The reading of Roland Ashford's will took place in a back parlor of the Wren Pryce Law Office on a Tuesday morning in October, when the mountains had already burned off their overnight fog and the courthouse square smelled of wet pavement and exhaust. Eleanor Voss sat on a leather chair that had been repaired so many times its surface resembled a topographical map, and she watched the rain begin again against the window, each drop catching the light before it slid down the glass.
Harlan Pryce stood at the credenza, adjusting his spectacles with the slow deliberation of a man who had performed this exact gesture several thousand times. His suit, a charcoal two-piece that had gone slightly green with age, hung from his thin frame like a curtain. He cleared his throat, twice, and then opened a leather portfolio stamped with the seal of the Commonwealth.
"Ladies," he said, though Eleanor was the only lady in the room. "Gentlemen."
Felix Crane, perched on the edge of a straight-backed chair near the door, glanced up from the leather satchel in his lap and offered a nervous half-smile. He was perhaps thirty, with the rumpled look of someone who had packed in a hurry and then repacked twice. His spectacles sat slightly crooked on his nose. He had a habit of tugging at his cuffs when uncertain, which he did now.
"You weren't expecting me, I don't think," Felix said, more to himself than to the room.
"Mr. Crane is here as a representative of the estate's research interests," Harlan said, his tone carefully neutral. "Roland retained his services some months ago. Genealogical matters." Harlan turned a page, cleared his throat again, and then read.
Eleanor listened with the patience of a woman accustomed to disappointment. Her father had died three years prior, leaving her the crumbling Ashford estate and little else, and she had learned to parse legal language the way a sailor reads a horizon.
"I, Roland Whitfield Ashford, being of sound mind though admittedly of failing health, do hereby bequeath the entirety of my personal property, including but not limited to: books, papers, correspondence, photographs, furniture, silver, and all contents of the house known as Ashford Manor, to my niece, Eleanor Catherine Voss."
A pause.
"I further bequeath to my said niece the sum of fifteen thousand dollars from the account held at the First National Bank of Wren, payable upon execution of this instrument."
Eleanor did not move. Her hands rested folded in her lap.
"The real property known as Ashford Manor, together with the surrounding twelve acres more or less, is held in trust by the firm of Wren Pryce, under terms previously established by my late brother, Edmund Voss, and myself. The trustee shall maintain said property in good order, shall permit reasonable access to my niece as long as she does not reside therein, and shall at the trustee's sole discretion determine its disposition upon the death of the survivor of the beneficiaries named herein."
Harlan turned the page. He cleared his throat. He looked up.
"Miss Voss," he said. "I expect you have questions."
She did. She had a great many. But she folded her hands tighter and said only, "Proceed."
"There is an addendum," Harlan said, and paused in the way of a man who had edited the pause to be longer than it needed to be. "Roland was, as you know, a private man. He was, in his final months, particularly so. He kept certain records separate from his main papers. These records are now in the possession of Mr. Crane, who has been cataloguing them at Roland's direction. Under the terms of the will, those records pass to you, but only upon your signature acknowledging that you have received them, and that you understand they are to be used solely for the purposes of completing the genealogical research Roland had undertaken."
Eleanor looked at Felix. He had gone pale.
"I don't know what they are," Felix said, almost apologetically. "He gave me boxes. He told me to inventory them. I inventoried them. I didn't read them, mostly. Some of them are in cipher, or in shorthand, or in a handwriting that isn't his, or in some language I don't recognize. He said when the time came, his niece would know what to do."
Eleanor's mouth thinned. "He didn't tell me anything about this."
"No, ma'am."
"Harlan," Eleanor said, turning back to the lawyer. "Did my uncle know he was dying?"
The old man hesitated. His spectacles slipped down his nose. He pushed them up. "Roland was not a man who shared his infirmities," he said carefully.
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at her, and something in his gaze shifted, a slight widening, as if she had surprised him. He had known her since she was a child, had handled her father's estate, had drawn up papers for her mother's burial. He had never been afraid of her, but he had occasionally been cautious.
"He had been in poor health for some time," Harlan said. "He saw Dr. Marchetti regularly. He did not confide in me the particulars. He confided in me only that he wished certain matters to be put in order before he passed, and that you were the appropriate party to receive them."
