The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  There was no way we could climb the stairs stealthily enough to avoid being heard—even if we could have done so in the stairwell’s stygian blackness—and a gibbering voice in the back of my head pointed out that the slower and more cautiously we went, the more likely we were to encounter . . . it, whatever it was.

  I found the light switch with fingers that felt as cold and brittle as icicles. “Run!” I said, flipping the switch, and we threw ourselves up the stairs like a pair of demented mountain goats. It was only much later that night, lying in bed staring at the patterns the moonlight made against the venetian blinds, that it occurred to me to wonder what we would have done if the light had failed to go on.

  We made enough noise for an army, maybe two—the clatter of our shoes, Miss Coburn cursing breathlessly in French, the air sawing in my lungs, and the echoes clamoring and wailing and clawing at our ears. But always, underneath it, I could hear that tap-tap-tap, unhurried, unemphatic. I could not tell if it was ascending or descending; after we had scrambled around two full turns of the stairs, I could not tell if it was above or below us. With the echoes, it was equally impossible to know if it was drawing nearer or moving away. There was just that sense of menace, filling the air like choking dust.

  Whatever it was, we did not encounter it. We burst through the stairwell door at ζ, both of us already fumbling for our keys. I found mine first, wrenched the lock mechanism over, every second expecting to hear the stairwell door open behind me, and shoved the door open. We both got through it somehow, and I locked the door again with feverish panic. And then we both simply sank to the floor where we were, panting for breath. I was intensely, absurdly grateful for the cold marble pressing against my knees and ankles, for the dusty, slightly sour air of the Parrington’s back hallways.

  When we were both breathing more normally again, Miss Coburn caught my eye and said, “Dripping water.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “But . . . I’m not going back to turn the lights off.”

  She laughed and got to her feet with a leggy athleticism I could only envy. “Come on,” she said and held a hand out to help me up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I do not like to be touched. I got to my feet without taking her hand; I felt her puzzled look, but did not meet her eyes.

  After a moment, she let it go, and we walked together toward my office. As with Mr. Lucent the night before, we found ourselves unwilling to separate. Neither one of us spoke; anything we said would only have made more crushing the reality of the dark, deserted museum around us.

  Then we turned a corner and nearly collided with Dr. Starkweather.

  “Mr Booth. And Miss Coburn.” His heavy eyebrows drew together into a scowl. “Were you in the Annex?”

  “Er,” I said. “I . . . ”

  “Yes,” Miss Coburn said, unfazed. “Mr. Booth was helping me with some research.”

  Dr. Starkweather seemed to contemplate her disheveled hair, then gave me a look I could not decipher. “I would suggest you conduct your . . . research somewhere else after hours,” he said finally. “Good night.”

  He continued on his way; Miss Coburn grabbed my arm and dragged me in the opposite direction, disregarding my reflexive attempt to shake her off. She let me go as soon as we were out of earshot and, unbelievably, started to giggle.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “N-noth—” But she could not get the word out. I stood and watched as her giggles deepened to whoops of laughter; she ended up leaning against the wall, snorting and panting for breath.

  “Miss Coburn, please, is it something I did?”

  She shook her head. “Starkweather . . . Starkweather thinks . . . oh God!” But she suppressed her giggles sternly and said, “He thinks we were necking in the stacks.”

  She met my eyes for a moment and then dissolved into howls. I could feel my face burning and wondered if anyone had ever gone off in an apoplexy from sheer embarrassment. Perhaps I could be the first.

  “I’m sorry,” Miss Coburn said, finally composing herself. “Really. I understand that it’s not funny, and I’m not . . . ” She fought her giggles down again. “I’m not laughing at you. I swear.”

  “Good night, Miss Coburn,” I said stiffly.

  “Good night, Mr. Booth,” she said, and I felt her amusement behind me all the way down the hall.

  Again, Miss Coburn was waiting at my office door in the morning. I was rather later than usual in the hopes that this craven ploy might allow me to evade Dr. Starkweather.

