Roses Manor, Weston Chapter 1
The sky was threatening snow. Or sleet. Or hail. Or whatever other driving nightmares it had been dumping periodically over the last two weeks of November. Gabriella had grown up in New England, she wasn’t afraid of driving in the snow. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t watching the sky apprehensively as the dark, heavy clouds hung over her commute to work.
Beyond the weather, it had been a pretty chill morning so far. Her car radio played quietly as she merged into the right lane on the highway a little ways before her exit. It was some band she’d discovered in college and forgotten about until the song had started moments earlier. Yesterday, she’d had enough time after her shift to get most of her errands done and sleep through the night. So now she’d left the house rested, with breakfast in hand, ready for the day.
And she actually remembered to make coffee this morning, so she hadn’t had to stop for a hazelnut coffee at the bad Dunkin’ Donuts on her way in. That was the only one on her commute and going to the good Dunkin’ might make her late. Not that James would be overly irritated if she was five minutes late to work. But things were always so busy and she didn’t want to add to the stress.
She pulled off the highway and onto the long stretch of road adorned with flags, ads, and city announcements that led into Leominster. She crossed over the Nashua River, where Gabriella was pretty sure she’d seen a new case last night when she checked her email before bed. Her inbox had contained three monsters and a monster-sized packet of forms sent by the Foundation that she had reminded herself to work on at some point this morning.
But checking those messages beat the way she was still checking her texts for anything from Elliot, the ex-boyfriend who had dumped her over her work with the Foundation only to join up himself months later, returning to her life in a way that left her drowning in resentment, confusion, and more attraction than she wanted to admit to herself.
Graham would be on monster duty at the Nashua, along with whoever was unlucky enough to get sent along to assist him. She didn’t know who was on today, hopefully everyone. And while she loved going out in the field, Gabriella was kind of hoping she’d be mostly inside today, working on research for the case. As the team’s official researcher, she still had to squeeze that in among other, more urgent duties.
Generally, the Foundation sent over just enough information to get them started and as the investigation began, Gabriella would disappear into a back bedroom of their suburban ranch house headquarters and surround herself with musty old books and crawling internet pages written by local weirdos twenty years earlier. Then she’d come back out with whatever background they needed as the field team came back from observing the space itself. This was assuming they didn’t need her to be on that team, in which case, the Angelfire sites had to wait.
It wasn’t ideal, in case Gabriella’s research came up with some kind of demon laying in wait under the stairs. But they didn’t receive cases until they needed to be started, and lately the Foundation was all over James, their captain and her oldest cousin, to finish things as soon as possible. Including the fascinating, but supremely irritating historical cases they’d been overrun with over the summer.
But James got a girlfriend out of that mess, so it was worth it. At least Gabriella usually thought so. Though when she ended up reading through an entire 1978 Leominster/Fitchburg phone book, or saw the grooves in James’s desk from where case drippings had eaten the wood, she had her doubts. Regardless of how much she liked Meredith or how happy James had been the past couple months.
She pulled up to the red light near the turnoff to the mall. There had been no cases there in a while and she kind of got the feeling that someone had deliberately stopped submitting anything. Not the case with the nearby Market Basket though. There were cases coming from there about once a week. And that was only one of three locations they ended up at on a regular basis.
She needed to go grocery shopping after work tonight. Maybe they’d get a case at one of the Market Baskets today and she could pick up her vegetables for the week while they were on location.
The light turned green, and Gabriella made her turn as the first splattered drops of rain hit her windshield. Her dashboard clock showed she had about ten minutes until her shift began. She took a hard right onto Varez Street where the neighborhoods became more residential. This area was somewhat of a grid, in a region where nothing was on a grid when it came to city planning. This included most of Leominster, but the blocks here were strangely neat.
There were only a few people outside as she drove through the neighborhood, passing Fairview Hills Cemetery on her right. It had been over a year since the case there, but she still caught herself peering through the iron gates sometimes, looking for some sign of the illusion the mischief had cast. Right now it was just wintery mix coming down on some unhappy dog walkers, nothing mysterious to be seen.
When she turned onto St. Margaret’s Way, the headquarters for the North Worcester County branch of the Foundation for Paranormal Studies blended into the neighborhood of similar raised ranch houses. The number of cars around it might have been kind of a giveaway, but it wasn’t much more crowded than the driveways of some of the families nearby. She turned down her music, pulled into an empty spot in the driveway, and turned off the car.
James’s car was next to hers, blocked in by Amelia’s. Along the sidewalk, Bradley’s car was pulled up to the curb. As she walked up to the front door, she saw he was still in it, sitting in the driver’s seat with headphones on. He either didn’t see her or didn’t care as she waved, so she just headed inside.