"In order," Eleanor repeated.
"Yes, ma'am."
"What manner of matters?"
Harlan shook his head, slowly. "I am not privy to the contents of those records, Miss Voss. I am only the custodian of the trust. That is the limit of my authority."
Felix cleared his throat. "I do know," he said, and then stopped, because both of them had turned to look at him, and he flushed to the roots of his hair.
"You know what?" Eleanor asked.
"I know what the records pertain to," Felix said. "In general terms. Roland hired me to research the Ashford family tree. Specifically, he asked me to trace the descendants of a certain Obadiah Ashford, who settled the original land grant in 1798. Roland believed there were branches of the family that had been, in his words, 'mislaid by circumstance.' He wanted them found. Or, in some cases, he wanted them accounted for."
"Accounted for," Eleanor said.
"Yes, ma'am. As in, documented. Identified. Brought into the record. In some instances, he wanted me to determine whether certain individuals had actually existed, or whether they had been, in his phrase again, 'removed from the family record by intent.'"
The rain continued against the window. The leather chair creaked under Eleanor's weight.
"My uncle," she said, very precisely, "was not in the habit of employing genealogists. He considered it a frivolous pursuit. He once told me that the only genealogy that mattered was the one written in deeds, and that deeds were usually forged."
"That was a long time ago," Felix said.
"It was nine years ago," Eleanor said. "We had a conversation about it. I remember it clearly."
Felix tugged at his cuff. "He changed," he said. "After your father's death. After your mother's. He began spending time in the library. He began pulling down boxes from the attic. He hired me in February of last year. He was, by then, already quite ill, though he wouldn't admit it."
"And what did you find?"
Felix hesitated. He glanced at Harlan, who gave a small, careful nod.
"I found the family tree as it had been written," Felix said. "And then I found another one. Hidden inside the back of a ledger. Written in a hand that wasn't his. And the names on the second tree didn't match the names on the first tree. Some of them were the same people. Some of them weren't."
Eleanor's hands had gone still.
"And the records in the boxes?"
"Photographs, mostly. Letters. Some legal documents. A journal, possibly. I'm not certain, because it's in shorthand, and I only know Gregg, and this isn't Gregg. There are some pages in a cipher I've not been able to crack. There's a packet of letters tied with a black ribbon that I wasn't permitted to open, because Roland said you would need to be present for that."
Felix stopped, out of breath, his cheeks still flushed.
Eleanor looked at Harlan. "You knew about this."
"I knew there were records," Harlan said. "I did not know their contents. Roland was very clear that I was not to know."
"And yet you placed them in the care of a stranger."
"Mr. Crane is not a stranger. He is a scholar of some reputation. He is also bonded through the firm, and has signed a confidentiality agreement that I drew up myself."
"And you," Eleanor said, "as the custodian of the trust, are now going to tell me that I cannot reside in the house that my uncle has left me in everything but name."
Harlan's mouth thinned. "I am going to tell you," he said, "that the terms of the trust are quite specific. The house is to be maintained. It is not to be occupied by any party with a potential claim to the estate, except under conditions that the trustee, meaning me, must approve. I have the discretion, under the document, to permit occupancy for a period not to exceed thirty days in any calendar year, and only for the purpose of inspection or maintenance."
"And who has a potential claim?"
"The heirs of Edmund Voss, which is to say, yourself. The heirs of any other individual named in Roland's separate genealogical research, the identities of which are unknown to me. And the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the event that no willed heir can be identified after a period of seven years."
Eleanor stared at him.
"Roland drew this up himself," Harlan continued, and there was something in his voice that might have been apology. "He had me witness it. He had it recorded. It is, I am afraid, quite legal."
Felix had gone very quiet.
Eleanor stood. The leather chair creaked again in protest. She walked to the window, where the rain had thickened, and pressed one finger against the glass.
"My uncle," she said, to the window, "has left me a library, and a mystery, and a house I cannot enter."
"Yes, ma'am," Harlan said.
"And you, Mr. Crane," she said, turning, "have brought these records here, expecting me to take them."
Felix swallowed. "He asked me to deliver them to you, ma'am. Upon his death. Which was, as you know, six days ago."
"And where are they?"
"In my car," Felix said. "In the trunk. There are four boxes. I didn't want to bring them inside without your permission."
