I stare at the theatrical poster and try to think about Tom Quinn instead of Nat Loomis. I picture a dashing dark-haired man performing amazing feats of magic on the stage. Then I start to write. I rewrite the séance scene, hinting that it’s Tom—Master of Disappearances—who shoots the arrow through Frank Campbell’s heart.
I’m so engrossed in my writing that when I look up from my laptop and out the window, I see that the last light is fading in the western sky. The clock on my screen reads 4:00—only another hour of quiet hours. Up until now the phrase has sounded like an admonishment from the ghost of some mad librarian, but today those hours have stolen past me so stealthily that I imagine them personified as Greek goddesses—like the Muses or the Graces: The Quiet Hours, barefoot girls in white dresses dancing around me in a sacred circle. I can almost hear them padding softly by my door . . .
I close my laptop and listen, then move to the door. Someone is walking by. I swing open the door and surprise Bethesda Graham walking barefoot down the hall in pajamas, cradling a blue-and-white teacup, which slips from her hands at the sound of my door opening.
“Shit,” Bethesda says, moving back from the splash of hot water and stepping on a piece of broken china with a sickening crunch.
“Your foot! God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“You could have fooled me. You swung that door open like the cuckolded husband in a bad French farce.”
“Can I get you a Band-Aid?”
“I’ve got some in my room.” Bethesda hops forward and nearly falls, but I grab hold of her arm and steady her.
“Let me at least help you to your room.”
Although she’s light, I have a hard time getting Bethesda down the hall because of the disparity in our heights and because she’s such an unwilling cripple. Instead of leaning on my arm, she alternately pulls on it and lurches away from it. By the time I lower her onto her unmade bed, my back aches and I feel as if I’ve pulled a muscle in my shoulder.
“The Band-Aids are in the desk drawer—do you mind?” Bethesda says, propping her foot on the opposite knee and leaning over to examine her wound.
Going to look for the Band-Aid, I can’t help but notice the change in Bethesda’s desk since I was last here. If my muses are a circle of barefoot girls, Bethesda’s muse must be the goddess Kali dancing her dance of destruction. The stacks of books and papers have careened into one another like a stack of cards that’s been shuffled, forming a mound several feet high and covering the entire surface of the desk. The chaos, like an overfertilized houseplant, has sent runners up the muslin curtains, where the number of notes and documents has doubled in the last three days. Turning to Bethesda, I see that she’s taken one of the pearl-tipped pins off the sleeve of her shirt (not a pajama top, as I first thought, but an oversized man’s dress shirt worn over thermal gray leggings) and is using it to pry a splinter of china out of her heel.
“Can I help?” I ask, bringing the package of Band-Aids to Bethesda.
She shakes her head and continues digging into her flesh, impassive as a surgeon. I can’t help thinking of the cutting reviews that Bethesda is famous for and the dissection of lives that she practices in her biographies. I look from the slight figure with pale skin and shadowed eyes back to the monument to research she’s erected on her desk. It’s bigger than she is.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Bethesda looks up. “Okay, but if you’re going to interrogate me, you might as well be holding the implement of torture.” She hands me the pin. “My eyesight is shot.”
I pull the desk chair over to the edge of the bed and bend over Bethesda’s foot. A half-inch-long blue splinter is wedged into the heel, the skin of which is surprisingly soft and uncalloused. I press my fingernail into the skin just below the point of the splinter and slip the pin under the skin. This is something I’m actually quite good at—something Mira taught me.
“Did you tell Diana Tate that you saw me in the garden with a woman in white?” I ask as I scoop the pin under the splinter.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. A woman in white? Are we in a Wilkie Collins novel now— Hey, you got it!”
I hold up the sliver and hand it to Bethesda along with the pin. “My mother is sort of like a character from Wilkie Collins,” I say. “That’s who it was. She paid me a surprise visit. Diana Tate said a guest—a female guest—saw us from her window.”
Bethesda laughs. “That’s one of Diana’s tricks. When she has a complaint, she always pretends that it originated with another guest.”
