It intrigued her. The rough, warped crest of furrowed skin had clearly not been properly cared for. The Inspector and Mrs. Zhao wouldn’t have allowed for such neglect, so the injury had to have been inflicted during Jasper’s previous life, about which she knew so little, even after his unexpected confession regarding his mother.
The window of her room was brightening with the coming dawn. Leo rubbed the parallel scars on her right palm. Warmth swirled just under her skin at the phantom press of Jasper’s thumb. Had it been her scars that had driven some awarenessinto him, causing him to release her? He’d done so with jarring swiftness.
Restless and muddled as she’d been all night, she now abandoned her bed with an objective in mind. The thin carpet on her floor pushed the early morning cold through the wool of her stockings as she crossed it toward her bureau. The piece of furniture was old and worn, the drawers stiff whenever she pulled them open or slid them shut, especially the bottommost one, which she rarely used. Recently, however, she’d opened it to store away the Inspector’s file on the murders. It was a fitting place for it, as the drawer was also where she kept the few things held over from her childhood.
Almost everything from the Red Lion Street home had been sold off, Claude had once told her. She’d kept her brother’s pocket watch, which Jacob had treasured for the short time he’d had it. Their father had gifted it to him at their last Christmas together, saying all young men should have one. Next to the pocket watch was the ragdoll Agnes had always held close like an extra appendage, with its yellow yarn hair, embroidered face, and calico dress. The indestructible ragdoll had been suitable for a four-year-old, but Leo had been five years older than Agnes, and so she’d had Miss Cynthia, a china doll, to cherish and care for. And she had, even after Jacob had thrown her to the floor and broken her leg. Leo had taken her doll to the attic, as much to sob about her broken leg as to try to figure out a way to piece Miss Cynthia back together.
The doll was now wrapped in several layers of tissue and tucked in the back of the bottom drawer. Such a childish thing, that doll. But if Jacob hadn’t broken it, Leo would not have been in the attic when the intruders had come. She would have been with Agnes in their shared room. And now, Leo would be with her family in the ground at All Saints Cemetery.
Unwrapping the doll for the first time in several years, she was surprised to see the ivory lace at the dress’s hem had faded to yellow. In the attic, Leo had removed Miss Cynthia’s stockings to inspect the damage to her porcelain leg, and all the doll’s accessories had been left behind. So had a few shards of her broken leg. One shard, however, Leo had kept. She’d clutched it in her hand for what felt like hours as she waited, hunched, cold and quivering in the pitch-black steamer trunk. The porcelain shard had been bloody when the Inspector had finally pried open her fingers and taken it from her. He could have thrown it away, but instead, he’d cleaned and returned it to her, telling her to be cautious of the sharp edges.
Leo picked up the shard, the largest of the broken leg pieces. Each of Miss Cynthia’s legs had been cast by the dollmaker using two hollow molds that, when glued together, left a seam down the front and back of her legs. When Jacob had thrown the doll to the floor, her leg had split apart at that seam. And later, when the attic door had opened and one of the intruders had climbed the steps, Leo had reached for the largest and longest shard. It was the whole of Miss Cynthia’s thigh, the curved portion near her hip sharp as a spear.
She ran her fingertip along the edges now; they were still sharp, though not enough to travel more than an inch, at the most, below skin if pushed hard enough. Leo gripped the shard in her right hand the way she had that night. The edges of Miss Cynthia’s broken thigh lined up perfectly with the dual scars on Leo’s palm.
Looking again at the curved end that had once been her hip, Leo drew upon the image of Jasper rising from the hospital bed earlier that evening, his chest on full display. Then again in his kitchen. This time, she didn’t meander through the various details that had made her breath hitch. This time, she wentstraight to the scar over his left pectoral. The length of it. The shape of it.
Leo dropped the doll and shard to the carpet as cold numbness stole over her. She got to her feet, but the floor seemed to tip sideways as she turned in a circle, her mind racing.
She was wrong. She had to be wrong.
Leo went still. Then, making a swift decision, she picked up the china shard, wrapped herself in her dressing gown, stepped into her boots next to the door, and left her room. The house was quiet. At just past five o’clock, Claude and Flora wouldn’t be awake for another hour or more. If she made noise as she took her coat from the peg in the front hall, she wasn’t aware of it. Nor did it matter. She wasn’t trying to be silent. She wasn’t thinking about anything at all other than that scar on Jasper’s chest.