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment.
"Very well," she said. "Bring them in."
Felix rose, almost knocking over his chair in his haste, and disappeared into the hallway. They could hear his footsteps on the wooden stairs, and then the outer door, and then the slam of a car trunk, and then the slow, careful return, with a cardboard box in his arms, which he set on the low table in the center of the room with a grunt. He went back for the second. And the third. And the fourth.
They were plain, unvarnished cardboard, tied with twine. Each had a tag attached, in Roland's small, neat hand: Box 1. Box 2. Box 3. Box 4.
Eleanor looked at them.
"Harlan," she said. "Who else knew about these?"
Harlan removed his spectacles and polished them on his lapel. "Roland," he said, "was a private man."
"That's not an answer."
"It is the only answer I have, Miss Voss."
She turned to Felix. "And you, Mr. Crane. Did anyone visit Roland in his last months that seemed out of place?"
Felix thought about this. "His housekeeper, Mrs. Marsh. She came every day. She brought soup. She stayed sometimes. Dr. Marchetti came weekly. The Reverend Tinsley called once, in August, but Roland wouldn't see him. There was a man who came twice, in September, who gave his name as Palgrave. Cyrus Palgrave. He said he was from the university. He had an accent I couldn't place. Roland saw him alone both times. I was not permitted in the room."
"Cyrus Palgrave," Eleanor repeated.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And you don't know who he is."
"No, ma'am. I asked Roland, after the second visit, and Roland said only that some questions had to be answered by people who had a right to answer them, and that I should not trouble myself with the name."
Eleanor stood very still for a moment. Then she untied the twine on Box 1, folded back the flaps, and looked inside.
There were photographs on top, in a manila envelope. Beneath them, a stack of letters, tied with a black ribbon. Beneath that, a leather-bound ledger, its spine cracked with age. And at the very bottom, wrapped in tissue paper, what appeared to be a small oil painting, perhaps six inches by eight, in a tarnished gilt frame.
Eleanor did not touch any of it.
She replaced the flaps, and retied the twine, with great care.
"I will take these," she said. "I will read them. But not here."
Harlan nodded, as if he had expected nothing else.
"There is one more matter," he said.
"Of course there is."
"The packet of letters tied with the black ribbon," Harlan said. "Roland instructed me to inform you that you are not to open them in the presence of any other person. Not Mr. Crane. Not Mrs. Marsh. Not me. He said you would understand why, when you saw them."
Eleanor's mouth thinned again.
"Did he say anything else?"
"He said," Harlan replied, and cleared his throat, and removed his spectacles and polished them again, and replaced them, and cleared his throat once more, "he said to tell you that the woman in the photograph was not your aunt."
The rain struck the window with a sound like small stones.
The rain struck the window with a sound like small stones.
Eleanor let the sentence settle. She did not ask which woman. She did not ask which photograph. She had spent three days cataloguing the contents of Ravenshollow Manor, and she knew there had been no photograph on top of the box at the reading of the will. Whatever Roland had meant, he had meant it to arrive later. He had meant it for this moment, in this kitchen, in front of a man who could not meet her eyes.
"I understand," she said.
Harlan exhaled. It was a long breath, and it seemed to empty him of something he had been holding for a considerable time.
"There is one more matter," he said again, and this time his voice was thinner.
"Of course there is," Eleanor said, more sharply than she intended.
He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and withdrew a small envelope, pale blue, unsealed. From it he took a key. It was old, and heavy, and made of brass. The bow was shaped like a serpent eating its own tail, and the bit was cut in a pattern Eleanor had never seen, with five deep grooves and two shallow ones and a curious notch at the tip.
He placed it on the table between them.
"This opens a room," he said.
Eleanor looked at the key. She did not pick it up.
"A room," she said.
"A private study. On the third floor, west wing. The door at the end of the corridor, behind the linen closet. Roland kept it locked for thirty years. He would not permit anyone to enter. Not the housekeeper. Not the cleaners. Not myself, though he asked me once to witness his will in there, and I did, and I have never set foot in the room since."
"You expect me to enter it."
"I expect you to do with it as you see fit. He was quite specific that the key was to be delivered to you, and to no one else, and that no inventory of its contents was to be made in advance. He said you would know what to do."
