Cassie
Dear Cassie,
Cousin Matthew, you say? Interesting. （Is he bald, too?）
Thank you for handling the packages for me. You are correct; they are strange. Hopefully there will not be any more of them.
I am glad you approve of my reading selections. I do not care much for the focus on romance, but I find reading stories set in the early nineteenth century comforting. I guess you could say they remind me of home.
FJF
I reread his most recent note, as amused by his defense of his Regency romances as I was disappointed in his lack of a more concrete explanation for the packages he’d been getting.
Because those packages . . .
Well.
They were truly something else.
He’d gotten six of them since I’d moved in. They all had the same return address—the sender was an E.J., from New York—written in an ornate, flowery cursive that reminded me a lot of Frederick’s pretty handwriting but for the fact that it was always written in blood-red ink.
The packages came in different sizes and shapes, each wrapped in a hideous floral wrapping paper that reminded me of the decor in my grandmother’s Florida condo. Some of the packages emitted strange smells. One of them appeared to have smoke coming out of it. I swore I could hear actual hissing coming from another.
Those had to be optical illusions, I decided. There was no way the mail would deliver anything that was actually on fire. Or living snakes.
Even though those packages were addressed to Frederick, not me—and even though their contents were patently none of my business—since he hadn’t given me clarification in his notes I decided I’d ask him about them the next time we were in the same room together.
Whenever that might be.
* * *
“You’ve had a good run,” I murmured apologetically to the painting of the hunting party in my bedroom.
I felt a little bad that I was taking it down and replacing it with my own art. It wasn’t the painting’s fault it was hideous; someone, somewhere, had put a lot of effort into making it. It also looked seriously old, making me wonder if it was what Frederick had meant when he’d referred to family heirlooms.
Either way, this was my bedroom now, and that painting was nightmare fuel.
I gingerly lifted it from the wall. It must have hung there for years, because the paint on the wall behind it was half a shade darker than the matte cream covering the rest of the bedroom.
I picked up the first of the three small canvases I was about to hang in Ye Olde Hunting Party’s place, smiling as I remembered how fun the week I’d made them had been. We’d been on vacation in Saugatuck, and Sam had teased me for spending so much of our beach vacation combing the beach for trash—but then, he’d never understand how it made me feel to take what other people threw away and turn it into art that would outlast us all.
I didn’t have a big important lawyer job like he did—but through my art, I made a statement. And left my own mark on the world.
I grabbed my hammer, then dragged the antique desk chair that had to be at least as old as the city of Chicago to the spot where I planned to hang my series. I climbed on it and started banging a nail into the wall.
After a few loud whacks with the hammer, I froze, realizing what I was doing.
It was five o’clock.
I was still a little fuzzy on Frederick’s exact schedule. Would he still be asleep?
If he was, hammering into the wall would probably wake him up.
If it did, he would likely leave his room and come lecture me about waking him.
I still didn’t think I was ready to see him again.
I gingerly set the hammer down on the floor, hoping against hope that Frederick hadn’t heard it.
But a few minutes later his bedroom door creaked open.
Fuck.
“Good evening, Miss Greenberg.”
Frederick’s voice was deeper than usual, and thick with sleep. I turned slowly to face him, bracing myself for a lecture on the importance of keeping quiet when one’s roommate was trying to rest.
His voice and disheveled hair implied he’d just woken up, but he was fully dressed in a three-piece, pinstriped brown suit and a pageboy hat. He looked like an English professor from the set of a period film, off to give a lecture on the symbolism found within Jane Eyre or something—not like someone who’d just rolled out of bed.
Not that I’d ever had an English professor who looked like that.
He didn’t launch into a lecture about Jane Eyre, though. He also wasn’t staring at me the way I was staring at him. He was frowning at my Lake Michigan shoreline canvases where they sat propped against my bedroom wall, as though confused about what he was looking at. His arms were folded tightly across his broad chest as he scowled, which absolutely did not make me think about what his bare chest had looked like the other night. Or the way it ostensibly looked right that very second beneath his too-formal clothing.