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“I like your Doctor Who pajamas,” he says. “Which Doctor do you favor?”
“I like the companions,” says Jane automatically.
“Sure,” says Ravi, “who doesn’t? But I think I’d go for Ten. Ten is yummy. And youthful.”
“The Tenth Doctor was nine hundred and three years old,” says Jane loftily.
“Well, yeah, but Ten was youthful in spirit,” Ravi says. “Yeesh. Do you let anything past?”
Before they get to their rooms, he stops at an unusual door Jane hasn’t yet noticed. It’s wooden and arched, with a doormat that reads WELCOME TO MY WORLDS. It has a mail slot and a bellpull and it occurs to Jane that it may be the entrance to the east spire.
“I feel like I’m in a Winnie-the-Pooh story,” Jane says.
Ravi grins again and says, “Those are favorites of mine. Someday, somewhere, I’ll meet a Heffalump.” Then he slips his hand inside his coat and pulls out one perfect nasturtium blossom. He pushes it through the mail slot and lets it fall through.
Together, Jane and Ravi walk on. “G’night then,” he says, retreating into the room right before hers, yawning mightily.
“G’night,” she responds, as much to Captain Polepants as to Ravi, who’s already gone.
* * *
There’s no point trying to get any more sleep now that she’s seen what she’s seen. Philip with a gun. Patrick, who’s Ivy’s brother. Patrick, who keeps telling Kiran he has something to confess, but never confesses. Ivy, who clammed up yesterday whenever Philip was around, or whenever Jane asked her what should have been innocuous questions.
Jane finds a clear wedge of yellow shag carpet near the morning room windows and lies down. She needs to think. The moon is smaller now, higher, paler than it was before, a slice of apple. Slowly it slides out of her view. The sky lightens and dissolves the stars.
No matter how many times she goes over the conversation, she can’t make sense of it. Philip is going somewhere and it’s dangerous. Philip is going somewhere, but he doesn’t know where? Patrick and someone else have put out a story that not everyone’s buying. Okay. A story about what?
Phoebe and Philip had been playacting at dinner; Jane had suspected it, and now she’s sure of it. Pretending to care about Kiran and her job. Pretending to care about the Panzavecchias. Pretending to be snobbish about Jane and her aunt.
Is the Panzavecchia story the one that not everyone’s buying? It’s true that Lucy St. George isn’t buying it. But what could Patrick and the Okadas have to do with a bank robbery, the Mafia, and a pair of missing socialites?
There’s the missing Brancusi too. How does that fit in?
Jane wonders, suddenly, if she’s being naïve; if it’s normal for rich people in fancy houses to walk around with guns. This is the USA, after all; judging by the news, doesn’t every third person have a gun? Maybe what’s remarkable is that she’s never seen anyone casually carrying a gun before this.
Then again, aren’t the Okadas British? Do Brits wander around with guns?
Why would Patrick, who’s a servant, be in charge of whatever’s going on? And if Patrick is in charge of something underhanded . . . does Kiran know? And what does it mean about Ivy? About all her strange moments of deliberate nonchalance?
It depresses Jane to think about that. She doesn’t want reasons not to trust Ivy.
Breathe, Aunt Magnolia would say. Wait. Let it settle. The pieces will start to fit together in a way that makes sense. And be careful, my darling.
What would an umbrella look like if it were a mystery? Jane wonders suddenly. Even better, what if it were a weapon of self-defense?
The ferrule, the tips, and the rod would be sharp. The springs would be tightly wound so that the canopy opened hard and fast like a blow from a shield.
“And I’ll choose shades of brown and gold that suit Jasper,” Jane mutters as she rolls up onto her feet.
An hour later, she’s trimming down the diameter of a birch rod using the lathe, wearing goggles and a heavy canvas apron, when she hears someone explode through her outer door. She pushes her goggles up into her dark curls.
Ravi looms in the morning room doorway, wearing black silk pajama bottoms and nothing else. It’s impossible not to stare.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yells, wincing at the light. “Do you know what time it is? Do you appreciate that I’m sleeping on the other side of the wall? My mother brought you here from a hell dimension!”
“You seem obsessed with your mother,” says Jane. “Have you considered therapy?”
He moans, rubbing his face. “No one would believe the truth about my mother.”
“Mm-hm,” says Jane. “Is that because it’s your own special truth?”
“What the hell are you building?”
“An umbrella,” says Jane.
“Are you kidding me?” he says, then sweeps his hand out in a gesture that encompasses the entire room. “You aren’t satisfied that there are enough umbrellas?”
“I make umbrellas,” Jane says, shortly. “It’s . . . what I do.”
Wearily, he rubs his head. His white-streaked hair must’ve been wet when he lay down, for it’s dried in a funny orientation, flat and sticking out to the right, like it’s secretly trying to point Jane in that direction without him knowing. “You know, I think Patrick mentioned you last night,” he says.
“Patrick talks about a lot of things,” says Jane significantly.
Ravi scrunches his nose. “Maybe to you,” he says. “He’s the strong, silent type to me.”
“He’s never . . . confessed anything to you?”
“That’s a really odd question,” says Ravi. “Why, did he confess something to you? Didn’t you literally just meet him, like, yesterday?”
“Yeah. Never mind.”
“I think Kiran mentioned you too.”
“Wow, you must know everything about me,” Jane says, with a touch
of sarcasm that alarms her. Ravi is a college graduate, an heir to the Thrash fortune, but he doesn’t make her feel like a child. He makes her feel like she might be about to do something unwise.
“Do you hate me or something?” he says, grinning.
“I’m working,” says Jane.
“Yes,” he says. “On umbrellas, at five thirty in the morning.”
“You’re interrupting.”
He’s looking around the room now with curiosity. “You made all these umbrellas?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, how?”
“Well, how does one build an umbrella? What’s the first step?”
“I don’t know,” says Jane. “You could start a few different ways. I’m not, like, an expert.”
“As an art appreciator,” he says, “I’m curious.”
“Well,” Jane says in confusion, “I mean, you can watch if you want.”
He sighs, then yawns, then marches out, then marches back in again, wrapping the blanket from Jane’s bed around himself. He weaves his way through the saws, umbrella parts, and umbrellas to the striped sofa Jane has pushed against the back wall, then settles himself down. For the next couple of hours, he alternates sleeping on her sofa with waking grouchily to the noises of her saws and asking intelligent questions about umbrella-making. “How do you keep the ribs from rubbing through the canopy after repeated openings?” he mumbles, then grasps his hair. “Christ. I keep dreaming about that damn Panzavecchia baby. Little Leo, you know?”
“I insert a small piece of fabric between the joints and the canopy as a buffer,” Jane says, focusing hard on the work of her fingers. “It’s called a prevent.”
He’s already half-asleep again. Jane notices, through her absorption, that his cleverness fades from his face when he’s sleeping. She wonders if she’s wrong to believe that he’s ignorant of the Patrick stuff.
“And yeah,” she says, speaking to herself. Speaking to the house, which groans back at her. “I dreamt about him too.”