Eleanor looked at the key for a long time.
"Did he say why it was locked?"
"He said," Harlan replied, and paused, and cleared his throat, and pressed his lips together as though trying to keep the words from escaping, "he said the room contained the answer to a question he had been asking for fifty years. He said the answer had nearly killed him once. He said he did not want anyone to find it until he was dead, because he could not bear to have anyone look at him while he was alive and know what he knew."
The kitchen clock ticked. The pipes groaned somewhere in the wall. Down the corridor, a shutter banged once against its frame and then fell silent.
"Did he say what the question was?"
"No, ma'am."
"Did he say who had nearly killed him?"
"No, ma'am. He said only that some doors in Ravenshollow should never be opened, and that he had opened this one once, and that he regretted it every day of his life thereafter."
Eleanor reached across the table and picked up the key. It was heavier than she had expected. It was cold. She held it in her closed fist for a moment, feeling the shape of the serpent press into her palm, and then she slipped it into the pocket of her cardigan.
"I will consider it," she said.
Harlan nodded. He seemed to sag, as though a weight had been lifted from him, though whether the weight was the key or the secret he did not say.
"There is one other thing," he began.
"Harlan."
He stopped.
"If you say 'one other thing' again, I am going to ask Dottie to put you out, and she will do it, and I will not lift a finger to stop her."
He had the grace to look abashed.
"That is the last," he said. "I promise you. On my mother's name."
Eleanor waited.
"Roland asked me to tell you that if you open the door, you are to take Mr. Crane with you. He said Mr. Crane would understand what you found, and that you would need someone to interpret it who was not implicated. He said, and I am quoting as best I can recall, 'the boy knows the archives better than he knows his own name, and he has no stake in the family, and that is precisely why he is the only one I would trust to see it.'"
Eleanor was quiet for a moment.
"He called Felix a boy," she said.
"He did."
"He is twenty-eight."
"I did mention that to him at the time. He said, and again I am quoting, 'twenty-eight is a boy, Eleanor, until he has buried someone he loved, and then he is a man, and Mr. Crane has not buried anyone, and I am not giving him the chance to begin with me.' He had a certain way of speaking about people."
Eleanor almost smiled.
"He did."
She stood. She collected the box, the envelope, and the key, and she held them against her chest the way one holds a sleeping child, with the particular care of someone who knows that what they carry is more fragile than it appears.
"You may tell Mr. Crane that I will require his assistance tomorrow morning," she said. "At nine. In the library. He is to bring nothing but a notebook and a pencil. No camera. No recorder. No telephone."
Harlan nodded.
"And Mrs. Marsh?"
"Mrs. Marsh is to be told nothing of the room. Nothing of the key. Nothing of the photograph. If she asks, I am cataloguing the linen."
"She will not believe you."
"She never believes me. That is not the point. The point is that she will not know."
Harlan inclined his head. He gathered his papers. He stood, a little stiffly, and he bowed in the formal way he had learned from his mother, which he still performed on occasion, though to Eleanor it seemed always to belong to a different century.
He left by the kitchen door, into the rain.
Eleanor stood alone in the kitchen for a moment. She set the box on the table. She took the key from her pocket and held it up to the light. The serpent glinted. The brass was dark in the grooves, as though it had been held many times by hands that were not clean.
She put the key back in her pocket.
She went to the foot of the servants' stairs and called up, in the carrying voice she had learned from Dottie, who had learned it from her own mother.
"Dottie. I am going to my room. I am not to be disturbed until morning. If anyone asks, I have a migraine."
A pause. Then Dottie's voice, from somewhere above, faintly exasperated.
"You do not have a migraine, miss Eleanor. You have never had a migraine in your life. Your mother had migraines. You have a look on your face like your father used to get when he was about to do something foolish."
"I have a migraine, Dottie."
"You have a look."
"Good night, Dottie."
"Good night, child. Mind the loose step on the landing. And lock your door. There is something in this house tonight that does not belong to the living."
Eleanor did not ask her to explain.
She climbed the stairs. The loose step groaned beneath her. At the top, she paused. The corridor stretched ahead of her, dim and long, and at the far end she could see the faint grey line of the door to her father's study, still closed, still locked, the key still in her possession.
