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Mrs. Aaron pursed her lips and began walking slowly around the attic, looking at the boxes. “Actually, quite a bit of this is yours. Your parents didn’t have much, Poe, but what little they had they left to you in the will.” She frowned and turned to me suddenly. “Did I ever tell you what your parents did? Did I ever tell you about them?”
I looked away and sat down on top of a dusty trunk. “Um…a little. I don’t remember much.” She had never told me anything. She had explained to me when I was very little that she’d been my mother’s nurse when she was in the hospital and that they had been good friends and that was why my parents had left me to her charge, but nothing more than that. I had never pushed it because by the time I was old enough to wonder, Mr. Aaron had started spoiling like an aging apple. When I was young, he was a good guy, but when I was about seven, he started drinking. Not much, but it was enough to change him. Honestly, he scared me even then. I didn’t want to ask about my family because it might have upset my foster-parents. I did not get the courage to want to ask until I was almost fifteen, but then I found out about Mr. Aaron’s affair. He was not going to tell me anything after that and that was also when he started abusing Mrs. Aaron. She became so terrified that she would never have told me a word about my heritage.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you, I’m sure you wanted to know.” She shrugged and began looking at the boxes again. “Better late than never, anyway. Your father was a writer.” She chuckled ruefully. “It must run in the family. Anyway, he was very good but couldn’t get published to save his soul. Your mom was a homicide cop until she got pregnant with Emma. When she found out she was pregnant, she turned in her badge and gun and prayed Edward would get a publishing contract. She loved her work and they needed the money desperately, but she knew it was too dangerous for her to do pregnant and that the crazy hours wouldn’t be good with a baby or little kids in the house.”
I frowned sadly. “Did he ever get published?”
Mrs. Aaron shook her head sadly. “The only things he ever managed to get in print were some essays he did for scholarships to get him through college. I read some of his work, the less gruesome stuff, anyway. It was excellent, but I guess it wasn’t what the public wanted then. All of his old manuscripts must be here somewhere. Unfortunately, your parents weren’t getting any income and their families weren’t going to help them. I’m sorry to tell you this, dear, but the Poe family is historically known for being poor. Your father was orphaned as a baby and grew up in the foster system. Didn’t inherit a dime from his mother and she never told who the father was. Now, your mother’s family was a different story. The Blackwings were very wealthy.”
Tilting my head in interest, I frowned in confusion. “They were? Then why didn’t they help my parents?”
Mrs. Aaron gave an irritated sigh. “Mr. Blackwing, your grandfather, never approved of poor Edward. Actually, he didn’t approve of a single choice your mother made on her own. If it had gone his way, Blackwing’s baby girl would’ve gone to Harvard where she met a CEO or politician-to-be. Instead, Elaina enrolled in the police academy right out of high school and became her precinct’s head homicide detective, then married a writer without a penny to his name and raised three kids out of a little apartment downtown. She and her father stopped speaking the day she married Edward and he didn’t even come to the funeral.”
“What?” I asked in shock.
“Mrs. Blackwing came and paid her respects…even apologized to me for her husband refusing to come,” Mrs. Aaron explained sadly. “I haven’t heard from either of them since and if you ask me, good riddance. Here are a few things.”
I stood up and crossed the attic to where she was, dusting off some boxes so she could read the labels. A sad look passed into her eyes and she met my gaze. “Did you want to open them, or look at them later?”
Frowning, I shrugged. “Um…I hadn’t really thought about it…”
She hesitated, then said in a cracked voice, “This box is photo albums. And I believe the one next to it is love letters. Edward and Elaina were high school sweethearts. While Elaina went to the academy and started at the Baltimore PD, Edward was in Maine studying creative writing. They only saw each other during the summers and wrote those letters back and forth the rest of the time. If you ask me, the time apart only made their relationship that much stronger. You might want to save those for later.”
I blinked and bit my lip to hold back the wave of grief. To distract myself, I asked, “How do you know that? How long were you and my mom friends?”
