Gray Dawn, Bleak Mo[u]rning

The night Eleanor Faderman was found dead it snowed thirty-one inches at Brookhants.

And it was still coming down the next morning.

The blizzard spread across New England, but Rhode Island received the worst of it and the Brookhants estate seemed to hold the storm’s heart. And it wasn’t only the snow, it was what the wind had done to it. Overnight it had formed drifts that reached up, like arms in cloaks, to hang from the bottoms of windows, and worse: drifts that crested into frozen waves that blocked doorways, forcing those inside to tunnel out and those outside to tunnel in.

Snow curled, like prying fingers, into the spaces between window and sill, and it slithered through the gaps between door and threshold, depositing white snakeskins on entryway rugs.

At Breakwater, enough snow had managed to scuttle indoors that it was noticed by Libbie Brookhants as she made her way up the twisting Spite Tower staircase. Some even dripped over the spines of the shelved books that lined the stairwell, as if it was hanging from the eaves of a roof. She shivered seeing it.

So much snow had blown against the tower’s many windows that it seemed they’d been covered in mourning shrouds, so even as the day filled with light, the windows let little of it inside.

Gray Dawn, Mary MacLane called it in her book.

Gray Dawn, Libbie Brookhants said to herself as she settled at her desk in the center of the round tower room, the peak of its ceiling high above her. It was like sitting beneath an open umbrella, the rafters its ribs.

As you may know, Readers: it’s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors. And in Spite Tower, the umbrella ceiling was never not open.

And the glass eyes from Harold’s stuffed birds and furry things mounted about the room were never not watching. The talking boards stacked on the shelf never more than half asleep, never not waiting for the scrape of charcoal to wake them up. The spoils of his strange travels, canes and statues, urns and books, all on the precipice of vibration should Libbie stray too close.

She shivered again. She set the book on the desk and stared at it. She was tired.

She’d barely slept, it’s true, but she’d not meant to sleep at all. She’d intended to wait only for Alex to fall asleep before she could, alone and unobserved, do something with the book. (Though she had no idea what that something should be.)

But Alex didn’t fall asleep right away. Too much had happened that night, too much had happened before that night, and so too much climbed into bed with them, sat heavily upon them, and kept them up and thinking, even if they did not say the things they were thinking to each other.

Especially because they did not do that.

And so while she had waited for Alex to fall asleep beside her, Libbie herself had drifted off. Into what seemed at first a happy dream—until it slithered into nightmare.

Libbie Brookhants had dreamed of a bright summer day there at Breakwater, the sun enormous and yellow in the cloudless sky. A group of her friends walked in a row down the steep wooden staircase that led from the terraced lawns and gardens to their private stretch of beach. They all wore wool or flannel bathing dresses—bulky and buttoned and built for modesty—but at least their legs and arms were exposed and some of them, like Libbie, had left a few of those top buttons undone as well.

In this dream, Alex was jovial and still young—Alex the Flirt, as she’d been when they’d first met in college—soon splashing and smiling in the waves, her shoulders warm from the sun when Libbie touched them, which she felt free to do many times. Everyone was laughing and relaxed, easy with one another. They drank tart lemonade from their picnic basket before kissing with puckered mouths in the surf. They did not hide these kisses. At some point, Alex’s strong hands were on her, there in waist-high water, wave-hidden hands pulling Libbie in and holding her close against the throb of the tide before moving slowly down the front of her sopped flannel costume before eventually, teasingly, resting between her legs. Libbie almost melted at the pleasure of their closeness in the sun and salt, their friends on the shore watching, until that pleasure melted into something else—the way it happens in dream time—the mood shifting as abruptly as the turn of a kaleidoscope lens, the colors jumbling to form a new pattern from the same elements, this one bleak and wrong.

Now wave after wave of seaweed tumbled toward them, thick and stinking, black seaweed like matted nests of hair or piles of rotting snakes, until the waves were more seaweed than water and everyone fled to the beach.

Everyone except Libbie, that is. She was stuck in place.

