Norma dropped the paintings onto the floor and walked over them. The glass crunched, her neck cracked, and the guilty feeling for having forgotten to put the pictures in the casket moved to her hair. She grabbed a pair of scissors off her mother’s shelf, and after snipping off the guilt, began flipping through the biographies of Elizabeth Siddal and Rossetti’s other muses. The cutting would help for a while—she was calmer now, and her hands were steady again. She couldn’t think of a better place to look for clues than in these books and paintings. The model for Ophelia and Regina Cordium, Elizabeth Siddal, was her mother’s favorite muse. She was the angel of the Pre-Raphaelites whose face and stately shock of hair everyone has seen on a card, on a poster, or in a book, yet her secret had remained hidden. She’d been just like Norma.
Elizabeth’s husband, the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, opened his wife’s grave six years after her fatal overdose of laudanum. Rossetti wanted to retrieve the collection of poetry he’d buried with her while playing the romantic mourning widower. His career had been in a downturn at the time, and the buried verses were exactly what he needed to elevate his star again. Norma easily found the section in Siddal’s biography since the page was dog-eared. No message, no picture, not even any underlining. The same thing repeated in the other books about Siddal. A folded page or a bookmark but nothing else.
Elizabeth Siddal’s story had shaken all the self-destructiveness out of Norma. It made her understand that accidents and suicides weren’t for their kind, not even in the deepest moments of despair, because when Rossetti opened the coffin, Elizabeth’s copper locks had cascaded out. Unlike the collection of poetry, they had withstood the ravages of time. Completely uncorrupted, they had filled the casket. If Norma died under conditions that left her body for someone else to find, the same thing would happen to her. What followed would be blaring headlines, paparazzi crawling through the windows, and the gawking doctors who had reduced the mystery of bearded women to hypotrichosis and a genetic defect. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to be cut up in a laboratory. That was why she always carried a small piece of paper with instructions to contact Anita Ross immediately if anything happened to her. That was why she kept her apartment tidy, to allow for surprise visits by the building superintendent or the police. The building was scheduled for window renovation, but that kind of traffic through her apartment didn’t worry Norma. Her home gave no indication that anyone out of the ordinary lived there.
—
Her mother’s bookshelves yielded no results. Norma grew bored and decided to continue later. The wave in her ends was either from her fascinating new relative or from the construction worker banging around the building. She glanced around the apartment, where everything looked normal, then went to collect the hair she’d left on the bathroom floor. As she slipped her feet back into her ballet flats, her gaze landed on a pile of newspapers. A moment passed before she realized the papers were untouched. Her mother hadn’t put her deliveries on hold during her trip to Thailand as she usually did. The only papers and magazines in the “read” basket were from Margit, from the weeks after the funeral. Norma’s mother had been a systematic person; the objects on the shelves, on the tables, and in the cabinets were arranged by height or in symmetrical patterns, and she never left the day’s newspaper unread. Norma had been looking in the wrong place again. She should be looking for flaws, not for a message. Flaws like a pile of unread newspapers.
Her mother’s mail consisted mostly of bills and advertisements. None of this told Norma anything, and she decided to start over from the beginning. She would go through her mother’s purse one more time, without the surge of emotion from before. Back at her own apartment, she spread the contents of the purse on the floor and carefully examined the pens, receipts, and business cards. Nothing jumped out at her until she picked up the keys. There were two key chains. One had a house key, the other a small pendant that read “Attic,” with Elizabeth Siddal’s picture as Ophelia. Her mother’s storage locker in the attic was number twenty—the same as her apartment—but the number written on the reverse of the Ophelia pendant was twelve. Norma hadn’t been up to the attic storage area for years—she didn’t store her own things and couldn’t remember her mother ever taking anything there. The key hooks in her mother’s entryway held a slew of less commonly used keys, including the key to locker number twenty.
—
The attic fire door was hard to open. The sun had made the whole floor hot, and the rafters shimmered. At first Norma thought she felt faint from the heat or from the air oxidized by rat poison and dust, but then she realized she was wrong. A familiar smell wafted through the chicken wire enclosures and grew stronger as she approached storage locker number twelve.
