Golden Girl

Ava continued to work on her novel every evening, although, in light of her argument with Will over Charlie Woodburn, the work took on a more sinister, secretive air. She knew now that she could never show him the novel. She could never openly betray his trust or that of Josephine, Fanny, and Maitland. And yet she couldn’t stop writing.

She had begun to work in earnest now, sitting down at her computer every evening when the house was quiet. If the other members of the house knew of her nocturnal endeavors, they said nothing, other than to tease her about her new habit of sleeping late. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the work, flowing between her fingers and the computer screen like an electric current. At night the house was hushed but for the periodic hum of the air-conditioning and the creaking of the ancient timbers settling around her. Caught up in the tragic story of Charlie Woodburn, she was unaware of time. Hours seemed to pass in a twinkling, and she was often stunned to look up and see that the bedside clock read four a.m. Often as she wrote, she became gradually aware of noises in the house—doors closing, footsteps in the hallway—but when she stopped writing and listened, the noises stopped.

She felt a connection to Charlie, and that connection was evidenced by the words that flowed from her fingertips onto the screen. And yet as the summer passed into the long hot days of late July, the work began to slow. She had entered the mid-book doldrums, the place where doubt and insecurity raised their ugly twin heads. It always felt to Ava a little like rolling a boulder up a mountain. Just before reaching the summit there was a moment of uncertainty, of breathless wondering: would the boulder roll back down and crush her, or would she be able to launch it over the precipice, where it would make its speedy, inescapable descent? With the story of Charlie Woodburn, she felt that she was being slowly, relentlessly crushed.

She felt stifled, confounded, unable to write anything she didn’t delete the following day. It was frustrating to have come so far and now find herself blocked.

She had rewritten Charlie’s character based on her conversation with Clara and Alice. She had made him more charming, more handsome, more popular and at ease with women. But something had happened. Some shift had occurred in the rewrite that made the story feel forced and false. Josephine was proving troublesome, too. She kept her secrets well. Despite appearing in several new chapters, Josephine had yet to divulge her lover. It was almost as if she was being coy, patronizing. Perhaps Ava had only imagined a secret lover after all.

Perhaps the story of Charlie Woodburn was beyond Ava’s capability to tell.

That’s what it all came down to, that same old fear and lack of faith she had struggled with for years. Did she have what it took to be a writer? Or was it just some girlish dream she had yet to outgrow? She had beat her head against this wall until it was bloody, and to come up against it now, when everything seemed to be going so well, seemed especially fatalistic. For the first time in her life she wondered if it was really all that important that she become a novelist. Surely a career as a copywriter would do just as well? Or perhaps she should just marry Will and settle down here in this quiet place where everything was simple and unhurried. Surely that life would do just as well?

No. She wouldn’t think like that. She wouldn’t give up, not yet anyway.

There was something with Josephine; she knew it. She had seen it in the scene she wrote yesterday, where Josephine, Charlie, and Clara stood in the garden and Josephine betrayed herself with a glance, an awkward movement, an affirmation that caused the other two to look away from her with swift, furtive expressions of pity.

Despite her frustration over the progression of her novel, Ava was thankful that another sleep episode had not occurred. The incident of the dark man by the window had left her shaken for days. A hallucination appearing after the initial paralysis had passed was something new, something she had not experienced before. She was afraid she might be entering a new stage of the disease.

But in the days following the strange appearance of the dark man, no other episodes occurred. As the days wore on, she found it easier to believe that she might have imagined the whole thing, the dark fleeting image brought on by her fright, a trick of the eyes, a subtle shifting of shadows and nothing more.

She spent her afternoons, while the others were napping, roaming the town looking for evidence of Charlie. She spent a great deal of time at the downtown library talking to the local historian, a retired schoolteacher by the name of Rachel Rowe. Rachel had not known Charlie—he had died before she was born—but she remembered her mother and grandmother talking about the scandalous elopement, and she was able to tell Ava about the boardinghouse where Charlie had lived before marrying, a rambling Victorian house that still stood not far from where Jake Woodburn currently had his furniture shop.

“Do you have any photos of him?” Ava asked her. They were sitting at one of the long tables near the research stacks, a large picture book on the history of Woodburn open in front of them.

