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“Let’s find her then,” she said. “Sooner rather than later.”
“Gonna be an hour or so,” said Eric. “She’s hosting a tea off in the Veranda garden, west side of the house.”
“Are we invited?”
Eric shrugged. “I was gonna invite myself. Until then, I was thinking of raiding the kitchen, see if I can scare us up some breakfast.”
Despite everything going on, her stomach growled. Besides, they had an hour.
“Now you’re talking,” said Melody.
25
The kitchen was little more than a pantry, and what was there was scarce. The cabinets were mostly empty. The larders were only half-filled.
“Most of this stuff is spoiled,” Melody said, wrinkling her nose. “Is this what we’ve been eating?”
Eric was busy rummaging through a line of half-empty jars and bottles. He was shoving the moldy ones off to the side, and there were a lot of moldy ones.
“Food was good the first night,” he shrugged. “After that…”
Walking through the house itself, Melody noticed the interior had changed as well. The sconces, for one, had been replaced. Where candles and lamps once hung, there were now fixtures. Fixtures fed by a thin series of pipes she recognized as gas lines.
“These weren’t here yesterday,” she said.
Eric wasn’t paying attention. He was busy trying to pry the lid off a tall, dark-looking jar.
“Seriously, look at these. It’s like they’re new, but they’re not new.”
Eventually they settled on a trencher of semi-soft bread that Melody somehow turned up and a tray of pickled eggs. The latter were taken from a very large, very ominous-looking glass jar. But once pulled from the gelatinous goop they’d been sealed in? They somehow smelled and looked okay.
“Bon appetite,” Eric smirked, biting into an egg.
They ate a very slow, very unenthusiastic breakfast at a small table in the back of the kitchen. No one showed up to stop them. No one came along to offer them anything better. When they were finished they left their plates where they were and moved back through the manor, searching each room as they went.
“What if its not here?” asked Melody. The very thought made her heart sink. “What if we’ve been wasting our time?”
The ‘wasted time’ comment seemed to resonate with Eric. He looked back at her strangely.
“It’s here,” he said firmly.
“How do you know?” she asked. “They keep moving everything. Look at this case,” she said. “It had all different stuff in it yesterday. And it was different the day before that.”
She paced the room, walking back and forth. “This case is empty,” she said. “And the one next to it, too. Where are they taking all this stuff?” She stopped and pointed. “There was a piano right here for shit’s sake. I’ve been all over the first floor and I don’t even know where they moved it.”
Eric shrugged. He was watching her closely though. Almost as if amused by her words.
“If we can’t find a piano, how the hell are we supposed to find—”
Melody stopped as she reached the window. Outside, on the far side of the house, a group of people were gathering.
“What are they doing?” asked Melody. “And why do they have umbrellas?”
Eric stepped up to join her. “Parasols,” he said. “Not umbrellas.”
“What’s the difference? It’s not even raining.”
“Parasols keep the sun off your face and neck,” Eric said mechanically. “That’s why they’re carrying them.”