Behind a jumble of junk was a box with an unmistakable scent. Still, Norma hoped she was mistaken, hoping so hard she forgot to breathe.
She moved the box out to the middle of the walkway.
It was full of her hair, all bundled neatly.
The family meeting would be pure hell. Marion prayed that her name wouldn’t be on the list. Over the past few weeks, Lambert had been assembling all his enemies—potential, imaginary, or real—and it was a long list, still growing, which he kept concealed from view in his breast pocket.
“What if we’re looking in the wrong direction?” Lambert said. “What if Anita wanted to take revenge on me? Was it really a coincidence that she ran into you in Kuopio, Alvar?”
The glowering furrow of Lambert’s brow deepened. He grabbed a strawberry out of the bowl and pulled the stem off so violently that it crushed the berry. In addition to mapping out their ongoing turf war, today’s agenda was also supposed to include the Nigerian water bottle factory and preparations for a trip to Vietnam, but Lambert spoke of nothing but Anita. Alvar poured a cup of coffee and tried to steer the discussion back on track. They had to get a sense for the overall picture instead of allowing Lambert to lead them toward paranoia. Anita was just one pawn.
“Anita wouldn’t be able to cover her tracks this professionally. Not alone,” Alla pointed out.
“And Anita wouldn’t have harbored a grudge for thirty years, not even on Helena’s behalf,” Alvar continued.
“Wouldn’t she?” Lambert said. “Are you sure Anita didn’t want to finish what Helena failed at? That woman wormed herself in here on purpose. What could this be about if not revenge?”
“Dad,” Alvar said, “someone got to Anita and made her infiltrate our ranks. We have to find that someone.”
Lambert pulled out his list again. Apparently he’d thought of a new name who might be carrying a grudge. Someone who would be ready to make an alliance with Anita or hire her to do his dirty work and dig into the clan’s secrets.
“Dad, we’re at war. Remember?”
Alvar spread out his own list on the table, this one of all the organization’s employees. He would go through the entire staff himself. Somewhere there was a leak. Someone had told Anita that she should go to the closed ward of that clinic in Bangkok.
“Who did Anita give the camera to?” Alvar asked.
Marion’s hand went to her right pocket again, the one where she’d kept the burner phone she and Anita used to communicate. They had called it their “project phone.” But the pocket was empty. Marion had destroyed it immediately after Anita’s death. She had no one to talk to, and no one to ask for advice.
—
Marion focused on massaging Ljuba’s scalp and staring at the wood grain of the sauna walls. Lambert had exploded over her nonexistent results until Alvar encouraged their father to focus on more important things. Dad—Alvar used that word skillfully, deliberately. That was why he received bonuses, like his villa. One of his bonuses had certainly been that they hired Anita after he brought her in, or maybe that was in recompense for Albino. No one reproached Alvar for anything. Or Alla, even though Ukraine was her responsibility.
Only Marion was blamed for mistakes, always Marion, and now she was sent away fro
m the table whenever the discussion turned to future strategies. She was good enough to treat Ljuba’s hair, nothing more.
Upstairs Lambert’s fist pounded the table again. Ljuba flinched and raised a hand to her belly. No one in the neighborhood wondered about the Russian nanny. But soon her pregnancy would show, and Ljuba would have to leave. The parents of the child she was carrying were getting divorced, and neither wanted children anymore. In all likelihood the baby would be dropped off at a St. Petersburg orphanage, or maybe Alla had found a buyer for it. Marion and Ljuba were equally as dispensable when they became dead weight.
“Everything is fine,” Marion said. “It just might not turn out that way for us.”
Ljuba returned Marion’s smile without understanding a word. If they had a common language, Marion would try to get Ljuba to talk about what Alla and Lambert discussed in private, but now all she could do was apply dye to Ljuba’s hair and a relaxing mask to her face, then point to the clock to indicate how long the treatment would take.
