The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

  I understood immediately why the poet had not left her books and papers to her children. The papers were at least in boxes, although they looked as if they had merely been dumped in by the armful; the books, including her diaries, had been thrown into the corner, a careless heap like a child’s discarded playthings. It seemed horrible to me that a poet’s children could take out their anger at their mother on her innocent and helpless books.

  “That’s funny,” said Miss Stapleton. “We didn’t leave them like that.” But there was no outrage, or even concern, in her voice, and I felt no compulsion to believe her.

  I said, “When my colleague gets here, could you . . . that is, I would be grateful if you would show him up.” Mr. Lucent, dilatory as always, was now nearly an hour late.

  “Of course,” said Miss Stapleton without warmth. “Don’t forget about the door.” And she left.

  I wedged the door firmly open and settled in to work.

  Cataloguing the books took very little time; there were only twenty-three of them. Oddly, for a woman whose tastes in literature, as represented by the rest of her library, were both catholic and sophisticated, the books Mildred Truelove Stapleton had clung to in her last years were all cheap popular editions of children’s books: the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, Marigold’s Prayers for the Young, Gulliver’s Travels, collections of fairy tales and poems. All of them were inscribed on the flyleaf Georgiana Beatrice Truelove in a schoolgirl’s copperplate. Clearly, from the printing dates of the books, Mrs. Stapleton’s sister, but why had Mildred ended up with Georgiana’s books? I made a note to give these books to Mr. Forsythe, who was embroiled in a massive and quixotic study of children’s books of the previous century, and moved on to the manuscripts and diaries which were properly Mr. Lucent’s domain, except that Mr. Lucent was not here.

  Aside from being thick with dust, the room was unpleasantly stuffy even with the door open; I was aware of sweat trickling down my collar and dampening my shirt. A cursory glance was enough to show that the situation pertaining among the manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence was vastly more complicated than that among the books. I groaned in spirit, loosened my tie slightly, and stood up, knowing that if I did not stretch at least occasionally, my joints would stiffen and I would have to be helped to my feet—and once I got involved in the labyrinth of Mrs. Stapleton’s papers, I would very likely forget to move at all.

  I paced back and forth in the narrow aisle of clear space, which brought me face to face with the old vanity at the end of each circuit. After the third or fourth time, I realized that I was avoiding my reflection and stopped, puzzled. It is true that I am homely and do not care to spend hours admiring myself in all convenient reflective surfaces, but I am not the Elephant Man or the Hunchback of Nôtre Dame, to shun my reflection as abhorrent and monstrous.

  I looked at the mirror. It was dusty, of course, and the glass was old and wavery. It was not a noticeably nice vanity—not a good example of any school of furniture and a little spindly for my taste—but it was not loathsome, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the mirror . . . except that there was. There was something about the way the room was reflected which set my teeth on edge. I realized I was staring at my reflection and had to make a conscious effort to look away from the mirror, as if I were pulling a piece of iron away from a magnet.

  Do try to control your imagination, Mr. Booth, said the voice of one of my prep-school teachers, long dead, in my mind. I shook myself away from contemplation of the vanity, sat down again, and addressed myself to the task of creating order among Mrs. Stapleton’s papers.

  I began by sorting into categories: correspondence, manuscripts, diaries (which were at least easily identifiable by virtue of being in bound volumes). I was working on the chronology of the letters when Mr. Lucent waltzed in.

  “You’re late,” I said without looking up.

  “Yes, I know. So sorry. I was just on the way out the door when—”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t bother. I’m not interested in your excuses.”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Booth? You don’t—” Then his voice sharpened. “What are you doing?”

  “Your job,” I said, securing together, with a paper-clip from my vest pocket, the three pages of a letter from the novelist Clemence Bradstreet.

  “You have no right.”

  I stood up to face him. “I had no assurance that you would make an appearance today, and if you recall, we promised the Stapleton heirs not to take more than a week. What else was I supposed to do?”

  Mr. Lucent had gone beet-red with indignation. “Let me remind you, Mr. Booth, that you are not my superior and you have no right to tell me how to do my job.”

