I opened the door.
Harrison and Prue stood sentry on either side of me as I knelt down and felt along the floor.
The loose board jiggled when my fingers ran across it. I forced my fingertips into the cracks between the boards and pulled upward. It popped up with ease.
And there, bundled in many of my sister’s clean wool socks, were the eggs.
They were perfectly white, not a blemish on any of them.
I felt a rush of sadness for these eggs. They had no chance of hatching. A poor track record for their siblings combined with a lack of their mother’s brooding left them no chance at all. They were cool to the touch and most likely already dead. I wanted to gather the pair of them in my hands and bring them over to a candle, warm them upand sing them to them and whisper to them and tell them stories of their mother and the legacy she had left behind. I wanted to wrap them in my sister’s socks and tuck them into my pocket and walk around so, so carefully, as not to upset or disturb them in any way. I wanted to cuddle them and hide them and find out who’d killed their mom and do something terrible to him. Something to match the terribleness of what he’d done to Annabella.
“Georgina?” Prue said.
“They’re here,” I said.
And I left them alone, undisturbed, and stepped back so Prue and Harrison could have a look. Harrison had come all this way to see Annabella, so it felt right that at least he was able to see these eggs, perfect and eternal, although, for all intents and purposes, useless.
“They’re beautiful,” he said, and they honestly were. An entire lifeform self-contained in one smooth white sphere.
Prue left her brother and went to look out the window. “The waters are rising,” she said.
We had dragged our boat-umbrella onto the porch, but now the porch was under a foot of water and the boat-umbrella was drifting languidly away, passengerless, a spot of bright against the dark blue of the rainwater.
“My sister was hiding from someone,” I said, watching Harrison put the loose board back in its place and move a pair of Mary’s shoes on top of it. If you didn’t know exactly where to look, you’d have no idea two of Annabella’s eggswere hidden there. “I think whoever killed Annabella might have done something to Mary.”
“Done something?” Prue said. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
And when I didn’t know something—like what sort of thing could happen to a girl to make her shrink and shrink and then ultimately, potentially, turn into a bird—there was one person who might.
Penelope Fernweh the Second.
The ladder to the widow’s walk was folded into the ceiling, so I knew my mother wouldn’t be up there. I went down to the kitchen, where Aggie was carefully icing the birthday cake. She quickly moved her body in front of it when she heard me at the door.
“I already saw,” I said, smiling.
“Oh, the surprise is ruined,” she said, and she went back to icing.
Aggie was a good cook, but she was an unreal cake maker. The yellow cake was completely covered by a smooth, creamy layer of buttery white frosting. She was working on the icing flowers now; there were at least twenty pastry bags spread around the counter, each holding a different shade of buttercream. There were delicate roses, vines that wound around the circumference of the cake, bright peonies, and yellow sunflowers.
“Aggie, it’s beautiful,” I said.
She set the icing bag on the counter and gathered me up in a hug. I realized it had been so long since I’d heard Aggie laugh. The kitchen felt empty without it.
“Your birthday snuck up on me this year,” she whispered into my ear, then held me at arm’s length to look at me. “It’s been such a strange summer.”
What would Aggie do now that Annabella was dead? If there were no birdheads to stay at the inn, if there were no birdheads to cook for...
I hugged her again, trying to imagine a summer where Aggie was not here, in this kitchen, every waking moment of the day. It felt impossible. When I finally pulled away from her, I could feel the tears in my eyes. She dabbed at my cheeks with her apron.
“I know,” she said. “But everything is going to turn out all right.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew that, how she could say that with even an ounce of conviction in her voice, but instead I shook my head, composing myself, and asked, “You haven’t seen my mother anywhere, have you?”
“She’s out back. In the rowboat. Have you seen the moon? I don’t think I’ve ever seen the moon as full as it is tonight.”
The back porch was under a foot of water, but my mother was waiting next to it in her rowboat, standing up, holding the railing for balance, like she had been waiting for me. Her hair was billowing all around her face inthe breeze: long and brown and messy. I waded across the porch and stepped carefully into the rowboat. She sat down across from me and said, “This reminds me of the night you and your sister were born.”
