Lost Among the Living(33)
“Oh, yes.” Martin’s voice was turning hard. “Wilde always did like to pick at her and inspect the pieces. He wanted to know what made Franny tick.”
I watched him carefully, his pain-etched face in the dim light. “And what did you want?” I asked him softly.
“To protect her, of course,” he replied. “I may not have been much of a brother—but I was her brother, wasn’t I? What a failure I made of that. What a failure we all made of giving her any kind of a life. An imaginary dog gave her more comfort than I did—than any of us did.” He turned on his pillow again and looked at me. “I know I said I was glad it’s over, Cousin Jo, but really I’m grateful she’s done with all of this. That she doesn’t have to deal with the sorry lot of us anymore.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said.
“Don’t I?” He closed his eyes. “I’m tired, Cousin. I have to wish you good night.”
When I left the room, I opened the door to find a scattering of leaves, brown and dry, in the hallway. The air was chilled. I stood for a long moment, listening, my heart pounding, my breath shallow in my chest. Finally I stooped and picked up a leaf, running my thumb over its waxy surface. It began to crumble in my hand, releasing the tangy smell of autumn. I was afraid, but I was excited, too, vindicated. Real. The leaves are real. I raised the leaf to my face and inhaled, closing my eyes.
“He didn’t mean it,” I said to the girl who wasn’t there. “He didn’t.”
There was no answer but silence.
I let my hand fall and dropped the leaf. When I opened my eyes again, the leaves were gone—all of them, the ones on the floor, the one I had held and dropped. I still smelled the tang in my nose, but there were no leaves in the hallway at all.
Her delusions became so real after a while.
Why not, after all? I was surrounded by madness. Why not me? Perhaps madness had its uses.
Because Martin had said many things, some of which he would regret. But he had said something that lodged within me, that fit with what I already knew.
He’d said his sister was not suicidal.
I wonder if someone did her in.
And if someone had killed her, there was only one person to find the truth. Me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next time Dottie released me early in the afternoon, I remembered the photographer’s shop in town and Alex’s camera, which I kept packed in its case in my room. I pulled it from the bottom of my trunk and hefted it to the floor, opening the fine leather case and examining the camera inside.
Alex had bought the camera in 1917, while home on leave. It had been, I recalled, a curious purchase. Alex wasn’t a spendthrift; nor was he overly fond of gadgets, though he was excellent at handling them. But the camera had arrived by delivery one day at the Chalcot Road flat, which I had moved into when we married. Alex had seemed almost surprised to see it, as if he’d forgotten he’d ordered it. “I thought we might take a trip to the countryside while I’m home,” he said when I questioned him, buttoning his collar with his long, nimble fingers and reaching for a tie so he could take me out to dinner. “I like the idea of taking my own photographs.”
Our money had been pinched already by then—and I’d been hoping for a child, which would strain it further—but Alex had come home so exhausted, and he bought things so rarely, that I did not argue. I still did not argue when a custom leather case came by delivery the next day; I merely put the two items together and left them where Alex could use them whenever he wished.
I forgot about the camera after that. Having Alex home was intoxicating, and I had room in my mind for little else. His leave was only of two weeks’ duration. How exactly we spent that time, I could not later recall. I only remembered the smell of him, the feel of him, the way he would run his fingers gently through my hair, sometimes rubbing the strands between his fingertips as if reassuring himself I was real. War had changed him; I knew he had seen things he did not talk about, and he often seemed as if something unbearably heavy weighed him down. There were bruises, new and old, beneath his skin, which he claimed came from the juddering discomfort of an airplane—he had gone into RAF training almost immediately upon enlisting. Still, he would trace the back of his finger beneath my jaw or the lobe of my ear, or brush his hand over the back of my neck, even as he read the newspaper and sipped his tea, as if his hands wished to touch my skin of their own accord.
The trip to the countryside never happened. Thinking back on it now, I wondered whether Frances Forsyth was dead even then, whether Alex had been to see Martin in the hospital, or whether those events were still in the future. I no longer knew all the pieces of my husband’s life.
Sometime after Alex had gone back to France, I found the camera and put it away in a closet, unable to look at it. I filled my time with volunteering, rolling bandages and sending care packages to soldiers with the local ladies’ circle as the war rolled on.
Now, four years later at Wych Elm House, I looked closely at the camera for the first time. It was a heavy thing, a thick black box with a handle on the top, a small lens in the front, and an eyepiece in the back. It was encased in dark leather, the texture patterned under my hands, a circled crest with NO. 2 BROWNIE stamped into the leather on the back. A latch at the side seemed to release the front mechanism and swing the camera open, but I did not touch it. Beneath the latch was a knob of silver metal—used, presumably, to advance the film through the chamber while taking photographs.