The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(8)

The young new maid, Mellie, appeared at Grandmother’s side, fiddling with the edge of her black uniform.

“What is it?” Grandmother snapped.

“Ma’am, it’s the phone again. Your son says it’s mighty urgent that he speak to one of the children—” The maid cut herself off when she saw me. The shade of white that washed over her face made her look half-dead with terror. Grandmother’s face hardened until she looked like one of the gargoyles on the Cottage’s roof.

“Is that so?” she murmured through a tight-lipped smile. “Kindly inform him that we’re busy, won’t you?”

It wasn’t a request, it was an order. One I was definitely going to ignore.

The two of us took off at the same time. The maid headed back toward the kitchen, but I bolted up the stairs. I’d only have a second, maybe less—

I threw the door to my granddad’s old study open and dove across his enormous dark wood desk for the old phone.

I gulped down a deep breath when I heard, “—sorry, sir, she says they’re busy—”

“Can you at least tell me why they aren’t answering their cell phones?” I had never heard my dad sound that way before. His voice was higher than normal, like he was barely keeping himself from yelling. I leaned back from the edge of the desk, patting around my pockets, only to remember I had left my phone in my schoolbag. There was a shuffling on the other end of the line, like he was about to hang up.

“Dad—Dad?”

“Prosper?”

Mellie blew out a deep, shuddering breath. She knew, I guess, what Grandmother could do to any hope she’d have of working again in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, never mind on planet Earth.

“Mellie, I won’t tell,” I swore. “Just let me talk to him, please.”

The girl’s voice dropped to a low whisper. “But Mrs. Redding…”

“I’ll handle her,” Dad said. “You won’t lose your job.”

I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a rare gleam of silver in the dark office. A framed photo. In it, my own dad was proudly holding up his new diploma from Harvard. My aunts had hooked their arms through his. It was embarrassing, but just seeing Dad’s grinning face made me feel a little better.

But there was something weird about the photo. Aunt Claudia had her other hand on another boy’s shoulder. This one stood off to the side of the group, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, a Harvard cap pulled down over his head. He had been photographed from the side and his face was turned down, but it could have been…it could have been my uncle.

The line clicked as Mellie hung up the phone in the kitchen. Before I could ask him what was going on, the words flew out of Dad’s mouth.

“Prosper, listen to me—you have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now. Right now. I can’t believe she’d do this, that she’d be so—” The connection flickered. “Mom and I are trying to get home, but—”

A milky-white light flooded the room as the door behind me was thrown open. I dropped the phone in shock, which gave Grannie Dearest an opening to scoop it up off the floor and slam it back down on the receiver.

“Hey!” I protested. “I was talking to—”

My grandmother stood staring at me for a moment, her chest heaving and her face flushed with rage. “You,” she began, hauling me out of the office with surprising force. “You have been the stone in my shoe since the day you were born.”

“Yeah, well, you’re no diamond either, Grannie.”

Dad read a mythology book to us once that had a story about a monster called Medusa, the one with a nest of snakes for hair that could turn any person into stone with one look. Well, she might have lacked the snakes, but the fury burning in my grandmother’s eyes turned my limbs into cement. I couldn’t even swallow.

“I only hope it’s you,” she hissed, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and dragged me toward the stairs.





Rayburn, the Cottage’s spidery butler, met us on the landing between the first and second floor with Prue. His cane stomped out an impatient beat on the rug, right by her foot. For a guy that personally raised three generations of Redding kids and saw—literally—hundreds of Reddings come and go, he had a surprising amount of hate for anyone under the age of forty.

He had been opening the front door for so long that no one knew which came first, the house or Rayburn. He didn’t work in the Cottage—he haunted it.

“Madam.” His voice was hoarse and crackled with age. “The others will meet us downstairs.”

Prue, who had been watching the line of family members shove their way down the hall below, whirled around. “What’s going on?”

Prosper, listen to me, Dad had said, you have to get your sister and get out of the Cottage right now.

I could grab Prue and we could run. Sure, she was bigger than me, but I wouldn’t need to carry her. Everyone was heading toward the back of the Cottage, but we could head out the front door. It would be easy, but I needed to get her attention—

The stairs behind me creaked as Great-Uncle Bartholomew and Great-Uncle Theodore came down behind us. Granddad’s brothers might have been in their sixties, but they were tall, with the huge shoulders of former football players. Bartholomew held out his arm to Prue, who—stupid, stupid, stupid!—took it without question, and began chattering with him as he led her down the stairs.