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I leant against my car and dialled my dad’s number, staring sadly at the house.
How had we let it come to this?
Had we been so wrapped up in our own lives that we’d forgotten about this part of it?
I knew the answer to that one.
“Hello,” Dad said. “Is everything okay?”
“Uh, I left the keys on the coffee table,” I replied.
He barked out a laugh. “Do you want me to bring them down to you?”
“If you can. You wanted to come anyway. But only if Mum’s okay.”
“Mum’s fine. She’s still sleeping. I think that sleeping pill knocked her right out,” Dad said. “Give me fifteen minutes, Lottie, and I’ll be there.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Christ. You’d think this place had been abandoned for four hundred years, not four.”
I took the keys Dad held out with a grimace. “I’m kind of scared to go inside, honestly. I’m worried it’s not all cosmetic and that those loose tiles are going to mean a roof repair.”
He backed up a few feet and looked up at the roof, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’ve got a couple of loose ones that have come down, but I think your biggest issue up there is going to be broken tiles. Looks like more broken ones than anything.”
“I hope you’re right. They don’t need fixing right away, do they?”
“No. And if we can find any of the fallen tiles intact or mostly intact, you can save money by having those put back.”
I blew out a breath. “Okay, that helps.”
“I bet you’re glad I’m here now, aren’t you?”
“Well, if I’d known it was this bad, I never would have come alone,” I reasoned. “I don’t even know where to start out here.”
“The grass. Let’s get rid of that fallen tree, cut the grass, and trim back these bushes. That won’t be a lot of work, and we can probably find a pair of hands or two to help us out,” Dad said. “That’ll help a lot. Right now, you’re trying to see through overgrowth, and that’s hard. You’d be surprised what mowing a lawn can do.”
I nodded slowly. He was right. Now that the initial shock of seeing the state of this place had worn off, I was able to look at everything much more rationally. Part of that was the landscaping.
Or, rather, the lack of it.
If we cut the grass, removed that fallen tree, and trimmed the bushes back to a regular size, it might not look quite so overwhelming.
Maybe.
It couldn’t look any worse than it did right now.
I unlocked the front door and took a deep breath as I pushed it open. It smelt old and empty, like a strange mix of stale rainwater and dead grass, and there was an underlying bitterness that told me there probably was somethingactuallydead somewhere in this place.
God, please let it be a rat and not a person.
“Blimey,” Dad muttered. “I guess the local wildlife have taken to living here.”
I looked down at the rat poop that was scattered all over the floor. “That explains the smell.”
“Leave the door open, let some fresh air in. I doubt this place has been aired through in years,” he said, stepping into the foyer.
The front desk was to the right, and the wall behind it was made of built-in shelves with a singular door I remembered leading to the office. To the left was a living area, and it truly was a relic of years gone by.
