The Mystery Guest

She sighs and stops her sewing. “If only I knew.”

“It’s something about change,” I remind her.

“Oh, you mean what’s next on the pillowcase. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can…”

“…and the wisdom to know the difference,” I say.

“That’s right,” Gran replies.

“Are you sure we can afford it?” I ask, as I wiggle in my squeaky seat and readjust the seat belt digging into my waist.

“Afford what?” she asks.

“This taxi. It will cost us dearly, won’t it? Waste not, want not?”

“We can splurge every once in a while, just not all the time. And today, your gran could use a little splurge.” She smiles and takes up her needle once more.

“Tell me again what it’s like where we’re going,” I say.

“It’s a well-appointed grand estate with rolling lawns, manicured gardens, and many rooms.”

“Is it bigger than our apartment?”

She pauses, needle raised. “Dear girl, it is a palatial mansion with eight large bedrooms, a library, a ballroom, a conservatory, a study, and a parlor filled with priceless antiquities. It’s the antithesis of our modest apartment.”

I still cannot picture it in my head, the scale of it, the grandeur. I try to call up the fanciest house I have ever seen on TV, a home on an episode of Columbo with dormer windows, English gardens, and creeping ivy. But it’s only when the taxi driver turns one last corner and Gran says, “We’re here,” that I realize I have never in my life seen a home like this, not in real life or on TV.

The taxi stops in front of imposing wrought-iron gates topped with menacing spears. The gate is flanked by two austere stone columns. Farther along is a gray, three-story security watchtower with dark tinted windows.

“I’ll just pop out a moment. The guard will buzz us through,” Gran says. I watch with wide eyes as Gran steps out of the taxi, presses a nearly invisible beige button on one of the stone columns, and speaks into camouflaged slats beside it.

She walks back to the taxi and opens my door. “Come,” she says. I step out, clutching her pillow to my chest while the taxi driver rolls down his window.

“I can drive you right up, ma’am,” he offers. “It’s no trouble.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she replies as she opens her purse and fishes out several hard-earned bills.

“I’ll get your change,” the taxi driver says as he opens his glove compartment.

“No, no,” says Gran. “The rest is for you.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he replies, then rolls up his window and waves at us both before turning his taxi in a wide circle and heading back down the road from whence we came.

Gran and I stand between the two stone columns of the wide-open gate. In front of us wends a cobblestone path lined with orderly gardens containing verdant bushes bursting with the largest blood-red rose blooms I have ever seen. At the end of the path looms the mansion, three stories, with a smooth, gray façade, eight black-framed windows set in three rows: two, two, and four. The entire edifice reminds me of the eight-eyed wolf spider Gran and I once marveled at on National Geographic—well, Gran marveled, while I cringed.

I grab Gran’s hand.

“There, there,” she says. “All will be well.”

It’s just another workday for Gran, who has been employed as a maid in the Grimthorpe mansion for a long time, but for me, this is my first visit. Gran has described many details of this mansion over the years—the parlor filled with treasures from Mr. Grimthorpe’s book tours abroad or passed down through his patriarchal line; the abstract artwork in the main hallway that Gran calls the “bourgeois blobs”; and more recently, the newly renovated conservatory off the kitchen, with its automated blinds that open and close with just a clap of the hands.

“That’s only the beginning,” Gran once said when I pressed her for more details. “The lights in the hallway upstairs turn on and off when they sense your presence.”

“You don’t have to flick a switch?” I asked.

“No,” Gran replied. “It’s as if the mansion knows you’re there.”

It sounded supernatural, like magic, something out of a fairy tale. And while Gran has described every detail to me, I’ve never seen the mansion with my own eyes. No wonder I feel like an astronaut landing on the face of Mars. Regardless, I’d rather be here with Gran than at school, which is where I’d normally find myself on a weekday.

That’s where we’re coming from, in fact—school. This morning, Gran was called to an early meeting with my teacher, Ms. Cripps, and despite Ms. Cripps’s protests, Gran allowed me to attend the appointment. We met my teacher in the principal’s office, which I’d visited more times than I cared to remember. Ms. Cripps seated herself behind the principal’s large wooden desk, while Gran and I sat in stiff chairs in front of her.