  “I finished with the memorandum books,” she said abruptly.

  “You . . . went back?”

  “Dripping water,” she said impatiently. “Nothing more. We spooked ourselves.”

  “Yes,” I said, because I did not want to argue with her. “Did you find anything?”

  “No. Nothing useful. If he was up to something, he must have realized he was incriminating himself. The most specific he gets after that entry with the books is all that talk of ‘plans’ just before he died.”

  “The books must have shown him what to do.”

  “You still think he killed her?”

  I had not meant to say that out loud. “I . . . I need to do some reading,” I said, hastily unlocking the door and entering my office. “Good morning, Miss Coburn.” I closed the door, locked it again, and made my way unsteadily across to my desk to sit down. I saw the outlines of what Havilland DeWitt had done, like a silhouette cast against a screen; I did not want to know more. I could not help Madeline Stanhope now, and there was no point in unearthing the details of this sordid, lunatic crime. Havilland DeWitt had gotten his comeuppance; the Venebretti Necklace had been found; and I was sure that word of Madeline Stanhope’s innocence would trickle out in the same way the original scandal had.

  I honorably added Havilland DeWitt’s unpleasant library to the list of my obligations and made a mental note to avoid Miss Coburn as well as Dr. Starkweather for the next several weeks.

  And there matters rested for quite some time.

  III

  Miss Coburn leaned around my office door one afternoon in early September. “Are you going to the Museum Ball, Mr. Booth?”

  “Er,” I said, looking up from an odd little Hellenistic statuette that no one quite knew what to make of, and felt the immediate weight of guilt across my shoulders. I had avoided Miss Coburn so successfully for two months that I had almost entirely forgotten my half-promise to follow up on Havilland DeWitt’s reading. “Yes, I suppose.” Dr. Starkweather had made it clear that attendance at Museum Balls was mandatory for all curators.

  “Excellent.” She came in and shut the door behind her. “I need an escort.”

  I stared at her. Her mouth quirked up, and she said in the simpering accents of a society debutante, “But, Miss Coburn, this is so sudden! Why, we hardly know each other at all!” Then, reverting to her normal voice, “You needn’t look so unnerved. Think of it as a favor.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That is . . . what sort of favor?”

  She laughed. “I have just lied shamelessly to Cameron Larkin and told him that I cannot attend with him because I already have an escort. You perceive the immediate necessity of making that lie a retroactive truth.”

  “ . . . Yes.”

  “And I am confident that you will neither become vulgarly drunk nor make a pass at me at two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Not at all,” I said, probably too hastily and too vehemently.

  She smiled again, but ruefully. “If you really dislike me that much—”

  Oh God, worse and worse. And I could not escape the feeling that I owed her a favor. “No, I don’t dislike you, Miss Coburn. Truly. I just . . . I . . . I will be happy to, er, escort you to the Museum Ball.”

  “You are too kind, sir,” she said with a mocking curtsey.

  “Miss Coburn, I meant no offense. I just . . . ”

  “I know. I took you by surprise. You remind me powerfully of my Aunt Ferdy’s cat Fortunato.
He greets any change in his routine with that exact horrified stare.” She opened the door. “I will come to your apartment at eight on Friday. I believe we can walk from there?”

  And somehow she knew that I did not own a car. “ . . . Yes. Yes, if that’s—”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Booth.” She shut the door briskly behind her and was gone.

  I had never had a sweetheart, never so much as escorted a young lady to a dance. My prep school was boys-only, and contact with girls, either from the nearby girls’ school or from the town, was strictly forbidden. Many boys defied that prohibition, but I was not among them. In college, my friend and roommate Augustus Blaine had held sole sway over the department of romance; even if I had been brave enough to wish to attract the attentions of a young lady, I could never have done so with Blaine in the room.

  This was not, of course, a date in any proper sense of the word. Miss Coburn was merely using me as a shield. But I still felt horridly like the gawky, shabby boy I had once been, too shy to say anything to my guardians’ goddaughter when she was kind enough to ask me how I did.

