heavily on the bed.
“Oh, Cora.” Minnie fought back tears of her own. It was her
fault, for dragging Cora into the water. It was always her fault.
“We can go back, look for it, and —”
Cora laughed, but it sounded harsh beneath her tears. “Yes,
let’s look for a beach rock on the beach. Never mind. It’s silly. I
shall simply worry less.”
“It’s not silly,” Minnie whispered.
Cora shook her head, shutting Minnie out again. “That man.
Do you think he’ll tell Mother?”
“No. I don’t.” He had nothing to gain by it, and it struck Min-
nie that Alden was a man who always wanted something to gain.
And it didn’t fail to register for her that he had no reason to be
in this hallway — in the back of the house, where the family had
their rooms and no guests ever stayed.
Minnie wanted to stay and comfort Cora, but it was clear
Cora wanted no such thing. Very well, then. Minnie tore out of
her clothes, throwing on a change of dress and pulling her hair
back, not caring that it soaked her collar. “I’m going to go get
something to eat,” she said, ducking out of the room before Cora
could protest being left with all the wet clothes. Minnie took the
back stairs, slipping along the wall and into the pantry. She found
the kitchen empty, and slid a small, sharp knife out of the drawer.
She could not shake the way that man had leered at her sister.
Like Cora was already his.
Cora was hers. She would never lose her, and she would never
let anyone hurt her again. A spare ribbon secured the knife under
her dress against her thigh, and the cold secret of it felt like power.
World War II
eleven
C
ORA WALKED NEXT TO THOMAS -- BUT NOT SO CLOSE
THAT THEY WERE TOUCHING -- DOWN THE LONG LANE
TOWARD TOWN. They had left Minnie and Charles
engaged in a game of checkers, where Minnie was cheating outra-
geously and Charles was letting her.
The bright summer day filled in the silence with a thousand
small sounds of life, but Cora wanted to talk with Thomas. She
was still humiliated from her hysterics that night on Barley Hill.
So what if she’d seen a figure looking down at her from the second
story? Arthur had explained that he’d gone upstairs to look for
Mary and glanced down to check on her.
And she’d fainted. And Thomas had carried her home. She
blushed deeply just thinking about it and, struck with the irra-
tional fear that Thomas was thinking about the exact thing,
rushed to fill the silence. “Do you have the list for the chemist?
He tends to forget things unless he has it in writing.”
“Yes.” He pulled a slip out of his pocket. His handwriting was
neat, slanted letters. There was an ink stain on his middle finger
that she realized was always there.
“Do you write? Music, I mean. You play so well.”
The corners of his lips turned down, but his eyes crinkled up
and she was sure he was trying not to betray his delight. “I try,
here and there. It’s rubbish.”
“I’d like to hear it sometime.”
“Really?” He turned toward her, hazel eyes filled with such
honest hope she realized how deliberately careful nearly all of
his expressions were. Not guarded and secretive, like Arthur,
but . . . shielded. As though he was afraid of ever feeling what he
actually felt, of putting on anything other than a brave, practi-
cal face.
He was terrified all the time.
Her heart fluttered with the recognition of someone else who
understood what it was to forever try to be strong and constantly
come up short.
“Really,” she said, her voice as gentle as her smile. She hesi-
tated, then, before she could think better of it, put her hand in the
crook of his elbow. “I’ll make certain Mr. Clemens follows
the order to the letter. He hates vacationers, but he’s always liked
Mother very much. We’ll get exactly what Charles needs.”
“Thank you,” Thomas said, reaching up to adjust his hat, then
piciously like pride. She had the power to fluster him with such a
simple action as her hand on his arm!
They walked like that to the town. The cool, dim interior of
the chemist’s shop was welcome after the heat of the afternoon.
She gave Mr. Clemens the instructions, and they watched as
he pulled out powders and liquids, muttering to himself as he
mixed several packets and a couple of glass vials. In a few minutes
he had everything together and helped Cora pack it all carefully
into her basket.
“How sick is he?” he asked, looking up through his bushy gray
eyebrows at Thomas.
Thomas cleared his throat, avoiding Cora’s concerned gaze.
“Getting better every day.”
“Hmm.” Mr. Clemens scowled doubtfully, then calculated the
cost and counted out Thomas’s change.
Cora fretted over the shift in Thomas’s demeanor. She knew
Charles was sick — very sick — and Mr. Clemens’s tone made her
think that it was not a sickness to be recovered from. They would
do all they could for him, but right now Cora worried more about
the older brother. It was not easy to be sick, surely, but it was also
not easy to be powerless to help those you loved.
