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I grimaced. “When I think of the pine path, I just think about the day we found Mimi. I remember my mom down there in the cove, screaming, trying to break through the ice. It was so clear, you could see—”
Adam squeezed my hand and said quietly, “Delphine, don’t,” but I couldn’t stop.
“—her eyes,” I finished, and shuddered. “Her eyes were frozen open. That’s what I remember.” I opened the car door and looked at him. “I just need to do a final walk-through, make sure everything is closed up. Do you want to come? Take a last look at the place?”
Adam waited in the foyer as I made my way through the north wing, opening doors, looking through every room without really seeing anything. The drapes were all drawn, the furniture covered with dust cloths, and I thought of the last time I’d done this, peering into the shadows in search of my missing grandmother, feeling all the time as if I was being tracked by unseen eyes. I thought of Mimi’s wheelchair, tipped on its side where Jack Dyer had hurriedly left it, one wheel still spinning in space. I thought of the fox I’d seen on the terrace, the way it sat unmoving and stared at me. The house had never felt more haunted than it did that day—and it had been, I thought. Not by ghosts, but by secrets.
I left the north wing and passed back through the foyer, checking the library and the parlors before moving toward the back of the house. Adam wasn’t standing there anymore, and I thought about calling out to him, then thought better of it. Maybe he was saying his goodbyes tothe Whispers, too, and if he wanted to do it alone, I understood. Jack Dyer had done the same thing when I asked him if there was anything in the house he wanted, something to help him remember his mother and the time they had spent living here. He’d said no, nothing. “Except I wouldn’t mind taking a walk through the old place,” he said. “Just by myself, just to really see it. I always wanted to go exploring in there, but Ma never let me out of her sight.”
He’d come the next day while I was working in the library, sorting through the documents I was leaving behind for whoever became the new owner. Ledgers, photographs, blueprints, a photocopied list of the heirlooms that Mimi had stashed somewhere and that we’d never found. At first I thought he might leave without ever mentioning what had happened the last time we saw each other, but in the end, he poked his head through the door and deadpanned, “I’ll be off, then... unless you wanted to offer me a cup of coffee.”
I hiked my bag higher on my shoulder and felt it vibrate: another email from the lawyer. One more bit of unfinished business. I sighed, scrolling back through the dozens of messages until a familiar subject line jumped out at me and I felt a chill run down my spine.
4 Mrm Crvasos family.
Speaking of unfinished business, I thought. Shelly Dyer had been dead for a month, but she was still haunting my inbox.
I scrolled absent-mindedly through the rest of Shelly’s unread emails, dutifully glancing at the attached photos before deleting them, feeling vaguely guilty as I did. Maybe this had been her way of saying thank-you to Mimi, to us, but the photos were all too blurry and off-kilter to be legible, let alone worth hanging onto. All they reminded me of was Shelly herself, the way her hands shook as she held the tablet, the way her eyes blazed in her half-frozen face—and then bugged out of it after she was gone. A choking accident, after all. It seemed like a horrible way to go.
l wandered through the kitchen and then took a final turn into the small bedroom that had been a servant’s quarters before it was Mimi’s. I deleted another photo from the funeral, this one taken on the way into the house: I could see the roofline at one end and a chunk of Shelly’s forehead at the other. But in the next message, the setting changed, and I found myself staring at my own face. Looking back at the camera across the hood of Jack Dyer’s truck, holding a bag that contained a cranberry holiday cake. Only two months had passed since then, but I hardly recognized myself. I looked startled and a little bit spooked. The woman in the picture had no idea what was coming and wouldn’t have believed me if I told her.
I turned back toward the open door, already thinking a step ahead—I’d take a quick run through the upstairs and then get going—but the thought died in my mind as I opened the last message, the last photo. I glanced at it but then looked at it, really looked, and the blurry shapes resolved into an image. A captured moment.
My feet had stopped moving. The last breath I’d taken was caught in my throat.
The world spun and swam around me, fading away, so that nothing was left but the picture. Out of focus, badly framed, but unmistakable. I closed my eyes, but it was too late.Once you understood what you were looking at...
