The Last Time I Lied(69)

In the bottom drawer, I find a wooden box. It’s just like the one Vivian showed me during our outing to the other side of the lake, only better preserved. Same size. Same surprising heft. Even the initials carved into the lid are the same.

CC

Charles Cutler.

The name slips into my head without warning or effort. One look at those initials and it’s right there, summoned at will. I lift the box from its hiding place and carefully turn it over. On the bottom are four familiar words.

Property of Peaceful Valley.

I turn the box back over and open it, revealing a green velvet interior. Nestled inside are photographs.

Old ones.

Of women in gray with long hair draped down their backs.

Each one assumes the same pose as Eleanor Auburn, minus the clutched hairbrush.

This is where Vivian got that picture. I’m certain of it. It’s merely one of what appears to be two dozen. I sort through them, unnerved by their uniformity. Same clothes. Same bare-wall background. Same eyes made dark by despair and hopelessness.

Just like the one of Eleanor, the back of each photo has been marked with a name.

Henrietta Golden. Lucille Tawny. Anya Flaxen.

These women were patients at Peaceful Valley. The unfortunates whom Charles Cutler rescued from squalid, crowded asylums and brought to Peaceful Valley. Only I have a gnawing suspicion his intentions weren’t so noble. A chill settles over me, increasing with every name I read until I’m practically numb.

Auburn. Golden. Tawny. Flaxen.

Those aren’t last names.

They’re hair colors.

I’m struck by a dozen different thoughts, all clashing together in my brain. Scissors in that crumbling box. The broken-glass sound they made when Vivian turned it over. Watching Allison’s mother in that guilt-inducing production of Sweeney Todd. A character sent to bedlam, at the mercy of wardens who sold their hair to wigmakers.

That’s what Charles Cutler was doing. It explains these women’s long locks and why their last names went unwritten, as if the only important aspect of their identity was the color of their hair.

It makes me wonder if any of them knew the purpose they served. That they weren’t patients but commodities, ones who surely saw none of the money Charles Cutler received from wigmakers. The idea is so distractingly sad that I don’t realize someone has entered the Lodge until a voice rings out from the entrance hall.

“Hello?”

I drop the photos back into the box and quickly replace the lid. The motion sets the charms on my bracelet clicking. I press my wrist against my stomach to silence them.

“Is someone in here?” the voice calls.

“I am,” I say, hoping it will cover the sound of me closing the desk drawer. “Emma Davis.”

Springing to my feet behind the desk, I find Lottie in the doorway. She’s surprised to see me. The feeling is mutual.

“I’m charging my phone. Mindy told me I could do it here if I needed to.”

“You’re lucky Franny’s not here to see you. She’s a stickler about such things.” Lottie sneaks a glance behind her, making sure Franny is indeed elsewhere. Then she creeps into the room with a conspiratorial gleam in her eyes. “It’s a silly rule if you ask me. I warned her that girls are different now than they were back then. Always glued to their phones. But she insisted. You know how stubborn she can be.”

Lottie joins me at the desk, and for a heart-stopping second, I think she knows what I’ve been doing. I brace myself for questions, perhaps a thinly veiled threat similar to the one Franny offered this morning. Instead, she focuses on the framed photographs cramming the wall behind the desk. They seem to have been placed there in no discernible order. Color photos mingle with black-and-white ones, forming a wall-size collage of images. I spot a grainy picture of an imposing man in front of what I presume to be Lake Midnight. A date has been hastily scrawled in the picture’s lower right corner: 1903.

“That’s Franny’s grandfather,” Lottie says. “Buchanan Harris himself.”

He has a hugeness so many important men of that age possessed. Big shoulders. Big belly. Big, ruddy cheeks. He looks like the kind of man who could make a fortune stripping the land of its trees and then spend that money creating a lake just for his personal enjoyment.

Lottie points to a birdlike woman also in the photo. She has big eyes and Kewpie doll lips and is dwarfed by her husband. “Franny’s grandmother.”

“I heard she drowned,” I say.

“Childbirth,” Lottie replies. “It was Franny’s husband who drowned.”

“How did it happen?”

“The drowning? That was before my time. What I heard is that Franny and Douglas went for a late-night swim together like they did every day. Nothing strange about that. Only on that particular night, Franny came back alone. She was hysterical. Carrying on about how Douglas went under and never came back up. That she searched and searched but couldn’t find him. They all went out in boats to look for him. His body wasn’t found until the next morning. Washed up on shore. The poor man. This place certainly has seen its fair share of tragedy.”

Lottie moves on to another black-and-white one showing a young girl leaning against a tree, a pair of binoculars around her neck. Clearly Franny. Below it is another photo of her, also taken at the lake, rendered in the garish colors of Kodachrome. She’s a few years older in this one, standing on the Lodge’s deck, her back turned to the water. Another girl stands beside her, smiling.