She called helplessly to her friends as they stood onshore, their toes just out of the water’s reach, silently watching as she was pulled farther and farther out, struggling against the waves and the black tangles until this unhappy scene flowed to another, and the beach and her friends drifted away, and Libbie, still in her bathing costume, wet and shivering, was standing in fetid water, oily and rank and up to her knees, the bodies of hundreds of wasps floating around her, there in the fountain in front of the Brookhants Main Hall. All of the students and faculty—and Flo and Clara and Eleanor Faderman, too—circled the fountain and stared grimly while a man in a smart suit, a man who most resembled her dead husband, Harold, sat casually on its rim, smoking a cigar while he instructed Libbie to clean herself. He tossed a cloth and a bar of soap at her, which she did not move to catch. The items bounced off her stomach, and when she looked down to see, that stomach, her stomach, was pregnant and stretched obscenely in her bathing dress. The bar of soap and cloth lay atop the black water until they sank into it as if sucked down by some unseen mouth. Into the fountain not-quite Harold threw his cigar, which hissed unnaturally as it went out, and then he reached down to the ground and pulled up something Libbie couldn’t see until it cleared the rim: a large tub of bathing salts with a garish pink-and-white-striped label, Dr. MacLane’s Arsenical Bath Salts—Guaranteed to Restore Virtue in All Ruined Women. A pen-and-ink drawing of Mary MacLane in a fashionable hat smiled coyly from the label’s bottom corner.

Then the drawing moved. It winked at her as its mouth stretched to say, “Time for a bath, Libbie!” And then again and again until the gathered students and faculty joined in, until it became a chant: Time for a bath, Libbie! Time for a bath, Libbie! And shadow Harold opened the tub and began pouring black salts into the fountain. But as they streamed out, right before they hit the water, they snapped into yellow jackets and were upon her.

Libbie Brookhants had woken to a room creeping with thin light. It was nearly seven. She was shivering with sweat and tied up in her nightgown.

But Alex, thankfully, was now asleep beside her. At least there was that.

She slipped from the bed and washed her face at the sink in her dressing room, making only whispers of noise as she dressed quickly in the half dark.

She then quietly, oh so quietly, took the copy of Mary MacLane’s book from where she’d hidden it from Alex: beneath her pillow.

Had there ever been a more obvious cause for a nightmare?

By the time the Eckharts arrived that morning and tunneled into the house, their noses and cheeks red, their coats and hats as if frosted with grainy buttercream, Libbie Brookhants had been at her desk in the tower for hours—groggy and addled and not yet solving the problem of Mary MacLane’s book.

The Eckharts were loud. They had to push back the snow that tumbled in with them. They stomped their feet and brushed the buttercream from their shoulders, sounding like people very glad to again be indoors.

She then quietly, oh so quietly, took the copy of Mary MacLane’s book. Had there ever been a more obvious cause for a nightmare?

They were also, Libbie saw, as she came down the tower stairs to greet them and ask about their trek, conspicuously without Adelaide.

Max reported that she was feeling poorly. He said she’d had some trouble even getting to their cottage the night before, though given the storm, they’d all had some trouble with that, and he’d hoped sleep would cure her. But then during the night she’d woken him, shaking his shoulders and calling his name. He’d found her up and out of bed with her coat over her nightclothes: pale, fever soaked, and talking nonsense about needing to come back here, to Breakwater, at once.

“Here?” Libbie asked. “Why on earth?”

“We don’t need to go into all of that, do we, Max?” Hanna, who had already seemed unhappy with her son’s storytelling, called from the dining room. She was on her way to the kitchen to fetch a mop. “Mrs. Brookhants doesn’t need the bother. Between her fever and this lack of sleep, is it any wonder Addie can’t keep her mind fixed on what’s real?”

“It really was only nonsense, Mrs. Brookhants,” Max said. He lowered his voice a little. “She had some idea about the storm causing the tide to rise and it carrying you off. I told her, ‘Addie, it doesn’t matter how much it snows—the water can’t come all the way up those rocks in one night.’ But she said it would. She wanted us to come see that you were alright, even though I said you were sleeping warm in your bed and that we’d be the only thing bothering you. I’m sure it’s the news of the girl that’s done it. My mother said it got in her head funny as soon as she heard.” Great clumps of snow had fallen from the sides of his boots and he stooped to gather it in his hands, which made no sense, as it was melting even as he did so.

“Oh, Max, please leave it,” Libbie said, watching him now awkwardly attempt to hold the dripping clumps, like a child who’s hauled snowballs indoors.

“Sorry, Mrs. Brookhants,” Max said, dropping it again.

