Lost Among the Living(45)

If someone had killed Frances, making it appear like she’d jumped, the first place I could think of to find evidence of it was somewhere in this room.

I was brisk and quiet, trying my best not to disturb anything. I searched the bed, including under the pillows and under the bed itself. I searched the wardrobe, running my hands along the insides, brushing the pockets of Frances’s few dresses—she’d been tiny and slender at age fifteen—and going through her drawers, lifting neat stacks of her underthings and letting my fingertips trace the bottoms and the sides. I searched the closet, which was nearly empty but for cold-weather coats and a few rows of shoes. I folded back the corner of the rug, got on my knees and peered beneath the dresser, looked carefully into the recessed window seat. My final stop was the bookshelf, where I even removed each book and shook it, looking for a clue to fall out.

Dottie had said that Frances liked to sketch; it was odd that the shelf contained no sketchbook. But when I pulled out a book called World Atlas for Girls, a folded packet was revealed on the shelf, tied with a faded ivory ribbon. I held the slim packet in my palm and tugged on the ribbon, revealing a small stack of photographs.

The first photograph was of a baby, dressed in a plush, frilly dress, sitting up and staring with baffled solemnity into the camera. Even in infancy, I recognized Frances. I turned over the photograph to find a single sentence written on the back in a blocky hand, the pencil nearly too faint to read:

Do you love her?

Frowning, I looked at the next picture. It showed Frances again, aged perhaps three, holding the hand of her brother. Martin was around nine, wearing trousers and a jacket. They were on the front lawn, Wych Elm House behind them, Martin squinting into the sunlight, Fran staring into the camera, clutching hard on her brother’s hand. It was a picture like any of thousands of others—the impatient boy, holding his little sister’s hand for a portrait in the bright sunlight. But I turned the picture over and saw words scrawled in the same faint pencil on the back:

It watches me

I turned the picture over again. Who had written these? It must have been Frances—but what did she think was watching her?

I was moving the picture aside to look at the one beneath it when the lamp behind me went out, then turned on again.

I froze. There was a breath of something cold on my back—a draft of icy air, as if a window were open. To my left, the wardrobe door creaked shut with a gentle snick.

Panic rooted me still for a long moment; I could feel my pulse pounding in my fingertips where they held the pictures. I swallowed thickly and turned around. I just had time to see the room was empty when the lamp went out again, the click making me jump as if it were a gunshot, and it stayed out this time, leaving me in the dark.

I blinked, my eyes watering, and focused on the square of the open bedroom doorway in front of me. It was just lighter than the blackness of the bedroom, gray with ambient moonlight in the hallway. I stepped toward it, my only thought now to leave. I placed one foot cautiously before me in the dark, then another, hoping not to stumble.

I had come closer to the door, my gaze fixed unwaveringly on its square of cloudy light, when a figure crossed the doorway from right to left, swift and silent.

I froze in shock. I knew that figure; I recognized it. The dress, the pinned-up hair, the high forehead. Frances Forsyth had just walked past the doorway on her way down the hall.

I could not go back—to stay in the room was unthinkable. What if the bedroom door was the next to close? Panic pushed me forward, propelled me in its icy grip to the doorway, though my mind rebelled at coming any closer to the figure I’d seen. The air grew colder as I advanced, and when I reached the corridor, I saw that the door to the service stairs hung open and the cold wind was blowing down from the entrance to the roof.

She had gone there, then. For a moment I pictured it—Frances, standing on the small landing on the house’s top gable, the place where she had died. She would cut a lonely figure, standing stark against the cold dark of the night. Would anyone be able to see her but me?

I fled down the corridor, making my footsteps as soft as I could, as if the dead girl could hear me. I was on the landing leading to my room before I realized I was still holding the photographs. I had turned to the third picture, but I hadn’t looked at it. I looked at it now and stopped, a soft sob of agony in my throat.

It was the picture from my London flat—the one Alex had seen when he’d come to my place that fateful day, the one of me posed for Mother’s artist friends in nothing but a draped Greek chiton. I had last seen it when I’d packed it in my trunk on my way to the Continent. As far as I knew until this moment, it was in that trunk still.

I turned it over. On the back was a now-familiar lettering in pencil.

Where is your Mother?

I put the photographs in my pocket quickly, unable to look anymore. That picture had come to this house when I did—and yet I had found it on Frances’s bookshelf, tied with a ribbon, inscribed with a message. It was tangible, real.

From downstairs, I heard voices—the Forsyth family had finished dinner and were going their separate ways. I listened as one door closed and then another. When I heard Martin’s steps slowly ascending the stairs, heading for his bedroom, I went into my room and closed the door.

But for Frances, I was alone.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN



Robert was right about one thing: Something had Dottie excited. It wasn’t just the fact that she sold two paintings over the next few days—at a considerable profit, as I was in a position to know—though that was part of it. “You see, Manders,” she said pointedly as she entered the amounts in her massive, detailed accounts book, “this is the benefit of a little avarice.”