  Gawky I still was, but shabby I was not, freed from the Siddonses’ parsimony; I bought Miss Coburn a corsage. It took all my courage to go into the florist’s, and I nearly fled when the young woman behind the counter asked if she could help me. But I held fast and managed to explain the situation—that I needed flowers for a lady with whom I stood on amiable (I hoped) but not romantic terms, and that, no, I did not know the color of her dress—and she provided me with some delicate white flowers and attendant greenery which, she said dimpling, would do charmingly. I suspect that she found me more than slightly comical, but my determination carried me through. I did not want to be any more of an embarrassment to Miss Coburn than I had to be.

  Miss Coburn arrived promptly on the stroke of eight. I had been ready and waiting since six. I opened the door to her knock. “ . . . Good evening, Miss Coburn.” She was wearing a black dress, long and unadorned and austere, under a plain and slightly threadbare black coat. Instead of its usual bun at the base of her skull, her hair was arranged in a coronet of braids, as stark and becoming to her as the dress. Her only jewels were a pair of diamond earrings and an antique signet ring on her right hand.

  “Oh, God, is it going to be ‘Miss Coburn’ and ‘Mr. Booth’ all evening long? My Christian name is Claudia, and I beg you will use it. And yours is . . . Karl? No.”

  “Kyle,” I said, “but no one calls me by it.”

  “What do your friends call you?”

  I bit back the instinctive honesty of, I have no friends, and said, “Booth, mostly.”

  “Then I shall call you Booth, and you will call me Claudia. All right?”

  “I . . . I got you flowers,” I said and dove into the kitchen to fetch them.

  “Booth,” she said when I reappeared, “I promise that I am not going to bite you.” She smiled a little. “But I must admit the flowers are lovely.” She accepted them and pinned them deftly to her bodice. I felt a great glow of relief, as if some dreadful barricade had been passed; I had been afraid she would be offended.

  “We . . . we should go.”

  “I suppose we should.”

  We left my apartment building and walked together from one streetlight to the next. She made no motion that would suggest she expected me to offer my arm, and I was grateful. But after a block and a half, she said, “It is quite appalling how little I know of you, Booth. Where are you from?”

  “Oh, er, here. Well, about twenty blocks north, to be accurate.”

  “So you are one of those Booths.”

  “The last one, yes.”

  “You certainly don’t put on side about it.”

  “There’s nothing left to be particularly proud of.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. You’re the last scion of one of the Twenty, and I don’t think anybody knows you exist.”

  “Considering the scandal of my mother’s death, I prefer to be forgotten. Are you a . . . a native?”

  “My mother was a Truelove who married beneath her. I don’t know whether I ought to be counted as a ‘native’ or not, although I suppose I must have spent about half my childhood here, all told. My parents’ marriage was rather stormy.”

  She did not sound as if she wished to say anything more, and we walked for some time in silence. Then she said, “You ditched me, didn’t you?”

  “Miss Coburn, I . . . ”

  “I recognize the plumage. I just want to know why.”

  “I, er . . . I didn’t . . . ”

  She waited.

  “I didn’t want to know any more,” I said.

  “You?”

  “I . . . ” She was right. It was not like me; I was known in the museum for the terrier-like tenacity of my pursuit of facts. It was why I was the person to whom all the mysteries were sent.

  “It wouldn’t help to know,” I said, looking away from her into the darkness. “Havilland DeWitt stole the necklace. He murdered Madeline Stanhope. Does the rest of it matter?”

  “I’m an archaeologist. I don’t like theories. I like proof.”

  “But what good does it do to prove it?”

  “You’re the one who wanted justice for Madeline Stanhope.”

  I did not look at her and did not answer.

  We walked without speaking until we came in sight of the museum’s brilliantly lit front entrance. Then Miss Coburn stopped and said, “Do you dance?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Dance. Do you?”

