Page 18 of Finders Keepers

The woman who beckoned us inside introduces herself to the small group of assembled people in the foyer as Sharon, the deputy director of the Sprangbur Conservancy and our tour guide.

She’s very pleasant, if a bit scattered.

Clearly someone who knows a lot about Julius Fountain and his estate, but isn’t necessarily well-versed in delivering that knowledge in a way that is organized and concise.

The historian portion of my brain appreciates the information and stories, but the rest of it wishes she would hurry up already.

We’ve been here for fifteen minutes so far and are only now getting to our first room of the tour, the library.

At this rate, it’s going to be at least an hour before we reach the second-floor parlor I tried to search as a kid.

I’m not sure I can handle standing beside Quentin for that long.

His proximity has a strange effect on me.

It’s like he’s a freak weather system sweeping through, leaving me somehow simultaneously cold, hot, and wet all at once.

My brain is aware that this is the same person who left me feeling abandoned seventeen years ago, but my body refuses to believe it.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been through so much lately, with losing my job and breaking up with Cole and returning to this town, and my subconscious is trying to protect me from falling into a deep depression by distracting me with an attraction to someone convenient.

Yes. I’m sure that’s all it is! A way to keep myself occupied so I don’t start anxiety spiraling. Nothing more.

It’s just a coping mechanism , I tell myself when he positions himself directly behind me as Sharon tells us about a dinner party during which Fountain apparently faked his own death twice (and his butler’s once).

I remind myself as the radiant heat of his body caresses the back of my neck.

Coping mechanism. When he leans forward to whisper a joke into my ear, his fingertips brushing over my arm. Coping…coping …what’s the word again?

Thank god. We finally reach the Star Parlor.

I shake my head, clearing it of the lust-induced fog that seeped in through my brain’s cracks so that there’s space to process my surroundings again.

We’ve been ceding the position directly in front of each doorway to the three elderly women with whom we’ve been sharing the tour, but this time I slip in front of them so that I’m the one against the velvet rope cordoning off the room.

It’s both gorgeous and discombobulating.

I recognize the room’s distinctive shape—a sort of half circle with a rectangle tacked on—from when I broke in, but otherwise I’d never guess it was the same space.

It’s a lot like when I saw Quentin on the porch from my car—newness with the vaguest, nagging hint of familiarity.

There are still stars on the walls, but instead of the faded and torn panels my cheap flashlight revealed as I searched, it’s smooth and vivid, pinks and oranges and the darkest navy like the most beautiful sky at dusk.

The constellations themselves are painted in subtly shimmering gold. It’s breathtaking.

“Wow,” Quentin says from beside me. We’re practically alone, the rest of the group gathering at the base of the wide staircase in the hallway as Sharon shifts to sharing fun facts about late nineteenth-century advancements in household technology.

My eyes work their way from left to right over each grouping of stars. It’s been a long time since I had reason to think about Cetus, so I can’t say I know exactly what I’m looking for here. “Do you see it?” I ask.

He takes a moment to answer. “No. And I doubt we will.” Quentin points in the direction of a portion of wall with stars positioned in a backward question mark.

“I’m almost certain that’s Leo. Which is only visible in spring and summer.

Cetus is wintertime. I don’t think it would be here. Not if it’s accurate, at least.”

And it most likely is. Fountain was big on accuracy and preciseness.

It was one of the first things he told his interviewer in the oral history transcripts we read, and everything else we learned about the way he ran his business corroborated his claim.

Apparently he insisted on monitoring the carbonation levels of his seltzer daily by having employees count the number of bubbles that appeared in the first three seconds of pouring a glass.

“What if, when they renovated, they chose a different pattern of constellations than Fountain originally had in here?” I suddenly want very much to have been correct about this, to have simply not searched thoroughly enough that night.

For my betrayal and everything that followed to have not been for nothing.

Quentin shrugs. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“We’ll talk to Sharon after,” I decide. “See if she knows anything about it.”