“Of Charlie Woodburn?” Rachel frowned, her eyes narrowing. “No. I suppose I could check the microfiche. There may be a photo with an article in one of the old newspapers.”

The next time Ava came in, Rachel beckoned to her and led her over to the large reader machine used to view the microfilms.

“I’ve found something you might like to see,” she said.

Ava felt a quiver of excitement. She was suddenly afraid that the man she had pictured, the Charlie she had created in her imagination, might not match the real thing. She hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed. She leaned forward, peering over Rachel’s shoulder. “Were you able to find any of the Woodburn papers that mention Charlie?”

“No, unfortunately, all the Woodburn family documents were given to Vanderbilt years ago.”

“Well, not all,” Ava said, remembering that Will had checked the attic when looking for the original blueprints of Longford. “There may be some papers stored up in the attic at Woodburn Hall.”

“Really?” Rachel looked at her with interest. “Do you have access to them?”

“Yes. I mean, I suppose I do. I don’t know exactly what’s up there, but I could check.”

“You might want to look. Sometimes old photos fall to the bottom of a trunk and get lost. You might find some family letters that mention Charlie. People had a tendency to keep them in those days. I had a friend who did some renovations on a two-hundred-year-old house and found a box hidden in the wall containing a cache of letters. And they were pretty racy, too,” she said chuckling. “For love letters of that day, anyway. Compared to now they seem pretty tame. Although I guess no one writes letters anymore, do they? It’s all emails and instant messaging. How sad.” She scrolled absently through the screen as she talked. “I did find one photo, and that’s what I want to show you.”

Ava laced her fingers together to keep them from trembling and dropped her hands into her lap. She sat quietly while Rachel wound and rewound the film until she reached the image she was looking for. It zoomed suddenly into view, dark and grainy, a photo of a group of men sitting around a long table in evening clothes. They were smoking cigars and wore what looked like laurel wreaths on their heads, facing the camera with the proud disdainful air that gentlemen of that period used when being photographed. There were no women present, but several black men dressed in dark suits and white gloves stood against the far wall.

The caption read “Gentlemen of the Commerce Club Gather for Annual Banquet.” Underneath that was a list of names. Ava read through until she came to Colonel James Woodburn. And beside him, Mr. Charles Woodburn. An aristocratic old man with white hair and a long white mustache stared into the camera, and behind him, half hidden by the older gentleman, a younger man leaned into view. His face was bathed in shadow, and his features were indistinguishable. One elbow was propped carelessly on the table in front of him, and in that hand he held a thick cigar.

“Can you blow it up?” Ava asked.

“I can, but it doesn’t make it any easier to see.” The old man’s face came suddenly into view, and Ava was shocked at his resemblance to Josephine. They shared the same proud, wary expression, the same high forehead and long blade-like nose. His head was tilted slightly up toward the camera, and his mouth was open as if he had been speaking or perhaps exhaling.

The young man behind him was still indistinguishable. His face was dark and blurry, but other details jumped suddenly into focus: the gold cuff link of his upraised arm, the smooth, slicked-back hair, a certain carelessness in the buttoning of his pintucked shirt, as if he found such formality absurd but necessary. But it was the dark blurry face with its inscrutable expression that most drew Ava’s attention.

Staring at him, she shivered.

On the walk home from downtown, she couldn’t stop thinking about that shadowy face. It was Charlie who had scratched Help me into the headboard of her bed. She was sure of it. He must have had some premonition of his death, some warning.

But how had he died? Was it really an accidental drowning, as the Woodburns seemed to imply? And if so, why would Josephine, Fanny, and Maitland refuse to speak his name more than sixty years later? Why were there no photos of him in the house? Grief was one thing, but a complete annihilation, a removal of any evidence that a person had ever existed, was something else entirely. It indicated—what? Revenge? Denial? Guilt?

She walked along the shady sidewalk in a stupor. The day was hot and humid, and she was glad of the overhanging trees. Their thick roots pushed up through the old brick sidewalk, twining around her feet like serpents.