“I think it might be best to send for the doctor,” Libbie said. “Just to be cautious. For a fever to be causing her such confusion so quickly—”

“Not today we won’t,” Caspar said. Libbie hadn’t realized he was still lingering in the entry hall with them, snow in his dripping beard.

She turned to him unhappily. “We won’t?”

“None would make it,” he said. “Anthony Harton’s crew will come when they can to help clear the school road,” he added. “But it won’t be passable today.”

“Not even by tomorrow if it keeps on like this,” Max said.

Libbie hadn’t expected this news. She could, of course, see that it was very unpleasant outside, but she’d been thinking the storm would only delay her arrival at Brookhants, not prevent it entirely.

Hanna was back, already swishing the mop through the snowmelt on the floor. “Adelaide didn’t know what she was saying,” she said again. “She needs only to rest.”

“It seems she’s been given just the day for that,” Libbie said. She tried to sound cheery about this, but it rang false. She had to get to Brookhants.

There were, of course, logistical matters that needed her attention, meeting with the trustees, drafting a formal letter to all parents apprising them, in official terms, of the bad news. And they would have to handle the newspapermen, hopefully better than they’d done with Flo and Clara.

But it was the immediate aftermath of this peculiar tragedy that Libbie was most concerned with, especially as it pertained to any gossip about the book, any questions raised or alluded to. It made her itchy and sour to be kept away from her school, unable to control its goings-on. No doubt Leanna Hamm would right now be in the dining hall, riling her colleagues as they tried to eat their toast, or worse: asking the somber and sleep-deprived students what they remembered about The Story of Mary MacLane and its influence on Eleanor Faderman, and on Florence and Clara, too. Soon Miss Hamm would be rounding up any lurking copies for some rash action she was planning. Perhaps a bonfire in the winter-drained fountain? Libbie could easily imagine the worst from Leanna Hamm and now she couldn’t even get to campus to counteract it.

“I shouldn’t have left my girls last night,” she said. “I’d be there now.”

“We did not leave the girls,” Alex said, coming down the wide staircase from the second floor. (Never to be confused, Readers, with the twisty, cramped, and book-lined staircase leading to the tower.)

Libbie had been hoping she wasn’t yet awake.

“They have every other instructor at their disposal.” Alex smiled but her tone did not match it. “It snows here each winter, and yet each winter we’re all so surprised to find it unpleasant.”

“I’ve never known it to snow like this,” Caspar said.

“Addie mentioned her snowshoes,” Libbie said, thinking aloud.

“When did that come up in conversation?” Alex asked. “And why?”

Libbie ignored her and turned to Max. “Do you think they might fit me? Well enough for just one trip?”

“I think they would . . .” Max said. It was clear there was something else he wasn’t saying. Max’s face was usually a signal flag for his thoughts.

“Adelaide would rather I not borrow them,” Libbie said. “Is that it?”

“Oh no, that’s not—” Max said, shaking his head with wide eyes in an effort to be most convincing. “Addie would want you to use them as much as you like. It’s just—” Again he stopped short of saying the thing he wanted to say.

“It’s bad out there, Mrs. Brookhants,” Caspar said. “Very.” Max nodded at this.

“I can see that,” Libbie said. “That’s why I thought of the snowshoes.”

“Yes, ma’am . . .” Now it was Caspar trailing off.

“They’re trying to tell you that it’s worse than what even Adelaide’s magical snowshoes can solve,” Alex said. “It’s not a trip we can make today.”

“Is that it?” Libbie asked the men. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I think Miss Trills has it right,” Caspar said. “It isn’t a day for travel, even on a short road.”

“Here we are in the great twentieth century and I can’t get across my own land to my students,” Libbie said. “Is that the full of this morning’s report?”

“I might go for you, Mrs. Brookhants,” Max said, determined to be the one to offer a solution.

“That’s an idea,” Caspar said.

“And why would it be right for you to do so but wrong for me?”

Max started to answer, but Libbie cut him off with a wave of her hand. “No, please don’t say. If I could go, that would be the thing. You in my stead does me no good. Though I thank you for the offer, Max. And with Addie ill.”

“Adelaide’s ill?” Alex asked. “What’s happened to her?”

No one seemed interested in going through that again, and so she was answered by Hanna with: “Only a touch of fever. She’ll be right as rain tomorrow if she gets the sleep she needs today.”

