“You’ll need to phone around and give people excuses as to why they won’t see you for a week.” Said Greg “and it’ll be better of you use our phone.”
“Why?” asked Bianca
Greg pointed to the old phone which looked like it had been built in the nineteenth century. “This way you talk and I’ll listen and write what you should say. Less chance of someone telling you to do something. Sure I could countermand the order but it would seem suspicious, this will be hard enough to pull off.”
“Why is it so old?” asked Bianca. “Actually everything here is old. The house and everything in it outside your room.”
“And Ashlyn’s actually. Yeah. Our parents were antique collectors; they actually bought the house to match their collection. I think they both felt they had been born a hundred years too late. I think that’s why they were so good together.”
“So that’s how you turned out so well. They brought you up to be a gentleman.”
“And Ashlyn a lady, of course she rebelled and went all twenty-first century. Me I went sideways kind of, getting interested in all the spiritualism and occult practices of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, which were not the parts that our parents were interested in. Anyway, after our parents died, and I inherited the house, I decided to keep it the way our parents left it, as a tribute to them.”
“Wow, that’s harsh” said Bianca “I’m so sorry about your parents”
“Thanks. Still this place helps me remember them it helps me feel that they are still with me somehow.”
“Why doesn’t Ashlyn live here?”
“Oh she hates the place. Being here makes her angry and sad. She feels like she disappointed our parents by rebelling against their old world values and that is why they left the house to me. It’s not true and they left her plenty, hence her state of the art computer systems, but she still refuses to come back here. Anyway, enough about my families morose history, we need you to make excuses to people.”
The two of them spent the next hour calling everyone Bianca thought needed to be told she would be away for a week. As far as the outside world was concerned she was out of state visiting a dying aunt. Bianca pretended to sob while Greg wrote anything she need to say and it seemed to work perfectly. She would be, of course, so distraught that she would forget her mobile phone.
Once they were finished Greg turned to Bianca.
“So what do you want to do now?” |