Page 32

September 19, 1925

The sun creeps slowly through the library, filling the room with light. A rooster crows, somewhere in the distance. I sit up from my makeshift pallet on the floor. After Weston’s attack, I was much too afraid to sleep alone in the attic, despite Beckett’s reassurances he would keep vigil. Marguerite and Beckett are awake and gone, but I can smell bacon frying and hear the low hum of his voice down the hall. I rise and look around me, the events of yesterday casting a disturbing pall over the morning. Outside, puddles stand on the flagstone terrace, and several downed tree limbs lie on the back lawn. An aftermath of the storm. Beckett will have his work cut out for him today.

I think of how tender he was with me last night, soothing my fears. He stayed awake and watchful until I’d fallen asleep. For all his initial gruffness—which I now know to be shyness—he’s someone quite different from the man I first judged him to be. A man who puts the care and welfare of others before himself. I wanted this house to be mine someday. Now I can’t picture myself living here without Beckett. But regardless of where our relationship leads, I’m determined to honor Marguerite’s wishes when she dies. And that begins with finding her will. Because if I don’t, my brother and my cousins will find a way to rip everything away from us. I can’t let that happen.

Remembering the papers I saw in the tower room, I decide to go upstairs to sort through things, to see if I can find something of merit. I wedge a chair against the hidden door, holding it open just in case Weston’s spirit attempts to shut me in. I have my suspicions he was responsible for locking Marguerite in the closet. I climb the steep stairs, the fractured light from the tower’s glass ceiling illuminating my way. I emerge into the hexagonal room, where the portrait of the young girl stares at me with blank, pupilless eyes. I wonder who she is and why Marguerite has resumed work on her portrait. All her other paintings have been images of her former lovers, but this one is obviously of a child, no older than twelve or thirteen.

I lift the lid to the window seat and riffle through the contents. I don’t find anything of great importance. Only ledgers noting household expenses, old Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs, and receipts from purchases Marguerite made decades ago. Most disturbingly, I find a box filled with knives and scissors, and wonder whether Harriet hid them for safekeeping or Marguerite put them there as a secret cache of weapons.

“Sadie!” I hear Beckett call. “Breakfast.”

“I’ll be right there!”

I turn to go back down the stairs, the box of sharp objects in hand. A small slip of pink paper on the floor catches my eye. I bend to retrieve it. It’s a receipt from a Kansas City seamstress. At the bottom, scrawled in Marguerite’s handwriting: L’s wedding gown—5 Jan. 1895.

1895. The year my parents married. Did Marguerite pay for Mama’s wedding dress? It’s likely, since my grandmother hadn’t approved of my father. She’d looked down her nose at his common Irish roots and only came around once Felix was born. But Marguerite had always liked Da—perhaps because he reminded her of Hugh. All these seemingly disparate things are weaving together, like threads in a tapestry, telling me more about my family than I’ve ever known.

I hide the terrifying box of knives in the liquor cabinet, locking it with the key. After breakfast, Beckett brings Marguerite’s easel and paints from the tower to the library, so I can better watch her while he goes about his outside chores. Dr. Gallagher arrives just as he promised, astride a sturdy gray mule. He checks Marguerite over efficiently and declares her safe from any immediate peril. Before he leaves, he draws me aside, addressing me with a solemn look. “Miss Halloran, your aunt is deteriorating quickly. She’s lost a significant amount of weight. You must begin preparing yourself for the inevitable.”

“How long?”

“In my experience with this disease, once anorexia sets in, it’s a matter of months, if not weeks.”

I think of all the years I’ve missed with my great-aunt, of how becoming her companion has opened my world in ways I never imagined. I’m not ready to lose her. Not when I’ve just found her. Not when I’ve already lost so many people I loved in this life. “Isn’t there anything that can be done?”