I’m tempted not to believe her, but then I take another glance at her desk and realize that it couldn’t have been Bethesda who saw me—at least not from her room. “I’m sorry,” I say, looking toward her desk. “Of course it wasn’t you. You can’t have opened those drapes for weeks.”
Bethesda follows my gaze to the pinned drapes and turns pink. “I suppose that looks like the work of a madwoman.”
“Then I guess we’re all mad. I’ve been sticking notes up all over, too. I just tacked an old theater poster to my window frame—”
“A theater poster?”
“I found one that lists Tom Quinn on it as a magician. It made me think he might have been the one behind the effects in the first séance.”
“You think he was Corinth’s accomplice?”
“Well, maybe,” I say, oddly uncomfortable with the notion of Tom as accomplice—it somehow doesn’t feel right—but then something else occurs to me. “Maybe he was working for Milo Latham.”
“Hm,” Bethesda says, with a look of grudging admiration, “you might have something there. After all, Milo was having an affair with Corinth—” Bethesda stops when she sees the surprise in my face and smiles—glad, I think—that I haven’t figured out everything, after all. “You didn’t know?”
I shake my head. “Did Aurora know?”
“Oh, yes, she mentions it in her journal. Let me see, I’ve got the reference here somewhere . . .” Bethesda goes to her desk and rummages through a stack of papers, some slipping loose from the piles and drifting to the floor. “Here it is. She wrote, ‘Today the medium arrived at Bosco. She is pretty in a common way, but I don’t quite see what Milo sees in her.’ ”
“But I thought Aurora herself invited Corinth Blackwell to Bosco.”
“Yes, she did. That’s what makes it so poignant. Aurora was so desperate—foolishly desperate—to contact her lost children that she was willing to undergo the humiliation of entertaining her husband’s mistress under her own roof.” Bethesda sighs and shakes her head. “Here, I want to show you something.” She gets up and goes to her closet. I’m expecting her to produce some document proving her point, but instead she comes back with socks and a pair of green rubber boots, which she proceeds to put on over her leggings.
“Come on, you can wear one of my sweaters,” she says, pulling on a white fisherman’s knit sweater and handing an almost identical one to me. “It’s cold outside.”
“But where are we going?” I ask.
“To the children’s cemetery.”
We go out the side door on the western end of the house and down a narrow path that leads directly to the ilex grove on the second terrace. No wonder she always beat me to it after breakfast; she had a shortcut.
Bethesda pauses in the center of the clearing as if listening for something. At first all I hear is the wind sifting through the underbrush, rattling bare branches and sweeping dried pine needles along the marble terraces, but then I hear a voice so faint I’m not sure whether it’s real until I recognize it as Zalman Bronsky’s.
“When water’s heart is silver, it will beat,” he recites, “so silently it can’t be found through sound.” The two lines, repeated, grow fainter until the words can’t be made out but the cadence remains, like the garden’s pulse.
“Where is he?” I ask.
Bethesda shrugs. “He’s probably on one of the hidden paths that Aurora had carved out of
the hedges. The whole hillside is really a maze. I was sitting here a few weeks ago reading one of Aurora’s journals, and I came across a reference to ‘the white-blazed path to the children’s cemetery’ and I happened to look down and notice this—” Bethesda kneels at the edge of the circle directly across from the marble bench and pushes away a vine to reveal a round white stone nestled in a bed of dried pine needles like an egg in a bird’s nest.
“These are all over the house,” I say, kneeling beside Bethesda, “in the library and on Diana Tate’s desk—I even found a few in my room.” I don’t mention that David Fox has a dozen of them in his room, because I don’t want Bethesda to know I’ve been there.
“The children collected them on hiking trips up at the Lathams’ summer camp. They’re from a river gorge in the mountains where they were rounded and smoothed by the water.” Bethesda picks up the stone and holds it, one hand over the other like a child trapping a firefly, and then passes it to me. It fits perfectly in the palm of my hand and feels cool. Holding it is like cupping water. I pass the stone back to Bethesda, who replaces it on its nest of pine needles as carefully as if it really were an egg. “She used them because the children were so fond of them.” She gets up, brushing gold pine needles from her legs, and sweeps aside a curtain of vines that hangs over an opening between two ilex trees. “Come on.”