Had Charlie set out to drink himself to death, and in an accident of tragic proportions, simply hastened the process, as Will had suggested? Or had he been murdered and, if so, by whom? There were several possible suspects with conceivable motives: the menacing cousins intent on avenging Fanny’s honor; stoic Josephine, the defender of family secrets; or perhaps it had been Clara, as Darlene Haney had suggested, a woman familiar with all the poisonous plants of the garden, although Ava could not imagine what motive Clara could possibly have had.

The one with the most motive, of course, was Maitland Sinclair, the jilted lover. On the surface, jolly Maitland seemed an unlikely suspect, yet Ava had seen the youthful photos of him in his big-game hunting gear. She had glimpsed his face that night when she had asked him why it had taken so long for him and Fanny to marry.

And then there was his curious answer. Penance.

His adoration of Fanny was all-consuming. Some people would do anything for love.

Even murder.

She could see the imposing roofline of Woodburn Hall rising above the tall hedges. She was almost to the garden fence when her phone rang, startling her out of her reverie.

“Don’t hang up,” Jake said. “It’s me.”

The tall hedge surrounding the garden gave way now to the wide, sweeping lawn. Ava glanced at the house to see if anyone was out on the verandah but it was empty. She slowed her steps. A pair of rocking chairs faced the street, half-hidden by a row of glossy-green shrubs.

“Hello,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She walked slowly, looking down at her feet, watching so she wouldn’t trip.

“I’ve been thinking about you.”

She’d been thinking about him, too. Because she hadn’t been writing, she’d had a lot of time to think about how she might have been too hard on him the last time they spoke.

“Can you talk?” he said.

“Yes.”

He made a sound that might have been a sigh. Or maybe it was just a bad connection. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said the last time we talked.”

“Look,” she said. “I was pretty irrational that day. Don’t pay too much attention to what I said.”

“No, I think you had a valid point. I should have opened up more about Hadley.”

She didn’t want to talk about Hadley. Not today anyway. “I took your advice,” she said quickly.

“What advice was that?”

“I wrote a letter to Frank Dabrowski. You know, my father. Asking him why he hadn’t ever sent me a birthday card or a Christmas present the whole time I was growing up. And do you know what he said?” Dear God, what was she doing? Why did she feel compelled to tell him the most intimate, depressing details of her life?

He was quiet, waiting for her to finish.

“He said he wasn’t my dad after all! I had it all wrong! Even though his name was on my birth certificate, he wasn’t my biological dad, and my mother told him it would be best if he just stayed out of my life. So he did.”

“Damn, Ava. I’m sorry.”

His voice was warm and sincere. She stood at the tall fence separating the sidewalk from the lawn of Woodburn Hall, clutching an iron paling with one hand. She was dismayed to find that she was crying.

“Are you all right?” he said.

She held her phone against one shoulder and rummaged around in her purse for a Kleenex. “I’m fine!” she said, then blew her nose.

“Do you want to go somewhere for a drink?”

“I can’t. It’s Toddy Time and I’m heading back to the house.”

“All right. How about tomorrow?”

She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “Why don’t you come over to Woodburn Hall? You can join us for a Singapore Sling.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

She blew her nose again.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Allergies,” she said. “I’m walking back from the library. I’ve been down to see Rachel Rowe. Do you know Rachel? The town historian? Anyway, she had a photo she thought I might like to see of your grandfather Charlie. I have a copy. Would you like to see it?”

He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Sure.”

“Did you know that your grandfather used to board at a house just down the street from where your shop is?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’ve got the address. I may go by there on Thursday.”

“Ava,” he said.

“What?”

She could hear movement in the background, as if he was placing his hand over the receiver. “Nothing.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by your shop while I’m in the neighborhood.”

“I’d like that. What time?”

“Well, I don’t get up much before ten.”

“Sounds like a pretty sweet life.”

“How about if I come by between 11:30 and 12:00?”

“That’d be great.”

“Okay then. See you later,” she said and hung up.

She was still snuffling into her Kleenex. Odd, how these crying spells seemed to come over her with no warning. She hoped her eyes wouldn’t be red when she showed up for Toddy Time. Will was sure to notice. He noticed everything about her these days. His eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went, as if he suspected her of something and was trying to see validation of her guilt in her face. No doubt she confirmed his worst fears (whatever they might be) every time she felt the weight of those eyes and blushed.