“Give her whatever she would like to eat. Anything easy to swallow that will stir her appetite. Keep to a routine with meals, and in general. People in her condition find a great deal of comfort in their routines. There’s also a nursing home, in Fayetteville, that has a ward dedicated to dementia. It offers groundbreaking care. However, an abrupt change in her surroundings at this late stage in her condition could prove to be catastrophic.”

“I think you’re probably right. She doesn’t want to leave this house.” I sigh, my weariness and exhaustion apparent. “Harriet mentioned she’ll be able to spend the night from time to time this winter. I’m hopeful that together the three of us can manage things until the end.”

He nods, placing his hat on his neat blond head. “I’ll begin calling on her once a week, during my usual rounds. Take care, Miss Halloran. Marguerite is very fortunate to have you.”

I rejoin Marguerite in the library, where she’s deliberately working, adding the final details to the background of Hugh’s portrait. Her tremors have become more apparent, visible now even as she works. I rest my hands on her shoulders and kiss the top of her head, fighting back tears. She frowns up at me. “I don’t know why that man brought everything down here. I much prefer working in the tower.”

“I know, Aunt Marg, but I need to be able to see you while I do my chores. The stairs are dangerous and we don’t want what happened yesterday to happen again.”

“What happened yesterday?” She blinks at me, her eyes clouded with forgetfulness.

“You hit your head. In the closet off the tower steps.”

She brushes her hand over her temple, wincing. “Oh yes. I remember now.”

“Would you like to listen to some music while you work?”

“Yes, that would be lovely, dear.”

I put a record on the Victrola and settle on the sofa, taking up my half-hearted attempt at cross-stitch. Without Harriet here today, I’ll have no respite from my watch. Even going to the powder room and leaving Marguerite unattended carries risk I’m not willing to take, given yesterday’s events and her increasing frailty. I try my best to push my concerns to the side and concentrate on my needlework, but I can’t help thinking of all the things I should be doing instead—namely, searching for Marguerite’s will or anything else that might clue us in to her wishes. Dr. Gallagher’s words were sobering. We’re running out of time. Perhaps tonight, after Marguerite retires to her room, I can finally search through the trunks in the attic.

But part of me is afraid to be up there, alone, in the place where I first encountered Weston’s spirit. My back still aches from him throwing me to the floor.

“He’s not going to leave you be, dear,” Marguerite says, startling me.

“What?”

“Weston. He’s not going to leave you be.” She wipes her brush on her smock, leaving a smudge of yellow. “Florence wanted to be free of him, too, but he kept drawing her back in, over and over. She was afraid of him. She couldn’t go to sleep without the lights on.”

“I remember that. She’d fly into a panic if the electricity went out during a storm.”

“Yes. I offered to take the painting. Asked her to send it to me. Yet she never would. I tried to help her. Tried to reason with her. But he had her captivated until the day she died.” Marguerite turns to me, the clarity in her eyes as sharp as the needle in my hand. “My sister ... didn’t understand what she did. What she called forth. What she made me a party to.”

“What she called forth?” The hair on my arms rises as chills dance over my flesh. “What do you mean by that, Aunt Marg?”

Marguerite chuckles softly under her breath. She shrugs and turns back to her painting. “There are so many things you don’t understand about my sister, Sadie. About Weston. But you’ll see. In time.”

That night, after the house has settled deep in its bones, I go to the library. I flick on a single light and stand before the portrait of Hugh. Marguerite’s love for him is apparent in his likeness—she’s captured him in the peak of his youth, with his sparkling brown eyes and wide smile. I wonder where he is now. Whether he’s still alive. Marguerite is only in her midsixties, so the chances are high Hugh is still out there, somewhere. Did he move on? Marry someone else? Perhaps, if I knew more about him, I might be able to find him again and help bring a sense of closure to Marguerite before she passes. I step closer to the canvas, curious to see whether Hugh’s portrait has the same uncanny quality as the others. It does. As soon as I reach out, my fingertips tingle, and the tawny leaves in the background begin to flutter. I take a deep breath, prepare myself for the free fall into the past, and close my eyes.