Chapter Text
Adam Parrish did not consider himself lucky.
Nothing he had, nothing he’d achieved, had ever been dropped in his lap. He’d never won anything he hadn’t earned. He’d never been granted anything he hadn’t put effort into. He had put his nose to the grind or he had studied hard for everything he had in life, unlike the majority of people he’d worked and studied with for the past ten years.
They had money, so they didn’t need luck. They had been fed with silver spoons since birth.
Adam was lucky to have been fed at all.
He’d long been over the jealousy that rankled him for years. His stomach no longer hardened the way it had when he was in high school and watched a classmate tear into the parking lot behind the wheel of the latest model luxury car while Adam locked up his secondhand bike. His vision didn’t blur at the edges anymore when he overheard someone talking about their summers on Cape Cod or their winters in Vail.
High-end sports cars and expensive vacations were what eighteen-year-old Adam put on his bucket list so he could get the feeling he’d made it when he finally crossed them off.
Twenty-eight-year-old Adam had a drastically different bucket list. One that centered on making a name for himself rather than making money. One full of things that came with financial stability instead of financial success. Like an economical replacement to his tri-colored car that was held together with zip ties and hope. Or living in a place with less than three roommates where one of the utilities wasn’t cut off monthly because their combined graduate stipends couldn’t cover all the bills.
Adam thought the tradeoff of success for sanity, and maybe even someday happiness, was worth the significant downgrade in his bucket list items.
So Adam did not consider himself lucky, until luck struck him in the unluckiest of circumstances.
Persephone Poldma had found Adam at precisely the right time in his life, right when he realized what he wanted wasn’t what he needed. She had been alongside him for most of his college career, shepherding him from the second semester of his freshman year through his dissertation defense, mentoring him through a bespoke program of physics and the metaphysical. She had been the one to help Adam understand the offputting uncanniness he’d carried through life wasn’t because he was odd, but because he was different, because he was more.
Then Persephone had done the one thing she made Adam swear he’d never do.
She scried too long, too far, and hadn’t found her way back in time to save her physical self.
Her death devastated Adam.
Persephone was more than a mentor, more than an advisor. She was a friend, one of his only friends. She was family. The only person Adam had any attachment to. The only reason he hadn’t succumbed to stress his freshman year and proved everyone right that trailer park trash had no place at Harvard.
Adam was still floundering in silent, concealed grief when he got a call from the lawyer handling Persephone’s estate. Persephone had no known next of kin, no estranged family members listed as beneficiaries, and her attorney was named as the executor of her very brief will.
I give all of my property to Adam Parrish.
Persephone left Adam everything in her tiny attic apartment in Cambridge. Every book, every bowl, every mirror. Every piece of furniture, every piece of clothing. Every tarot deck, including the dark deck with spidery lines and smudgy backgrounds Persephone had been using when she’d passed.
And Persephone left Adam a house. More precisely, half a townhouse. In Washington, D.C., footsteps away from Georgetown University, which awarded Adam a postdoctoral fellow position the same day Persphone’s lawyer called him about her will.
Persephone had been a far better psychic than Adam would ever be.
The fellowship seemed so tailor-made Adam couldn’t believe it wasn’t: collaborate on a book about the influence of fortune telling on medieval literature, society, and rule, and then present the findings; teach two courses in both the fall and spring semesters, preferably core curriculum, but he could create his own; and be in residence to engage with the staff and students of the Theology & Religious Studies Department at the university. Adam had met the professor he’d be working with, Dr. Dean Allen, at conferences and they’d corresponded on and off for years, but it was only when Dr. Allen showed up at Persephone’s memorial service on the arm of one of Persephone’s best friends, Maura Sargent, that Adam realized something, or someone, had bent the universe in his favor.
Adam hadn’t been the only applicant for the position, but he’d evidently been the most qualified. That was unsurprising, given his area of study. The way the fellowship had been crafted to precisely suit his strengths should have bothered him, but Adam knew better than to not look a gift horse in the mouth. Postdoc positions were few and far between in any field, and their rarity led to extreme competitiveness, so Adam was glad to have landed one at all, let alone one in a location where he very recently acquired lodging.
