Rule of Three

The thirty year-old woman guided her rented Civic up the quarter mile of gravel driveway. She glanced to the left, the way she had done a million times before as the white farmhouse with the blue trim came into view between two ancient oak trees. Her heart felt bruised, barely moving inside her chest as she pulled to a stop next to the three concrete steps that lead up to the side-porch door. She waited for her grandmother’s face to appear, blurred by the screen door, but vibrant, and excited to see her.

Harmony Hope Voss thought she would cry at this point. The entire, three hour drive from the airport she had imagined this exact moment, and she had seen herself crying. She rolled the loop of keys over in her hand, realizing she had never needed to unlock this door, and was entirely unaware that it even had a doorknob - this door had always been flung open before she could reach the first step. After several hugs a mug of tea was placed in her hand and she had somehow been teleported from the lawn to the kitchen table while a small round woman bustled around her in a faded floral apron.

She took her seat in the kitchen and ran her fingers over the woodgrain. She sighed and a puff of breath floated out in front of her. No doubt it was colder inside the house, several weeks after the electricity and gas had been turned off, than it was outside in mid-March. Nothing else had been touched. The sink was perfectly clean, all the geese were facing the correct direction on the electric conduit covers that capped all four burners on the stove. The house didn’t even echo the way it should, because each piece of furniture was still solemnly absorbing the sound of her footsteps.

Swinging a bright pink and purple afghan over her shoulders, Harmony slid down the edge of her grandmother’s bed to the floor. She sat there until her nose and fingertips were cold, staring across the room to the wall of romance novels, all organized - first by author, then by height on the bookshelves that lined the room. It made sense - her grandfather had died in 1986, several years before Harmony's birth. That's over 30 years to collect “happy heart stories” as her grandmother lovingly called them. Rolling herself tighter in her blanket she lowered her body to her side and let herself drift a little on the raft of the 100 year old rag rug.

Hours passed, possibly longer, before Harmony - prompted by the tingling in her arms and the kink her neck - rolled over to her other side. She blinked a few times as she peered under the bed. There was absolutely nothing under the bed. Not a shoebox, not a dust bunny. The moonlight glided easily in from the window, across the floorboards, over the braid of the rug and only stopped in the middle of the mattress where the bed cast a shadow.

“So tidy.” Harmony whispered under the bed. She reached out and ran her whole arm across the rug in one long motion. First down, and then up. Then thump.

“Ow!” She pulled her arm back and touched her wrist gingerly where it had just met something with a square corner. She reached her hand back in carefully and touched the hard cover of a book. Pulling it out she looked at it in the dark. It appeared to be a simple black notebook.

Still wearing the afghan as a shawl she snatched her car keys off the kitchen counter and dove for the driver's seat of the Civic. She pressed the ignition, cranked the heat, and turned on her seat warmer.

“Light, I need light.” after poking every button in the car and thoroughly molesting the ceiling she finally found the cabin light and flicked it on.

She pulled the elastic band off of the black notebook and opened it to the cover page. Scrawled in elaborate cursive were several names. At the bottom of the list Harmony recognized the same signature that had been at the bottom of every birthday card her whole life:

Candice Cole Voss

“She obviously signed this book after she was married.” Harmony had once asked why her grandma didn’t have a “pretty” middle name like she did.

“Cole is my maiden name, dear. Before I was married my middle name was the same as yours, Hope. But, when I got married, I decided to change my middle name to my maiden name, and take your grandfather’s name.”

Harmony flipped to the next page. The writing matched that of the first signature on the list: Augusta Anne McPherson.

This paper is enchanted to grant you your dreams.

Once you ask in ink, it can never be blotted out.

Balance will be maintained -

So weigh your desires soundly

And use it wisely, daughters.

She flipped to the next page to read the next poem. Augusta never wrote in the book again. Harmony matched the handwriting on the next page to a woman named Madeline.

I wish for a daughter.

Harmony flipped through the book. Each person wrote a different amount in the book. Then she came across the writing of her grandmother. The cursive took three pages and each page had one smaller note tucked into the binding, and the final page had a yellow post-it note stuck directly in the middle of the page.

The post it read: 52 States, Happy Heart

She peeled the post-it off the page and read.

$10,000,000

Puzzled, she flipped to the middle page that had been authored by her grandmother.

My house is always perfectly clean, every morning.

Next to those words, a tiny strip of paper was jammed into the spine of the notebook: Looney Toons

Then the first page.

I want my Albert safe at home, in bed.

This one had a newspaper clipping next to it.

The headline read: “Local Boy, Lost”

Harmony read the article that described her father as a child, how he left for school on a Monday morning and hadn’t come home.

“How did I not know about this?” She puzzled, reading the article over and over. “He was gone for at least three days.” Why had her father never told her about this? Was he kidnapped? When was he returned?

Tears welled up in Harmony’s eyes. She had a strained relationship with her parents. When her mother passed she had attended the funeral and she and her father quietly visited her grave every November 14th on her birthday. Her father took his own life only 6 months before Candice Cole Voss’ cancer took her.

“These things happen in threes.” Seemingly disembodied voices kept saying to her at the funeral.

She flipped to the person who came before her grandmother. Almost chicken scratch she could make out a few words.

I wish for a safe voyage.

Harmony closed the book. She popped the trunk and searched through the roadside assistance kit and found a tiny keychain flashlight.

Back in front of her grandmother’s bookshelf she pulled out a copy of A Lover’s Reconciliation. It was noticeably heavier than a paperback novel should be. It opened at the center revealing a stack of 100 dollar bills, perfectly banded, in a compartment created using an X-Acto knife and mod podge.

Holding the book Harmony took a few steps back and sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand she held a romance-novel-made-book-safe and in the other hand the means by which each of the 1000 books on her grandmother’s bookshelf came to hold a stack of $100 bills.