She put the shard into her handbag and hurried out. Duke Street was calm and slumberous as dawn encroached; a few lampposts were still lit from overnight. Her feet seemed to move of their own accord, her mind briefly touching on the good fortune that she’d plaited her hair into a single braid after her bath last night rather than twisting it into numerous curling papers like usual. She didn’t know if she would’ve had the patience to remove them all before dashing out. As it was, she’d forgotten her hat. It didn’t bother her enough to turn around and go back though. Forward was her only option, down the Strand and toward Whitehall Place. The thrumming of her blood, her breathing loud in her ears, matched the cadence of her feet on the cobblestones.
You’ve never spoken of it,Jasper had said to her a few months back.That night. You’ve never talked about what happened in that attic.
He was right. She never had. Not even to the Inspector, who perhaps should have known about the shadowed figure in the attic.
Jasper had faulted his father for being obsessed with his persistent inquiry into the murders of her family, though Leo had never seen it that way. It hadn’t governed the Inspector’s life. No, it had just been there, lingering in the background, tempting him from time to time, when and if some new piece of the puzzle came into his field of vision.
At first, Leo tried to convince herself the boy in the attic hadn’t been real, that he’d been conjured by delirium and fear. Perhaps she had found her own way into the steamer trunk, and as the Inspector had assumed, sliced open her hand merely by gripping the doll’s broken leg too tightly.
In the end, however, her rational mind could not dispute the truth. Leo could not lie to herself. But she found that she could indeed lie to others. There was nothing at all wrong or suspicious about a little girl hiding in the attic to escape murderers. To admit that one of them had chosen to let her, and her alone, live would have been a different story. She’d been too afraid to breathe a word about it. So, she’d kept it secret. What difference had it made anyhow? It had been so dark in the attic she hadn’t even seen the boy’s face. She wouldn’t have been able to describe him or pick him out of a pool of suspects.
Her whole body had gone numb by the time she reached Charles Street. In a blink, she had walked the quarter hour there. She couldn’t recall a single passing horse or carriage or person. It was as though she’d been moving through a thick brume, the rest of the world shrouded and muffled.
Her fingers shook as they reached into her handbag for the key the Inspector had given her several years ago. He’d said he couldn’t stand the thought of his doors being locked to her, should no one be at home when she came calling. Only once had she used it, and that had been when Mrs. Zhao had been away, nursing her sister back to health for a week. Leo had stopped in during the day to surprise the Inspector with a mince pie she’dpurchased at a bakery for his supper. Later, he’d confided that it was even better than Mrs. Zhao’s, though she’d known that to be a lie.
Leo inserted the key and turned the lock. The door opened with a soft click, and she closed it again behind her. The house was still asleep. Though it had only been a handful of hours since she’d last been there, to Leo, everything had changed. She was an intruder in an unfamiliar house.
In her dreamlike state, she took the carpeted steps to the first floor, her hand sliding along the banister, and then she turned down the corridor. Jasper wouldn’t have taken the Inspector’s old bedroom. He would have kept his own, the one he’d chosen all those years ago. At the time, Leo had been staying two rooms down the hall in another guest room, and she’d been skeptical of the boy who would be joining her. He was so quiet, and his face was ugly, swollen, and discolored from a terrible beating. He wouldn’t even tell them his name.
Her heart thrashing against her ribs, Leo came to a stop outside his door. She twisted the knob. It was too bold. Too improper. He’d be furious. And yet none of that would be enough to stop her from entering his room and getting her answer.
She wanted to be wrong. Sheneededto be wrong, and she would risk his censure for it.
The blue light of dawn reached inside his room, between window dressings that hadn’t been drawn together. Leo’s eyes went straight to the four-poster, where Jasper lay on his stomach, his bruised and gashed back bare. He was asleep, arms raised above his head on his pillow. The sight stripped away the dreamlike state she’d been existing in and planted her firmly in reality.
She had entered Jasper’s home. His bedroom. With a prickling of intuition, as if her eyes alone had touched him, heawoke. Lifting onto his elbows and twisting his head toward the door, he saw her—and then he bolted up.
“Leo?” His voice was hoarse from sleep. “What in hell are you doing in here?”
He leapt from the bed, the linen sheet that was covering him slipping briefly before he caught it and held it higher. He wasn’t dressed at all underneath, but Leo didn’t startle at the sight of him as she had in the kitchen. She walked toward the bed, her attention solely on his chest.
“How did you… You can’t be in here,” he stammered while hurrying to wrap the sheet around his waist. “I’m not dressed, Leo, what the bloody hell are you doing?”
She couldn’t think of what to say or how to explain that she’d needed to see that scar again. No words would come, so she didn’t bother with them. She rounded the corner of the bed and stopped within an arm’s length from him. Frozen to the spot, Jasper’s alarm was complete.
