As the weeks pass and I creep closer to the answer, I find that I no longer mind descending into the cellar. Even on the mornings when the sun is shining and the birds chirp madly in the trees.
A part of me might have actually come to enjoy it.
When Juliet’s response comes, I rip into it without leaving the post office.
“I’m sorry for my delay in responding,” she writes. Her handwriting is the same and yet older, somehow. “I’ve actually been rather ill—?can you believe it?”
As if I could forget how she’d hardly been ill a day in her life when we were younger. Always the opposite of me, in every way.
But reading those words is the first time I ever associate her miraculous health with wearing the Stone. The first time I wonder whether that Stone actually does have some power in it after all.
“She still has it,” I tell Phineas, and his face becomes brighter than I’ve ever seen it. “She sent it to be polished, and then she’ll put it in the mail to us.”
Hope threatens to open long-shuttered wings inside my chest, but I push them back. Hoping makes it harder to breathe. I notice how eager she sounds to do anything that would make things right between us again.
I wonder if I could even forgive Juliet for all her past sins. If she does something unselfish for once and helps me save Phineas.
That night I creep down the hallway and peek into his room. The light falls across him as he lies motionless in the bed. His skin is papery and faded into the pillow. My heart catches for a moment at the silence.
But his chest still rises, falls. I stand and watch its movement until my own heart returns to a normal rhythm.
Some nights I want to lie down on the floor next to him and hold on to his sleeve, as I had so long ago with my school uniform.
As if that is all it would take to make sure he is still there in the morning.
I wait for the package from Juliet, the one that will carry the Stone. A week. Then another. Then another. She is certainly taking her time to send it.
No—?she is taking Phineas’s time. From him.
From me.
My rage builds and burns. I write her one more time. Suggest that I could even come get it myself.
The day before I plan to jump on a train and confront her over her silence, her response finally comes.
I know with one glance that it is too small, too thin. I slit it open with trembling hands. Wondering what excuse she is going to give. If I would actually have it in me to kill her.
But I don’t find her effusive scrawling. Only the tight handwriting of her husband, Harold Quinn, and a newspaper clipping folded inside.
Dear Mr. Shaw:
I’m sorry to tell you that Juliet has passed away.
Forgive me for not inviting you to the funeral. I’m only just now making it through all of Juliet’s old mail. I’ve included her obituary.
We buried her yesterday.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The week that passes after my fight with Miles does nothing to cool my anger. I’m trying to help Mother’s reputation in Sterling, and he’s done nothing but make it worse. It feels strange to be in a new year without her—?as if I’m walking through a door into a new room, leaving her behind, and the next year will be another room, and another, and I don’t want to go.
Cass’s response to my letter about Miles is so laced with reassurances and shared history that I could cry, but the days pass with no mail at all from Father. I sit in the library and halfheartedly look through Austen and Shelley for possible music Variant clues while George steadily crosses off more lines in Dr. Cliffton’s black book.
“No closer?” I ask as he packs up his things.
“Every wrong answer eliminated is a step closer to the truth.”
“What does the truth even matter,” I say, suddenly bitter. “People are just going to believe whatever they want to believe.” I think of Mother’s desecrated house. “Or what is most convenient for them.”
