Lost Among the Living(53)

The wind blew against the panes of the window. My nose and cheeks grew cold, and even my closed eyelids felt chilled. When I rolled over on the damp mattress, my hand touched something under the blanket next to me.

I jerked upward, coming awake. Whatever it was had been tucked into the bed with me, resting almost against my body. The bedroom door was closed; nothing else in the room had been disturbed. I swallowed and pulled back the cover.

It was a book. A large, flat book, the hard cover gleaming in the moonlight through the window. I touched it tentatively, found the texture of the paper rough. The pages inside were thick, some of them warped, so the top cover did not sit exactly level. I scooted over on the bed, turned on the bedside lamp, and opened it.

From the first page, I knew it was a girl’s sketchbook. The subjects were domestic: a vase of flowers, leaves on a checked tablecloth, a cat in the old stables behind the house. There was a profile of Dottie, her head bent over her work at the library desk, and another of Martin in his war uniform. All of them were detailed and clearly rendered, as if the artist had taken the time to catch every detail.

I turned the pages. There was a portrait of Wych Elm House, taken from the woods. Another of the vista that rolled down from the edge of the woods to the village, where I could see the spire of the church and smoke rising from some of the chimneys. I pictured Frances—for this was most certainly her work—sitting on the stile in the lane I’d passed only that day, perched for hours, drawing and drawing until her hands cramped and her feet lost all feeling. I could see it so clearly in that moment, it was as if I’d seen her again.

I tilted the page with the sketch of the village toward the light, looking more closely. From behind the hedgerow leading to the village she’d drawn a shadow, stretching long and dark, that did not fit with the rest of the scene. A man, perhaps? Or something else? I turned back the page to the picture of the house again and looked at it, too, under the light. There was a shadow breaking away from the main shadow of the house, difficult to see at first glance. And in an upper window, on the third floor, was the shadow of a face in the smudges of pencil, two deep-set black holes of eyes in a white oval.

She complained of a face that would appear at that very window. A man begging her to let him in.

It watches me.

Was it a man? It was impossible to tell. Was this the face Frances had seen in her nightmares, one of the many faces she claimed wouldn’t leave her alone?

Strangely excited, I leafed through all the pages of the sketchbook. Some of the pictures had shadows in them; some did not. The drawing of Wych Elm House was the only one that featured a face. Some of the book’s pages had been torn out, the jagged edges visible in the spine of the bound book. From outside my window, the dog with the low, throaty voice barked until the sound trailed off in a whining growl.

I slid my feet over the edge of the bed and opened the drawer in the nightstand, where I’d put the photographs I’d taken from Frances’s room. I picked the photo of Fran and Martin standing in front of Wych Elm House. Then I turned the sketchbook to the drawing of the house and placed it side by side with the photograph under the light.

It was there, in the photograph—the same shadow in the upper window, behind the children. Two pinpoints of black in a larger shape. I hadn’t seen it before, or perhaps I’d assumed it a natural shadow in the window glass. But now, putting the sketch next to the photograph, I could see what it was.

It watches me.

“Frances,” I said softly into the darkness, “is this what you want me to see?”

There was no answer.

I gently closed the book, placed it reverently on the table with the photograph inside, and turned out the light again.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO



“Are you all right?”

It was February 1918, and I was standing in Victoria Station, seeing my husband off after his final leave. He had been home for three weeks—longer than I had expected, longer than he’d ever been home before. And now he was leaving again.

I gripped his sleeve with my gloved hand. “I’ll be just fine,” I said.

“You look frozen solid.”

“No, no.”

It had snowed the night before, and London was deep in slush, the rims of it icy on the pavements and in the gutters. Filthy half-frozen snow had been tracked through Victoria Station by thousands of hurried feet and continued to be tracked in by thousands more. I wore my thickest shoes, my heaviest coat and gloves, but still I could not get warm. I felt the muscles between my shoulder blades contract in a convulsive shiver, but I fought it down. A headache was making its way up the back of my neck and over the top of my skull.

“Look,” Alex said, “you needn’t come farther. We can say our farewells here.”

I gripped his sleeve harder and looked up into his face. “No.”

He looked down at me, and those extraordinary eyes softened beneath the brim of his handsome, sharp cap. “The train leaves in fifteen minutes, Jo.”

“Fifteen minutes, then. We should keep moving. You’re going to be late.”

He looked into my face a moment longer; then he turned away and led me through the crowd. I followed with my arm entwined with his, staring at the line of his shoulder, the weave of his wool coat. I had done this before, seen him off on leave. This was always the worst, these last moments, in the middle of a crowd, wanting to say everything and nothing at once. It was an experience so painful one’s mind suppressed it, like the death of a loved one or the agony of childbirth. Yet there was no avoiding it. I would not say good-bye at home and let him walk away without me any more than I could detach my own limbs from my body and let them walk out the door.