Fable: An Unfortunate Fairy Tale Book 3 Read Online Free PDF Page A

giant no-no.
     
    Terry drove away from the cemetery and onto
a turnpike. It felt surreal—they had just buried her brother, and
now they were getting evicted by their friend and moving on the
same day. Mina began to wonder if her mother’s boss had a screw
loose. After what felt like hours, but in reality probably was only
few minutes, they exited the highway and turned down an unfamiliar
road. They must be on the edge of town, because she didn’t
recognize the terrain.
    They turned onto a barely discernable road,
and Mina wondered if Terry knew where they were going. Finally,
they followed the road up a winding hill, and Mina could see a
house in the distance, a very large house. Terry pulled up to a
wrought-iron gate, and stepped down from the van and fished around
in her wallet for a key card. Finally, she found the right one and
slipped it into the security box, and the gate opened. She slid
back into the car and drove up the driveway, lined with weeping
willows, and stopped in front of a large estate.
    It was antiquated and hauntingly beautiful
at the same time, as if the architect couldn’t decide which era to
design the house after, so he merged all of them. Or, better yet,
as if the house had been there for centuries, and each century
something modern was added to it. It was in need of quite a bit of
work and a coat of paint. The outside shutters had fallen off and
needed to be fixed, the bushes were overgrown, and the front steps
were missing a board. A large greenhouse was attached to the house,
and even from this distance she could see that quite a few of the
glass windows were shattered and overrun with foliage.
    “ Welcome home!” Terry
chimed happily as she put the van into park. “I made a few phone
calls and pulled a few strings, but it’s yours.”
    “ What is?” Sara
asked.
    “ Why, the house, of
course! It’s one of the estates that my company has had a contract
with…well, forever. It has sat empty for most of those years, and
the owners have no desire to sell it and are hardly ever here,
either. So it continues to sit empty, which isn’t good for a house.
I contacted them and explained your situation and that you were one
of my most trusted employees and a dear friend, and they offered it
to you and your daughter…on one condition.”
    Sara looked at the large house, her hand
jumping to her heart in fear and wonder.
    “ You will have to live in
it and take care of it. I can recommend a great handyman to help
fix up the place, and soon it will be as good as new.” Terry’s head
bobbed in excitement. “Don’t get me wrong, I love having you two
live with me, but it’s about time for you to start anew. Especially
since Mina has to go back to school in a few days—”
    Terry continued to relay her news to a
shocked Sara and unlocked the front door and walked them into a
spacious entrance hall. What the hey? A spiral staircase? The house
looked like it had come out of a movie, all right…a horror
movie.
    Off the entrance hall was a sitting room
with a library with a very dusty grand piano, while to the right
was a formal dining room. In every room there were obvious blank
spots on the wall where pictures had been hung and looked like they
had been recently removed, because of a slight, barely noticeable
discoloration of the wall. They were all prime locations: above the
fireplace, in the library above a desk. Each newly discovered bare
spot made Mina irritated. Were these priceless portraits removed
because the owners thought they would steal them?
    There were multiple wings of rooms to be
explored at a later date. They kept going and walked into the
largest kitchen she had ever seen. It was a chef’s dream, with
multiple islands and granite countertops, but things Mina didn’t
really care about. What she zoned in on first was, of course, the
dishwasher.
    “ It’s all very nice,
Terry, but I don’t know how comfortable I am with this commitment.
I’ve never even met the owners. How