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I thought about those shells as I lingered in bed the next morning, exhausted and uneasy. The spot outside Mimi’s first-floor bedroom where Diana had found them was sheltered by a pair of overgrown evergreens, which meant that someone could easily have been lurking there without being spotted, but also meant that the shells themselves could have been left there months or even years ago by some handyman, a houseguest, even Mimi herself. There was a part of my mind, logical and insistent, that liked this explanation a lot. Surely it made more sense than the alternative: that someone was lurking nearby, hiding in the dark, spying on us through the lighted windows.I don’t really believe that,I told myself.
And then I’d think of that shadow I saw in the hallway, the one shaped like a man. I’d imagine a pale face at the window, eyes like pits, lips peeled back to reveal a smile the color of bark.
I went downstairs and found my mother on her knees on the red oriental rug in the library, surrounded on all sides by papers, ledgers, and several photo albums that she was shuffling through with one hand while scrolling her phone with the other. She flipped the album closed and sat back on her heels as I came through the door. “Oh, there you are,” she said. “Close the door.”
I did, unsettled by the directness in her voice. The last time I’d seen her she was barely holding it together, but there was no trace of that now; she looked focused and intent on the task at hand... whatever it was.
“You found the photo albums?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm,” she said, without looking up.
“Where were they?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, and gestured around the room and then at the mess on the floor. There was a tube of paper near my foot thatunrolled halfway when I prodded it with my toe, revealing a familiar outline. “Is that the blueprint for the house?”
“One of them. I thought I might be able to figure out where your grandmother disappeared to yesterday. Adam said it looked like she went through a servant’s entrance at one end of the north parlor. Did you see that?”
“Not really,” I said, not sure what Adam had told her, not wanting to say too much. It wasn’t a lie, anyway: I hadn’t seen the servant’s entrance. I was too busy panicking and trying to get my pants back on. “But wherever she was, it’s got a hell of a jewelry department.” I had pocketed the glass pendant last night after Mimi fell asleep; now I pulled it out and handed it to my mother. “When I brought her to bed last night, she had this.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “I’m almost certain this was my grandmother’s. I’ll have to check it against the list.”
“List?”
She smiled grimly. “Of missing heirlooms. She was hiding things before I moved up here. I guess it’s pretty common with dementia. She was obsessed with the idea that someone might be trying to steal from her—so she stashed her valuables somewhere, and now—”
“She can’t remember where she put them,” I finished.
“Yep. I’ve been checking everything against a list from the insurance company, but there’s so much missing I doubt they’ll cover it all. She didn’t happen to have anything else?”
“Just this.”
“Twenty years from now, some lucky person is going to bump up against a trick panel in one of the walls and a pile of jewelry is going to come falling out like candy from a piñata,” she said, sighing exasperatedly. “My grandfather really outdid himself when he built this place.”
“Maybe his wife liked to play hide-and-seek, too,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.
“Right, the wedding present story. Nice idea, but I’m pretty surethis house was built for money before it was built for love. Pop-Pop needed a place to stash all the liquor he was bringing in . . . among other things.”
“Dead bodies,” I said, joking, but Mom just raised her eyebrows. I guffawed. “Come on.”
She shrugged. “He was a very old man by the time I came along. When he was younger, who knows? He did run a highly illegal business, and he had a reputation. Not a guy whose bad side you wanted to be on.” She rolled the blueprints back up. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I want you to keep an eye on your grandmother today.”
I felt myself turn red. “Mom, yesterday—”
She waved a hand in the air. “This isn’t about yesterday. This isn’t aboutanythingthat happened yesterday,” she added, looking pointedly at me. “We don’t need to talk about that. It was ugly, enough said.”
All I could do was stare, but she wasn’t even looking at me anymore; she had begun rifling through the papers again as she spoke, her brows knit together in concentration. “Did Aunt Diana tell you what she found?”
“The shells?”
“Yeah. Do you think we need to be—”worried,I was going to say, but she cut me off.
“No. I’m pretty sure— Aha!” She broke off, reaching for one of the photo albums. She flipped through it rapidly and then set it down, turning it toward me.
“Look at that,” she said. I leaned in. It was a black-and-white photograph of two women smoking cigarettes, sitting at a wrought iron table on a broad veranda that I recognized instantly as the one behind the Whispers. One of the women was unmistakably Mimi, with her coifed dark blond hair and broad smile. She was tipped back in her chair and laughing at something the other had said, one of her bare feet kicked up in the air. The other woman was nobody I knew: she was small and wiry, with wide-set eyes, dark hair, and short, thickbangs. She was leaning forward and looking straight at the camera, smiling with her lips closed, her cigarette held forward as if she were offering it to the photographer.
“That’s a cool picture.”
My mom tapped her finger above the head of the dark-haired woman and said, “That’s Shelly Dyer.”