The day’s disappointments now dispensed, Hanna and her mop and Caspar and Max all went about their work. Other than Libbie, only Alex remained, looking out the window at the swarming snow.

Libbie turned to slip up the tower stairs, but as she did, Alex said, “You didn’t sleep.”

“If you know that it must be because I kept you awake.”

“You didn’t,” Alex said. “I couldn’t sleep thinking of Eleanor and the angel’s trumpets. She knew the risk. I’m sure she must have.”

“That they’re poison?”

“Yes, but more than that—that they would kill her, all that she ate.”

“You mean to say what?” Libbie would not be the first to use the word.

Alex shook her head as if to clear a thought. “What have you done with the book?”

“Which?” Libbie asked.

“You know which. I think it’s past time I read it and now the snow’s given me a day to do so.”

“Is your memory so short as that?” Libbie asked, trying for nonchalance. “We read it only this summer.”

“That was your diversion,” Alex said. “Not mine.”

Now Libbie was indignant. “Surely even you can remember Sara Dahlgren reading aloud its most relevant entries?” She gestured toward the dining room. “Right here. At dinner? She stood on her chair. Katharine was laughing so much she choked on her cocktail.”

“Isn’t Katharine often choking on her cocktails?”

For a moment, Libbie considered the worth of continuing in this vein. She decided that it was better to try than not to do so. “Later that night I recall us both being quite inspired by what we’d heard. Sara teased us the next morning about how quickly we’d rushed off together. Or have you no memory of that, either?”

“Vulgarity has never suited you, Libbie,” Alex said, her voice a notch lower and her eyes casting about for Hanna. “And yet you’re so determined to keep trying it on.”

“I’d say that I wear my vulgarity better than you do your priggishness, but I’m no longer certain that’s true. It quite suits you.”

They looked at each other unhappily. Outside the wind snarled to match.

“We’re both tired and quarrelsome,” Alex said, as if she was now being the reasonable one. “Let’s not give in to it. I don’t want the copy from Sara Dahlgren’s performance, anyway. I want to read the copy we found last night with Eleanor Faderman. Where is it?”

“It’s on my desk,” Libbie said, sighing and again starting up the tower stairs. “Come fetch it.”

“Yes, I think I will,” Alex said, taking a step or two in the same direction. And then she stopped, fully planted herself, and looked up the narrow tower stairs as they twisted into dim light. “Are you working now?”

Libbie had anticipated this reaction. Unlike Harold, Libbie’s departed husband-of-happenstance, Alex did not find the story of the Rash brothers and their Spite Tower charmingly representative of ye olde New England. Truth be told, Alex had always found the tower unsettling—a place to avoid in the otherwise well-appointed house. Because of this, she left its dominion solely to Libbie. Which Libbie was grateful for, and sometimes took advantage of.

Like now.

She stopped climbing and turned to face Alex below her. “I still have to write the Fadermans—and I don’t know what that will take from me. If you’d prefer, I can send the book with Hanna when she brings my tray.”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Alex said, retracing the steps she’d just taken. “I’ll be in the parlor.”

Libbie was pleased by the success of her deflection, however momentary. The tower stairs were as good as a drawbridge and moat, she thought as she climbed the rest. Any additional time granted to her was necessary. The book was there on her desk, just where she’d placed it hours before, and she still didn’t know what to do with it.

She pulled the shawl from the back of her chair and wrapped it over her shoulders before sitting. It was much colder here in her perch atop the tower, the world outside its windows still a swirling white void. She flipped through the book, letting the pages fall against each other until she found what she wanted: the March 5 entry.

Again, she stared at it. Alex was far too clever not to notice it. And Alex, being Alex, would also understand how to read it. Sara Dahlgren was a lot of things, but cunning code maker was not among them.

This entry, one of the book’s controversial anemone lady passages—this was proof of Libbie’s lie. It showed what she had done, right there on the page in ink. A Pinkerton might be able to handle the book and not discern her culpability, but the same could not be said for Alex. Her Alex. This was the page that connected Libbie to the book, because it was her book.

Or it was once, at any rate.

Before she gave it to Flo and Clara.

They’d come to her office to ask permission to form their club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society. It was the morning after the hailstorm and she’d been busy with the groundskeepers, sorting out the damage, so she’d been unable to make time for them. They’d instead made an appointment for the following day. They were so excited! And smitten, it was clear. In the giddy rush of their pink-cheeked crush, they so reminded Libbie of herself and Alex, once upon an earlier time.