She clung to the iron fence and blew her nose for the last time. At the edge of the lawn, under a glossy shrub, a white cat watched her warily, its tail twitching. She could hear distant voices. It sounded as if they were already gathered in the library for Toddy Time.

“Great,” she said, checking her purse for eyedrops. She wished she hadn’t teased Jake about coming for Toddy Time. She’d been trying to throw him offtrack, to hide the fact that she was crying, but she saw now that she might have seemed insensitive. She would apologize Thursday when she saw him.

He really was a nice guy. There was no reason they couldn’t be friends.

Will was sitting on one of the long sofas when she came in, and he raised his glass in greeting. He seemed to trail her with curious eyes the whole evening. After dinner, he followed her into her room and shut the door.

“I’m sorry about the way things have been lately,” he said, sitting in the chair by the window. His movements were stiff and awkward, and Ava saw how difficult this was for him. At Bard he had been open and friendly, but here in Woodburn he seemed, at times, clannish and cold. Not proud, but every bit a Woodburn. Able to switch off his feelings at the least provocation.

“You don’t owe me an apology,” she said quickly.

He put one hand up as if to stop her. “I don’t want things to be difficult between us,” he said evenly.

“I don’t want that either.”

He sat back, crossing his legs, resting an ankle on top of one knee. “It’s hard to understand if you aren’t from around here,” he said. “People speak a hidden language. You don’t always hear what’s being said if you haven’t learned to listen for it.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” she said.

He played with the frayed hem of his jeans, taking his time before he began again. He had broken with tradition and dressed casually tonight. Ava had the feeling he had rehearsed this. “We’re courteous, polite people, and we don’t give ourselves away to strangers. There’s so much history here, not all of it good, a lot of it terrible. And all our stories are mixed up together from having been in the same place for so long. They all overlap. And everyone has a different version of the truth. Their truth.” He gave her a swift, earnest look. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, folding one leg under her. She said slowly, “When I asked you about Charlie Woodburn, I wasn’t trying to be rude or hurtful. I was just curious. It’s my job to ask questions, to try to figure out why people act the way they do.”

He continued to play with the hem, wrapping his fingers tightly in the threads. “I know that, Ava,” he said.

“I saw Help me carved on the headboard, and I wondered who could have done it. And it occurred to me that it might have been Charlie, that he might have had some kind of premonition about his death. Or maybe he suspected—someone.”

He looked at her and Ava could see that he was angry, but he was fighting his anger. She had the sudden impression that he felt as if he was belittling himself, as if it should have been her apologizing, not him.

“I’ve been hearing these stories all my life,” he said. “People in this town have always talked about my family. They say things that are untrue and hurtful. The thing with Charlie happened a long time ago, and none of it matters anymore, so let it go. I’m asking you. Please, just let it go.”

She couldn’t let it go. He had no idea how tied to this story she was, how dependent on it she had become. And she couldn’t tell him why. She might never be able to tell him.

He sat watching her and she stared back helplessly.

Distantly, from somewhere deep in the house, she could hear the slow, somber music of Ravel.

She was having trouble sleeping, and when she did eventually fall into a restless sleep, her dreams were wild and nightmarish. She had begun to keep the lamp on all night, although she knew from experience that this did little to banish her dark fantasies. It was an old trick she had learned in childhood soon after the episodes of sleep paralysis had first begun.

She had suffered nightmarish dreams, but she had not had another experience of sleep paralysis, and for that she was grateful.

The night after Will came to apologize, she sat in front of her glowing computer screen, willing the words to come. They wouldn’t, and after a while she stood, threw open the shutters, and raised the window. It was a beautiful night. Moonlight flooded the garden, and a chorus of crickets throbbed like a beating heart. Ava leaned her elbows on the sill and pressed her face against the screen. The air was hot and sultry, but occasionally a mild breeze stirred.

It was on a night like this, a moonlit summer evening, that she’d had her first attack of sleep paralysis. She was twelve, sleeping with the window open on a hot, muggy evening. She had lain awake long after she heard Clotilde go to bed, listening to the increasingly sporadic sound of traffic in the street. Far off in the distance she could hear the mournful wail of a passing train.

