Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance
Nocticadia: Chapter 34

Having finished a list of tasks that Kelvin had requested during my work study shift, I hustled to the Adderly Memorial room for some peace and quiet. There, I pulled my laptop from my bag and Googled: Corbin Dracadia Island. An obituary popped up for Arabella Corbin, who’d apparently passed just four years ago. Preceded in death by her husband, Richard Corbin. Survived by her only daughter, Vanessa Corbin, who’d gone missing in 2003. The attached picture offered an eerie glimpse of what my mother would’ve looked like, had she aged to seventy-four years old.

My grandmother.

I tried to wrap my head around that, but it refused to go there. It refused to believe that my mother, a woman I’d adored, respected, trusted, for so many years had lied to me. She’d told me to my face that her mother had passed at an early age of a stroke, and that she’d never known much about her father, either.

For years, I’d believed that.

Even if I assumed that I had been the reason my mother had left the study, why lie about her family? In what little I’d gleaned about the Corbins, I hadn’t gotten the impression they were terrible people.

Tears formed in my eyes as I Googled more pictures of Arabella. She appeared to have been an active woman, a potter, who’d often attended various craft shows on the island. She seemed to be well liked and respected by her community, who’d spoken highly of her in the comments below the obituary. The younger photos showed her long, auburn hair, like mine, and bright blue eyes—beautiful and vibrant, just like my mother.

Another article on her told of an estate sale held two years before her death. I peered at the address, jotting it down in a notebook. When I Googled the address, it appeared that the house had been in foreclosure at some point.

As soon as work study ended, I headed for the bike rental shed with the address clutched in my palm. After the usual interrogation from the guard at the gate, I biked toward town. Past the strip of shops, I rounded the corner onto a dirt road that ended at a white picket fence. Beyond it stood a small, yellow cottage with a white door, and a bow window half-blocked by a bush with bright pink flowers. The courtyard in front surrounded a sturdy oak tree and a small, white bench beneath it. Stone paths weaved through a wild mess of flowers, and birds flocked around a small stone fountain in their center. While it had a slightly unkempt and unlived in appearance, it was no less adorable with the vast blue of the ocean behind it.

After rubbing away some of the salty residue on the window, I peered through into an empty and quiet space that hadn’t looked lived in for years. Keeping on with my nosing around, I unlatched the fence and padded through the small courtyard toward the back of the house. As soon as I rounded the corner, I skidded to a halt. The air caught in my lungs.

A vibrant American elm with bent branches stood off to the side, a single swing hanging from a bough, and behind that, a cliff tapered down to a gorgeous ocean backdrop.

My mother’s painting.

The sight of it stabbed my heart. A place I’d thought to be nothing but fictional in her head, one that had always brought me such peace and serenity, turned out to be the home where she’d grown up.

How sad that it now stood alone and abandoned. Unwanted. I wished right then that I had the money to snatch it up and bring it back to life, to own a small piece of my past–a place where Bee and I could come and try to reconcile the mess our mother had left.

I had to assume my mother had had her reasons, though. Maybe those reasons had something to do with Professor Bramwell’s father and that study.

Staring out over the ocean, taking in the serenity of the view, I recalled something from my reading. My grandmother had passed four years ago. Frowning, I tugged my phone from my pocket and opened the notes app where I’d jotted the few dates I’d gathered in my research.

July fifteenth.

Around that time, my mother had gone out of town to look into a specialist and financial assistance for the small benign tumor on Bee’s eye.

I’d been left in charge of Bee for those two days, so my mother could go alone, which I’d thought strange at the time–she’d never gone anywhere without the two of us. Although not life-threatening for my sister, the cyst had always been part of her insecurity, and perhaps even contributed to the anxiety she’d always felt around others. It’d troubled my mother that we couldn’t afford to have it removed, with us not having insurance or any means of paying for it. A little over a week later was about the time when my mother had first started showing signs of illness that we’d thought might’ve been something she’d picked up in her travels. From there, it had progressed over a period of weeks, up until her death.

Was it possible that my mother had returned home for the funeral? Maybe Bramwell and Crixson had had nothing to do with it. Had she somehow exposed herself to Noctisoma then?

If so, how?