Charmed by these students, Libbie had, at some point during her busy day, thought to bring them her personal copy of Mary MacLane’s book. She’d surprise them with it. She knew that copies of the book were scarce at Brookhants, that some teachers (like Leanna Hamm) had even told students that they were banned from campus, though that wasn’t true. (At least not at the time.)

If Flo and Clara were surprised by this gesture, by their own Principal Brookhants not only owning such a book but giving it to them, they did not show it. At least not to Libbie.

But even as she handed it to the girls—and before that, when she’d plucked it from the bookshelves lining the tower—Libbie knew Alex wouldn’t approve. It was one thing for their students to be such champions for the book. It was quite another for their principal to seem to endorse it, and the things it said.

And now, of course, and now . . .

Well, someone like Leanna Hamm would make much out of the bad fact that it was Libbie’s own copy that kept turning up with dead Brookhants students. And perhaps it wouldn’t only be Leanna Hamm who felt that way.

Libbie knew it wouldn’t.

She’d been so pleased with herself and her decision, her secret support of these girls in crush, that she’d quite forgotten about the book’s March 5 entry and how it exposed her. She’d forgotten about it, that is, until her copy was found in the woods with Flo and Clara and the questions about who had brought it there had bloomed, and with them the examinations of its marginalia.

And then she’d remembered.

Under any other circumstance, Libbie would have been disappointed with what the students had done to her book. It was positively filled with scribbles—in ink and pencil both, passages underlined and circled, others marked with stars or hearts or cryptic notes written above or below the print.

Perhaps they had never intended to return it to her, but under the strange and terrible circumstances that did return it, Libbie Brookhants was grateful for those markings. If they hadn’t been there, her connection to it would have already been discovered. The book had been handled by many people before Eleanor had stolen it. But as it was, Libbie was still the only one who knew. And now that she had it again, she planned to keep it that way.

* * *

Last August was only the third time that their friends—the friends who were most like Libbie and Alex—had come to Spite Manor to visit. This was just a few months prior, but now, with all that had happened since, it seemed impossibly long ago: a full week of sunbake and salted skin, of sand in their hair—sand all over the house, really, on the floors and in the bedsheets—all of them eating too much peach ice cream out on the porch because they could not stop themselves from doing so. It was rich and sweet and deliciously cold. It made their teeth and temples ache.

The night Sara Dahlgren had read those passages from Mary MacLane’s book the lot of them were, Libbie remembered, a little bit drunk and a lot sun silly from their day. The Eckharts were away at Max and Adelaide’s wedding in Pittsburgh, so Libbie and her friends had enjoyed the full run of the staffless house and were already stripped down to their nightgowns and silk robes, nothing at all on underneath. Sunburned Alex had even deigned to wear the striped boy’s nightshirt Sara bought for her in Spain, though she’d blushed and laughed at it when Sara had given it to her.

It was meltingly hot, each of Spite Manor’s windows open with the ocean crashing outside, all of them lolled around the dining table, goading each other on.

Their friends^* had delivered to them all manner of gay surprises from the Continent: poems and novels, a book of nude drawings, and a set of artistic stereo cards purchased from the private stock of a prominent Parisian photographer. In those images, women in top hats and tails had their arms around each other, and women in far less clothing had their mouths upon each other.

“Good thing I decided not to invite Anthony Comstock,”^* Libbie had joked when the stereoscope^* was passed her way and she had the chance to view the most explicit of the photos.

“Can that whiskered rhinoceros really still be at it?” Sara had asked.

“He’s even worse than before! They gave him an ounce of power and he’s spun it into a pound of tyranny.”

“Have I ever told you that I had the great displeasure of meeting him once at a benefit?” Sara asked.

“We know!” Katharine said, trying to cut short the story they’d all heard, which never worked with Sara.

“Although that particular evening did also then offer me the very great pleasure of voicing a number of new obscenities in Mr. Comstock’s pitiful presence. I don’t think he even had time to write them all down for his records, so many came his way at once.”

“We’ve heard this before!” Katharine shouted again.

More drinks were mixed, more Comstock-condemned materials passed around.

