13 Little Blue Envelopes(64)

Now she’s dead.”

Now she had done it. Now she had said it. Now her voice

was starting to crack. Ginny dug her fingers into the blanket.

Keith sighed, then sat down next to her.

“Oh,” he said.

Ginny clenched a fistful of Death Star.

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“All right,” he said. “You can sleep here, but in the morning I’m driving you back to Richard’s. Deal?”

“I guess,” Ginny said. She rolled over toward the back of the sofa and felt Keith’s hand slowly rest on the back of her head and slowly stroke her hair as she broke into sobs.

290





The Green Slippers and the

Lady on the Trapeze

The spare key to Richard’s house was there in the crack of the stair, waiting for her. On the table, there was a note that read: Ginny, If you’re reading this, you’ve come back, and I’m happy about that. Please stay until this evening so that we can talk some more.

“See?” Keith said, spying a loose piece of breakfast cereal and popping it into his mouth. “He knew you’d be back.”

He drifted out of the kitchen and looked around the rest of the house, stopping at the door to Ginny’s room.

“This is my . . .” Ginny began. “My . . . it was my aunt’s room. I know it’s a little . . .”

“You aunt painted all of this?” he said, running his hand along the trail of cartoons that decorated the wall, then stooping to look at the patchwork on the blankets. “It’s bloody amazing.”

“Yeah, well . . . this is what she was like.”

“It looks a bit like Mari’s place,” he said.

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He circled the room, taking in all of the details. He walked over to the Manet poster.

“This is her favorite painting?” he asked.

“She loved it,” Ginny said. “She had a copy of it in her

apartment in New York, too.”

She’d stared at this poster so many times before . . . but like Piet, she’d never noticed much about it. Aunt Peg had

explained it, but she’d never gotten it. Now the girl’s flat expression in the midst of all the activity, all the color . . . it made a lot more sense. It was a lot more tragic. All of that activity in front of her and the girl wasn’t seeing it, wasn’t enjoying it.

“When you look at it,” she said, “you’re standing where the artist is supposed to be. The thing that she loved about it, though, was that nobody ever notices the green slippers in the corner. It’s a reflection of a woman standing on a trapeze, but you can only see her feet. Aunt Peg always wondered about her.

She was always talking about her green slippers. See? Right here.”

Ginny stepped on the bed and poked at the upper left

corner, where the little green slippers dangled their way into the picture. As she touched the poster, she felt a lump under the corner, right where the green slippers were. She ran her fingers along the surface. It was all smooth except for this point. She pulled on the corner. The poster was attached to the wall with sticky blue putty, which gave way easily when Ginny peeled it back. Under the corner, there was a larger lump of this blue stuff.

“What are you doing?” Keith asked.

“Something’s under here.”

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She pulled the entire corner of the poster down. They both stared at the glop of blue putty and the small key that was pressed into it.

The key sat between them on the kitchen table. They’d tried it in all of the door locks to the house. Then they’d looked all through Ginny’s room, trying to find anything that it might fit into. Nothing.

So now there was nothing to do but drink tea and stare at it.

“I should have known to look there,” Ginny said, putting

her chin on the table and getting a close-up view of the crumbs.

“Was there anything in any of the letters telling you to open something?”

“No.”

“Did she ever give you anything else?” Keith asked, flicking the key across the table with his finger. “Besides the letters.”

“Just the bank card.” She reached into her pocket and set the Barclaycard on the table. “It’s useless now. There’s nothing left in the account.”

Keith picked up the card and flicked it to the edge of the table.

“All right,” he said. “What now?”

Ginny thought this one over.

“I guess I should take a bath,” she said.

Richard had anticipated this need as well. Sitting on the floor by the bathroom door were some of his smaller clothes, some running pants and a rugby shirt. She soaked herself until she pruned. She hadn’t had this luxury in a while—really hot water, towels, the time to actually get clean.

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When she emerged, Keith was watching the tiny round window of the under-the-counter washing machine.

“Put your clothes in for a wash,” he said. “They were

disgusting.”

Ginny always thought that the only way of getting clothes clean was by drowning them in scalding water and then

whipping them around in a violent centrifugal motion that caused the entire washing machine to vibrate and the floor to shake. You beat them clean. You made them suffer. This machine used about half a cup of water and was about as violent as a toaster, plus it stopped every few minutes, as if it were exhausted from the effort of turning itself.