She went to her own room. She locked the door. She set the box on the bed. She took off her cardigan and hung it on the back of the chair, and she took the key from the pocket and set it on the nightstand, where it lay gleaming in the lamplight like a small, sleeping animal.
She did not open the envelope with the photograph.
She did not open the letters tied with the black ribbon.
She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, with her hands folded in her lap, and she listened to the rain, and to the house, and to the silence between them, and she thought about a man who had kept a room locked for thirty years because he could not bear to have anyone look at him while he was alive and know what he knew.
She thought about a question he had been asking for fifty years.
She thought about an answer that had nearly killed him.
She thought about a key in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail.
At some point she undressed and put on her nightgown and brushed her hair and braided it and pinned it up the way her mother had taught her, with the two pins crossed at the back. She turned down the bed. She did not open the box. She got in. She lay on her back. She looked at the key on the nightstand until her eyes closed.
She did not sleep well.
At half past three she woke to the sound of something moving in the corridor outside her door. It was not footsteps. It was the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor, slowly, with effort, and then a pause, and then the sound again, and then a pause. It went on for some minutes. It stopped. There was a long silence. Then she heard, very faintly, the sound of a latch lifting, and a door opening, and then nothing at all.
She lay still.
She did not get up.
She did not unlock her door.
She lay in the dark and listened to the house settle around her, and she waited for morning, and she thought about a room on the third floor, west wing, behind a linen closet, at the end of a corridor she had not walked down in twenty years.
In the morning, she would ask Felix Crane to walk down it with her.
In the morning, she would put a key in a lock.
In the morning, she would find out what Roland Ashford had been hiding for thirty years, and why he had wanted her to be the one to find it.
The rain went on falling. The house went on listening. The serpent on the key went on eating its own tail, slowly, in the dark, as it had been doing for a hundred years, and would go on doing for a hundred more.
Eleanor closed her eyes.
She did not sleep again until dawn.
Morning came grey and reluctant, the rain thinned to a fine mist that clung to the windows like gauze. Eleanor rose before Dottie called her, washed her face in cold water, dressed in the dark wool skirt and cream blouse she had laid out the night before, and went down to find Felix Crane already awake in the breakfast room, surrounded by three open ledgers and a pot of tea he had clearly forgotten to drink.
He looked up when she entered, and she saw at once that he had not slept either. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and his tie was knotted crooked, and there was a smear of ink on his left cuff that he had not noticed. He stood when she came in, the way he always did, pushing his chair back with a small apologetic scrape.
"I couldn't sleep," he said, before she could ask. "I kept thinking about the spine. I went back to the library at four in the morning. I shouldn't have. I did. I had to see if the whole row was hollow or just the one."
"And?"
"Just the one. I measured the cavity. It goes back about fourteen inches into the wall. There is a false back panel made of the same oak. I couldn't open it without prying, and I didn't want to damage the shelf. I thought you should be there."
Eleanor poured herself tea from the pot and sat down across from him. The tea was lukewarm and bitter. She drank it anyway.
"I'm glad you waited," she said.
"I wasn't sure I should have. Part of me wanted to just rip it open and see. But that's not how you do things, is it? You do them properly. You do them in order."
"Yes," she said. "You do them in order."
They looked at each other across the table for a moment. Felix's hands were folded around his own cup, the knuckles pale, the fingers too long for the rest of him. He reminded her, suddenly and painfully, of a boy she had known in college who had wanted to be an astronaut and who had ended up, twenty years later, teaching physics at a school no one had heard of in a town no one could find on a map. The world had a way of putting people where they fit, and sometimes where they fit was not where they had aimed.
"After breakfast," Eleanor said, "I need you to walk with me to the third floor. West wing."
Felix blinked. "The third floor is closed. Dottie has the only key, and she says Roland had the corridor boarded up in the late nineties."
"I know. I'm going to ask her for the key. I'm also going to ask her why Roland had the corridor boarded up, and I expect she will tell me the truth, because Dottie has been telling the truth to the women in this family for fifty years, and I don't think she intends to stop now just because the man who told her to stop is dead."
Felix nodded slowly. He picked up his tea, seemed to remember he had not drunk it, and set it back down again. "Do you want me there when you ask her?"