  “Someone ought to.”

  “Well, it’s not going to be you, you pinch-faced stick!”

  A voice said mildly from the doorway, “Excuse me.”

  Mr. Lucent and I whipped around like stags at bay, and the oppressive, resentful anger in the room shattered into sticky fragments like a dropped egg.

  It was Martin Stapleton, Mildred Truelove Stapleton’s principal heir and only son. He was a quiet, decisive man, far gentler and more thoughtful than his sisters. “Is anything wrong?”

  Mr. Lucent and I looked at each other. “No,” Mr. Lucent said doubtfully. “We were just . . . ” And then he trailed off, clearly no more certain of what had just happened than I was.

  I made a desperate effort to pull myself together. “It’s the, er, the heat. Can we do something for you, Mr. Stapleton?”

  “Shoe’s on the other foot. I was just looking in to see if there was anything you needed.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “We’re quite all right,” chimed in Mr. Lucent.

  “Although,” I said because I did not want Mr. Stapleton to think we were getting rid of him in order to continue our quarrel in peace, “there was one thing . . . I noticed, I was wondering, er . . . that is, can you tell me who Georgiana Truelove was?”

  “Mother’s younger sister. She died when they were girls. Why?”

  “Oh, these books,” I said and waved at them. “They were hers.”

  “Ah,” he said. “So was this room. Mother disliked it very deeply, and I am not sure I care for it myself. In any event, if you need anything, just let one of us know. We should be around most of the day.”

  He left.

  Mr. Lucent and I stared at each other in dismal, appalled silence.

  Finally, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “No, honestly, I don’t know what got into me. You’re far more qualified than I am any day of the week.”

  “Mr. Lucent, please, don’t say that. I oughtn’t to have . . . ”

  “Well, anyway, I’m sorry I called you a pinch-faced stick.” Then, with a gesture of putting the past behind him, he said briskly, “Now tell me how far you’ve gotten.”

  Gratefully, I introduced Mr. Lucent to my three unwieldy groupings, and he got to work on the manuscripts while I continued with the correspondence. All the while, as part of my mind mechan-

  ically noted dates and authors, I wondered miserably what had happened, why I had been so vicious to Mr. Lucent, who was always courteous and kind—and good at his job, even if unpunctual. Except for my lame spur-of-the-moment explanation to Mr. Stapleton—“the heat”—I had no solution to the puzzle of what had possessed me to say such terrible things. I wondered if this might be the first warning sign of schizophrenia. In the depths of my mortification, that seemed almost more appealing than the idea that there was no reason at all, that I had said those cruel, officious things simply because, somewhere in the depths of my psyche, I wanted to.

  With the two of us working, the organizational phase of our endeavor did not take long. Mr. Lucent pulled out his notebook and said diffidently, “If you’d like to . . . take a break or something, Mr. Booth . . . You’ve been
at work for quite a while. It might do you good to stretch your legs a little.”

  He wanted to be rid of me; I did not blame him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lucent,” I said and got stiffly to my feet. “I appreciate your, er . . . that is, thank you.”

  I went downstairs, intending to go out into the garden, but walked straight into a low-voiced, venomous argument between Mr. Stapleton and his second sister, Mrs. Hilliard.

  “Father would have!” Mrs. Hilliard was saying as I came into earshot.

  “But this isn’t Father’s will, and Mother made it per—”

  They became aware of my presence before I could retreat and stared at me like two cats.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, feeling my face heat.

  “Do you need something, Mr. Booth?” said Mr. Stapleton—politely but clearly in exasperation.

  “I, er . . . that is . . . fresh air?”

  The look on Mrs. Hilliard’s face indicated that she was wondering if the museum had deliberately insulted her mother’s memory by sending a mental deficient to take charge of the library. Mr. Stapleton merely stepped aside and politely waved me to the front door.

  I felt their eyes on me every step of the way, and the silence in the front hall would have done justice to a mausoleum. They were arguing again before the door had latched behind me.