She fell asleep with her face turned toward the window but awoke suddenly in the middle of the night. She was lying on her back, taking short, shallow breaths. The room was a velvet blackness but, oddly, she could sense a light coming through the window. It was then that she realized that she couldn’t turn her head to look, she couldn’t move at all, lying stiff and wooden on the bed. There was a sense of something heavy resting on her chest; she couldn’t quite catch her breath. But this was nothing compared to the gradual horror, the dawning awareness that there was something in the room with her. She could hear whispering. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the movement of several small, shadowy figures. They didn’t move like humans; they skittered like crabs, and they were touching her cold skin with long, probing fingers and chattering among themselves, some strange language she couldn’t understand. Her terror was so extreme she thought she might faint. She tried to scream but couldn’t.

And then she could, screaming long after Clotilde had burst through the door and gathered her up in her soft arms.

Remembering this episode now, Ava shivered. She rose and began to walk around the room, stopping to stare at Clotilde’s vase. She had not spoken to her mother since the letter from Frank Dabrowski had arrived but now, remembering Clotilde’s comforting presence all those years ago, she said bitterly, “Don’t think I forgive you. Because I don’t.”

Clotilde maintained a knowing silence.

Ava sat down on the edge of her bed. She could hear a soft tapping in the wall behind her, and it was then, while listening halfheartedly to whatever was making the sound, that a thought occurred to her.

She rose, went into the small office, and took down one of the ledgers from the glass-cased secretary. On the spine was written 1919–1920. She opened it and began to read. The handwriting was more modern, more easily decipherable than the earlier journals she had studied. Colonel James Woodburn, the aunts’ father, had continued his ancestors’ habit of keeping farm journals, except that his entries had less to do with farming and more to do with the weather, business, and family events. She closed the journal and put it back, running her fingers over the spines of the books until she found the one reading 1927–1928. Nineteen twenty-seven. The year Charlie Woodburn first came to town.

Ava opened the journal and began to read. The Colonel wrote in short, choppy sentences, in a rather somber, self-conscious manner.

It was here then, hidden among trivial notations about weather and business, that Ava would find the clues to her story. She read on.

And farther on, Ava found this:

Ava looked up, studying the dark square of window at the end of the room. Only two days after meeting Charlie in the street, the Colonel had had lunch with him. Which meant, surely, that Charlie must have made a favorable impression on his old kinsman.

She took the journal to bed with her. It was two a.m. when she finished the last entry and, rising, went into the office and pulled the last slim volume off the shelf. 1929. The year the Colonel had died. The year Charlie Woodburn had eloped with Fanny. She padded back to bed with the book cradled in her arms. The entries here were less frequent, the handwriting less legible, as if in the last year of his life, the Colonel’s eyesight had begun to fail. A short time later she came across this rather odd entry:

There were only six more entries after that one, the last in October, a week before his death. None of them mentioned Charlie.

The following morning Ava awoke early but lay in bed waiting for the others to leave the house. Fanny had a dental appointment, and Josephine and Maitland were scheduled to take her in at ten o’clock. They planned to make a day of it, having lunch downtown and then buying groceries, so Ava figured she had at least an hour to roam around in the attic looking for photos of Charlie Woodburn before the cleaning people arrived. She could have asked Josephine; she felt certain Josephine would have politely agreed to her exploring the house, but she didn’t want to have to explain what she was searching for. She didn’t know how to broach the subject, so in the end she said nothing, waiting until she heard the car pull out of the drive before rising and going to the window.

To make sure she was alone, she went to the hallway and called out, but no one answered. The mantel clock chimed ten o’clock. She stood for a moment, listening, then slowly climbed the staircase, letting one hand trail along the banister.

There was a peculiar stillness to the house, a heaviness, as if somewhere in the darkest corners a storm might be brewing. She thought of Fraser’s comment that Will had been afraid of the staircase as a boy, that he had often seen the ghost of the Gray Lady standing there, and it was not too hard to imagine how this might be so. The staircase curved sharply to the left at the landing, and ascended for many wide shallow steps to an open central hall on the top floor. The sharp curve of the staircase, as well as the placement of a tall stained-glass window on the landing, caused the lower portion of the staircase to be bathed in shifting shadows.

