All Dolled Up!

Charlie’s POV

Later that month, I got a surprise visitor.

“Hello who is it-” I began to say as I went to open the door, but then stopped as I saw who it was through the window. “Grandpa?!”

He waved at me and I opened the door. It was a bit before noon, so Charlotte wasn’t going to be in the equation, and she was in her room right now and not somewhere where he would find her and start asking questions.

“So, how has it been going?” he asked. My grandfather, though pushing eighty, still looked relatively healthy. He took care of most of the properties he owned himself, with my father often commenting on how it was only a matter of time before he hurt himself, with the answer in reply being from my grandfather that if he ever stopped, that really would be the end of him.

Ironic how it seemed that now, I was closer to the grave than he was, though neither of us mentioned that, or even spoke about my condition, as he sat down. Instead, we talked about everything else.

“So, I see you’ve done quite a number on this place,” he said. “It looks far better than how it was before.”

“Yeah,” I told him. I then remembered why it was that I had wanted to talk to him in the first place. “Grandpa, who sold you this house and why?”

“It was a friend of mine, an old colleague,” he said and waved his hand. “He isn’t even, you know, around anymore- but it was some time ago. It was part of a bundle deal, if you can believe it.”

“So, you never saw this place before you accepted the deal?”

“The rest of it was good enough that I didn’t need to think twice, but… turns out that I couldn’t sell it later on at all. Ended up giving it to you for a fraction of what it should have been worth,” he said.

I nodded. “Did you ever… live in the house yourself?”

“I came to look at it, but no, I never lived in it,” he said.

“But, did anyone tell you that they thought that the house was… haunted?” I asked him.

“Haunted? Yeah, those ghost stories popped up around the house, and the locals thought there was a ghost, you know, dumb urban legends, and that’s probably why I couldn’t sell it. But, it’s all nonsense, of course, you’ve been living here just fine all this time, haven’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. It looked like he really had no idea about Charlotte. “Did anyone live here before me - I mean when you owned the house?”

“I’d occasionally rent it out for a while to some people,” he said. “People I knew of course, but they never lasted for long for some reason.”

I sighed. If there was an answer that I would get, it wouldn’t be from him. Yet another dead end. “Actually, there is something that I’d like to show you.” I handed him the book Charlotte had found.

“What is this? French?” he asked as he flipped through the pages.

“German,” I corrected. “I thought it might be yours, given that it was in the house.”

“Nope, must’ve been left by someone else,” he said.

We had some more small talk, dancing around the elephant in the room, which I was grateful for as I had no desire to talk about it any more than I had to. But, on a whim, I decided to try something. “Hey, there’s something I wanted to show you - maybe it’ll jog your memory.”

I walked up the stairs with him asking me to slow down. “I know I may run around all the time, but these knees are not what they used to be…”

“Have you seen one of these before?” I asked as I opened the door and showed him Charlotte, still in her case.

“Oh, that’s a big one,” he said. “Your grandma’s aunt had a collection of those things, though they were small. Where’d you get that?”

“Came with the house,” I told him.

“Really? Why’d someone leave something like that here?” he asked.

I looked closely at his face - it didn’t look like he was hiding something.

So, this really was a dead end.

“I don’t know,” I said as I led him back downstairs. “I thought you might have some idea…”