However, for once the biggest success of the evening’s sapphic show-and-tell did not belong to the fashionable Europeans and their artistic photographs. On this night the winning item was as young and brash as its country of origin: American Mary MacLane’s portrayal, a book Sara told them she’d sought out as soon as she’d arrived stateside the month before.

“And that was all quite fortuitous,” Sara had said. “Something out of a novel. Did I tell you? My regular bookseller didn’t have a single copy left in stock—and I’d gone there especially for them. He said he would have to order them for me and I didn’t know if I’d have them before I had to leave New York and I was most vexed about that and was walking up Lexington, pouting, trying to think where else to look, and I ran into the most interesting woman selling them from a folding table right there on the sidewalk. Can you believe it? I practically stepped on her.”

“You think every woman you meet is the most interesting woman you’ve met,” Alex said, to the group’s particular delight because Alex did not usually speak this way, not even to Sara Dahlgren.

“Not every woman, Alex.” Sara blew her an exaggerated kiss before continuing. “As it was, this interesting woman sold me five copies. I would have taken more, and I told her that, but I couldn’t carry them, and unlike my regular bookseller she did not offer delivery.”

“You don’t say,” Alex said. “How remarkably uncouth of the woman on the sidewalk with the folding table.”

“What a queer thing to be selling on the street,” Katharine said. “Where do you think she came from?”

Sara smiled like this was the best part. She shook her head. “Clearly a woman with a head for sales. Anyway, you should be very grateful that I was so willing to play pack mule, because I am now giving you one of the copies that I hauled up Lexington that day.”

“Aren’t we the lucky ones?” Libbie had said, squeezing Alex’s leg beneath the table and then leaving her hand there on Alex’s bare thigh.

That night, the group of them had first giggled, then howled, as Sara read aloud Mary’s continued beseeching of the devil. Fed by this audience of rummy women, Sara grew more and more animated in her performance. Eventually she climbed atop her chair and practically sang the entries she’d been saving for her finale: Mary’s erotic desire for Fannie Corbin, her anemone lady.

At first, they all also pretended to find these passages worthy of more titters. But this was only to save face. They were, each to a listener, stirred.

For Alex and Libbie in particular, Mary’s bold declarations of lust kindled a shared longing. It was a longing additionally charged by the company, the photographs, the cocktails—but its greatest fuel came from their own memories of who they had been, and what they had been to each other, all those years before when they were Mary’s age, or just about: the year they had discovered the previously unmapped landscape of their desire.

They had believed, then, that they were charting new worlds with their bodies. Surely the arch of Alex’s back, the jut of her hip bone, the flush of her cheeks when Libbie moved atop her were each more beautiful than the sunsets or mountain passes or banal wildflowers Libbie had previously gushed over, never guessing at their mere adequacy. She could almost (though not quite) blush to remember the hours—hours!—they had spent together in the narrow, squeaking bed of an empty Wellesley dorm room (one with a leak in the ceiling that had yet to be repaired), using their hands and mouths to explore the territories of each other’s bodies. And most importantly: those bodies when they were fitted together.

Mary MacLane’s words were now like an echo of that lost time. And that echo had lasted for more than just a single night of lovemaking to be overheard and remarked upon the next morning by their pretending-to-be-scandalized friends.

In fact, Readers, it seemed to Libbie that it had lasted all the way into the fall and the start of term. She and Alex had been better. They had been more like what they once were to each other—more like the couple they’d been, like the people they’d been—before this life at Brookhants.

Until, that is, the tragedy with Flo and Clara.

And now Eleanor, too.

And so here was Libbie, at her desk atop the tower, the book before her, and what to do with it?

Sara Dahlgren and her games, everything a chance to play.

Her very personal inscription to Libbie was buried in the March 5 entry. She’d made boxes around letters and underlined words until the passage read as follows:

To library^*—

I feel a strange attraction of sex

a certain strained, tense passion

And this is my predominating feeling

It brings me pain and pleasure mingled in that odd, odd fashion.

Love,

Your sara

Sara had written beneath in her own hand: P.S. Hasn’t your Alex ever learned to share?

Libbie sighed. She looked out the windows at the snow still coming down and thought she might let herself be hypnotized if she stared long enough. It seemed almost to hum. She could hear it beyond the shivering windows. Perhaps she should just give the book to Alex as it was, even leave it open to this entry when she did. Then they would finally have to talk about the things they’d rather not. Wouldn’t they?

