Conor felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldn’t hold back. “Could it have been a person instead?” he asked. “Screaming, maybe?”
“I don’t like to think about it,” she said. “It makes me upset.”
“Does that sound come from the house too, Grace?” Conor asked. “The wailing?”
“No!” she said, shaking her head hard, as if trying to dislodge memories or sounds. “I told you, the house is silent.”
“Tell me another thing,” Joe said. “You mentioned that the girls from the sailboat are like you but not like you. They’re like you because they were once sick, and in treatment, but how are they different?”
“Because I’m here,” she said. “I have my life. They didn’t take it.”
Conor had the feeling she meant it very literally: that she was alive while other women were dead. While some of what she said seemed to come from delusion, he felt that she was absolutely solid in saying that she had her life. He saw her take a quick glance toward the dead end of her road. A chain was stretched between two wooden posts: Beyond the chain, a gravel road meandered through a field, up a rock-strewn slope, and into a grove of trees.
“What’s up there, Grace?” Conor asked.
“That’s where they have the parties, in a big mansion. The Finishing School. You can’t see it from here. It’s on the hilltop, behind the trees.”
“Finishing school?” Joe asked.
“Oneof the finishing schools,” Grace said.
“You said the parties last until midnight,” Conor said.
“The clock strikes twelve,” she said.
“What happens then? Where do the people go?”
“Back on the boats,” she said. “And away. They leave the island.”
“OnPsyche...” Conor began, but she put her hands over her ears.
“I don’t like to talk about it. You have to go now.”
“Okay,” Conor said. “We will.” Then, leaning closer, he looked at the canvas she was needlepointing. “That looks pretty.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Conor could see that she had been stitching a tableau of a big stone building surrounded by trees, in the middle of a vast green lawn. At first the canvas seemed to depict a painterly bucolic scene, but then he saw that the tree branches were bones, the stones in the yard were human skulls.
“What is that place?” Conor asked, pointing to her canvas.
“The mansion.” She pointed at the hill and looked worried.
Conor took the pictures of Belinda and Suzanne from Joe’s hand and showed them to her again. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you, Grace? These two women.”
“The young one,” Grace said, pointing at the photo of Suzanne. “Yes, I’ve seen her. She was here last fall.”
“But not the other one?”
“Maybe,” Grace said, lips tight. “But not here, and it was a long time ago.”
“Where?” Conor asked.
“Somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“The place they get the girls,” she said, swallowing back tears. The words thudded as Conor thought of the restraints he had seen on the boat.
