“I want to see that.” I had no idea what a recamier was. “Come on, Isa. I’ve been here a week and haven’t bothered to check out the whole house. Let’s go together.”
“No, thanks. Peter and Jessie used to go up there,” Isa said, but now she’d lost a touch of her “Hostess of Little Bly” voice. “And once Jessie locked me in the old playroom.”
“Locked you in? What do you mean, locked you in?”
“Just what I said.” But Isa had stopped painting and was twirling her paintbrush like a tiny baton. “I mean, it wasn’t for a long time or anything. And she felt bad after, on account of how I threw a fit. And she gave me her best drawing to say sorry. We both love—loved—drawing and painting.” She dunked the brush in water and began to stir. She refused to look at me, and I sensed she wanted us both to stop talking about it.
“Okay, then you keep on painting. I’ll go exploring myself.”
After I left, I assumed Isa’d be peeping around the corner soon enough. She struck me as the kind of girl who didn’t like to miss out on a thing.
I bypassed Isa’s room, a froth of pink and tulle. Appliqué butterflies alighted on several surfaces. Milo’s was locked, though I bet it was identical to Teddy’s inside, reeking of sweat and Old Spice while the floor was an upchuck of clothes and video games and sports equipment.
The master-bedroom suite was grand and dull, and had a deck that overlooked the sea. I imagined Miles McRae reclining in the button-back chair, reading the paper while drinking coffee that Connie’d brought up on a silver tray.
“Excellent job with Isa,” he said, peering over the business section of the Times. “You’re just as sophisticated as your mother, even if you’ve never summered anywhere before. I can see why Sean Ryan was attracted to you.”
“Thanks,” I answered. “And since we’re speaking honestly, you might have mentioned that your babysitter died and your house is haunted and cursed, Miles, old pal.”
But when I blinked, he was gone.
I lingered another minute, half waiting for Isa to join, and when she didn’t, I took the stairs to the third floor. It was airless with the smell of cleaning ammonia and brine. Rain drummed the roof.
A softer pounding had started in my own head, and the beating rain plus no breakfast began to jumble me. My mind picked up the pattern of a Mother Goose rhyme—rain rain go away come again another day little Isa wants to play go away ha-ha hey-hey.
Luckily, I found a bonus stray pill in the pocket of my shorts. I broke it between my front teeth and crushed it deep into my molars. Awful-tasting, but maybe whatever it was, it would balance me.
The first two rooms standing opposite each other were guest bedrooms, both furnished with stuffy chintz curtains and lace counterpanes. Down the hall was a storage room and Isa’s unplayful playroom—little Jamie wants to play but not the same old boring way—with a shelf of musty fairy tales and a plastic dollhouse.
Then I entered the room that faced the playroom. Like my bedroom, it bore a thumbprint of the home’s original grandeur. A canopy bed, a black marble fireplace, and voila—the recamier—an exquisitely fragile chaise lounge in faded gold brocade. Perfect for swooning.
But the room was rancid. An awful stink. I drifted through it, my fingers splayed against my nose, breathing in teacup sips. Connie’s housekeeping must not extend to this floor. I practiced a swoon, diving into the chaise, and leaped up again with a scream as the pain shot into my hip.
“What the …?” I found it right away, where it had dropped to the carpet. A long, heavy needle with a black bead like an evil eye on one end. Such an antique, odd-looking thing—I was pretty sure it was a hat pin. I rubbed my skin where the pin had pricked me, but as I readjusted the bolster pillow, my eyes caught in disbelief what was concealed behind it.
Crude, hard, a knife cut dug deep against the wood grain.
Its touch was rough against my fingertip, like the mindless path forged by a termite or a carpenter ant. J for Jessie? Strange. Why would she have done that? If it was true that this piece of furniture had been priceless, now it was probably worth nothing. What a pointless sabotage. But I had no urge to call Connie and dime out a dead girl. I had no urge to stir up anything.
Guiltily, I replaced the pillow and then stared at it as the pinging rain seemed to beat away my thoughts go-away go-away go-away.
A sound drew me to the window. I parted the curtain. Through the sheet of the downpour, I saw Isa dashing toward the orchard. Someone was chasing her; I caught a flash of a gangly kid in a pink shirt and khakis who was just as quickly lost among the trees.
Milo? No. But I knew that kid.
Isa was laughing as she reappeared, streaking across the wet grass. Zigzagging around the trees through the downpour. And then the boy stopped. Lifted his head slowly to look up at the window. As if he knew I’d been watching all along. He struck a muscleman pose. To show that he enjoyed my spying on him? He was a few years older than Milo, and he wasn’t as classically handsome, but he had something to him, a fierce charisma. He took a few steps closer, almost exaggeratedly, as if he were sneaking up on me, and yet his eyes were trained to a point just past me—quickly I glanced over my shoulder, to make sure nobody else was in the room. But I was alone.
I tapped on the glass, to normalize it. So that I wasn’t just gawking at him. I halfway smiled.
In answer, he yawned, but from him, the gesture seemed more tantalizing, and I realized that I was standing at the very same window I’d gazed up at that first day, when Connie had picked me up and driven me here.
Only now the situation had reversed itself, and the boy was closer, almost directly below.
He was staring upward. I was looking down at him. His eyes were extraordinarily pale, a washed-out, tobacco-juice color, like those of the portrait children. And now a shiver of recognition ran down my spine as panic plucked at the root of me. My heart was racing—because yes, it was the same kid, it was the boy from the cliff, the gangly boy it was
No no no you’re being paranoid. It’s just some kid from next door or a friend of Milo’s you’re just dozy on that pill.
And then he was gone, turning away to speed around the corner of the house friend of Milo’s of course had to be, but I jerked the curtain shut, and with that sure motion, another surprise.
Unlike the J, though, this wasn’t a human endeavor. The marks that cut around the windowpane were desperate, claws and teeth that had scraped at the wood like a knife scraping corn from a cob. As if some small, feral creature had been trapped in this room, and then had tried to chew his escape through the window.