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I grabbed the actual book and flipped to the page that Desmond had translated. On the opposite page was the portrait of the woman with black eyes—Vaughan eyes. But this wasn’t Annalise Vaughan at all. It was this young woman, Mary.
If we were all descended from Annalise, then why did we have Mary’s dark eyes?
I fanned through the pages, as if answers would leap out at me. But there was only more indecipherable code and pictures I didn’t have enough context to understand.
I reached the end and started to close the book. But then I paused. I’d missed something. Tucked between the final page and the back cover of the book was a small envelope. It looked too modern to be from the same era as the notebook, and the handwriting on the outside was different.
Harrow’s girls, it said. The letters were rounded and squat, done in careful cursive—not like the scrawl at the front of the book—and made with what looked like a ballpoint pen, which I was pretty sure didn’t exist in Old Nick’s day.
The envelope itself was folded in half to fit in the book. I unfolded it, the paper crackling, and lifted the flap.
There were four photographs inside, each one of a girl between about seven and twelve. The style of their clothes and the type of photograph anchored each girl in a different decade. The oldest photograph looked like it was from the early twentieth century, the most recent from maybe ten or twenty years ago. All of the girls had eyes so dark they were almost black.
Harrow’s girls. Benjamin Locke told me that’s what they called girls who disappeared, supposedly devoured by Harrow.Had Bryony known these photos were in the journal? Were they part of why she’d given it to me?
After yesterday’s conversation, having an excuse to talk to her again made me excited—and petrified. I couldn’t pin her down. She seemed to want to talk to me one minute, and then resent me the next. To be friendly and then to hate me. She’d said that I could be certain of her, but it didn’t help me to know her feelings were genuine when I couldn’t tell what those feelingswere.
“Gah,” I said eloquently, and shook my head rapidly. “Come on. She’s just a girl. You know how to talk to girls.” I did not know how to talk to girls. Talking to girls was terrifying. “Witch. She’s a witch, and she knows stuff you need to know.” Better.
I gathered my bag, in which I stowed Nicholas Vaughan’s journal, and checked my reflection in the mirror. My hair was as unmanageable as ever, but I finger combed it into a semblance of submission and headed out toward the groundskeeper’s house.
I’d been expecting a more functional version of the witch’s cottage—a cabin, a stump with a hatchet sticking out of it for chopping firewood, a stone chimney. But the house was neat and modern with a long driveway leading out to the road that ran behind Harrow’s grounds.
I scaled the steps and knocked, then stood there, losing my nerve with each passing second. There was no answer. My heart sank at the same time as relief washed over me. I turned to go. The door opened, and Bryony appeared, wearing the gray dress she’d worn the first day I met her, the one perfectly cut to her willowy body.
“Hey,” she said, surprised.
Was I imagining things, or was that a hint ofpleasantsurprise? Probably imagining it. “I found something in the journal,” I said.
“Desmond broke the code?” she asked, sounding impressed.
“No. I mean, yes, at least a bit of it, but that’s not what I’m here about,” I said. “Did you know these were in there?” I held out the envelope.
“This is my Nana’s handwriting,” she said. She looked at the photos, frowning. “Who are these girls?”
“I don’t know,” I said, disappointment making my shoulders slump. “I hoped you’d know. But—your dad said you still had your grandma’s stuff? Maybe we could look through her stuff and see? Your dad said it would be okay, and I thought since you gave me the journal and everything...” I was aware that I was babbling and also aware that, if I stopped, I was never going to get started again.
She sighed and held the door open wider. “Not like I can turn you away when you own the place, anyway.”
“I own your house?” I asked.
“It’s part of Harrow, isn’t it?” she shot back. I followed hesitantly as she led the way. The interior of the house was cramped but well-kept, with floral wallpaper on every wall.
Up in the attic, she gestured broadly. “Everything’s in these boxes, but it’s going to take me a minute to figure out which ones.”
The attic was a cramped space, cluttered with an old metal-framed bed, a standing mirror, an obscene number of doilies, and stacks of boxes, everything coated in a thick layer of dust.
Bryony shoved a stack of oldReader’s Digestmagazines out of the way with her foot. “I think this is it,” she said hauling at a box, and I moved to help her. We maneuvered it onto a clear patch of floor. Bryony opened it up, crinkling her nose at the explosion of dust. She waved a hand at it. “Go ahead, then.” She backed off, and I knelt beside the box.
“How did your grandmother get interested in this stuff?” I asked as I lifted the lid. “Was she a Harrow Witch, too?”
She made an amused sound. “Definitely not. She was extremely Christian and extremely skeptical about ‘hokum and nonsense.’ She thought Nicholas Vaughan was a lunatic, and she was deeply suspicious of his descendants ‘following him down the path of occultism.’ She thought you all were up to no good.” She waggled her eyebrows at me. I snorted in surprised laughter, then immediately looked away, embarrassed by the undignified noise.
“Have you heard of them? Harrow’s girls, I mean,” I clarified, clearing my throat.
She shrugged. “Sure. There was this sort of rhyme that went around about them. I remember boys chanting it on the playground. Something abouteyes of blackand then... oh, I don’t remember. But it ended withHarrow takes its daughters back, I remember that.”
“So it’s true. Girls with black eyes go missing. Harrow takes them. Or... the Other does?”
