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“Wow,” says Jane. “You really make me want to work for you. I want a job where I get to threaten innocent visitors and lie to all the people who trust me most.”
“On second thought,” says Mrs. Vanders, “you stay right here. I’m getting someone to walk you back to your rooms.”
“Kiss my ass,” Jane says, then turns and walks out.
* * *
As Jane is making her way up the back staircase with her plate, Patrick comes clattering down from the west attics, which doesn’t surprise her. He reaches her, then turns back around to accompany her. Jane doesn’t even look at him.
“What would you do if I started screaming something about your stupid organization?” she says. “Wrestle me down and gag me?”
“No,” says Patrick calmly. “But I would stop you.”
“I’m innocent, you know,” Jane says, “and I didn’t ask to be involved in all this crap.”
“Didn’t you?” says Patrick. “Weren’t you following Grace around this morning? And weren’t you asking everyone questions about your aunt Magnolia?”
“Not because I was hoping to find out she was a spy!”
“She had reasons.”
“Do me a favor,” says Jane, “and don’t flaunt the ways you knew my aunt better than I did.”
“Don’t be silly,” says Patrick. “She was your aunt. You’re the one who knew her.”
He sounds like he means it, but it’s too absurd to be answerable. They’re walking back the way Jane came before, through the second story’s west wing, past Aunt Magnolia’s photograph.
If it’s even hers.
“All these years,” she says to Patrick, “you’ve been lying to Kiran about who you really are.”
He doesn’t speak again for the rest of the walk.
* * *
Jane remembers the questions she’d had after Aunt Magnolia’s death. One of her aunt’s colleagues had called from the Antarctic Peninsula. “A storm came up,” he’d said, his voice cutting in and out; the connection on that phone call had been terrible. “She was too far from the base. She never made it back. I’m sorry,” he’d said, but Jane hadn’t understood what that meant.
So she’d dragged herself to her doctor, Doctor Gordon, and asked what it meant to die in a snowstorm in Antarctica.
Doctor Gordon had sat Jane down gently. “The first thing that happens is that your blood moves from your skin and extremities to your core,” she’d said. “This is called vasoconstriction. It helps you conserve what heat you have, rather than lose it to the environment.” She’d stopped, waited for Jane’s nod. “Then you start shivering,” she’d gone on, “all over your body. You become clumsy. It becomes difficult to use your hands or walk.” Another nod. “Your thoughts start to get dull, you have some amnesia. Apathy sets in, which is a blessing, really. You might burrow somewhere, like a hibernating bear,” she’d said, “before you lose consciousness. Once you do lose consciousness, you might wake now and then to hallucinations, but finally you fall asleep and don’t wake up again. Your body can take a long time to die, but during that time, you’re not suffering. Do you appreciate that, Janie? That at the end, she wasn’t suffering?”
But Jane hadn’t been able to bear the idea that Aunt Magnolia had certainly known, in a snowstorm in Antarctica, what her own sleepiness had meant. Jane’s sleep had gotten even worse from that day on, because that’s how Aunt Magnolia had died. Or so Jane had thought.
Did she ever even go to Antarctica? Or did I drag myself to the doctor and sit through that horrible litany for nothing? She’s suddenly hot with shame at the thought, as if Aunt Magnolia has pranked her.
Her eyes find the framed photos she’s hung on the morning room walls. The anglerfish in Indonesia. The squid in Peru. The falling frogs in Belize. The Canadian polar bear, suspended underwater. Aunt Magnolia had used to draw Jane a map for every trip she took, with the dates written carefully, so that Jane could have the comfort of following her progress and knowing where to imagine her at any point in time.
All lies. Other people had known where Aunt Magnolia really was. Ivy had probably known. Jane crosses to the photo of Aunt Magnolia herself, standing in scuba gear on a New Zealand seafloor, touching a whale. Is that even Aunt Magnolia? In scuba gear, it could be anyone.
Jane reaches into her pocket for her folding knife. She flips the screwdriver extension open, takes the photo down from the wall, and applies the screwdriver to the back. When the backing comes loose, she throws it aside, then grabs the photo and holds it out before her, staring at that person on the ocean floor.
Liar, Jane thinks, and tears it in half, separating the person from the whale. Then, with a growing rage, she tears the person in half, then in fourths, then into as many tiny pieces as she can. She runs to the fireplace in the bedroom, hurls them into the grate, and throws some small pieces of wood in there with them. Finding a box of matches, she lights a few and throws them in there too.
