Page 35 of Savage Blooms
“I always took more after my father. We were both quick to anger and quick to affection. It wasn’t that my mother and I didn’t get along; I know she loved me very much. I just think she wasn’t sure what to do with me, most days.”
“So it was just the three of you out here, growing up?”Adam went on, taking up a handful of letters and sorting through for his grandfather’s name.
“That’s right. My father’s father was long dead by the time I was born. It’s a miracle he lasted long enough for my father to go away to university. My grandfather always had a weak heart; cardiac arrest did for him at the end. At least that’s what the doctor said. Personally, I think some creature from underground frightened him to death. That’s one of their favorite ways to pick off the nervous ones in my family.”
Adam still wasn’t sure how to approach the whole family curse thing, or Eileen’s bone-deep conviction that there were magical creatures out in the woods who wanted to kill her, so he tried to keep the conversation focused on more mundane things.
“Didn’t you get lonely? It doesn’t sound like you ever left Craigmar to go to school.”
“Certainly not. I wasn’t well enough, and I didn’t like other children much. But how could I have been lonely? I had Finley right next door. He’s all I ever needed.”
Adam stopped what he was doing and stared at her. She spoke so plainly, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. Adam couldn’t tell if she was putting on a strong face by being dismissive, or if she really didn’t see how that was not at all normal.
“Have youeverleft Craigmar?”
“Of course. When my parents were still alive, one of them would stay here while the other took me into town,or on drives to see the countryside. I went to Glasgow once, for my tenth birthday. That was exciting. But my father called my mother in a panic, and we had to come home early. He had volunteered to stay behind and watch the estate, but then he started hearing voices in his sleep telling him to jump from the third-story window.”
“Did your dad have, like, mental health stuff going on?” Adam asked delicately. It was probably invasive, but hehadto ask. He had to know that Eileen was at least considering the fact that perhaps faeries had nothing to do with her family’s hereditary propensity for emotional anguish and sudden death.
Eileen let out a sharp bark of a laugh, like a Pomeranian.
“Don’t we all! Let’s move on to the next box. I don’t think there’s anything relevant in this one.” She carefully stacked her mother’s letters back in the box, then wiped the perfumed dust from her hands. “Let’s try photos next. What did your grandfather look like?”
“A lot like me,” Adam replied, scrubbing at his eyes. They were already burning from looking through the letters, and they had barely started. There must be eight boxes piled on this desk, and Eileen said there were more in storage. “Blond hair, blue eyes. Not as tall, though.”
“I can work with that,” Eileen said, placing her mother’s box of letters on the ground and hoisting a box labelledMemoriestowards them both. She popped the lid to reveal stacks of loose photographs, along with a few bound albums.
“Do you think there’ll be pictures of him in with the family stuff?”
“Probably not, but it’s worth trying,” Eileen said. “If you’ll recall my father’s portrait, Kirkfoyle blood runs strong. We tend towards dark coloring, not fair. No matter who we marry, that brunette hair tends to pull through. If your grandfather is here, he’ll be easy to spot.”
“You’re sure you’re okay with me going through all this with you?” Adam said, fingers itching to touch the yellowed photographs.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know, it just seems…”
“Intimate?” Eileen asked with a wolfish smile. “Maybe I like being intimate with you, Adam Lancaster.”
Adam ignored the way his cheeks heated at that remark, then nodded and plunged his hands into the photographs.
Eileen helped him sort the photographs into piles, stopping occasionally to introduce him to a family member via their ghostly visage, imprinted forever on Polaroid. Adam saw countless pictures of her parents when they were young and in love, Jennifer gamine-slender and grinning with her long honey-straw hair tousled by the wind, James with his arms slung around his wife, looking slightly bohemian despite the expensive clothes with deliberate five o’clock shadow and his waves of dark hair curling past his ears. He also saw a couple of pictures of a teenage Arabella, one in which she was striking an arabesque pose, in tights and ballet shoes, on the upstairs landing, and another inwhich she was dressed for some type of formal event in the library, primly done up in a cream brocade dress. She looked very much like Eileen, if Eileen’s long oval face was pinched into a heart, and if Eileen gave off ultra feminine energy as opposed to unexpected but alluring androgyny.
“Is everyone in your family ridiculously good-looking?” Adam muttered, pausing for a half second too long on a candid picture of James in evening dress smiling rakishly over a glass of champagne at the camera, no doubt held by Jennifer.
“Are you trying to use my dead family to come onto me?” Eileen asked with a smirk. “How macabre.”
She bumped shoulders with him companionably, and it put Adam enough at ease to flirt back, if only a little bit. There was no harm in a bit of good-natured flirting, right? Society was basically built on flirting.
“You seem like the type of person who appreciates a macabre compliment.”
“Maybe I am.”
Adam was quickly forgetting what the purpose of this exercise was, especially when Eileen’s eyes slid languidly to his mouth. But then she looked past him and let out a gasp of triumph.
“Ah! Is this him?”
Adam didn’t see the picture at first among the dozens of photographs spread out on the table. But then Eileen plucked up a single Polaroid, and a knot formed in Adam’s throat.