  A great, grimed weight seemed to fall off my shoulders as I crossed the porch, and I felt myself grow lighter and cleaner with every step I took away from the house, as if the air were water washing away the black, sticky residue of that silly, spiteful, pointless quarrel. The gardens were beautiful, benevolently peaceful in the May sunshine, and the light breeze cooled my face, caressed my hands. For a quarter of an hour, I was able not to think about myself.

  But then I had to return to the house. It was not, I must make clear, an ugly house: smart white clapboard with green trim, built by Mrs. Stapleton’s father on the occasion of his marriage and conscientiously maintained ever since. It was not Otranto or Dracula’s castle or some other Gothic splendor. But I dreaded it all the same. The shade of the porch had the chill of deep water, and stepping into the front hall was like stepping into an opium den, except that the noxious miasma of the Stapleton house was not tangible to eyes or nose or lungs.

  At this point I caught up with my runaway imagination. First the vanity, now this. I had lost my temper, I told myself; there was no need to blame the house for my shortcomings. I went resolutely up the stairs, determined to shake off my morbid self-absorption and get our task completed.

  Mr. Lucent was in the hallway outside the room in which we had been working. He burst into speech at the sight of me, as if he was afraid I would accuse him of shirking: “It’s Miss Stapleton. She said she needed to look for something in her mother’s armoire, and she wanted privacy for her search.”

  “Oh,” I said. Sure enough, the door was shut, and I could hear movement from within the room. “What do you think she’s looking for?”

  “No idea,” Mr. Lucent said and made a face. He lowered his voice. “I’m not even sure there is anything. I think she just—”

  That was when Miss Stapleton screamed.

  Mr. Lucent spun round and tried to open the door, but it had locked itself, as Miss Stapleton had warned me it would. Mr. Lucent rattled the knob ferociously, but to no avail. Miss Stapleton screamed again, and we heard a terrible creaking noise; the brutal percussion of a piece of furniture hitting the floor; and the sharp prolonged scatter of glass breaking.

  Miss Stapleton was still screaming.

  Mr. Lucent and I threw ourselves at the door. It gave way, sending us stumbling into the room, just as Martin Stapleton came racing up the stairs, closely followed by his two married sisters, Mrs. Hilliard and Mrs. Crosby.

  “What happened?” he cried. “Was that Amelia—”

  And then he came to the doorway and could see for himself.

  Amelia Stapleton lay pinned beneath the vanity, which had toppled forward over its own weight in a way I would have been tempted to dismiss as impossible if it had not so clearly happened. She could not have done it herself.

  She must have made a last-minute effort to save herself; only one leg was pinned by the vanity’s full weight. The mirror frame lay awkwardly across her hips, but was too light to have done any serious damage. She was bleeding from a number of cuts caused by the broken glass that sparkled everywhere underfoot.

  She had stopped screaming as the door gave way, but now she was moaning, and not from pain.

  Her forearms were crossed over her face, and I could just make out her words: “ . . . her eyes . . . her eyes . . . her eyes . . . ” over and over again with the shrill monotony of a talking doll.

  Mr. Stapleton took control of the situation immediately. He sent his youngest sister, Mrs. Crosby, scurrying to telephone for a doctor, and his second sister, Mrs. Hilliard, to fetch water and smelling salts and bandages. Then he looked at Mr. Lucent and me and said, “I don’t think we’d better move her, but would you help me lift this damn vanity?”

  Between us, Mr. Lucent, Mr. Stapleton, and I succeeded in lifting the vanity and restoring it to its former position. It was not terribly heavy, nor was it (as I had subliminally expected) unpleasant to the touch, but it was astonishingly awkward, and even when we had gotten it upright, it seemed unsteady on its base, rocking back to pinch Mr. Lucent’s fingers against the wall, trying to rock forward to fall on Miss Stapleton again.

  Mr. Stapleton sighed. “My mother hated this thing, but she would never get rid of it.” He knelt down beside his sister, catching her hands and drawing them away from her face, and began talking to her in a low, gentle voice. To avoid looking at Miss Stapleton’s dull, glazed eyes, Mr. Lucent and I looked at the vanity. Without the mirror to define its purpose as the appointment of a well-to-do young woman’s room, it looked like the altar of some dark and blood-hungry god.