Back in the morning room, she takes the next picture down from the wall, and the next, and the next, tearing the squid in pieces, tearing the anglerfish, the frogs, tearing the polar bear with Aunt Magnolia’s writing that says “Sing Ho! For the life of a Bear!”
Lies, she thinks, all lies!, stumbling back into the bedroom and throwing the pieces onto the fire. Miraculously, a corner of wood is alight, despite her careless fire-building, and pieces of the first photo are curling and catching fire. She watches them turn black, trying to decide what she’s going to do with the huge photo hanging in the second-story west corridor. Bring it back and throw it on the fire? Or smash the whole thing to pieces right there? She runs into the morning room again, lifts the Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella-in-progress over her head, and crashes it down onto the rug. When nothing breaks, she crashes it again, harder, until she hears the ping of ribs snapping off the runner and small pieces of metal go flying. Crying now, she grabs the purple iridescent fabric and pulls until the seams tear apart with a scream of breaking thread. She traps the silver-gold fabric under her boots and pulls again, ripping it to pieces.
She’s reaching for the next umbrella, the pale blue eggshell with brown spots, she’s lifting it and raising it high, when Jasper runs into the room, presses against her legs, and starts whining.
Jane is momentarily confused, because she last saw the dog on the second-story landing. How did he get in?
Ravi’s voice, rising from her bedroom, answers her question. “Not much of a fire,” he’s calling to her. “You need to build a sort of chimney out of these smaller pieces of wood.”
“What?” Jane drops the eggshell umbrella and grasps her head. What’s going on?
“Don’t worry,” Ravi calls, “I’m fixing it.”
“You can’t just come into my rooms!” she yells back at him.
“I knocked and you didn’t answer.”
“That means you’re supposed to go away and leave me alone.”
“The dog wanted in.”
Jane glances around. Crumpled on the floor, the Aunt Magnolia Coat umbrella looks like some sort of large insect she’s defeated in hand-to-hand combat. And she feels like she’s been in a battle. Her face is swollen and her breath short. Mopping her eyes with her sleeves and sniffling hard, she pushes the umbrella’s broken pieces into a pile, hoping Ravi won’t notice it, or her tears.
Ravi appears in the morning room doorway, wiping his hands on his shirt. He peers at her. “You okay?”
She avoids looking at him directly. “Yeah.”
“You look—crazed.”
“It’s an artist thing,” Jane says. “Don’t worry about it.”
He indicates the mangled umbrella. “What happened to that one?”
“Sometimes they don’t work out.”
“Okay,” he says skeptically, surveying the rest of the room. He wades into the midst of the completed umbrel
las and surveys them gloomily, dismal and pathetic, like Hamlet, or maybe Eeyore.
“This is the only room in the house where I feel any peace,” he says, gripping his white-streaked hair and sighing.
“If you’re hitting on me again—”
“I mean the umbrellas,” Ravi says, waving his hand around. He points across the room at one that leans in a corner. It’s a simple, understated umbrella, alternating pale yellows with a mahogany rod and handle. “May I open that one?”
“Really?” Jane says tiredly. “Now? I’m working, Ravi.”
“I think I want to buy it for Kiran,” he says. “It makes me think of Kiran. If I like it when it’s open, I’ll give you three thousand dollars for it.”
“That is ludicrous,” Jane says, enunciating each syllable. “Come back when you’ve recovered your senses.”
“No one is taking this seriously,” Ravi says. “Have you noticed that?”
“Taking what seriously?”
“The Brancusi!” Ravi says. “Mrs. Vanders still hasn’t called the FBI. It’s all ‘the gala’ this, ‘the gala’ that, as if the gala is more important than the family or the house.”
Jane has completely forgotten all about the Brancusi, the gala, everything. She considers, for a moment, what would happen if she told Ravi that his servants are using the Brancusi to pay some woman to protect the missing Panzavecchia children, because Giuseppe and Victoria are mixed up in some sort of espionage, possibly involving weaponized smallpox.
He would flip out. Loudly, and dangerously. That’s what would happen.
Jane crosses to the yellow umbrella. Carrying it back to Ravi, she places it into his hands and says, “Take it with you. Open it in your own rooms. Inspect it. If you like it, you can buy it for a hundred dollars.”
“Like hell,” Ravi says. “That would be theft.”
“I’m not taking three thousand dollars from you for one umbrella.”
“Twenty-five hundred, then.”
“I’m pretty sure this isn’t how bargaining is supposed to go.”
