Yes, someone from Aunt Helen’s dark and mysterious past—that made sense. But why would anyone want to murder her? And why now?
“What did he look like?” Chief Inspector Daniels asked Mother, a question I wondered at his not asking before this.
“He was the biggest man I’d ever seen,” Mother said with a shudder. “He was incredibly tall, he had red hair, he was hideous. Oh, God.” Fear entered her eyes. “What if he comes back?”
Chief Inspector Daniels hastily assured her that this was unlikely, as the house was now full of people, many of whom were officers of the law.
Mother abruptly turned her gaze on my father, anger filling her eyes. “Where were you today?” she demanded. “Why weren’t you here?” Then her gaze shifted to me, her eyes only slightly less angry. “Where were you?”
That accusatory gaze, that question: it would echo in me for the rest of my life.
A madman could subdue two women easily enough with the threat of a knife. But a madman, even a monster, could not have succeeded had there been four of us there.
Of course the police did search the neighborhood for the man, but he wasn’t found. And they asked the servants, the servants who had paraded by our door as Mother stood talking to the strange man, but none of them had noticed him—they had been too busy thinking on the seriousness of their purpose. Nor did any of the others at the fire, including my father, remember such a man—again, they had been too busy trying to put the flames out.
And the only other witness—Aunt Helen—wasn’t talking.
• Twenty-four •
It was difficult to believe that our home had been the site of a great party less than twenty-four hours before. People had laughed, eaten, danced, drank—some of us had even kissed. Those had been other people. It had been another world.
My father had said that Mr. Carson would need to spend some of his tightly held fortune to repair their ruined home. Well, it would take a lot more than money to repair the one room that had been damaged in ours. Once the police had completed their investigations there, once my aunt’s lifeless body had been taken away for further investigation—a process none of us could bear to watch—my father ordered the back parlor boarded up. Scrub away the stains on the chairs, floor, and walls? Spend money on new furnishings? I doubted enough scrubbing could be done, nor enough money spent to persuade me to ever set foot in that room again. If the room could have been cut neatly away from the rest of the house, like a gangrenous limb sawed off a wounded soldier, it would have suited me perfectly well.
The remainder of that dark day passed in a fog, prelude to a more proper mourning. Mother at last was permitted to change out of her blood-spattered dress, giving it to the police as yet more evidence. A servant from the Carson household, unaware as to what had passed in our household, came with a message of thanks from the Carsons for all the help my father and our servants had provided, further informing my father that the Carsons would be moving to their other home in the country until the one here could be rebuilt—as if any of us cared about that right now. As for the Tylers, they stayed on until late in the afternoon, seeking to distract us from the reminding sounds of policemen scurrying hither and yon, providing comfort when necessary, providing silence when that became even more necessary, urging us all to eat at least a little something. But none of us could eat. Food? Sustenance? What was that now?
Knowing that Kit was in the house did help. From reading books, I knew that some people run from tragedy, fearing that proximity could invite it to spread into contagion, while others race toward it, not from any noble feeling but rather with the joy-tinged excitement of one watching a play enacted upon the stage—it is not real if it is not happening to you.
But there is also a third kind of person who sticks to tragedy in order to see if they can genuinely help, the impulse coming from a generosity of spirit combined with an empathic nature that immediately recognizes that if they were to ever find themselves in such straits, this is how they would like the world around them to respond.
Kit belonged to this last group; I think that all the Tylers did, and for this I was grateful.
And yet, I could not keep Kit in my thoughts for very long. I had always been the kind of girl who could think of two things simultaneously: I could hold down my end of a spirited conversation with my father about literature, while planning how best to beat Kit at chess the next time we should meet; I could read a book, taking in the words on the page, while at the same time working through another problem in my mind entirely. But now there were too many things crowding that mind—my shock and sadness about my aunt, my concern for Mother and my relief at her survival, followed hard by my guilt at having wished my aunt the dead one so that Mother might live, not to mention my crushing guilt at having been away from home when the madman came to call. There simply was not any room left for one more thing.
Eventually, as day turned into evening and then night, like spectral figures fading one by one from a house they had mistakenly been haunting, everyone disappeared. The last to go out the door was Kit.
And then we three were alone.
. . . . .
My father cleared his throat.
“Aliese?”
She did not look up at the sound of her own name. So deep was her shock, there had been moments scattered throughout the day where it seemed she did not even know where she was, who she was. She would alternate between offering the Tylers a drink—as if this were an ordinary social occasion!—with these moments of distant staring.
“Mother.” I touched her sleeve. “Father is talking to you.”
At last she looked up at him, but she did not speak.
“Perhaps we should all go up to bed?” he suggested, adding with a bluff assurance, “Sleep, time—that is what we all need right now.”
But even then I sensed that for once my father was wrong about something.
Time could not heal all wounds.
Time, which had already played such a dreadful trick on us—what if we had all stayed home that day? Could what had happened still have happened?—would never heal this.
