The Mystery Guest

On the way to the Grimthorpe mansion, I interrogate Gran. “What are we going to do about the rent? What if Mr. Rosso never turns the electricity back on? What if we have to live in darkness for the rest of our days?”

“Not to worry, Molly. Your gran has a plan.”

When we arrive at the mansion, we stop at the gate as usual.

She presses the intercom, but instead of saying hello and requesting entrance, she says, “I’m coming to the watchtower.” This is highly unusual. She’s never gone to the watchtower before, that impenetrable fortress that stands guard over the Grimthorpe mansion just a stone’s throw away from the gate.

There’s a buzzing sound, and the gate opens.

“You wait here a moment,” Gran tells me.

I nod, confused, but trusting that Gran knows best. She walks along the wrought-iron fence to the watchtower, then enters through a door I never even knew was on the far side. What for? Why is she going in? What is she doing?

I bide my time by the gate counting the pointy spears on top of the fence line. Just when vertigo begins to ripple the ground at my feet, Gran exits the tower and starts walking back my way.

She pauses when she reaches me. “I’ve received an IOU,” she says in her singsong voice. “I’ll have the rent money later today. Which means power will be restored. Let there be light.” She lays a gentle hand on my back, then guides me up the path of roses toward the mansion.

As we walk, I try to process the news, but I’m having trouble putting the pieces together. “So, who gave you the rent money, Gran?” I ask.

“The gatekeeper,” she replies.

The invisible one, the man of mystery in the tower? “Why would the gatekeeper lend us money?”

“Because there are still some good eggs left in this world, Molly. There’s one in that tower. He’s been watching over us this whole time.”

I glance behind me at the three-story pillar of cold, gray stone with the tinted windows from which anyone can look out but no one can look in. I decide then and there what I must do.

—

I spend the morning polishing silver in the pantry. Mrs. Grimthorpe enters at around eleven-thirty to survey my work.

“That will do,” she says. “You may go upstairs and read quietly.”

I leave her, then go up to the library, where I grab Great Expectations and arrange myself on the chaise longue. No sooner am I seated than I hear a click and see light flow onto the floor through the crack in the wall. The shuffle of slippers, the Oxford dictionary moves, and a moment later, the wall of books opens, and Mr. Grimthorpe stands in the threshold, grinning from ear to ear.

“Pip,” he says. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you up here in days. I’ve been hoping you’d appear. You really are the child prophet, the young soothsayer, she-who-knows-all.”

“I know nothing,” I reply. “With each passing day, I know less than before.”

“But you gave me the answer,” he says. “I’ve been struggling for ages, and you offered the solution—the lye solution. The end is nigh, Pip. I’ve almost finished my latest novel.”

I stare at the rickety man before me. His face is glowing like the Fabergé on the mantel downstairs.

“Really?” I ask. “You’re done writing your book?”

“Almost,” he replies. “The lye and the maid. Both of them were your ideas. You figured it out—how a body can be there one moment and be gone the next. Dissolved. Disintegrated. Disappeared. Invisibility and absence, the impact left behind. It will take me a few more days to scribble the last words, but I’m nearly there. And I think I’ve done it. I think I’ve earned a new place on the literary shelf—in perpetuum.”

He begins to pace the room. He picks up a black monogrammed Moleskine and his fountain pen, scrawling something in it with big, loopy strokes. His angular body is different today, transformed. His knotted asymmetry, his sharp angularity—everything about him is intensified, sleek, and purposeful, like a panther on the hunt.

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

There it is again. The typing, clear and resonant. The lady in blue must be in her office, and wherever that is, she’s busy now, typing up the ending to the great writer’s new work.

Since Mr. Grimthorpe is in such a buoyant mood, I decide to take my chances. “Mr. Grimthorpe,” I say. “Where is your secretary’s office? I see her enter through the side door every day, and I hear her typing away, but never once have I seen where she works.”

“Not looking too closely, then,” says Mr. Grimthorpe. He claps his Moleskine closed and flashes me a lopsided grin.

“She never walks around the mansion,” I say. “Sometimes I wonder if she’s real.”

Mr. Grimthorpe chortles out loud. “Oh, she’s real. She’s definitely real.”