“Does he need any of this right now?” she asked. “Because if it
can wait, I have been meaning to visit Miss Smith’s candy shop.
I can never go with Minnie because she spends all our pocket
change, but the candy dishes at the boardinghouse are getting low.
And,” she added, whispering conspiratorially, “my personal stock-
pile of sweets is nearly out.”
“Well, we can’t have that, now, can we?” He offered his elbow
and she gladly took it. “We could even bring some back for Charles
and Minnie.”
“If you insist on being noble and generous, I suppose we
can share. But most of it will be our secret.” Cora noted that
Thomas’s face grew even brighter at her choice of pronoun.
Perhaps Minnie ought to be cautioning me about the wisdom of
falling for summer boarders.
“Tell me about New York,” Cora said as they turned the cor-
ner onto the main street.
“It’s —” Thomas froze, then, without warning, pulled Cora
back around the building. “That woman — she’s just outside the
grocer’s — do you know her?”
Frowning, Cora peered around the corner. There was a tall
woman, hair dark and dress elegant and obviously expensive.
Cora knew every yearlong resident, and recognized most of the
regular summer visitors, but had never seen this woman before.
“No, I don’t,” she whispered, still observing. “Why?”
“I ran into her the other day. And I think . . .” Thomas paused,
then rushed out the next sentence as though embarrassed by it. “I
think she followed us here. I heard her, the night before we left,
speaking with m
y father. And she knew I had a brother when I saw
her, though we’ve never met.”
Cora frowned, unable to determine why Thomas seemed so
spooked to run into an acquaintance of his father’s. Then the
woman turned and, in an exasperated twist of her shoulders,
motioned for someone to come closer.
That was when Cora noticed another woman clinging to the
shadows of a door stoop, her dress oddly childlike and several years
out of fashion. Her hair draped across her collar and down to her
knees in an impossibly long braid.
The witch.
“Thomas!” Cora gasped. He was immediately by her side, and
recognition dawned on his face with the same mixture of surprise
and horror.
The elegant woman spoke to Mary, reaching up to tuck a
strand of hair back in the braid. Then she took Mary’s hand, pat-
ted it, and pulled Mary alongside her.
“She’s rather upright for a dead woman,” Thomas said, his
voice dry. Cora didn’t know whether to be relieved at this proof
of life, or cross at the witch for pulling such a horrible trick on all
of them.
“They know each other,” Cora said. “No one knows the
witch — Mary, I mean. She never comes out of her house. Why
would she now?”
“Let’s follow them.”
Cora hesitated, but found the pull of answers too strong to
resist. She felt as though Mary owed her. She’d spent too long
being terrified of everything she associated with that house and
that woman, and now to see her walking down the street as
though everything were normal? Cora wouldn’t have it. This was
her town.
They hurried after the women, keeping a discreet distance but
careful not to lose them. Mary drifted as she walked, constantly
pulled back to the sidewalk and redirected by the other woman.
They disappeared around a corner. Turning it, Cora and
Thomas pulled up short, horrified to be nearly on top of their
prey. They ducked behind a shrub, peering through the branches.
Mary and her friend were outside a small, expensive teahouse Cora
had never visited.
“There you are,” said a man — Alden! — joining them.
“Constance, you are as lovely as a dream. And, Mary, pet, how
wonderful to see you again after all these years.” He leaned for-
ward and Cora could have sworn Mary hissed at him.
When all three had disappeared into the teahouse, Cora and
Thomas briefly whispered about whether to follow them in, but
decided it couldn’t be done unobserved. They walked quickly back
in the direction of home.
“Isn’t that the man staying at the boardinghouse?” Thomas
asked.
“It is.” Cora frowned, fighting back a shudder. “I don’t like
him. I think he was waiting for me the other day, in our hall where
he had no business to be.”
“I don’t like any of them. And it can’t be a coincidence that
they know each other. That woman — Constance — showing up
here after I heard her threatening my father? Alden staying at the
boardinghouse with us? And then that crazy witch.”
“She couldn’t have known we’d be at her house, though,” Cora
said, trying to puzzle it out.
“She could have, if Alden watched us leave and then ran ahead
and told her.”
“But why would they be watching us?”
Thomas scowled and kicked at a stone as they left the sidewalk
for the dirt lane to the house. “My father is wealthy. Very wealthy.
The way he was talking that night — he was scared. He’s not a
man who gets scared. Maybe he sent us away so we’d be safe from
that woman, but now she’s followed us here!”
Cora’s head spun. “Do you think they want to kidnap you?”
“Or Charles. Or maybe she’s blackmailing my father. I
don’t know.”
