Page 39 of City of Liars

She didn’t answer me. Instead, her voice rose, wavering, though the piano still played. “He knew. He knew.”

A chill traveled down my spine, the way it had when I’d seen the little girl on the beach. “What are you talking about?”

She lifted her hands from the keys and turned to look at me. Shadowed as her face was, I couldn’t see more than the curve of her cheek, the dark hollows where her eyes should be. “I cursed him. You will see.”

Goosebumps stippled my arms. “What do you mean? You cursed who? How?”

As if I hadn’t spoken, she went on. Her voice held a strange, watery quality, as if it were coming from far away. “I died here, you know. My poor Suselah was right to say I doomed our family when I laid the curse on the goyim, but it was as if a dybbuk had hold of me, and I could not set it free.”

A chill raced through my body. I glanced around the room—the bars on the windows, the institutional paint. I died here, she’d said. My poor Suselah. Was I trapped inside the Kings Park psych ward with the ghost of my great-grandmother?

“No.” Horror threaded my voice as I backed up to the door and rattled the handle, but it wouldn’t open. I was locked in here, with her.

Wind battered the windows as she shifted on the bench, shrinking back into the shadows. Once again, her fingers flashed on the keys. “You’ll be the one to find the answers. You’ll show her the truth and let her know I’m sorry. And you’ll bring her back to me. You’re the only one who can.”

Fear spiked, its tang metallic on my tongue. The walls folded toward me, the ceiling dropping lower still. “How am I here? What’s happening to me?”

The shadows swallowed her. She was a wisp now, an outline of a woman. When she spoke, her voice was barely distinguishable from the howl of the wind. “Gei gesund, Theodore.”

This was a phrase I knew; Grandma Susi had said it often enough, every time I came to visit. Go in good health, it meant. Goodbye.

And then she was gone. The spotlight faded. Nothing moved in the shadows where she had been. But the piano still played, and a breeze swept through the room, carrying an old-fashioned, sepia photograph, well-worn and curling up at the edges. I grabbed for it, but it slipped through my fingers. All I could make out were glimpses: a hint of black velvet; the curve of a child’s face; the soulful eyes of a small dog.

I’d thought she’d vanished, but from the dark corner by the piano, my great-grandmother spoke again. “Tell her I forgive her,” she said. “Tell her—remember.”

I woke from the dream sweating, the bedclothes tangled. The clock said it was 3:00 a.m. and the TV had shut off. My apartment was silent, other than the rumble of the occasional passing car, and the sickly-sweet scent of the asylum still filled my lungs. I lay still, reassuring myself that it had been a nightmare. I was in my own bed. I was safe.

But just as my pulse began to slow, an impossible sound trickled from the living room: my piano, playing the song from my dream in the dark. The notes of Bye Bye Blackbird drifted through the rooms of my apartment, where I was the only living soul.

Was I still dreaming?

Dreaming or not, the piano played on. I leapt to my feet and charged into the living room, prepared to confront an intruder. Although what kind of burglar announced their presence with an instrumental solo, I had no idea.

I paused in the doorway, heart pounding. The streetlights that streamed through the windows illuminated every corner of the room.

It was empty.

23

Liv

“Did you know there’s a human skull upstairs?” Ethan Polk asked us.

Theo and I were sitting in The Players’ cigar-scented Great Hall, on a leather couch that was more expensive than comfortable. Opposite us, in a wingback chair in front of the mantel, sat the man we’d come to New York to see. His bald head reflected the light of the ornate chandelier, which, given the bizarre sentence he’d just uttered, struck me as creepy.

I forced myself to smile politely, rather than leaping from my seat and fleeing in horror. “Oh?” I said, with such perfect composure, it would have made my mother proud.

At the thought of my mother, nausea threatened. She doesn’t know you’re here, I reminded myself. I’d tried to call her twice since the night she hung up on me, but she hadn’t bothered to pick up. And you’re doing the right thing.

Ethan chuckled. “I just like to say that for the shock value. You should see your faces!”

I glanced sideways at Theo. We’d met up for coffee at Krista’s apartment this morning and searched it top to bottom for clues—especially Charles’s old study—but hadn’t found anything illuminating. Most of the old family paperwork had been cleared out. We’d spent three hours going through old file boxes, turning up useless crap: ancient immunization records, paperwork on a random Kansas property that Uncle Jamison and my dad had probably bought to turn into a wind farm, decades-old tax returns.

Frustrated, we’d settled for narrowing down the list of prospective orphanages where it looked like Mystery Girl could’ve ended up to two: Divine Grace, where Ella had been found, and St. Jerome’s Refuge for Girls. An online catalog search showed that the 42nd Street Library had the records for both orphanages, which was a stroke of luck. After we finished interviewing Ethan, our plan was to head over there and do some digging before our appointment at the Manuscript and Archives Division. But for now, we were here—and from Theo’s expression, there wasn’t enough caffeine in the world to make this conversation worthwhile.

“So there isn’t a skull?” he said, raising a brow.

Ethan Polk folded his arms across his barrel chest, looking pleased with himself. “Oh, there is. It belonged to the club’s founder, Edwin Booth, who used it in his production of Hamlet. Alas, poor Yorick, and all that.” He gave us a jolly grin. “Edwin’s rooms are at the top floor of the club, just the way he left them when he died. Skull and all.”