James and Amelia were sitting in the living room, discussing something over a notebook on the coffee table as she walked in. “Morning!” Gabriella called on her way up the stairs from the front door.
“Hey, Gabs,” James said. “Did you see Madelyn on your way in by any chance?”
“No,” she said. “I did see Bradley out there though.”
“He’s not my fucking problem until eight.”
Gabriella had been pulling off her jacket, but paused, blinking at James. Him and Bradley fighting wasn’t anything new, but the intensity in his voice certainly was.
“Alright then,” she said, wishing she’d said nothing. “Um, yeah, I haven’t seen Madelyn yet.”
James looked slightly embarrassed, but also didn’t seem like he was going to explain. “I left my final notes on the Warren case in the pink bedroom,” Gabriella said, moving to hang her damp coat on a nearby hook. “I’m on now, so I’m going to go wrap those up before I start anything else, if that’s cool.”
“Yeah,” James said. “Yeah, that’s totally fine. We’ve got a couple new ones today, so we’re meeting at nine.”
“Great.”
She had her coffee already, so she smiled awkwardly and went back to the pink bedroom, mostly to work, but gratefully taking the opportunity to escape whatever the hell that was.
***
Gabriella wasn’t in any hurry to go back out there, so she took a few extra minutes to get the notes right, then emailed them to James to go with the final report. She heard the front door open a couple minutes before eight and reminded herself that whatever battle was happening between James and Bradley, it wasn’t her problem, eight o’clock or otherwise.
“Hey, do you mind sending me the Warren notes too?”
Amelia was in the doorway, looking far easier than James had. “Yeah, of course,” Gabriella said.
“Thanks,” she said, coming into the room and sitting on the other bed as Gabriella sent the email. “I just told James I’d wrap that up so he could prep for today. Wait til you see this case that just came in. Do you know anything about video games?”
“Kind of,” Gabriella said. “I play them once in a while. Wait, do we deal with haunted video games?”
“Apparently we do now,” Amelia said. “We’ll talk about it more at the meeting, but it’ll be you and Madelyn on that one. We found her, she’s down in the gym. Apparently she walked over from Graham’s.”
“Great.”
Amelia looked like she was searching for a reason not to leave the room and Gabriella knew it wasn’t her company that was so appealing. “So..?” she started as Amelia unnecessarily smoothed the neat quilt on the bed.
“So?”
“Are Mom and Dad still fighting in the living room?”
Amelia let out a snort of surprised laughter. “God,” she said, leaning back with her hands on the bed behind her. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. They were fine, then had an absolute blowup last night right as I was leaving. I thought I was going to end up with matching resignation letters by the time I came back for the overnight shift.”
Which meant that this meeting was going to be forty minutes of them intentionally pressing each other’s buttons and maybe twenty minutes of actual cases. Great, exactly what Gabriella had been hoping for when she woke up this morning.
Amelia stayed where she was, shaking out her faded blonde hair behind her as she leaned back and looked around the bedroom. “We should redecorate,” she said.
Gabriella laughed. Amelia wasn’t wrong, but that was the last thing that had been on her mind. “What are you thinking?” she asked.
“No idea,” Amelia admitted. “I’m just avoiding going back out there.”
Despite her words, she groaned and stood up. “Alright,” she said. “So we’ve got the end of the Warren case. Then I think today is the video game thing, a couple standard cleansings, and we’re starting something at a library, but I don’t know anything about it yet.”
“Can I be honest?” Gabriella asked.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Those both sound awesome.”
Amelia laughed and shook her head. “Listen,” she said. “We have you on the game, but maybe if you’re good you can do the library one too.”
Gabriella laughed. The teasing was gentle, and in line with how Amelia seemed more comfortable with Gabriella these days. She’d been the one to tell Gabriella it was time to let what happened with Robin go, but Gabriella hadn’t fully counted on that including Amelia letting it go too.
“Also,” Amelia said, still not leaving. “Saskia called from Hillsborough County about a case that slithered over the state line. Like, actually slithered. It’s going to be Graham’s problem if it hangs around, but we can hope that it just kind of slithers back over to being their problem.”
Hillsborough County was both the team that had made her miserable last winter and Elliot’s new home base. And Gabriella had been so proud of herself for not getting distracted by him yet today. “Do you want me to text Elliot about it?” she asked reluctantly.
“Nope,” Amelia said, to her relief and disappointment. “Just looking forward to sharing the good news with Graham.”
“He’ll be so happy.”
“Alright, time to stop stalling,” Amelia said with another groan. “Meeting at nine.”
“Can’t wait.”
Amelia left and Gabriella realized she really didn’t have any excuse to hide in here either, now that the Warren notes were done. And besides, James and Bradley were both professionals with over a decade on this job. Were they really going to be, like, fistfighting out there or something?