  “How do you suppose it happened?” Mr. Lucent whispered to me.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t look like it could.”

  “She pushed it,” Miss Stapleton said, quite clearly.

  “Who, Amelia?” said her brother.

  “The girl in the mirror. The girl with no eyes. She said, ‘Wait for me, Melly,’ and the vanity tipped over.” Miss Stapleton clutched at her brother’s hands, and her tone grew pleading. “How did she know my name? Martin, how did she know my name?”

  Mr. Stapleton looked helplessly at us, but we could not answer his sister’s question either. We waited in oppressed silence until the doctor arrived.

  With Mrs. Hilliard and Mrs. Crosby in anxious attendance, the doctor bore Miss Stapleton off to bed. Mr. Lucent and I assisted Mr. Stapleton in clearing up the broken glass; in return, he assisted us in carrying the boxes of his mother’s books and papers down to Mr. Lucent’s automobile. We did not want to stay in that room, that house, any more than he wanted our continued presence. Standing by the automobile, Mr. Stapleton assured us that if we found anything to be missing, he would bring it to the museum himself, and we offered awkward wishes for Miss Stapleton’s swift recovery.

  Suddenly, Mr. Lucent, who was facing the house, cried, “What is that?”

  Mr. Stapleton and I turned hastily, but saw nothing.

  “What is what?” said Mr. Stapleton.

  “Nothing,” said Mr. Lucent, although he was frowning. “I thought I saw someone in the window of the . . . of that room. But there’s no one there.”

  “I locked the door before I followed you down,” said Mr. Stapleton. “But the window’s open. You must have seen the curtains moving.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” Mr. Lucent said. We exchanged formal, stilted good-byes, and Mr. Stapleton returned to the house. Mr. Lucent and I watched him go.

  “Who did you think you saw?” I asked when Mr. Stapleton had disappeared into the house and the door had closed behind him.

  “A girl. Fair-haired, wearing a pale blue dress. Very, um, shadowy about the e
yes.”

  “ . . . And do you think it was the curtains?”

  Mr. Lucent said nothing for a long moment, struggling with it. Then he said simply, “No.”

  We returned to the museum in uneasy silence.

  I had dumped the diaries in the corner of my office and forgotten about them. But that passage, that cheap superstitious rubbish about ghosts and mirrors, had reawakened the memories and with them an unhappy curiosity. I put the facts in order, oppressed with fatigue and that faint, peculiar, sourceless fear that wells up after midnight when one is entirely alone. Mildred Truelove Stapleton, her children asserted, had hated the vanity and believed the room in which it stood to be haunted. The vanity had almost killed Miss Stapleton, and both she and Mr. Lucent had seen something, something which they both described as a girl. Mildred Truelove Stapleton had had a sister who had died, and whose books she had kept until the end of her own life. My insomnia insisted there was a connection; my rational mind talked unconvincingly about coincidence and suggestibility. I wished, futilely but fiercely, that Mr. Lucent had taken the diaries himself.

  I finished with the bound miscellany and looked at my watch. It was quarter past one. If there had been the slightest hope that I could have slept, I would have gone home and gladly. But, despite my fatigue, I was incontrovertibly awake; if I left, I knew I would only sit in my apartment and think about the diaries until I returned. Moreover, by that point in my reasoning, my conscience as an archivist had calculated how long those diaries had been sitting in that corner unheeded, and even in the midst of my dread and indecision, I was appalled.

  I cleared off my desk by the simple expedient of adding everything on top of it to one or another of the piles that rendered my office floor all but impassable. I brought the box across to my desk, set it down on the floor, and opened it, taking the diaries out and placing them one by one on the desk. We had never, I remembered, properly inventoried the diaries; Mr. Lucent had only just begun to penetrate past the dates neatly written on their spines when Miss Stapleton had ousted him. That was something I could do—legitimate, purposeful. I got the necessary paraphernalia out of my desk drawer and began.