. . . . .
Alone in my room at last, I was finally able to let grief overwhelm me. Lying on my bed, still fully clothed, I cried as I had never cried before or since.
No one in my world had ever died before. True, Mother’s mother had died, but I was small then, and she was not someone in my daily orbit. But this? It was as though one of the stars had been ripped from Orion’s belt. The sky would never look the same again.
I now knew that I could lose things—people—in a way that I had not known that fact the day before. When Kit caught the typhoid, I had worried, daily, that he might die. But I had never really believed in that possibility, not really, nor had I understood what such a fact would mean.
And now I did.
Sobs racked my body, sobs like giant waves assaulting a beach with so much force they would reset the shoreline, sobs so big it reached the point where I thought they would rend my body in two. And still I could not stop. I did not want to stop, for if I stopped, it would be as though I were saying that already the loss meant a little less this minute than it had meant the moment before.
The thing that finally did put an end to my loud show of grief?
The thought entering my brain that I might be so loud I would further disturb Mother. For this, I felt, I had no right.
Biting on to my own hand to keep the sounds from coming out of my body, in the sudden stillness of my room, against that backdrop of silence I could now discern the noises of someone abruptly moving about on the floor above me.
Impatiently brushing away the tears from my face, I rose, went up to investigate.
My parents’ bedroom door was shut, but at the end of the hall—in what had formerly been my aunt’s room—the door was open, a lamp was lit, the light mockingly blazing good cheer after the gloom of my bedroom.
I blinked against its glare, trying to make sense of wh
at I was seeing.
The woman, dressing gown sashed tightly at the waist, was moving briskly from bed to wardrobe, tossing dresses into boxes that were scattered haphazardly there. The frenzy of activity created the impression of a woman packing for a trip she’d only just been notified she would be taking. Looking at that golden swirl of hair, the hair having been let down for the night, for one moment—for one brief, glorious moment—I believed that I had been granted my earlier wish, that the events of the day had been erased, rendered a bad dream; I believed that I was looking at Aunt Helen again.
Of course I was not.
“I don’t understand why your mother feels the need to do this right now.”
I turned at the sound of the voice, almost a whisper, saw my father seated in a chair in the corner of the room, legs crossed. He, too, wore his dressing gown.
Mother continued with her movements to and fro, seemingly oblivious of being talked about.
“What is she doing?” I whispered back.
I don’t know why I whispered, save that he had done so and it seemed like the proper thing to do, as though we were witnesses to some solemn church service or a one-character scene from a play upon the stage.
“She is packing her sister’s things away,” he said.
“I am not packing them away!” Mother paused long enough to spit out the words with heat. “I am boxing them up. Then I want them all burned.”
“But surely, Aliese, this can wait until morning? Or even another day?”
She did not respond. Instead, she returned to yanking dresses from the wardrobe, tossing them at the boxes on the bed.
“Your mother is not herself.” Wearily, my father rose, placed a hand on my shoulder. “Perhaps you will have better luck at talking some sense into her. I fear that if she goes on like this, she will make herself sick.”
And then he was gone.
This was the first time Mother and I had been alone together since I had come upon her and my aunt in the back parlor.
I sat on the edge of the bed, unsure of what to do. Sadness? Tears? I would have known what to do with those things. I would have held Mother in my arms as though she were the child and I the parent, stroking her hair until there were no tears left to cry. But this? This barely coiled anger of hers? I had no prescription for it. I had never seen Mother like this before.
And then it struck me: As devastated as I was by what had happened, how much worse it must be for Mother. I had lost an aunt. But she had lost a sister, and not just any sister—an identical twin! Surely it must be a loss beyond what anyone who was not a twin could understand. The surviving twin, she must feel incomplete. No. More—it was almost as if Mother had died herself.
Now I felt I could fathom her anger. A grief as enormous as hers must be, were she to cry, she really would never stop. And yet the depth of emotion must come out somehow, and so it came out as this. If she could stay angry forever, she would never have to be sad again. There would be no need to accept what had happened.
Still, I could see that my father was right. If Mother kept on at this rate, she would wear herself out. And she would need her strength for what was yet to come: the funeral, seeing her twin put in the ground.
“Will you sit with me, Mother?” I asked softly. “Just for a moment?”
I did not think she would stop for me, her movements had been that hurried, but it was as though my words had let the wind out of her sails as she settled into port, on the edge of the bed beside me.
Reaching out a hand, she tucked a stray hair behind my ear; with a finger, traced the trail of an earlier tear down my cheek.
Then she looked into my eyes as though really seeing me there for the first time.
“You really did love your aunt, didn’t you, Lucy?” she said with wonder in her voice.
“Of course I did! Did you ever doubt that?”
“Maybe once.” She smiled an odd smile, neither happy nor sad. “When your aunt Martha tried to convince us all that you were secretly jealous of her, I thought perhaps she was right. I thought perhaps you wished she had never come.”