A tiny ball of nausea bounces around my stomach. It’s guilt—something that’s always been there, hidden behind the anger and hurt—resurfacing as I remember that night in more vivid detail than I’ve let myself in a long, long time.

Quentin and I were supposed to meet at 11:30 at the cenotaph to check if there was a loose stone or anything else among the constellations etched there.

Instead, I borrowed one of my dad’s hammers and pried the nails out of three of the new planks covering the same side door I’d snuck through earlier that summer.

It was 11:50 when I heard Quentin whisper-yelling my name outside.

By then I was getting pretty freaked out being alone in an abandoned, crumbling mansion with only a (squirrel?) skeleton for company, so I decided to get out of there and go meet up with him after all.

I’d managed to squeeze my upper body back through the hole I made when a throat cleared loudly to my right.

“Quentin?” I asked quietly. But it wasn’t Quentin.

It was Deputy Kramer of the Catoctin Police.

Who definitely didn’t buy that I was there alone after hearing me say someone’s name.

She made quick work of finding Quentin, who was basically a sitting duck.

(Or a roaming duck, I guess, since he was still wandering around the property quietly calling for me.)

Sharon is now telling the group about Louisa Worman, Fountain’s secretary, and I try to push aside the memories of what came next that night: my tearful apology in the back of the police cruiser, and Quentin’s cold, angry words: This was a mistake.

It was all a mistake. Followed by silence.

The loudest, longest silence of my life.

One that might have never ended had fate not simultaneously knocked us down several pegs.

And all because I made the stupid decision to look inside the Star Parlor. Which probably didn’t even feature Cetus among its constellations.

I look back now, and all I can think is Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

“Nina,” Quentin says, his voice farther away than expected.

I blink, refocusing on the present, and find that I’m still lingering in front of the parlor while Sharon leads the rest of the group back downstairs.

Quentin is halfway between me and them, as if he started in that direction before noticing my continued stillness. “You okay?”

“Who’s to say!” I answer, not willing to commit to a solid yes at the moment.

In the basement, Sharon tells us about Fountain’s domestic staff, who were paid double the going rate in the area at the time.

Which seems like the very least Fountain should do for his employees, considering one of his favorite pastimes in his final years apparently included filling his claw-foot tub with various non-water substances to see what it would feel like to soak in them.

Thankfully, this anecdote is so unexpectedly weird that it reboots my struggling brain and allows me to get through the last ten minutes of the tour without becoming lost in the past or turned on in the present.

Once everyone has returned to the main level, Quentin and I linger in the foyer, waiting for Sharon to bid the elderly women goodbye.

He leans in toward me again, and this time the clean scent of him is such an intense contrast to the musty basement we recently vacated that I take a startled step away.

“What’s going on with you?” he asks, giving me a puzzled look. “Have you been possessed by a maid who tragically drowned when she fell into Fountain’s molasses bath?”

Thankfully, Sharon’s attention turns to us now, freeing me from having to enumerate the many things going on with me at the moment.

“Great tour!” I say with too much enthusiasm.

“Oh, thank you for saying so. I haven’t given one in a while, believe it or not.”

Oh, I can definitely believe it, considering it took over an hour to get through ten rooms.

“We had a few questions about the house, if you don’t mind?”

Sharon practically glows, happy to keep talking about Sprangbur Castle. “Absolutely! What can I answer for you?”

Quentin takes over with, “We were wondering if you knew more about the Star Parlor. It’s beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?” Sharon’s glow intensifies, as if she designed the room herself.

“It was one of the most complicated—and expensive!—parts of the Sprangbur Castle restoration. You see, we had a few photos of the room to go off of, but they were all black-and-white, of course. Thankfully a specialist was able to pull samples from the walls before we replastered them to identify the approximate colors used. Imagine our delight when we saw how wonderfully it came together.”

“Incredible,” Quentin says. “I noticed the constellations seem to be spring or summer ones. Do you know anything about that? If Julius Fountain chose that time of year deliberately?”