—
From the bar cabinet in the sauna lounge, Marion chose a thirty-year-old Highland Park, Lambert’s most expensive bottle, which had been a gift from a grateful customer of the agency, and poured glasses for herself and Ljuba. The map was still above the cabinet, and the growing number of pushpins in its surface told of the progress of Lambert and Alla’s world conquest. Silver pins for hair wholesale, colored for the agency, each year with its own color. Ten colors. There was one red pin. Thailand. That was where it all started. Lambert had realized the country was full of illegal Vietnamese immigrants, who were poor, easy, cheap. The next year the operation expanded to Vietnam itself, which quickly became Lambert’s favorite child, and a blue pin appeared on the map.
The clan had good relationships with local producers. Just one farm delivered fifty to sixty tons of raw hair to the Chinese hair factories—the hair moguls became millionaires, and 80 percent of the population of the surrounding villages supported themselves selling hair. The only problem was that hair grew slower than demand. Once all the village women had been sheared, the boys had to make increasingly long motorcycle journeys to far-flung areas. Russia and Ukraine—Alla’s territories—were marked with green pins. Then they had expanded into Georgia. After that office opened, agency revenue exploded. They’d also succeeded in landing American customers through Mexico. Americans had begun to stream into Cancún from any state where the laws were difficult, or just looking for cheaper prices. Clients also flooded in from Scandinavia, Great Britain, Australia, and now Japan.
The pin in Nigeria might be removed once this meeting was over. They’d already decided to pull out of the country, but then Anita and her magical skeins of hair appeared. That shook up everything, and Lambert decided to give the country one more chance because their hair industry was growing by leaps and bounds. Marion could guess what Lambert was saying upstairs. He would compare Nigeria to Thailand and Georgia and Ukraine and Russia. Each area had its own difficulties, but challenges were meant to be conquered. Cowards might shit their pants and accept defeat without complaint, but Lambert never did.
—
Marion shouldn’t have taken a picture of the map and shown it to Anita. The scope of the clan’s operation had come as a shock to Anita, and after she recovered, she became reckless. There were only two days remaining of the week Lambert had given Marion, and the girl still hadn’t responded to any of her messages. In two days, the clan would proceed by its own methods.
When the scopolamine patches eased the nausea and Norma could stand steadily again, Eva’s blue eyes seemed to follow her. The contents of the boxes of hair still covered the living room floor, but the bundles no longer writhed like a nest of snakes, and the air from the open window had dissipated their concentrated smell. In the middle of the bundles rested Eva’s picture. Her poise was majestic, and she eyed Norma reproachfully like a mother with a tantruming child, her mouth pursed like the bud of a rose. Norma pressed a hand to her solar plexus. Restless hoofbeats pounded her chest: There’s someone besides me. You are like me. Eva seemed to shake her head. The most important thing now was to figure out what Norma’s mother had gotten her involved in. Eva’s business could wait.
In the attic locker she had found two boxes. One was overflowing with hair, and the other contained miscellaneous papers. Eva’s pictures lay on top. One of them was the postcard Antero had sent from America. The stack also included the photo Norma’s mother had found in Stockholm of Eva as an adelita. The face was missing. It had been used as a graphic for a book named Confessions of Rapunzel, and Norma’s mother had printed the cover.
Norma gathered the pile of papers in her lap, closed the living room door to keep the stench of hair in one room, and spread the collection on the entryway rug. It was comprised of old newspaper clippings, notes written in an unfamiliar hand, black and white photos of women with long tresses, Sutherland sisters hair elixir advertisements, a few English-language articles about Nigerian baby farms, hotel brochures from Tbilisi and Cancún, and a relatively recent article from the Helsingin Sanomat monthly insert about a couple who rented a uterus in St. Petersburg. An article about Victorian wet nurses who had turned out to be the worst serial killers in history had been read carefully. It contained notes from two different pens, one in handwriting that wasn’t Norma’s mother’s: exclamation points, angry underlining, and circled words. The article about Dr. Conde’s baby farm had been ripped in two and taped back together. A New York society lady revealed in an interview in 1921 that all three of her daughters were adopted. Her husband hadn’t known a thing about it. Ultimately the woman came forward out of a desire to proclaim to all the world the good tidings of motherhood made possible by adoption. Taken together, the collection made no sense, but the hair in the other box did.