"Yes. I want a witness. I want her to know that whatever she says is going to be written down."
"Written down," Felix repeated, in the tone of someone who has just realized that the field notes he has been keeping for a week have become evidence. "Right. Yes. I have my notebook."
"Get a fresh page. And Felix."
"Yes?"
"Bring your tape measure. And your camera. And if you have a pencil rather than a pen, bring the pencil. Pencil can be erased. Pen cannot."
He nodded again, more quickly this time, and rose from the table and went out, and Eleanor heard his footsteps going up the stairs two at a time, which was the way he always went up stairs when he had been given a task, as if the stairs themselves were an obstacle he intended to clear in the minimum possible time.
Dottie was in the kitchen. She was making biscuits. There were already forty-eight of them on the counter, golden and perfect, and she was rolling out the forty-ninth with a pin that looked older than the house. She did not look up when Eleanor came in, but she said, "You're up early," in a way that meant she had been up since five and had been expecting Eleanor for at least an hour.
"I need the key to the third floor," Eleanor said. "West wing."
Dottie's hands stopped. The pin rested in the dough. The kitchen was very quiet, and from somewhere outside a bird was singing, three notes over and over, as if it were practicing a phrase it had not quite learned.
"No," Dottie said.
"I wasn't asking."
"I know you weren't. I am saying no anyway. That is how no works, Eleanor. You know this. You have known it since you were four years old and I told you no about the cookie jar, and you stood on a stool and took a cookie anyway, and then you cried because you knew you had done wrong. You are not four years old. You do not need to stand on a stool."
Eleanor sat down at the kitchen table. The enamel was chipped at the edges. The table had been there since before she was born.
"Roland is dead," Eleanor said. "The man who told you to keep the door closed is dead. The reason he gave you for keeping it closed died with him, or it didn't, but either way the silence is no longer his to keep. It is mine. It is the family's. And I am asking you, as the woman who changed my diapers and taught me to read and pulled me out of the pond when I was six, to give me the key."
Dottie looked at her then. The rolling pin was still in her hand. The dough was still on the board. The biscuits on the counter were cooling in their rows like small golden soldiers.
"He was scared," Dottie said. "You need to know that first. Whatever you find up there, and I do not know what you will find because I have never been up there, he was scared. He spent the last twenty years of his life scared, and the twenty before that scared in a different way, and I watched him do it, and I said nothing, because he was the man of the house and I was the help, and that was how it was. I am not proud of that. I am not proud of any of it. But I am telling you now because he is gone, and you are here, and you are the one he chose."
"Chose for what?"
"I don't know. I never knew. He told me to keep the door shut. He told me to tell anyone who asked that the third floor was unsafe, that the joists were bad, that the plaster was falling. He paid me a hundred dollars a month for twenty years to tell that story, and I took the money, and I told the story, and I have hated myself for it every single month since the first one. The key is in my room. Top drawer of the bureau. Underneath a prayer card for Saint Jude, patron of lost causes, which I put there because I thought it was funny and because I thought it might help. I will make you a deal."
"What deal?"
"I will give you the key. And I will tell you the one thing I know that I have not yet told you. And in exchange you will not bring that young man from the historical society up those stairs."
"Felix has to come. I need him to document whatever is there."
"You need a witness. I will be your witness. I have known you since you were a day old. I do not need a tape measure to know what is true. Let the boy stay in the library and do his measuring. Let him be useful. You and I will go up together, because that is how the women in this house have always done things, and I will tell you the one thing on the way, and you will decide what to do with it after."
Eleanor sat with that for a moment. The bird outside had stopped singing. The kitchen smelled of flour and butter and the faint, older smell of the iron stove that had been in the house since the eighteen hundreds.
"Tell me now," Eleanor said. "Tell me before we go up."
Dottie set the rolling pin down. She wiped her hands on her apron. She sat down across from Eleanor at the table, and the chair creaked under her, and the sound was the same sound it had made when Eleanor's grandmother had sat in it, and her great-grandmother before that, and probably women whose names had been forgotten in the century before.
"Your great-uncle Roland," Dottie said, "had a daughter."
Eleanor did not move.