Ava noted this now as she climbed, watching the way the swaying trees outside the colored window caused murky shadows on the stairs. It was not hard to imagine a child mistaking those shadows for a ghost.

She stopped and turned around, staring at the bottom of the stairwell. A slight breeze puckered the back of her neck. She remembered the entry in Colonel Woodburn’s journal, the image of his dead wife standing at the edge of the garden in a long white gown. What was it he had written? The dead are with us always. Even now, if she stared long enough, she could see, out of the corner of her eye, a small dark-haired woman in a gray gown standing at the foot of the stairway.

But no, Fraser had said Delphine Woodburn always dressed in black. She was constantly in mourning for one of her dead children. Ava reordered the image in her mind and now the woman was dressed in a dark, flowing gown that pooled around her feet. Her pale face, gazing up at Ava, was set in lines of despair and grief.

Turning, Ava continued to climb.

Despite her lush imagination, she had a hard time believing in ghosts. The rational side of her wouldn’t be swayed by something she’d never actually seen. Being raised by Clotilde, a woman who believed in reincarnation and divination, had made her a skeptic. And yet the imaginative side of her, the creative side that could imagine characters and dialogue and the way a landscape looked a hundred years ago, was willing to believe in an unseen world. Here, too, perhaps it was Clotilde’s influence, her stories of gnomes and changelings and lonely wandering spirits, that had shaped her.

More than Ava cared to admit.

She reached the top of the stairs and stopped. She’d been up here once before, when Will first showed her around the house, but she hadn’t climbed the stairs since then. There had been no need. She was comfortable on the bottom floor of the house. Her rooms were large and pleasant, and the other occupants of Woodburn Hall left her alone to work. Up here she felt like an intruder, a guilty thief.

She stood at the top of the stairway, listening. If anyone came home unexpectedly, if Will showed up unannounced, she’d decided that she’d say she’d heard a noise above her, and, knowing the house to be empty, had gone to investigate. She would claim to have been worried that one of the cats was trapped in a room and wreaking havoc. Standing there now, she thought she did hear a scratching sound coming from one of the rooms. But as she began to walk stealthily along the creaking floor-boards, the noise stopped.

The ceilings on the second floor were lower than on the first, maybe nine or ten feet high. Two large bedrooms opened off the hallway to her left, separated by a bath. On the right was a large room, the old nursery where Josephine and Fanny had slept as girls, and next to it was a small, slope-ceilinged room where Will had slept as a boy.

“The nurse’s room,” Fanny and Josephine had called it, giggling.

At the end of the hall was a door, and behind it was a set of narrow stairs leading to the attic.

“You don’t want to go up there,” Will had told her the night he’d showed her the house. He had opened the door so she could peer up the narrow staircase into the darkness, but he had not stepped inside.

“Why not?”

“It’s dusty and filled with broken-down furniture, and the light isn’t very good.”

Ava stopped on the threshold of Will’s room, ducking her head inside. The bedroom was a time capsule. She imagined that it hadn’t changed since Will left home for college. Led Zeppelin, The Melvins, and Soundgarden posters plastered the sloped ceilings, and in one corner a full-size cutout of Janis Joplin stood with several school ties looped pompously around her neck. A neatly made twin bed was pushed beneath the window, and on one wall a tall bookshelf covered in sporting trophies, photos, and tattered paperbacks stood next to a small maple desk. Above it hung a bulletin board plastered with cartoon cutouts and newspaper clippings.

Ava turned and continued to the end of the hallway, knowing that she had little enough time to explore the attic. Will’s room would have to wait for another day. The housecleaners would be arriving soon, and she didn’t want to be up here when they came for fear that one of them might say something to Josephine.

She stopped in front of the attic door, standing with her hand on the knob. Will and Josephine might not have minded her wandering the house, but they certainly would have objected to her looking for evidence of Charlie Woodburn, and this knowledge filled her with a sense of guilt and foreboding. And yet, she told herself, if they had been open about Charlie from the beginning, there would have been no need for subterfuge.

It was easier to blame them than it was to admit her own treason.