The clock struck the half hour and startled her, its chime filling the room like a warning bell. Hanna would arrive with her tray at any moment.

Libbie picked up her pen. She did not want to talk to Alex about the things they did not talk about.

So for now, she would add more brackets and boxes to confuse the issue. That’s what she would do. She’d thought of doing it earlier but couldn’t, for whatever reason, make herself mark the page. But she would do it now. It would hide Sara’s original code in plain sight. If almost everything in the passage was marked, then who could read it and make any sense of it—who could discern the original message or its sender?

Libbie put the pen to the page. And, she would have sworn it, the buzz from outside grew louder. Her eyes wobbled. She refocused, tried again. Her markings looked so obvious to her—so tellingly new, added after the fact.

She drew boxes and circles. She underlined and crossed out.

But the more of her own markings she added, the more Sara’s original message seemed to stand out. She couldn’t explain this, but it was almost as if Sara Dahlgren’s lines were now darker.

And that buzzing from outside had come in. Libbie looked up into the umbrella ceiling and then behind her at the shelves lined with Harold’s collections. She almost expected to see the mounted taxidermy, the broken pieces of ancient pottery, the framed photographs and sky charts and maps vibrate. The buzzing moved through it all: from the floorboards up through her desk and the walls to the rafters above.

And now Sara Dahlgren’s message was practically glowing. This was so stupid, so stupid a thing, and yet Libbie was so frustrated that she was now near to tears.

And Alex would read it and Alex would know. Another wrong between them.

She could hear Hanna saying something below. She was on the landing, on her way up.

Libbie had waited too long and now her only choice was to remove the page. Its absence would spark other questions, yes, but the evidence that connected her to the book would be gone.

Libbie bent the binding back, heard it break as she did. She found a ruler in the drawer—quickly, quickly now—and set its thin edge against the inside fold of the page. She fit it there exactly and then applied pressure.

Now there was the rattle of Hanna and the tray of dishes up the twisting stairs.

Using her right hand, Libbie tore the page from the top.

Never before in her life had Libbie Brookhants so neatly removed a page from a book: no jagged edges or remnants left behind. There was a chance, slim but possible, that Alex wouldn’t even notice it was gone. Or if she did, she might think this hop from page 180 to page 183 merely a printing error. (Though given that it occurred in one of the most explicitly sapphic entries in the volume, this was doubtful, Readers.)

Libbie now slid the leaf that was pages 181 and 182, the evidence against her, beneath some other papers on her desk and closed the book just as Hanna came up the final stair and into the room, the coffeepot and saucer rattling with her efforts. “A bit late this morning, aren’t I?” she said. “But my jam will make up for it, I hope.” She placed the tray at the edge of the desk and turned the cup over so that she could pour into it.

Libbie felt like she’d been slapped hard across her face. Or maybe it was more like she’d ducked away from a slap at the last moment. She couldn’t tell.

“Hanna,” she asked, as even the scent of the coffee warmed her, “do you know the cause of the buzzing? Is Max doing something else with the radiators?”

“What is it, now?” Hanna asked, adding a ghost of cream.

“The buzzing sound,” Libbie said as if it should be obvious. It should have been, but now that she had said it, she noticed she could no longer hear the noise.

“I haven’t the least idea,” Hanna said, turning her head as if to listen.

“It seems to have stopped,” Libbie said. She took a drink of her coffee. It was bitter and rich, a combination she favored.

“Oh good,” Hanna said. “Max has fixed it, then. He is clever about those radiators.” She set a plate with toast and fruit in front of Libbie, mentioned again that the blackberry jam had turned out well, if she did say so herself, and then asked, “Is there anything else, ma’am?”

“If you could bring this to Alex,” Libbie said, handing her the book. “I think she’s in the parlor.”

“Yes, I just saw her there,” Hanna said.

So it was done.

Hanna was carrying the book away and it no longer showed Libbie’s secrets. She would have to do something with the page, of course, but it was only a single piece of paper. She might drop it in the kitchen fire or confetti it with scissors. Or she might keep it. She might. Because it was from Sara and because she wanted to.

But she had a little time to decide about that, anyway. For now, Libbie wanted only to finish this cup of coffee and then put her head upon this desk and rest her eyes.

She was so tired.