Excerpt: Blame it on the Rain

Prologue

There are sometimes when you don’t want things to happen the way they do, but you can’t help it. When my great grandfather died, it turns out that he left his big old house to my mother, because he considered her much more responsible than my Uncle Samuel, and I can’t say that I blame him very much. But it really went to my father, because my mother is dead. I didn’t really care though, until my father decided to move us to the house—all the way from California to Haslett, Michigan in one big leap of a jet.

The first thing I noticed was how much colder it was compared to California. We arrived when it was raining, and it kept raining. The end of spring is not the best time to be in Michigan, though I heard that the winter is worse. It was also much smaller that where we had lived, but I’m not saying I complained about that, because I always found it hard to find friends in the huge school I had gone to.

The Carrington house, now in possession of my family, the Prussers, had once been a big boarding house. It had so many small little rooms, hallways, and mystically secret passages that I couldn’t wait to explore. My father told my brothers and I to pick where we wanted our rooms to be so that the movers could put our things there. I had one toe in the attic before my older brother, Callum, and so I got it, no matter how much he complained.

It was easily the biggest room in the house, but there was storage space in the basement, so it wasn’t used for that. It looked like it had once been someone’s bedroom, and I couldn’t help wondering whose. I was spinning about in my big empty space, checking out the little pockets of space the dormer windows made, and knocking on all the walls when something caught my attention.

I tapped that space of wall again, distinctly hearing that it was hollow. I kept tapping, and discovered that it was a hollow space as big as a door, but there was no handle. I kicked it slightly angrily, and to my surprise a magnetic closure clicked open, revealing that one of the dormers had been boarded over, leaving a secret space behind the wall.

It was no bigger or more remarkable than any of the other dormers, but I didn’t care. It had a secret door, and that’s all that mattered to me, at least until I took a closer look at the walls. On closer inspection, there were newspaper clippings taped up, but looking at the headlines I could make no sense of them. They were on every subject imaginable, from sports headlines to political news. It was if a Sunday paper had thrown up all over the walls.

Only one thing on the walls was not a newspaper article. When I turned around too look back at the door, I noticed a Polaroid photograph taped there. It was terribly worn and discolored, and I snuck myself incredibly close to it before I could make out what it was. At first I thought it was just a street, but I realized that on the left side of the picture there was half of a girl, split so cleanly that I would have to believe the photographer had done it purposely.

I decided that it had to be a member of my family, perhaps even the one who had lived in this room and had this secret place full of newspaper clippings. Remembering the photo albums my grandmother had, where all the pictures had her beautiful handwriting with names and dates, I carefully peeled this photograph off the wall, hoping that someone might have written on the back, but it was blank.

At that moment I heard footsteps on the attic stairs, and quickly set the photo of the mysterious person on the dormer window sill and left the secret room, clicking the magnetic lock behind me. I was just in time to hear the knock on my door.

“Arissa?” I heard my father call, “Arissa, are you in here?”

“Yes, Dad,” I yelled back, not bothering to open the door.

“Well, could you let me in then?” he asked, seeming more patient than usual. This move had seemed to make him happy, as he lost the stress of his big city job.

“It’s not locked,” I said, twirling a bit of hair between my fingers as he let himself in, forcing his smile just a little at the sight of me standing in the middle of the room. I couldn’t figure out why though.

“So you want your things here?” he looked doubtful, casting his gaze around the attic. “It will probably get cold.”

“I have blankets, and yes, I do. Are the movers here?”

“Yeah, I’ll send them up. They might not like having to come to the fourth floor though.”

“Oh, I didn’t think about that...” I said, suddenly worried that there would be angry moving men chasing me down the tree-lined street to the lake I had seen when we drove in.

“Don’t worry, Arissa, that’s what I paid them for.”

“Okay,” I said, and went back to twirling my dark hair around my fingers.