After Alice Fell(75)

“How did you get out of your room?” My voice slips across the doorjamb.

He doesn’t answer. I hear him breathing, open mouthed. Then he slides a long pin over the jamb. A songbird in blue, tipped with pearls. Alice’s hat pin.

“She taught you.”

“Now you can escape. I’ll be right here.”

We stare at each other. “I don’t know how to pick a lock.”

A floorboard creaks above us. Toby twists to peer in the hall, then scrabbles along the wall, springing open the understairs closet and sidling inside.

Lionel’s feet plod the stairs. He stops at the bottom, taking a step to the dining room, hands curled in the pockets of his dressing gown. The blue silk glimmers in the light. His feet are bare and he curls a toe against the parquet before turning into the parlor and rummaging around for a drink. The hinges of the cabinet protest, then give way. A twist of cork and a glug of liquid to a glass. He must bolt it down, because the glass is refilled once more.

He paces. A minute or ten, I don’t know, but long enough I wonder if he’ll ever leave. But then the glass thuds to the felt on the game table, and he is back again in the entryway. He faces the hall and me and, please God, hasn’t heard a thing.

He rubs his hands over his face, and sighs. “Oh, God,” he mutters. “Oh, Jesus.”

And then he takes the stairs again and shuts the bedroom door.

I wait. Toby waits. The moonlight shifts in the hall until it is a single arc of gray light through the window.

There is a click of a latch. The small door opening. Toby slips out and steals back to me. He kneels to the floor and I follow suit. I slide the hat pin back to him. “Try.”

He scoops it up. I can hear the scratch of the pin against the lock tumblers. Silence when he removes it, and then the scratch as he works the lock again. I run my fingers over the brass plate, with its molded whorls of dandelion stalks and feathery pampas bristles. A Snow & Son original design.

“It’s not the same.” Toby clicks the tip of the pin to the matching plate on his side.

I sit back, push the heels of my palms to my forehead.

Think.

“Toby.” I push myself forward to speak through the keyhole. “Can you hide something for me? In your room.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to give you something.”

“All right.”

I move to the wardrobe, grab out the stocking with the lantern slides, then kneel again to the floor. I press the stocking flat, the tinkling of the glass muted. He can hide them in his room, somewhere behind the books on his shelf.

I roll on my back and stare at the ceiling, pulling the stocking to my stomach and twisting the top. He’s only a child. If she did look—

“Auntie.” His fingers trill the floor, expectant. I touch them with mine, to still them, to feel the warmth. He’s torn the nail on his ring finger.

“Put this to the very back of your toy shelf.” Before I can change my mind, I push the slides to him.

“Why are you in trouble?”

I pause. “I think it’s because the constable came. That made your father angry.” My foot catches on the length of wallpaper coiled to the floor. Above me the plaster gapes and the lath looks like ribs.

“How will I get you out?” he whispers.

I drag in a breath. “Oh, I’ll be out soon, when I’m not in trouble anymore. You’ll be out, too, if you’re a good boy.”

There’s no answer.

“Toby?” I dig into my thigh and peer through the opening. He’s still there. “Toby.”

“They’re going to take you, too, aren’t they?”

“No.”

He sniffs. “I’m scared.” His head disappears from view. The hat pin is pushed back to me, bent at a right angle from his endeavor with the lock. I kneel to look through the lock. He lifts his hand to the balustrade, just able to reach the newel, and I see the weight of this horrible house in the hunch of his shoulders.

“I’m scared too.”





Chapter Thirty


The clink of a teacup wakes me. Then another. A patter of voices and one titter that is certainly not Cathy’s. I roll on my side and stare and listen.

They are in the dining room.

Women.

I sit up in bed. Wait through a bout of dizziness. I appraise the paper I reset to the wall with toothpowder and spit. There is a ragged hole where the hood once was, and nothing I can do to fix it. The chunk that is missing is now stuffed between my arm and the splint. It is a witness. It is a talisman.

The murmurs run in notes high and low and come from the dining room.

“Well, of course we would list all the names.” The voice, watery bright, is followed by a crunch of a biscuit or meringue.

“Of the donors?” Cathy says. She sits at the head of the table. Her voice comes clear through the doorway and is tight with anxiety at this group of visitors she no doubt wished had come last week rather than this.

“Of the dead.” A wiser voice ends with a disapproving hmph and cough.

“Yes. Of course. Of course, the dead.” A clink of a cup to saucer, just a hair too sharp.

“We’re thinking bronze.”

I frown and try to recall the voice. One of the women from the park. Seeking the right spot for the future Statue of the Fallen Soldier. A statue and fountain.