“We grew up next door to each other,” she answered, smiling slightly, remembering. “We first met when I moved in when we were…oh, probably four? We were best friends all through the end of high school, but when I went to med school and Elaina went to the academy, we grew apart a bit.” She sighed. “When I saw her name on the hospital chart, I swear I all but fainted.”
I sat down on the nearest trunk and rested my chin on my fist. “What happened to them? Do you know?”
Mrs. Aaron exhaled slowly, mournfully, and sat on a trunk across from me. “I don’t know, Poe.”
“You know something.”
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t…I don’t know anything for certain. I only have little half-formed suspicions and such nonsense. I shouldn’t tell you, none of it makes any sense anyway.”
I leaned forward excitedly. “Mrs. Aaron, trust me. I’m very good with weird. Tell me anything you know or don’t know… anything. Please.”
She almost didn’t tell me. Almost. But she couldn’t help it. I don’t know why she told me, maybe out of guilt for never talking about my family or not protecting me from Mr. Aaron. Whatever it was, though, it was enough for her to tell me something that chilled me to the bone. “Your father…he was always a little…off. Obviously he wasn’t your Average Joe, being a horror writer of all things, but that wasn’t it. Even back in high school, he used to come to school with dark circles under his eyes, like he’d been up all night, and he spent a lot of time in the hospital. When he got sick like your mom, I looked at his hospital records. He’d had nearly every bone in his body broken at some point in his life and had insomnia, he’d been on treatment for depression at a time…and once, he’d been shot.”
My eyes widened. “Shot? As in gunned at on the street?”
Mrs. Aaron shrugged. “The records said it was a single bullet in his chest a few months before your family got sick. I never found out more. But, getting back to what happened to them, I think your father may have been involved in something a little bigger than tapping away at his typewriter all night. Something that got him and the rest of your family killed in the end.”
“What do you mean ‘got them killed’?” I asked in confusion. “Something with the curse?”
She shook her head slowly in warning. “Don’t take any of this too seriously, Poe. This is all me making crazy assumptions. Don’t read too much into it. But what happened to your family was no random disease and I don’t think it was random that the coroner made a mistake on the autopsies, either. I think someone did that to them intending to kill all of you and missed you by accident. I think the curse got your father involved in something he couldn’t handle.”
My brow creased, trying to follow the strange tangent. “What are you saying? This was some kind of poison? Bioterrorism?”
“It was more complex than some poison, I know that for certain. If it was just a poison, the hospital could’ve done something or at least realized what it was. I’m thinking it was more along the lines of bioterrorism…something crazy and unknown that we couldn’t have picked up on and the coroner could’ve covered up easily. This sounds absolutely ridiculous now, though. If I were you, honey, I’d just forget everything I told you.” She shook her head, as if to clear it of the tangent she had gone off on. Standing, she brushed the dust off her pants and turned around, looking for more boxes. “Anyway, though. I think that one over there is yours, too.”
I let her shift the subject so it wouldn’t seem like I was probing into ‘nonsense’, but didn’t forget a word she said. “Okay. I’ll grab that too, I guess.” I stood and followed her to the other boxes and trunks as she picked them out.
I believed with the highest degree of certainty that my family had been murdered and that I had somehow escaped by chance. And I also believed with the same certainty that someday I would find out who had done it and return the favor.
Mrs. Aaron collected four cardboard boxes and two trunks together for me. They were filled with my father’s writings, photos, and family heirlooms. One even contained ancient-looking clothes and papers that I suspected could have been passed down from Edgar himself or his child. I vowed to examine them carefully and called a cab to cart it all back to my apartment. In the meantime, Mrs. Aaron talked more about my parents, but only vague pleasant memories of their courtship. She apologized for not being able to tell me more about the curse, but explained that she had not been privy to much information.
At least I had the boxes and trunks, though. I had somewhere to start.