What did bother Adam, though, was that in almost a decade of knowing Persephone, she had never once mentioned she owned half a property in Washington. She was never in the habit of sharing many personal details, preferring mystery and speculation over forthright revelation. Adam didn’t exactly share much about himself and his past either, but the countless times they’d talked about the fellowship at Georgetown were perfect opportunities for Persephone to bring up that she owned a townhouse right near the university’s campus. The fact that she hadn’t mentioned the home sent Adam down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
He needed to figure out why she’d left him half of the house.
Persephone’s lawyer was not teeming with information and he had very few answers for Adam’s questions about the townhouse. After meeting with the attorney to sign paperwork and pick up keys, Adam knew two things. He knew Persephone had updated her will the year before and he knew who owned the other half of the townhouse.
He knew what owned the other half of the townhouse.
The estate of Niall Lynch held the other half of the deed for 2914 Olive Street NW and had been providing the funds for upkeep since Niall’s death over ten years before. Persephone’s lawyer didn’t know whether the house was occupied, and, if it was, by whom. The phone numbers Persephone left for both Niall Lynch and his attorney had, not surprisingly, been disconnected a long time ago. No forwarding numbers had been provided, and Adam's searches for any information about the surviving family noted in Niall's obituary, his wife and three sons, had been as fruitless as searches for Niall himself.
So in the weeks between his meeting with Persephone’s lawyer and Harvard’s graduation ceremony, between finding and requesting promising primary sources for his upcoming collaboration, Adam researched the Georgetown property in a near-obsessive way. He spent hours hunched over his computer as he looked up everything he could about the half-a-house he now owned. The last time it sold predated Zillow and other online real estate listings, so there was little to find other than the last selling price: $473,000. Property taxes were always paid in full and always paid on time, and when all his other searches for public records came up empty and without much else to go on, Adam brought the house up on Google Street View and got very familiar with its exterior.
2914 looked well kept, a facade of clean white-painted brick with a black front door at the top of a wrought iron staircase that stretched from the brick sidewalk in front of the house. Black shutters framed the door and windows, and like many of its neighbors, the townhouse had bars over the windows that could be reached from ground level.
With one difference: the half-size windows of the basement were bricked over behind their black iron cages.
Adam didn’t think much about that. He only thought whoever lived, or had lived, in the house was very concerned with security, which he found perfectly sensible. The whole townhouse seemed sensible, painted so it didn’t stand out from the other townhouses around it, well maintained so it didn’t stand out like an eyesore on a block of very nice homes. It was a house Adam would never have been able to afford, not after committing himself to a path that started and ended in academia. His half of the property taxes alone would eat up a sizable chunk of his salary for as long as he lived there.
If he ever lived there.
Before he packed his things into his car, Adam tried everything he could think of to get in touch with someone living in the townhouse.
He sent regular letters that went unanswered. He sent certified letters that were returned stamped UNCLAIMED.
There wasn’t a landline number tied to the address, so he couldn’t call, and though he found phone numbers for other houses up and down the street, Adam wasn’t interested in bothering potential future neighbors with a problem that wasn’t theirs.
He briefly scried into a candle, but was peculiarly blocked from getting beyond the walls of the house. He consulted Persephone's tarot deck, but it left him with more questions than answers, along with the feeling the deck was possibly haunted.
He attempted everything short of hiring a private investigator, an endeavor he didn’t have the funds for even after selling most of Persephone’s possessions, and then Adam had no choice but to take his chances. He had to be out of his apartment before another month’s rent was due and he had to be in D.C. for the start of his fellowship, so once his doctorate was conferred, he got in his car, punched his new address into his GPS, and drove.