When she got out to the living room, Bradley was the only person there. He was working on one of the computers and didn’t acknowledge her as she walked in. Gabriella went over to the computer farthest from him, which was still only a seat over and down.
“Hi,” she said, for reasons completely unknown to her.
“Hi.”
She didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t seem inclined to either. As she looked over, she noticed he was wearing thin-framed glasses she’d never seen before. Gabriella was about to compliment them before she remembered who she was talking to and kept her mouth shut. She logged into her email and started sifting through the mess in there.
“There’s some new forms you need to fill out,” Bradley said suddenly. “They should’ve emailed them to you. There’s a lot of them. The Foundation’s shifting to a new HR setup and apparently it’s time to update everything.”
“I saw that,” Gabriella said. “I can do a few now.”
“You can’t fill them out online,” Bradley continued. “I spent two hours last night trying to make it work. So print them out and give them to me as you get them done. I’m submitting them all together so I’ll take care of scanning them, unless there’s anything private you don’t want me to see. In which case, talk to me and we’ll work something out.”
The words sounded rehearsed and surprisingly subdued for someone who had apparently had a screaming row with his captain the night before and had never been shy about giving his opinion anyway. But Amelia wasn’t one for exaggeration and Gabriella had seen how pissed off James still was when she arrived.
“Thanks,” she said, spotting the email again in her cluttered inbox.
“Yeah.”
She opened the first folder of forms and hit Print, waiting a long moment until she heard the whirr of the living room printer actually working. But as it started to print, the page poked out just slightly and a grinding sound filled the room as the machine shook.
Bradley swore with more force than the occasion called for, standing just as Gabriella did. “I got it,” she said, moving toward the printer and tugging gently on the jammed page.
It might not have been the official best way to get the paper out, but it came out after a few tugs, half-printed and smeared with ink. She tried printing the forms again and, again, the printer jammed.
“I’ll see if the printer in the back bedroom-”
“It isn’t there. It had to go in for maintenance.”
“Do you know when it’ll be back?”
“I have no idea, I’m not fucking psychic.”
He was, in fact, very much fucking psychic but she wasn’t going to interrupt this current argument to start up that argument with him. “James has a printer. Is he in his office?”
Gabriella was instantly mad at herself. “No clue,” Bradley said, looking straight ahead at his computer.
He didn’t say anything else. But she wanted to get at least some of these forms done while she was thinking of it, so she went to the captain’s office door and knocked.
“Come in!”
James rarely had his office door closed, so maybe he was just getting out of a meeting with McGovern? Either way, she crept into the warm, cluttered space. James was sitting at his desk, glaring at something on the computer screen, but he gave her a tired smile as she came in. “What’s up?”
“Is your printer working?” Gabriella asked. “I have some forms to fill out and the printer out there keeps jamming.”
James sighed irritably. “Do you need them now?”
“I guess not,” she said, her cheeks heating up as she turned to leave. Joining Bradley on his shit list was not how she wanted this shift to start. “Sorry, I just figured I’d start them while I had time, but I can…”
“Sorry, Gabs,” James said, shaking his head. Like Amelia, his hair was looking a little longer than usual. “I didn’t mean…” He groaned, then stood up, gesturing for her to sit. “Here, send it from my computer, it never works right from the ones out in the living room.”
“Are you sure? I can do it after.”
“No, do it now.”
She hesitantly took his seat, closing his email (but not before seeing the alarming amount of messages in his inbox) and opening her own. She printed the first three forms that popped up and they came out of the machine smoothly this time.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Yeah, no problem.”
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” James said, waving off her concern. “Just a crappy few days, that’s all.”
Beyond whatever drama he had going on at work, his girlfriend, Meredith, was moving to Australia at the end of December. And no matter how casual they were, Gabriella knew he really liked her. So that had to hurt.
“Okay,” she said. “Um, let me know if you need anything.”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing. But thanks.”
She took her papers and left the office, going straight to the dining room table to fill them out. It was simple enough, an updated medical form and a couple new permissions and disclosures. Nothing weird about them. When she was finished, she set them on the computer station beside Bradley.
“There’s a full packet of probably twenty in your email,” he said. “I’m aware it’s a lot. It’s not from me, it’s from the Foundation.”
God, this was so weird. “Yeah,” Gabriella replied awkwardly. “I know that. I’ll do more later today.”
He nodded and went silently back to work. She glanced at James’s office door, which was still partially open, and saw him glaring at his computer again, obviously having heard everything.
The tension wasn’t broken by the slow footsteps coming up the stairs, but Gabriella was relieved to see Madelyn walk in. She smiled at Gabriella and Bradley, then made her way down the hall as Gabriella reluctantly returned to her email.
