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Don’t,it says.Don’t, damn you.
A crack of light is shining from beneath the door to Shelly’s room, and Miriam moves toward it. She sees a shadow moving there. Another step. Her hand extends toward the doorknob. She bites her lip, her brow furrowed with disapproval: for Shelly to carry on with her sailor out of the house is one thing, but to bring him back here! And then the floorboards creak beneath her feet and the sound abruptly stops, and the door swings open in front of her. Shelly is in her nightdress, her short hair tousled and her eyes at half mast, as if she’s only just woken up.
“Missus?” she says, blinking. “Is everything all right?”
“I thought I heard—” Miriam starts to say, but stops as she peers over Shelly’s shoulder. The door is open, wide open so that she can see every inch of the room. There’s nobody there, no one at all.
“The wind,” Shelly says with a smile. “It woke me too. Sounds like it’s talking sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“I always wondered why they’d call a house the Whispers, but I sure understand it now.” She pauses, waiting for Miriam to say something else, but Miriam just looks past her again and doesn’t say anything. She hasn’t been in this room since she can’t remember when, and the sight of it makes her cringe. It’s so small, so dark and drafty. Looking around now at the bare walls, the threadbare rug on the floor, she wonders how Shelly stands it, and feels guilty thatshe herself never thought to suggest she stay in one of the rooms upstairs. Confining the young woman to the servant’s quarters—what was she thinking?
The answer comes immediately: She wasn’t. She was just doing what was done, what they’d always done, a bit of snobbery left over from when her father, always so obsessed with the trappings of class and status, was master of this house. He’d made Smith sleep here, too, even though the man was practically his only friend.
But that time is over, fading into the past if not entirely gone. She thinks again of those cozy houses in town, with their picket fences and pretty gray shingles, just made for a family. There’d be no space for live-in help, of course, but she wouldn’t need that, and she wouldn’t miss it, either. How nice it would be to snuggle in with Theo, husband and wife and three little children, how nice to have a home that might not be the finest damn house on the island but would certainly be a happier one than this.
“Missus?” Shelly is looking at her strangely. “Are you all right? Did you need something?”
Miriam opens her mouth to speak, not knowing what she intends to say. She does need something, she thinks. She needs time to think, to look hard at the life she’s stumbled into, to ask herself before it’s too late if it’s really what she wants, after all. She needs to knock at the closed door of Theo’s bedroom upstairs and tell him she thinks she might have been a fool.
And she needs to stand here for a moment, just one moment more, because there’s something about this room. Something about its place beside the kitchen, something that made it different from the other small, dark places in the house. Something important and something terrible.
One day she’ll remember. One day, in this very room, she’ll whisper the urgent warning she would have given to herself long ago. About this room and this house, and the things that hide inside it.
But not tonight. Tonight Shelly is waiting, and the silence has already stretched too long, and so what she says is “No, thank you. Good night.”
As she climbs the stairs with the hot milk in her hand, she can hear Theodora: awake, again.
Screaming, again.
21.
2015
January
The sound of the slap hung in the air. I lifted a hand to my cheek, more out of reflex than anything else, too shocked by the act itself to really feel the sting of it. I had never been hit in the face before; my own mother had never even spanked me.
Mom was the first to break the silence, rushing to my side and putting her cool hands on either side of my face. “How dare you,” she said, glaring at Diana, who was in turn staring at her own hand as if she couldn’t believe what it—she—had done. Her face was deathly pale.
“I—” she gasped. “I’m sorry. I was just—”
“I don’t want to hear another word!” Mom was angrier than I’d ever seen her. “If you ever touch my kid again, I swear to God—” She broke off, looking at me. “Are you all right?”
I took a step back from both of them and took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening. What the hell is this?”
Diana turned to my mother. “Five thousand dollars. That’s it. That’swhat I get. And I’m guessing it’s what you get, too, baby sister, because this greedy little thing”—she pointed at me—“probably wouldn’t think twice about stabbing her own mother in the back, if it meant she got what she wanted. Isn’t that right, Delphine?”
I took another uneasy step back. I didn’t like the way Diana was scowling at me, but I liked the incredulous, unhappy expression on my mother’s face even less.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but this was only half-true. No, I didn’t know, but I also wasn’t stupid: between her comments and our current location, I could make a pretty good guess. Behind Diana, someone cleared his throat. I looked up to see a man standing at the door of the office she’d just stormed out of. He was medium height and balding, and he was looking at the three of us like we were a trio of escaped zoo animals—not the kind you’re afraid might eat you, more like the kind you want to steer clear of because when they’re mad, they start throwing feces.
He also looked like a guy who was pretty good at dodging airborne shit.
“Miss Lockwood? Delphine Lockwood?” he said, and although I wasn’t stupid, I pointed at my own chest in my best impression of an idiot.
“Me?”