“Do you think you ought to leave? If she knows where
you are . . .”
“I’ll send a wire to my father. She knows where we live at
home, too, so going back there wouldn’t solve the problem. I want
to keep it from Charles, but it’s probably safer if everyone is on
guard. We’ll talk with them about it. Besides, if Constance hasn’t
done anything yet, we’re probably safe for the time being. Right?”
Cora couldn’t find it in herself to agree. Nothing felt safe in
her town anymore.
Las Vegas, Nevada
October, 1948
twelve
A
RTHUR, NEEDED TO GET RID OF THOMAS AND CHARLES.
It was either that, or run away. Arthur could not bear
the thought of leaving Cora and Minnie behind, nor
could he devise a way to convince them to run with him.
But it was very clear to him now that whatever forces
were converging on this town, Thomas and Charles were
already tangled. He would not let Minnie and Cora be caught
as well.
He paced in his small attic room, a path well worn by his feet.
Dust motes hung lazily in the golden patches of dawn’s new light,
eddying and resettling every time he disturbed them.
The case called to him from its grave. There were lists in there,
connections his father had made. His mother kept the lists tacked
up, read them to herself. Mostly it was places but also names, and
he had a creeping suspicion that if he were to look he would find
Wolcott among them. But if he opened the case, if he read what
was in there, who was to say he wouldn’t catch the same obsession
that had orphaned him?
No. It was bad luck for Charles and Thomas, and he was sorry
for them, but he would not give up what he had here to try and
save them.
They would have to save themselves.
With a weary sigh, he pulled the unopened letters he’d stolen
from Mary’s house out from beneath his pillow. Tapping on the
aged, thick paper of the envelopes, his fingers hovered, and then
he tucked them back away. He’d burn them tonight, rid himself of
this link, and then convince Mrs. Johnson to send Charles and
Thomas away.
Arthur’s jaw tightened. It wasn’t because he was jealous of
losing so much of the girls’ attentions — it wasn’t. He had seen it
in Cora, but it did not bother him because she seemed genuinely
happy. Minnie, however. He had seen her, more and more, with
something desperate but determined in her face as she looked away
from him and to Charles.
He couldn’t lose her.
Them. He couldn’t lose them. He had to protect them. His life
before them had been controlled by fear, but the day he decided to
stay, they became the foundation of his world.
He walked silently down the narrow wooden stairs to the sec-
ond floor, passing the girls’ room and pausing, as was his habit, to
listen for their soft sleeping murmurings and make sure that every-
thing sounded as it should.
Satisfied, he went to the kitchen, unlocking it with his key.
He’d eat before anyone else was awake. He could go sleep for a
couple of hours after, knowing the gir
ls were safe in their morn-
ing chores. His body ached from holding its rigid sentinel position
on the peak of the roof yet again, and he felt the sort of bone-
weary tired he hadn’t since losing his mother.
All his vigilance haunted him, though. If one of them was
under the very roof he was watching from, how could he possibly
see everything he needed to?
He cut a chunk of yesterday’s bread, smearing some of Mrs.
Johnson’s strawberry preserves on it. He wanted something
weightier but was too tired to prepare anything. Turning to go
back to bed, he nearly ran into Thomas.
“What are you doing in here?” Thomas asked.
Arthur raised an eyebrow. “The kitchen is off-limits to guests.
I am not a guest.”
Thomas’s shoulder stooped, then he straightened deliberately.
“Mrs. Johnson told me I was welcome to get whatever I needed,
whenever I needed it. I’m making tea.”
The dark circles under Thomas’s eyes told a story of more than
one sleepless night. With a sympathetic pang, Arthur wondered if
perhaps Thomas kept his own nightly vigil over his brother.
“Tea is in the pantry. Here, I’ll show you.” Turning, Arthur
opened the door and felt for the jars by memory.
They both heard footsteps outside the kitchen. Without think-
ing, Arthur grabbed Thomas and pulled him into the pantry,
closing the door so only a sliver remained for them to see out of.
“What?” Thomas whispered.
“No one should be down here yet.” Arthur was suddenly
embarrassed at this display. His first reaction was always to hide,
to watch unseen. He had no way to justify it to Thomas. Cringing,
he planned how to play it off as a sort of game.
Then the door opened and Alden came in.
Both boys held their breath, not daring to so much as breathe.
Alden walked to the wall next to a bright window, where a small
board Arthur had made hung. It held keys to every room in the
house, neatly labeled in Cora’s precise handwriting. It had been a
Christmas gift for Mrs. Johnson, who was forever fumbling for the