The Other Mrs.(45)

I’m stricken with two things: disappointment, for one, that Otto would disobey me and come into the attic when I said not to. But also relief that Otto is drawing again, the first step, perhaps, in a return to normalcy.

Maybe Will is right. Maybe if we give it time, we can find happiness here.

I make my way to the sheets of paper. They’re on the floor. The window is open an inch, crisp December air coming in, making the paper move. I bend at the knees to retrieve it, expecting to see the big anime eyes of Asa and Ken staring back at me. The characters from Otto’s graphic novel, his work-in-progress. The barbed lines of hair, the sad, disproportionate eyes.

The pencil, sitting inches from the paper, is cracked in half. The end of it is worn down and blunt, which isn’t like Otto. He’s always taken such great care of these pencils. I reach for that, too, and stand upright, before looking at the image before me. When I do, I gasp, a hand going involuntarily to my mouth.

It’s not Asa and Ken I see.

Instead angry, incomplete lines that stop and go. Something dismembered on the page, a body, I assume. A round object at the end of the sheet that I take for a head; the long, limb-like shapes for arms and legs. At the top of the drawing are stars, a crescent-shaped moon. Night. There’s another figure on the page, a woman, by the looks of it, from the long scraggly hair, the lines that jut out of her circular head. In her hand, she holds something with a keen edge that drips with something else, blood, I can only assume, though the drawing is in black and white. No telling red. The eyes of this figure are mad, while the decapitated head nearby cries, big shaded blobs of tears that tear a hole in the page.

I suck in my breath and hold it there. A pain settles in my chest. My arms and legs go momentarily numb.

The same image is replicated on all three sheets of paper. There’s nothing different about them, nothing that I can see.

The drawings are Otto’s, I tell myself at first because Otto is the artist in the family. The only one of us who draws.

But this is far too primitive, far too rudimentary to be Otto’s. Otto can draw much better than this.

But Tate is a happy boy. An obedient boy. He wouldn’t have come into the attic if I told him not to. And besides, Tate doesn’t draw such violent, murderous images. He could never visualize such things, much less depict them on paper. Tate doesn’t know what murder is. He doesn’t know that people die.

I go back to Otto.

These drawings belong to Otto.

Unless, I think, drawing in a deep breath and holding it there, they belong to Imogen? Because Imogen is an angry girl. Imogen knows what murder is; she knows that people die. She’s seen it with her own eyes. But what would she be doing with Otto’s pencils and paper?

I close the window and turn my back to it. There’s a vintage dollhouse on the opposite wall. It catches my eye. I first found it the same day we arrived, thinking it might have belonged to Imogen when she was a child. It’s a charming green cottage with four rooms, an expansive attic, a slender staircase running up the center of it. The details of it are impeccable. Miniature window boxes and curtains, tiny lamps and chandeliers, bedding, a parlor table, even a green doghouse to match the home, complete with a miniature dog. That first day, I dusted the house out of respect for Alice, laid the family in their beds to sleep until there might be grandchildren to play with it. It wasn’t the type of thing Tate would use.

I go to it now, certain I’ll find the family fast asleep where I left them. Except that I don’t. Because someone has been up here in the attic, coloring pictures, opening windows, meddling with things. Because things in the dollhouse are not how I put them.

Inside the dollhouse, I see that the little girl has risen from bed. She no longer lies in the second-floor bedroom’s canopy bed but is on the floor of the room. The father is no longer in his bed either; he’s disappeared. I glance around, finding him nowhere. Only the mother is there, sleeping soundly in the sleigh bed on the first floor.

At the foot of the bed lies a miniature knife, no bigger than the pad of a thumb.

There’s a box beside the dollhouse, chock-full of accessories. The lid of it is closed, but the latch is unfastened. I open it up and have a look, searching inside the box for the father, but finding him nowhere. I give up my search.

I pull the string and the attic goes black.

As I travel down the steps with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, it dawns on me: the house is quiet. Imogen has turned her offensive music off. When I reach the second-story landing, I see her standing in her doorway, backlit by the bedroom light.

Her eyes are accusatory. She doesn’t ask, and yet I read it in her expression. She wants to know what I was doing in the attic. “There was a light on,” I explain, waiting a beat before I ask, “Was it you? Were you up there, Imogen?”

She snorts. “You’re an idiot if you think I’d ever go back up there,” she says.

I mull that over. She could be lying. Imogen strikes me as a masterful liar.

She leans against the door frame, crosses her arms.

“Do you know, Sadie,” she says, looking pleased with herself, and I realize that she’s never called me by name before, “what a person looks like when they die?”

Suffice to say, I do. I’ve seen plenty of fatalities in my life.

But the question, on Imogen’s tongue, leaves me at a loss for words.

Imogen doesn’t want an answer. It’s for shock value; she’s trying to intimidate me. She goes on to describe in disturbing detail the way Alice looked the day she found her, hanging in the attic from a rope. Imogen had been at school that day. She took the ferry home as usual, came into a quiet house to discover what Alice had done.