I opened my eyes. The picture was still there.
...you couldn’t stop seeing it.
I clutched the phone and sank onto the bed in Shelly’s room, staring into space as the minutes ticked silently by. Outside, the light was beginning to fade and the room felt cold, just as it had that night when I brought Mimi back to bed after something—someone—had frightened her. A figure I knew couldn’t be real because it was like something out of a nightmare, a man with brown teeth, and I’d been so focused on that horrifying image that it never occurred to me to tease it apart. I never stopped to think that even Mimi’s most outlandish stories, like the one about going to the moon, were always basedon something real. Something she’d seen or heard that lodged like a stone in the darkness of her broken mind and gathered moss until it turned into a false memory. Something like a man who came at night, who hid inside the walls, who brought her presents and promises of forgiveness.
My sweetheart gave it to me.
Dread sat like a stone in my guts as I worked Adam’s ring off my finger. I looked again at the inscription, remembering how I’d laughed when he said it belonged to “some fat lady”—laughed so hard that I’d forgotten to wonder ever again about who its previous owner might actually have been. But as I stared at those faded letters etched in gold, I realized that I didn’t have to wonder. I knew. I could have known anytime: it had been staring me in the face for weeks, three-quarters of the way down a page I’d shuffled past countless times as I organized the paperwork for the house sale.Lady’s inscribed vintage yellow gold ring with one 2ct round almandine garnet,just one more item on the list of things that Mimi had hidden away. One more story lost, forgotten, for lack of telling. This one was about a woman I’d never met, but whose blood ran in my veins. A chorus girl who’d married a bootlegger, a man who wooed her with pretty words, lofty promises, extravagant gifts—including a ring she’d worn so often that pieces of the inscription inside had all but disappeared by the time she passed it along to her only daughter. The story already beginning to fade away. But if I looked, if I looked closely, I could still see where a horizontal line once extended from the bottom of the F in F.A.T.
Not an F, but an E.
I put the ring back on.
The servant’s quarters were sparse, but the wall was paneled with the same intricate millwork as the rest of the house—inlaid wood with a motif of decorative rosettes every few feet—and I saw the seam in the wall before I even knew I was looking for it, half hidden behind a coatrack in the corner of the room. I grasped the nearest rosette, feltit turn under my hand. There was a faint click, then a rush of cool air as the door swung out, and on its heels, something else.
The scent of pipe tobacco.
To my right was a narrow staircase that rose six steps and then turned, spiraling toward the second floor, the kind that the staff would have used to deliver breakfast trays to the upstairs bedrooms while sparing any guests the horrors of having to meet a servant on the main stairs. To my left was a small cubby with a shelf and two hooks. Hanging from one of these, an old canvas coat and a cap, the kind that fishermen used to wear. The coat was missing a button, and I reached automatically into my coat pocket, feeling the jumble of objects there, the things I’d taken from Mimi’s nightstand drawer after she was gone. A slip of paper, an acorn. A tiny spoon.
A brass button.
I knew even before I pulled it out that it would match. I could picture it: the button coming loose, its ancient moorings starting to fray. Maybe it had snagged on the doorframe as he passed through, tumbling unnoticed to the floor where Mimi had found it and picked it up. Or maybe she’d plucked it off herself surreptitiously, a keepsake from the nighttime visitor whom nobody would ever believe was real.
I turned, gazing around the room. Thinking of the times I’d been in here with my grandmother, and then further back, to my first weeks at the Whispers, when the house had seemed like a giant box full of props, little bits of the lives of everyone who’d lived here scattered in every room. A collection of mismatched dining chairs nobody had sat on in decades; stacks of old magazines someone had once intended to read; fussy little hats all trimmed out with velvet and flowers and feathers, hats that used to advertise you as a lady with good taste and money to burn, suddenly rendered useless when people stopped wearing hats altogether.
I thought of how easy it would be, in a place like this, to drapeyourself in the leftover pieces of one of those lives and pretend to be someone else.
Behind me, the hidden staircase beckoned.
I began to climb.