I follow her onto the narrow path, but when I try to straighten up as Bethesda has done, my head hits the branches of the ilex trees, which have twisted into a low canopy above the path. Even when I crouch, the prickly ilex leaves catch at my hair. It’s all I can do to keep Bethesda in sight as we wind our way down the steep hill passing from the ilex grove into the maze of overgrown box hedges. Fortunately, Bethesda’s white sweater stands out against the dark green hedges even as the light fades in the sky above us and the path grows dark. I can also see the white stones that mark the path whenever another path crosses over it—at least most of the time. Some of the crossroads are unmarked, their stone markers either sunken into the brush or picked up as souvenirs by previous houseguests. Bethesda, though, appears to know exactly where she’s going, and she also seems to be in a rush to get there, not sparing a look back to see if I’m keeping up. In fact, I can’t help wondering if this isn’t some nasty trick Bethesda has cooked up to get back at me for that afternoon in Nat’s room. Maybe she plans to lead me into the dense underbrush of Bosco and abandon me.
The idea makes my skin prickle with shame. It’s like high school all over again, when my classmates would draw pentagrams on my locker. It was after I’d transferred from the local Lily Dale school (where half the children had parents who were psychics) to a magnet school with a gifted program. No matter how hard I had tried to blend in—ditching Mira’s organic lunches and saving my babysitting money to buy clothes at the mall to replace Mira’s hand-sewn tunics and peasant dresses—I had been a pariah. It wasn’t until college and writing classes, where an eccentric background was deemed an asset, that I began to make friends. Now I feel I’m back where I started: the butt of a practical joke.
The path levels off and I guess that we’ve passed the giardino segreto and are behind the rose garden. Thick thorny rose branches reach up through the hedges, the dead roses and rose hips rustling in the wind with a dry papery whisper that sounds like the whisper of witch I’d hear as I walked to my table in the school cafeteria. I swipe angrily at my face, and my hands come away sticky. I’ve walked through a spiderweb and a strand of the sticky silk has gotten in my mouth. I stop and spit and rub at my face with the rough sleeve of my sweater. When I lift my head up, the hedges ahead have closed around me; there’s no sign of Bethesda or the path.
“Okay,” I say out loud, “I’ll just go back, then.” But when I turn, I see that the path behind me is barely discernible in the gloom and that it divides in two not far from where I stand. There is, though, something white snagged on a rose thorn in the hedges on one of the paths—a scrap of wool maybe from either my sweater or Bethesda’s—which would tell me which path we came on. As I reach my hand into the hedge, I’m suddenly visited by an image from my dream—the white-blazed trail of flesh—and as I touch the scrap of white, I know immediately that it’s not wool or cloth but some kind of skin. As much as I want to draw back my hand in horror, I don’t. I extract the scrap from its nest of thorns and watch as it uncrumples into the shape of a hand.
A glove. Made of the palest green leather and lined with spotted yellow silk. I turn back the hem and read the label—Latham’s Gloves—and then look more closely at the lining. What I thought was a pattern in the silk is really a stain of some sort—red wine, maybe, or blood. A shallow pocket has been sewn between the silk and the leather.
“There you are! I thought I’d lost you.” It’s Bethesda, right behind me on the path. “I passed the entrance to the cemetery, but I see that you found it.” She brushes past and, pushing back a curving branch of dried roses that clatter like hanging beads, steps into a round clearing encircled by tall cypresses and filled with the white round stones—or at least so I think until I step into the circle myself (carefully folding the glove and tucking it into the back pocket of my jeans) and look down at one of the stones to see that it’s actually a grave marker inscribed with a name and a date. James Latham, March 3, 1879. The single date of birth and death telling his whole story: a stillborn child. Spinning in a slow circle, I see that the sunken gravestones spiral out from the center, a tightly coiled snake burrowed in a nest of the same black-leafed shrub that grows in the rose garden, and that there are nearly a dozen of them.
