Lost Among the Living(38)

I put my hand to the striped wallpaper, steadying myself. I could see a faint strip of light between the edge of the door and the doorframe. It hadn’t been there before; the door had been closed and locked, silent. The creak came again.

I stepped softly on the flowered carpet, holding my breath, as the sound came again, furtive. With a chilled hand, I pushed open the door.

It was a girl’s room. A pretty wooden dresser, painted white, against one wall; a matching wardrobe; a bed covered in linens the soft green of new leaves, a canopy above it; a window seat furnished with pillows, much like the window seat in my own room. The curtains on the window were drawn back, tied neatly, showing the blank black square of night outside. A bookshelf, crowded and scuffed, adorned the far wall. A single lamp, barely throwing light past its own circle, was turned on, casting a glow beneath its china shade. In the middle of the room stood a wooden rocking chair, the source of the creaking noise. In the rocking chair sat Dottie.

She was angled away from me, so I could see only the neat twist of her hair on the back of her head, the line of her neck and shoulders, and a glimpse of her ear and jaw, the same way I’d seen the ghost of her dead daughter. She wore the same dress she’d worn all day, of soft, expensive wool, its color drained to gray in the weak light. She did not turn to look at me. As I watched, the image of Frances overlapped with the image of her, her feet in their practical oxfords pressed to the floor, and the chair rocked slowly, back and forward again.

“You have never been in this room, have you?” she said.

I swallowed. “No.”

“Do you see any chains?”

I blinked, recalled the rumors in town about how mad Frances Forsyth had been kept under lock and key. “No,” I said again.

Dottie nodded. “I couldn’t bear to get rid of her things,” she said. “Pack them up as if she’d never been. I left the house instead. I haven’t been in this room since she died.”

I stepped farther inside, circling Dottie until I could see her face. It was half in shadow, her expression subdued, though her lips formed a tight line. Her hands curled over the arms of the rocking chair. She was looking straight ahead, into her own thoughts, and not at me.

“It’s a pretty room,” I offered.

Dottie was silent for a long moment. Her gaze traveled to the bed, with its untouched cover. “Frances was a difficult girl from the day she was born,” she said. “Even as a baby, she fought me. The nannies I hired quit—they said she was unmanageable. I ended up caring for her myself.”

I held my breath, listening.

“She had imaginary playmates,” Dottie said. “All children do. I’d overhear her, alone in this room, talking quietly. I’d think she was talking to her dolls, but she never was. She never played with her dolls at all. I’d always find her sitting on her bed or in the middle of the floor, alone.” Dottie paused for a moment. “When she was six, she began to speak of—things she was seeing. Faces. Voices she heard in her mind. She complained of a face that would appear at that very window, over there.” She pointed briefly to the window with its furnished window seat.

“A face?” I asked.

“A man,” Dottie said. “With a white face and black, deep-set eyes. He’d appear at night, begging her to let him in. There is no way anyone could stand at that window—it’s three stories from the ground—but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t sleep. And one night we heard a crash and a scream. I found Frances crouched by the wall, just there, her hands cut and running with blood. She’d tried to smash the window, telling the man to go away.”

I stood silently, picturing it.

“It got worse,” Dottie continued. “I had doctors come, but they were fools. They told me she’d be better off in a hospital, just because she saw faces and heard voices. A hospital!” For the first time, Dottie looked at me, and her eyes were like small, hot coals. “Do you have any idea what can happen to a little girl in a place like that?”

A chill went down my spine as I thought of the hospitals I’d toured while looking for somewhere to put Mother. I could guess very well.

“Robert wanted her to go to boarding school,” Dottie said. “I fought it, but he said I was being overprotective. Frances wasn’t stupid, and given the opportunity, she could learn as well as any other child. And finally I gave in.” She took a breath, and I realized she was quietly furious. “It didn’t stop the visions—her letters told me there were ghosts. A girl at her bedside, a dead girl in the pond. She didn’t fit in, of course—she had no hope to. The other girls showed her no mercy. They smelled blood, as girls will. They teased her, played tricks on her, put terrible things in her bed. I wanted to remove her, but Robert said no. He said she had to wait it out, that the girls would eventually leave her alone.”

I walked to the bookshelves and glanced over them, unable to observe Dottie’s pain anymore. I saw books of nursery rhymes, fairy tales—the books any girl would own. I ran my fingers gently over the spines. This room looked so much like a normal girl’s room, like a living girl’s room. I’d never had a room like this one, and if someone had given it to me, I would have thought I was in a dream. “What happened?” I asked.

Dottie’s voice was brisk, hard. “They chose a cold night and locked her alone in the school’s bell tower. But first they took away all of her clothes.”