Adam didn’t know what he’d be walking into when he arrived in Georgetown, if he’d unlock the front door to find a vacant house or a family of four. He’d purchased an air mattress in preparation for the former. For the latter, he wasn’t sure how to prepare other than being willing to live out of his car for the foreseeable future. He wasn’t going to upend the life of a family if he knocked and the door opened on parents, kids, and a dog. If he needed to, he could couch surf until he found another place to live; Adam had put all his eggs in the basket of 2914 Olive because until he had a definite answer about whether it was occupied, he didn’t want to part ways with a first month’s rent and a security deposit.
When he crawled down Olive Street, Adam’s little multi-colored sedan didn’t look as out of place as he thought it would. It was the worst looking car on the street, but the road wasn’t lined with as many luxury cars as he thought there would be. Other than a late model Audi and a vintage BMW, most of the cars were of the moderate sort, and Adam parallel parked between a VW and a Ford. Before he climbed from his car, he gave himself the same pep talk he’d given himself for the whole nine-hour drive from Cambridge.
“The worst that can happen,” Adam said to the steering wheel, “is you’re sleeping in the backseat for a few days.”
Then Adam climbed from his shitty little car, and holding his key to the townhouse like it was proof he belonged there, he climbed the wrought iron steps of 2914 Olive Street NW.
The doorbell echoed on the other side of the front door after Adam rang it. He waited, counted to thirty, and rang the bell again. Adam repeated the count, then repeated the ring, and thirty seconds after the third ring, he rapped the brass knocker mounted in the middle of the black-laquered door. Again, he waited, and again, no answer. Like the bell, he tried the knocker again, and putting his faith in the power of three after waiting another half minute, Adam knocked a final time.
When the last knock got no response, Adam put his key in the lock.
Stepping inside, Adam immediately knew Persephone had never lived in the house, or if she had, all evidence of her residence had been removed. Persephone had been ethereal, and her apartment in Cambridge reflected that. Everything was light and lace. Layered rugs padded the floors. Mismatched furniture cluttered the rooms. Mirrors mounted everywhere made the apartment seem endless.
The townhouse on Olive Street couldn’t have been more different.
The walls were painted dark, charcoal if not completely black, and the hardwood floors were stained almost to match. The living room furniture around the front windows and the fireplace was just as deep and rich, tufted couches and leather chairs. Artwork on the walls carried the mood, textured, abstract, and modern. The brightest thing Adam could see, thanks to a general lack of interior walls, was the white granite of the counters and island in the kitchen at the back of the house.
It was too nice to be unoccupied. There was too much that screamed someone lives here: a pair of running shoes by the door, a stack of books on the mantle, a laptop on the coffee table. Adam didn’t see the trappings of family life, there were no toys or baby photos or the general clutter that came with kids, but the house was certainly lived in. And though he had all the legal paperwork that proved he should be there, and though he’d let himself in with a key that still worked in the door, Adam Parrish felt like an absolute intruder.
His eyes went to the steps to the second floor, but he didn’t hear sounds of life from upstairs as he angled his right ear towards the steps. He listened for a few more moments, for noise from a first floor bathroom or from the basement, but Adam heard nothing. He would have been able to hear a pin drop in the silence that hung in the house.
Finally, Adam called out, “Hello?” Despite his pep talks, his voice was brittle, and Adam cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello?”
He took a few slow steps towards the kitchen and waited, rotating slowly to catch any sounds of movement. But Adam still heard nothing, so he kept walking.
A dirty bowl, a spoon, and a glass with the remnants of orange juice sat in the sink, further proof someone lived there, and staring at the items in the basin, Adam went back over the plan he’d crafted the past few weeks. Introduce himself, explain the situation and that he’d tried to get in contact but didn’t have a way, provide the legal paperwork, the deed to the house with the ink of his signature hardly dry.
In the end, Adam didn’t need his plan. The house’s silence worked to his benefit, and he heard the barest creak of a floor board before he heard the faint click of a safety.
Slowly, Adam raised his hands and slowly, Adam turned from the sink to find a pistol pointed at his chest.
The man at the other end of the gun asked, “Who the fuck are you?”
Very rapidly, Adam Parrish felt very, very unlucky.