"Her name was Ruth. She was born in the spring of 1952. Her mother was a woman named Alma Crane from over Haysville way. Alma came to the house to help with the spring cleaning. She stayed the summer. In the fall she went home and never came back. She left the baby here, because Roland asked her to, and because Alma knew, the way women in those days knew, that a baby born out of wedlock in a house like this would be taken from her and put somewhere, and that somewhere would not be good. Roland told Alma he would raise the child as his own. He told Alma the child would be safe here. Alma believed him. Alma went home. Alma died in 1968 of a broken heart, or what they called then a weakness of the chest, which is what they called it when a woman grieved herself to death and no one in the family would say the word grief out loud."
"Where is Ruth?"
Dottie looked at her. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady, because Dottie had been a woman who had learned to cry on the inside a long time ago, and had done it so often that the inside was now where she did all her weeping.
"I don't know," she said. "That is the one thing I do not know. I know she was here. I know she was a quiet child. I know she had her mother's eyes. I know that in the autumn of 1962, when she was ten years old, she went out to play in the afternoon and she did not come back in for supper, and Roland called the sheriff, and the sheriff came, and they searched the woods and the road and the river, and they did not find her. They never found her. And after that, Roland was not the same. He stopped going to church. He stopped seeing his friends. He took down every photograph in the house that had a child in it, including the ones of you and your sisters when you came to visit, and he locked the third floor, and he paid me to say the joists were bad, and he sat in his study every night until two in the morning with the door closed, and whatever he was doing in there he did for thirty years."
"The clippings," Eleanor said. "The photographs. The string."
"I don't know about the string," Dottie said. "I never went in. I never asked. I was afraid of what I would find, and I was more afraid of what I would not find, and so I did not look, and I took the money, and I told the story, and I have been a coward about it for half my life, and I am telling you now because I am old and I am tired and because you are the one he sent the key to, and I think he sent it to you because he thought you would be the one to finish it. I don't know what finish means. I don't know what is in that room. But I know that his heart stopped on a Tuesday in the library with his hand on a book, and I know that he had been reaching for that book for thirty years, and I know that whatever is on the other side of that door is something he could not bear to look at alone."
Eleanor stood up. The chair did not scrape. She had been careful, the way she was always careful, not to make unnecessary noise.
"Get the key," she said. "I'm going to tell Felix to stay in the library. Then I'm going to come back here, and you and I are going to go up those stairs together, and we are going to open that door, and we are going to see what Roland could not bear to look at alone, and we are not going to close it again."
Dottie nodded once. She stood. She went out of the kitchen, and Eleanor heard her footsteps going down the hall, slow and heavy, the footsteps of a woman who had been walking these floors for fifty years and who had decided, on this particular morning, to walk them one more time.
Eleanor went to the breakfast room. Felix was standing by the window with his notebook open, pencil in hand, clearly ready. He looked at her face and the readiness drained out of him, slowly, the way color drains out of a sky before a storm.
"You're not taking me," he said.
"No."
"Is it because of what I said? About Alma Crane?"
"It's because Dottie asked me not to, and because she is right that the women in this house have always done things themselves, and because whatever is up there belongs to her and to me and to the people who came before us, and I will tell you what I find. I promise you that. Every word. But I need to see it first, and I need to see it with the woman who knew Ruth, if Ruth is what we are looking for, and who kept the secret for fifty years and who is tired, now, of keeping it."
Felix closed his notebook. He put the pencil behind his ear. He nodded, the way he had nodded the night before when she had told him to leave the library.
"I will be in the dining room," he said. "Cataloguing the silver. There's a fork from 1847 that I think is mismatched. I will not come up unless you call. If you don't come down by noon I will come up anyway, and Dottie can shoot me if she wants to."
"Dottie doesn't have a gun."
"She has a rolling pin."
Eleanor almost smiled. Almost. The muscles in her face began to move, and then stopped, because there was nothing in her yet to smile about, only the slow, cold certainty that whatever was behind that door had been waiting for her since the day she was born, and that the waiting was over, and that she was, at last, ready to see it.
She went back to the kitchen. Dottie was waiting by the back door, the key in her hand. It was an old key, smaller than the brass one, iron rather than brass, black with age. The bow was shaped like a four-leaf clover. Dottie held it out, and Eleanor took it, and the iron was cold, and the cold went up through her palm and into her wrist and stayed there.