The Magnolia Palace(21)
She glanced out the window again. As much as she’d like to return home, she couldn’t imagine flights were taking off in this weather. In fact, she wondered if the train would make it out to Newport. Storms like this occurred so infrequently in Britain, she was unsure of how it all worked here. Americans most likely soldiered through regardless of the weather, as the models had earlier. That stupid, snowy caper had been ridiculous.
But was Veronica willing to put her plan for Polly in jeopardy over one lousy photographer? Sabrina would be terribly disappointed as well. Veronica let out a long breath. No, instead, she’d go down and talk to Barnaby, try to reason with him, and get him to agree to a fresh start in Newport. It was the grown-up thing to do.
She gave one last look at that unnerving portrait of the little girl on the wall and walked out.
As she rounded the corner, the high-pitched squeals of the other models rang up the stairwell. They were on their way back upstairs. For all of Veronica’s earlier swagger, she wasn’t ready to see the other girls yet, to have them regard her as if she were some kind of madwoman. Instead, she ducked through the nearest open door and closed it softly behind her.
She was standing in a small vestibule that opened off to the left into a larger room that was filled with strange shiny tubes. She put down her suitcases and walked farther inside.
The tubes must be the pipes for the organ in the stairwell. During her family’s few pilgrimages to the local parish, Veronica had stared up at the pipes that rose behind the church organ and wondered how the sound traveled from the keyboard, if there wasn’t someone back there blowing into them to make them work.
A narrow walkway cut through the maze of tubes, and she wandered through as carefully as she could toward a small window on the far side of the room, which looked to the north but didn’t have much of a view.
The girls’ voices had dissipated. They would need some time to change out of their clothes and pack up, so for now the coast was clear. Veronica was heading back to the vestibule to collect her suitcases when her right heel unexpectedly skidded along the floor and she lost her balance, stumbling backward. She fell hard on her bottom, breaking some of the impact with her palms. How pathetic. She had no right being a model if she couldn’t even put one foot in front of the other without ending up in a heap.
She sat for a moment, legs out in front of her, and rubbed her stinging palms together. As she braced herself to stand back up, a flash of white caught her eye. Deep within the forest of organ pipes lay what looked to be a small pile of papers. They were slightly curled at the edges, and reminded her of the love letters her mother had stashed in a box at the back of a hall closet after her father’s death. She reached in, sliding her fingers between the cold metal until she could grasp them, and slowly pulled them out.
The pages were covered in dust, and she sneezed twice. Sitting cross-legged, she gently fanned them to one side to shake off the residue. What a strange place for old papers. Maybe it was the instruction manual for the organ.
But it wasn’t. Each page contained some kind of odd poem, written with a fountain pen in an old-fashioned calligraphy. They were numbered, and filled with strange references to pillars of salt, marriage caskets, seascapes. You’re halfway to the end of the course of clues, read one.
A series of clues. The very first one had a date on it: November 1919.
When she and Polly were young, they’d entertain themselves with scavenger hunts on rainy days when they couldn’t go out in the garden. Or rather, Veronica entertained Polly. She’d rummage through their toy chest and pick out the smaller items, like a penny whistle, or a tiny doll, and make drawings of what they were and where they were—a doll holding a biscuit to indicate the biscuit jar, for example. Then she’d hide them about the house and watch with glee as Polly tried to locate each one. Whenever her sister found one, she’d throw her head back and make her happy sound, which always made Veronica burst into laughter as well.
She couldn’t remember the last time they’d done the treasure hunt—it must have been years ago. As they’d grown older, the toys were donated to the Salvation Army, and the silly games died out.
Veronica read through the clues, one by one, until the sound of a grandfather clock chiming deep in the house broke her out of her spell. How long had she been sitting there? She had to get downstairs, join the group, and try to make it up to Barnaby on the long train ride north.
The archivist from earlier might find these papers interesting; she’d hand them over before they left. She tucked the clues into the big pocket at the front of her sweater to free up her hands and stood carefully, wary of falling a second time. Her suitcases and small suede purse sat in the vestibule to the organ room where she’d left them, and before she headed down to the main floor, she opened up the purse to check for her train ticket.
It wasn’t there. Dread coursed through her like venom from a snakebite, making her feel shaky and faint. In her mind’s eye, she could picture it sitting on the bureau in the upstairs bedroom, after she’d dumped out the contents of her purse in a frenzy to find tissues. Clearly, the ticket hadn’t made it back inside.
Lugging her suitcases, she rushed down the hall and took a wrong turn, unsure which direction she was facing. Through trial and error, she finally found the room tucked off the back hallway. The ticket lay on the rug, where it had fallen.
She scooped it up and was turning to leave when the lights suddenly went out.