Read The Poe Estate for Free Online

up—I often felt her watching over me invisibly. Lately, she took her job as Sukie protector more and more seriously.
    I glared at Cole and didn’t answer.
    â€œWhat’s it like inside your cousin’s house?” he went on, apparently completely unbothered by my glare.
    â€œOld,” I said.
    â€œYeah, but old
how
? It’s so
big
! What are the rooms like? Is it just your cousin in there?”
    â€œHey, Farley! Cole!” Some of his friends at the back of the bus had spotted him. “What are you doing up there? Get back here and sit with us!”
    â€œOkay, okay! Coming,” he shouted. He gave me an apologetic half smile—did he think I would actually
mind
his leaving? “Catch you later, Spooky,” he said and strode gracefully away to join his friends.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Cole left me alone on the bus home. So did everybody else. When I got off, I shouldered my backpack and started up the steep hill to the mansion that was now my home. Big black birds—crows, maybe—sat on the peak of each gable, cawing one by one as I approached.
    â€œSukie, is that you? Come in here a minute,” called Dad from the carriage house. He had several cardboard boxes open on his workbench. “That doorknob you sold to the museum lady yesterday—remember what it looked like?”
    â€œIt was brass. Sort of ferny. Why?”
    â€œShe wants to know what house it came from and if I got anything else there. Come help me look.”
    â€œOkay. What am I looking for?” It was warm in the carriage house—Dad had a wood fire going in the potbellied stove. I shrugged off my backpack and coat.
    â€œAnother doorknob like the one she bought,” he said. “Here, these boxes have stuff from different houses. Find the doorknob, you find the house.”
    I poked through the boxes of old hardware—doorknobs, hinges, knockers, mailbox slots, things like that. All the doorknobs in the first box were made of china, mostly plain dark brown, though a few had swirls in the glaze to make it look like wood grain. The ones in the next box were made of brass, but they were all oval, not round, and instead of the leafy design, they had intertwined initials on them. I wondered what it would be like to be so rich that you put your initials on your doorknobs. But maybe the letters stood for the name of a school or a hospital or something, not a person.
    The third box had the doorknob I was looking for—I recognized its ferny swirls. I recognized something else too: The doorknob gave off an electrical coldness when I touched it. It was the same feeling I got when Kitty showed up in a room, the same feeling I got from the broom everybody wanted to buy. Was that what made Elizabeth want these?
    Remembering how Elizabeth had smelled her doorknob, I lifted this one to my nose. It smelled like brass, just as you’d expect.
    I didn’t find anything else very interesting in that box. A couple of the hinges had a faint echo of the doorknob’s electrical chill, and there was a bell attached to a neat spring mechanism, but that didn’t feel alive like the doorknob. Well,
alive
wasn’t quite the word—maybe
inhabited
. I twisted the bell, making it ring.
    â€œFind anything?” asked Dad.
    I held up the doorknob. “Here. Do you remember which house the stuff in this box came from?”
    He nodded. “That was a great old one, with the beams and gingerbread trim, but in terrible condition. It was a shame they had to demolish it. Almost nothing was salvageable. All the floors were rotted through. And the bats in the attic!” He whistled. “The whole thing gave me a chill. Thanks, Sukie. Here, toss it back in.” I dropped the doorknob in the box. Dad tore a piece of transparent packing tape with his teeth and sealed the box shut. He taped Elizabeth’s card to the top. I wondered if she would want everything in the box, or just the