narnia, or something.
It turned out to not be a magical place, but still a beautiful library about twice the size of my bedroom back home. Shelves full of books lined either side of the room, and a large window at the opposite end let in the bright gray light from outside. “Dibs on the library!” I called down the hallway, rushing in to search its contents.
By the time my mom wandered in to join me, I had checked out most of the books on the shelf, at least enough to gather that my grandad and I didn’t have a lot of overlap in our taste in literature, but I at least recognized a few titles. Now, though, I was rummaging through drawers and desks. Mostly adult paperwork I didn’t care about, some receipts and wrappers (what a weird thing to hide away), and some sketches. Mostly landscapes, but there were a few of what I guessed were my dad and some kids playing around the house. Grandpa John had a knack for portraits, but there was something off in these sketches, something different than the others. I wasn’t an artist, so I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Even though I knew this stuff belonged to my grandpa, I didn’t really feel like I was going through a relative’s stuff, and I leaned into feeling like a detective as we went through his things, even though there wasn’t a crime to investigate.
“This one’s locked.” I said, pulling on the bottom drawer of his desk.
“Well, there has to be a key,” Mom said, and she began searching through one of the shelves.
I tried to remember if I’d seen one, and pointed to one of the drawers. “I think I remember seeing one in there.”
She rummaged through the drawer, before pulling out something shiny. “Try this one.”
She handed a clunky looking brass key to me. I took it wordlessly, trying it in the deep colored wooden desk, shiny as I imagined it was when it was first brought into the house.
I stuck the key into the drawer, smiling when it proved to be the key, and pulled it open to examine its contents. The search seemed almost fruitless, but a file titled Amelia Wright Case File hiding at the very back of the drawer caught my eye. I narrowed my eyes in a thin glare, looking up at my mom from over the desk. She didn’t notice me watching, which was probably better because I wasn’t very happy about having my file in some dead relative’s desk.
I thought back to two years ago, when everything had happened. Mom and I were naturally secretive people, I don’t even think she told my tias about what happened, and while I hadn’t thought to worry about Dad telling any of his family, since he hadn’t talked to any of them since he came to the U.S., I wondered if maybe he’d mentioned something to his dad. Still though, why would my grandpa care enough to have my case file? Why would he keep it?
I took a seat on the fancy computer chair—it was newer than the rest of the furniture in his office—well our office now—and flipped open the file.
It was a small cluster of pages, and immediately I realized I wasn’t the Amelia Wright this file wasn’t about. I bit my lip, glad I hadn’t been quick to call out my mom and turn it into a fight. But, who was this person, and what did she do?
The case file of the murder of Mr. John Wright and the suicide of Mrs. John Wright in 1887.
I furrowed my brow. It was a surreal experience, seeing mine and my grandpa’s name referring to two completely different people. They had to be ancestors, right? Coincidence about my name, though, since I had been named after my maternal grandpa’s sister, who passed right before I was born, not after whoever this lady was. I skimmed the first page briefly, reading about how Amelia murdered her husband, and then herself, in a haze of pregnancy craziness. I scowled. She went crazy because she was pregnant? That didn’t happen in real life, right? I continued down the page, reading the doctor’s outline of her hysteria in the months leading up the murder. Skeptical, I flipped over the page, seeing a letter dated a few months before the murder, written in pretty, looping cursive.