“No!” I said. “I was glad when she came! And I am … I am”—I closed my eyes against the threat of more tears—“I am sorry that she is gone now.”
I opened my eyes at the feel of Mother’s fingers beneath my chin, tilting my head upward to face her.
“I suppose,” she said, “that is as it should be.”
Then she rose, returned briskly to her earlier task.
“Father is right,” I said, hoping to stop her. Something about the way she was immediately dismantling Aunt Helen’s presence from the room—it was unsettling. “This can wait until morning or another day. I will even help you when the time comes.”
“No, Lucy.” This time, she took the briefest of moments to fold the dress in her arms before dropping it into a box. “I feel I must finish this tonight.”
“But don’t you want to keep any of it? You and Aunt Helen used to trade clothes so often. Wouldn’t you like to keep a few things to remember her by?”
“Only this,” she said, removing an item from the very back of the wardrobe and showing it to me.
It was the drab gray dress, the one that Aunt Helen had been wearing when first she came to us. I was surprised Aunt Helen had kept it all this time.
“This is the only reminder I need,” Mother said, folding the tattered garment with great gentleness over her arm before regarding the boxes on the bed, a hardness settling over her expression as she added, “The rest will burn.”
. . . . .
Much later—Mother having since returned to her room and I to mine—I crept back up the stairs to the third story, crept past my parents’ closed door to Aunt Helen’s open one at the end of the hallway. I was not sure exactly what I sought: some sort of answer, perhaps? Some clue as to why this awful thing had happened? Maybe I just wanted a few moments alone in the room, surrounded by the scent of her that yet lingered faintly on the air before it disappeared forever.
As I tiptoed into the room, candle in hand, I saw that the doors of the wardrobe were still flung open, and that’s when I saw that Mother had left something behind: Aunt Helen’s old carpetbag.
I placed my candle in a wall sconce and lifted the carpetbag with great care as though it were some precious and irreplaceable relic destined for the museum. As I set it down on the bed, I felt something shift within it. Opening the carpetbag, I reached inside and extracted a slim volume. It was crude: tattered boards for covers, the pages protruding beyond the borders of the covers as though they’d come loose from the binding, the whole held together with a piece of graying string.
What manner of book was this?
I undid the knot, peeled away the front cover, and saw that I was holding a diary.
Aunt Helen’s diary.
My heart began to beat faster with excitement. Aunt Helen had kept a diary! Perhaps there were answers here. Perhaps I would discover the identity of the monster, maybe even uncover a motive.
The scrawled handwriting on the first several pages was as childish as I remembered it from when Aunt Helen first came to us. She had obviously started keeping the diary not many days before she knocked on our door, for the first pages were all filled with her fears and hopes over the prospect of finally meeting her twin. It made my heart ache to see that childish scrawl, those poorly formed letters and poorly spelled words, made my heart ache further still when I came across her impressions upon first meeting me: she had liked me right away, considered me her one true ally here.
Oh, Aunt Helen!
I brushed tears from my eyes and read on, saw the penmanship transform itself, improving as the pages flew past until I reached the entry that had been written on the morning after the joint birthday celebration she’d had with Mother, and I saw that Aunt Helen’s handwriting was now indistinguishable from that of her twin. I turned the page, saw nothing. Flipped through the remainder of the diary with increasing speed: more nothing. I
t was as though, having achieved some sort of imperceptible goal, Aunt Helen had lost the need to record her story.
Immediately, all the excitement I’d felt earlier left me. There had been no mention of people from her past, no mention of monsters. There would be no answers tonight.
Still, after placing the carpetbag back on the floor of the wardrobe, I clutched the diary to my chest. I would take it back to my room, hide it away in my own wardrobe. It had been important to Aunt Helen to keep this diary, despite that it revealed little of import, and so from now on I would keep it for her.
Taking my candle again, I exited the room.
It was as I was creeping past my parents’ door that I heard Mother cry out: the sound of someone waking from a nightmare only to discover that the nightmare yet went on.
“The blood!” I heard her cry. “All that blood!”
“There, there, Aliese,” I heard my father’s more muffled voice soothing her. “It will be all right.”
“But what if he comes back?”
“It will be all right.”
“The blood! Did you see it all?”
Unwilling to eavesdrop any longer on Mother’s pain and my father’s inadequate efforts to comfort her—how could there ever be enough comfort in the world after such a thing?—I tiptoed on.
There were, I was certain now, more nightmares in our future.
. . . . .
At breakfast the next morning we were no more hungry than we had been the night before.
Everything—toast, eggs, even tea—sat untouched.
Another thing had not changed: Mother’s barely contained anger.
“I wish,” she informed my father, “that when Helen’s body is returned to us, she should lie in state in the ballroom for two days before the funeral.”
“Well”—my father stumbled over his words—“that is not the usual … that is to say …”
I knew what he meant. Aunt Helen having been neither the master nor the mistress of the household, it would be peculiar to accord her such an honor now.
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