I don't know what to do. It's been a long month since I have written anything here, and I am not the lame person as she who wrote the last entry. And that girl, Tory, was not the same as the Victoria who first began this diary. Now I don't know what to do, and I should… I must… tell it to someone SO… this little book with all its blank pages and empty lines.
There is so much.
Our nearest neighbor, although there are eight acres here, is less than one mile away. Straight through the woods out back. I met him a few weeks after… after their deaths. He is Mr. Parker, and Aunt… I mean Isobel… calls him Erik. Erik Parker. A tall man, thin or rather slim, with large hands with long fingers. A great deal of black-and-gray hair, combed straight back from a high forehead. Beautiful gray sideburns, almost white in places. A very well-trimmed beard. Is he fifty? Forty-five? Fifty-five? I don't know. He has eyes every bit as piercing as Au… as Isobel's, but his are a deep brown.
He is a very handsome man.
He lives in a strange stone place that was some sort of gamekeeper's lodge long, long ago when not only our property and his but a lot of the surrounding area was one vast estate. His place ii surrounded by trees and grapevines and all sorts of underbrush. I don't think the grapevines bear. He isn't interested in agriculture.
He is as strange as Isobel. He lives alone… well, no. That's another strange part. There are a young man and woman living with him. She cooks and launders and does the housework, and the young man, I assume, does everything else there is to do.
I was very shocked to learn that they are not married. It is not only a strange, but doubtless a sinful household.
Mr. Parker, of course, has money. He reads a great deal, he says, and thinks, he says, with his great dark eyes piercing while he speaks and his beard writhing a bit, and he writes. Articles, and he says he is doing the story of his life and of all humankind. Whatever that means.
It is to his place that Aunt Isobel has been going at nights. Walking, through the woods, all alone, to return sometime before I awake. It is all too strange, and a little scary. I know why I have begun to write here but even as I write I am trying to talk myself out of it, what I am thinking, but the mystery, the suspense, is far too much for anyone, certainly, and definitely far far too much for anyone with my curiosity. I must try to dissuade myself.
No, I have only steeled my resolve.
I shall.
I shall follow her.