Bethesda leads me on a tour of Aurora’s lost children, walking between the stones and pointing down at each one as though she were naming flowers in an exotic nursery. “This was the first Cynthia,” she says, pointing to a stone that’s sunk so deep into the black ground cover that it’s like looking down into a miniature well. “She only lived a week. And here are James number one and James number two, both dead before their first birthdays.”
“My God, I had no idea. I knew she lost the three children and then Alice—”
“Those were the only children who lived past infancy. She had four stillbirths and three children who died of ‘crib death,’ as they called it in those days. After she lost the third child, she wrote in her journal”—Bethesda stops and, tilting her head, squints up toward the sky as if listening for the approach of a winged messenger—“ ‘I have begged my husband to release me from this torture chamber of procreation.’ Then Milo would go off to the city and his women and leave her alone for a while, but as soon as he came back . . .” Bethesda’s voice trails off and she holds both hands out at her sides, palms up. Standing in the middle of the cypress-ringed circle in her long, white voluminous sweater, she looks like a figure from a Greek tragedy, standing alone on the stage after five acts of unspeakable carnage. “Imagine what it was like to lose this many children! Can you blame her for doing anything—even suffering the humiliation of harboring her husband’s mistress under her own roof—to contact their spirits?”
I can’t think of an answer. Instead, I scan the circle of cypresses and notice a broken marble column lying beneath one. “What’s that?” I ask, walking toward the column.
“I don’t know,” Bethesda says, joining me at the edge of the circle. “I hadn’t noticed it before.” I pull back a cypress branch, uncovering a hollow in the greenery, like a cave that’s been carved out of the trees. The trunks of these trees, though, are dappled white and green, almost like the bark of a sycamore, although they’re much too slim and low to be sycamore. Moving closer, I can see that they’re actually marble columns that have been covered in vines and lichen, holding up a low triangular pediment.
“Maybe it’s a crypt,” Bethesda says, kneeling between the two columns. “Look, there are stairs going underground. In her journals Aurora refers to ‘the well of sorrows that lies beneath the garden and inside the pit of my soul.’ I’m going to see what’s down there,” she says,
getting to her feet and starting down the marble steps.
“Be careful,” I call after her. I hope Bethesda doesn’t think I’m going down there. On the last step that the light reaches, though, she turns around to see if I’m following and I start to tell her that I’ll wait up here, but no sound comes out of my mouth. A form is emerging out of the darkness, just below where Bethesda is standing.
When I call out to warn Bethesda, she wheels around and loses her balance on the slippery marble, falling to the bottom of the stairwell along with whoever, or whatever, had been coming up out of the crypt, both figures disappearing into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs.
I take one look behind me, hoping that someone working in the garden may have heard my scream, but there’s nothing in the circle but the silent white gravestones. Then I plunge down the stairs. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light, and then I make out a raised circular well in the middle of the floor and beneath it two figures lying on the floor, one whose legs are skewed at such an unnatural angle that my stomach clenches. But then I realize that one of the figures on the floor is a broken statue, the other is Zalman Bronsky, one leg bent at an angle that’s almost as painful looking as the statue’s. Bethesda is crouched by his side, her ear pressed to his chest. “Is he—?”
“He’s breathing,” Bethesda says, “but he’s unconscious. I think he’s broken his leg and hit his head. We’ll never get him up the hill on our own. You’ve got to go get Nat and David.”
“But I don’t know the way.”
“Just follow the white stones,” she says. I’m about to ask why doesn’t she go, but Bethesda snaps, “Well, don’t just stand there! The man could die while you dawdle.” Her voice is so coldly dictatorial it propels me right out of the crypt. I cross the circle of white stones and duck under the arch of dead rose vines onto the narrow path. I turn toward the house and see again that there are two paths, both going uphill, and no white stone to tell me which way to go. I know that if I keep going uphill I’ll eventually find my way to the house, but I also know that every minute I waste might prove fatal to Zalman.