The attic door stuck, and she had to pull on it forcefully before it swung open. A sudden blast of hot, stale air greeted her. She peered into the gloom, trying to adjust her eyes, and fumbled in her pocket for her key chain flashlight. She flipped it on, and a thin beam of light shone weakly over the planked walls of the stairwell. She could see a string hanging from the ceiling, and she pulled it, switching on the overhead light. It was nothing more than a bare suspended bulb and gave off little light. The stairs were covered in dust, but there were footsteps clearly visible, no doubt from the day Will had climbed to hunt for the plans of Longford.

She stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her, and began to climb the narrow stairs. Her breathing was labored in the sultry heat. The light from the overhead bulb bled into darkness at the top of the steps, and the thin beam of her flashlight was barely enough to illuminate a few feet in front of her.

Will had been right. She didn’t like it up here. It was dark and dusty, and the air felt as if it was too thick to breathe. She imagined mold spores growing on the dark beadboard walls and ceiling, poisoning her lungs. She stood peering into the gloom, filled with a vague sense of dread.

She understood why, as girls, the aunts had been afraid to play up here.

The room was long and narrow, and had a coved ceiling covered in dark pine. Along one wall, two dormered windows overlooked the drive and the back lawn. The walls were dark, too, giving the room a drab, dreary feeling that the light falling through the small windows could not dissipate. A tall bookcase stacked with medical journals and apothecary jars stood along the opposite wall. She remembered that Will’s ancestor, Jerome, had once used the room as a medical laboratory.

At the opposite end of the room were several old leather trunks and stacked boxes, and beyond that, a narrow passage led into a large open room under the eaves filled with broken furniture and discarded household goods. Ava had no intention of exploring that space; it was too dismal and dank.

She concentrated on the boxes and trunks, which were mostly filled with moldy shoes and clothes, delicate hand-stitched linens and silks ravaged by time and insects. A tower of round boxes filled with ornate, wide-brimmed hats occupied her for some time. There was a treasure trove of vintage clothing here, although most of it had been left to rot.

She found several boxes of documents: old receipts, newspaper clippings, bills, check drafts, and household ledgers. But no letters and no photos.

She heard a car door slam and, going to one of the windows, she saw the Merry Maids van pulled up in the yard and two employees unloading mops, buckets, and a vacuum cleaner. As if sensing her presence, one of the women looked up, and Ava stepped back into the shadows. She remembered her first day at Woodburn Hall, when she, too, had felt herself observed from one of the upstairs windows. Perhaps the very one that she was standing behind now.

A delicate shudder touched her spine, and she turned away from the window. She was beginning to feel depressed by the room, weighed down by something indefinable. There was a peculiar heaviness in the air, an unpleasant odor of formaldehyde, mold, and something unfamiliar, something Ava didn’t like to think too much about, an odor that seemed to linger in the dark, dank corners. She went quickly to the trunks and began to hurriedly repack the clothes.

It was while running her hands inside the bottom of the trunks, looking for forgotten letters, that Ava’s fingers closed over something of interest.

She pulled out a small red leather book. Opening it, she read,

There were very few entries, and none of them were dated. Most of the pages were filled with elaborately drawn cartoons of flappers, jazz singers, and college boys in raccoon coats and saddle oxfords. One cartoon showed a tall, dark-haired boy in a badly fitting suit, his bony wrists and ankles comically exposed, blowing on a clarinet in front of an audience of wild-eyed girls. The caption read, The Sheik works his magic on a bunch of Dumb Doras. And how!

Ava slid the diary in her pocket, and, closing up the trunks, she quickly descended the stairs.

She paused on the threshold of Will’s room, hesitating even as she heard the shouts of the cleaning women below. And then, because she knew she would find what she was looking for, she hurried over to the bookcase. The photo she was searching for wasn’t in sight, but she found it pushed behind a stack of Mad magazines, a silver-framed photo of Will, Hadley, and Jake standing in the shade of a graceful colonnade, their arms around one another. Will was the same slender boy she remembered from Bard, but Jake looked different. He wore a grave, obscure expression, and his face was turned coyly away from the camera, as if he were embarrassed, or hiding something. Both boys had their arms—protectively? possessively?—around Hadley.

She was beautiful, tall and blonde and lovely as Ava had known she would be, as she had already imagined her, gazing at the camera with an expression that seemed both artless and arrogant, a golden girl who knows the world is hers for the taking.