  “No . . . that is, not—”

  “Then I’ll lead.” She put one hand up to touch her hair, a gesture which recalled my mother to me in a painful momentary flash, and then said, with the hint of a sigh, “Well, Booth, let’s do the pretty, as my Coburn grandmother would say. Give me your arm. And just to prove you can do it, will you call me Claudia? Once?”

  I could not tell if she was still angry at me or not. “ . . . Yes, er, Claudia,” I said and offered my arm. I had braced myself and did not flinch when she took it.

  “Very nice,” she said. She smelt of verbena. “And now I will stop baiting you. On all fronts. You are, after all, doing me a favor, and I appreciate it.”

  She was not still angry; I let my breath out, relieved, and dared, “Is Mr. Larkin so very awful?”

  “Horrid. I’ve met cows with more personality.”

  “Oh.” I wondered how I compared to cows in Miss Coburn’s estimation.

  “There’s nothing worse than a garrulous bore. Oh, look, a limousine. That’ll be Reginald Dawe and his fifth wife.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about . . . ”

  “High society? You may thank my Truelove aunts. Mama was the only one of the three who got married, and so Aunt Ferdy and Aunt Vinnie have no one but me to lavish their expertise on. They don’t count my brother. They say men don’t notice things anyway.”

  She gave me a bright, sidelong look, as if daring me to respond. I said nothing. We came to the steps, proceeded up them. Miss Coburn was looking very grand, as if she did not take these same stairs two at a time when she was in a hurry. The rotunda was full of men in tuxedos and women in dresses that shimmered and swirled, the Foucault’s pendulum swinging in their midst, the clock of the Titans’ mother Gaia. As we crossed to the coat-check counter, I could feel the stares and whispers; in all the years I had worked at the museum, this was the first time I had escorted a woman to the annual ball. I could imagine the rumors starting and felt a cold quiver of dread in the pit of my stomach.

  When Miss Coburn had surrendered her coat, she gave me a doubtful look. “You don’t want to mingle, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then I’ll find you when the doors open. Just don’t hide.”

  “I—”

  “You do stand out in a crowd, you know,” she said and swept away, as stately as a swan.

  I knew I stood out; I was six-foot-three, and my hair had gone entirely white when I was twenty-
four. The combination made me horribly visible. The best I could do was to stay back near the wall, in the shadow of one of the columns, and pray that no one noticed me.

  I had been standing there for maybe five minutes when I saw her. I do not know how I recognized her as Madeline Stanhope, but I never had the least doubt of who she was. She was a small woman, wrapped toga-fashion in something long and white and trailing, like a bed-sheet or a shroud. She was standing very straight at the top of the museum’s main staircase. She did not look like a ghost—she was neither transparent nor insubstantial to the eye—but she was clearly not a living woman. Her face was too white and too still, with her eyes burning like the promise of eternal damnation. She was staring straight at me.

  Miss Coburn had accused me of “ditching” her; that was nothing compared to my crime in ditching Madeline Stanhope. I did not know why she had appeared here, now, but I knew I could not ignore her.

  Madeline Stanhope gave me a very slight nod and turned away, walking into the long Contemporary Art gallery that ran the length of the museum. I understood; I followed her.

  Three-quarters of the way up the stairs, I heard a clatter of heels behind me. I had been trying with all my might to ignore the assembled wealth and dignity of the Museum Ball, but at that noise, like Orpheus, I could not forbear to look back.

  Miss Coburn, clutching her skirts carelessly in one hand to keep them out of her way, caught up to me and said, in a low hiss, “Booth, what are you doing?”

  I kept climbing. There was nothing I could tell her that would not sound even less likely than the truth. “Following Madeline Stanhope.”

  “Foll—” Automatically, Miss Coburn kept pace with me. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  We reached the top of the stairs; Madeline Stanhope was halfway down the gallery. She moved with neither hurry nor hesitation, not drifting but walking with firm, even steps, although her feet made no sound. When she looked back and saw that I was following, her smile revealed small sharp teeth—certainly not teeth belonging to a living woman, nor like the teeth I had seen in Mrs. Stanhope’s skull.