—
Norma remembered clearly the evening preceding her mother’s vacation. She had already packed and came to cut Norma’s hair before going to sleep. She fretted over the single strands of gray as she plucked them out. There was no indication that she was in an abnormal frame of mind or excessively worried. Her mother had been in a good mood and seemed to look forward to her vacation. She had filled Norma’s pill dispenser and reminded her not to forget to take her vitamin supplements every day. She harped on the dangers of osteoporosis, possible blood vessel issues, and all that yet again. She was only a mother thinking of what was best for her daughter, and her words left a guilty feeling in Norma’s chest.
Nutritional supplements and sample packages had begun appearing in the house as soon as Norma’s mother started at Shear Magic. In her opinion, the possibility of a slight increase in hair growth was a small price to pay for better health. Norma would have more energy, the gray hairs would disappear completely, and her nails would grow normally. Reassured by her mother, Norma began popping pills of trace elements. The spice shelf grew crowded with bottles of orthosilicic acid, lycopene, sea protein, and horsetail capsules. One morning Norma found a pill dispenser filled with manganese, copper, calcium, zinc, and folic acid on the table. Her hair continued to gray, but her hangnails disappeared.
The employee benefits at the salon might explain the easy and inexpensive access to hair nutrient products but not the steak that started showing up on the table in the middle of the week. While before they mostly ate tenderloin only on holidays, that spring they began roasting it on Wednesdays and weekends. Norma remembered the plastic bag from the market, the receipt at the bottom she’d found and was using to write her own shopping list, when she noticed the total on the reverse side. At first she thought it must have belonged to someone else. However, the items on the receipt matched the contents of the refrigerator—ingredients for that week’s dinners—so she asked whether her mother had scratched a winning lottery ticket without telling her. Her mother replied that her pay was better than at the post office, and she’d been working long days at the salon. But her income couldn’t be high enough to explain a vacation to Thailand or the trip t
o Africa early the previous winter. Her mother had also visited Georgia just before Easter. Where had the money for all that come from? Norma hadn’t thought about it at the time. Instead she spent their evenings together lamenting her own troubles, complaining about her gray hairs, which had begun to appear during the labor negotiations at work, and devouring the beef without a thought for the cost.
—
When Norma looked at the remnants of the boxes she had torn open, it was clear that her mother had been going through her garbage.
Washing hadn’t completely removed the smell of coffee grounds, composting avocado pits, and banana peels from the bundles of hair. The artificial briskness of shampoo hanging over them only made the smell worse. Airing out the apartment would take at least a day. The bundles were packed in cellophane with gold elastics holding them closed. The crackling of the packets was like birthday presents.
The careful sorting of loose hairs told its own story: at first her mother had bunched them together any old way but then later realized the value of virgin Remy quality hair. It was the best, the most expensive, and it required cutting the whole bundle of hair in the direction of growth. The early bundles weren’t Remy, but the more recent ones were. Norma remembered the moment when her mother had started cutting her hair a new way, putting it up in a ponytail first. According to her mother, it made tidying up easier.
When the wind chimes jingled, Marion nearly dropped the extension iron. She counted to ten, letting the wave of relief fade, and suggested to the client that they take a break. Once the woman in her cape rustled out to the smoking spot in the backyard, Marion approached the girl and extended her hand.
“We didn’t have a chance to talk at the funeral,” Marion said.
The girl was frozen at the threshold, shifting her weight uneasily from one foot to the other. The rough skin of her palm was clammy, the bones clearly visible, and her grip was weak. Sunglasses concealed her eyes, and her nose twitched like that of an animal. She seemed on the verge of tears.