Esse Quam Videri

    When at Brook-hants, mind the hour,

    for here time is queer.

    If you think you hold the power,

    death will draw you near.^*

As soon as she was certain Ava was sleeping in her bed—her wounds dressed and her broken arm set in a cast by the doctor—our Libbie did not wait one moment more to do what she’d come back to Brookhants to do.

What she’d pretended, for far too long, needn’t be done.

She gathered the book and the awful doll, too. She bundled them in a feed sack she’d taken earlier from the barn. Then she packed a valise with a few items of clothing—she could send for the rest later—and told Caspar to ready the carriage because she’d want him to take her over to Newport as soon as she finished a chore.

What gall, Readers, to call what she had to do a chore.

And what gall to think she would ever finish it.

Since nightfall, Libbie hadn’t been able to account for Adelaide’s whereabouts and that did trouble her. But she was already so troubled. What did it matter, really? Addie would find her, when she wanted to. Or she wouldn’t. No matter which, Libbie had things to do until someone or something stopped her from doing them. She herself would no longer be that someone.

She headed out into the dark, across the terraced lawns to the wooden stairs, slick with mist and algae, that would take her down to the water’s edge. She took each step carefully, holding the railing with her free hand. No need to create cause for an accident when Spite Manor specialized in them.

She cleared the final stair and her footfalls sank into the wet sand. The dark water flashed white in its crashing surf, like the ocean baring its sharp teeth again and again, its mouth rolling open and closed. As she walked, wind whipped sand into her own mouth. It crunched between her molars and tasted of rot. The beach was colder than she’d expected, than she remembered. Her time in the asylum had been like being buried beneath this sand: only the world in her head had felt real to her there. The doctors tried to reach inside it but she wouldn’t let them. And though it was a dark and lonely world, one built from her own guilt and fear, she hadn’t minded. Not entirely. It gave her somewhere safe to wait while she plotted. While she puzzled and repuzzled the events that had ended with her Alex at the bottom of the Spite Tower stairs. When Libbie apportioned the blame for this, she always took the biggest helping. Even still: there was plenty left to go around.

And then Adelaide had written to tell her that Hanna was dead.^*

This news hadn’t made Libbie feel consoled so much as curious. And maybe a little bit brave. If Hanna’s death wasn’t a sign that it was time for her to act, what would be? Libbie was someone who put much stock in signs, now.

So she’d stopped hiding.

And just this morning, she’d come back to Brookhants.

Sara Dahlgren told her plainly that it was mad for her to do so, even for only one night. In fact, Sara said, it was the kind of idea that belonged to someone who should stay in the asylum until she no longer had it. You must have guessed that it would be Sara Dahlgren, Readers, who would call in several significant favors from her coterie of well-connected double-dealers in order to bypass Senator Packard’s wishes and to hasten Libbie’s release. For now.

Sara said she wanted to get them (and Ava) on a boat back to France as soon as she could make the arrangements. (And maybe after she’d also attended one or two parties in Newport. You know how it is, Readers: when in Rhode Island . . .)

But Libbie had no such plans. When their carriage had rounded the Spite Manor drive earlier that day, and passed through the tower’s shadow as it stretched over the road, she knew she’d likely never leave again.

“It’s as ugly as it’s ever been,” Sara said, as they pulled up to the house.

“Worse,” Libbie said as a reward to Sara for getting her here.

Sara had been anxious, distracted, saying, “Promise me you’ll pack only a few things, for now, and we’ll send for the rest later. We’ll go over to Newport for a week or so—if we make the ferry—just until you remember what it’s like to be a person with other people. And then on to Boston and out of Puritanical New England for good.”

Libbie wasn’t even paying attention because there was Ava, already there she was, out on the porch to greet them with Adelaide close behind. (And with Hanna dead and gone besides.)^*

“She’s bigger than I imagined her,” Libbie said. Though she hadn’t imagined her very much. She thought she saw something of Harold in this girl now staring at their carriage from beneath the shade of the low porch roof. Maybe she even saw, strangely—impossibly—something of Alex. But Libbie saw nothing of herself.

“Oh, she is a weed, isn’t she?” Sara said, looking, too. “France is more her home than America will ever be—clever girl. She’ll be happy to go back, I know it. And you’ll be happy again. Finally.” Sara had then turned from the window to look at Libbie. “Oh, Library, you look so old.” Were those tears in her eyes? Was it possible, Readers?^*

Sara Dahlgren was still Sara Dahlgren. There was some comfort in that. But Libbie didn’t want to be comforted. She’d only wanted to use Sara to do what had now been done: to return to Brookhants. She wouldn’t explain herself. She knew she couldn’t.

So Libbie and Sara had argued. And then Sara had left, saying she couldn’t miss the ferry over to Newport or she’d be stuck here, but that she’d come back for them on Monday. She’d give Libbie the weekend to get acquainted with Ava and to pack her things, sort her affairs, but she would not leave without her. Sara knew Libbie would change her mind, she said. She knew Libbie would see her way to reason.

But our Libbie no longer dealt in reason, Readers. She dealt in signs and omens. And this afternoon, in the orchard, she’d had plenty of those.

Now, she walked on, thirty, maybe forty yards down the cold beach, to the area she and her friends had once favored for splashing about in their new bathing suits, the same place Alex had kissed her brazenly in the surf and Libbie had let her and everyone had cheered.

Libbie was not surprised to hear the sound of the yellow jackets begin in a low hum and then ramp up to a deep and throbbing whir as she went. She had expected this. Though the pain in her hip, where the apple bruise had been—and where it hadn’t been for more than a year—that did catch her out.

She knelt in the fine, wet sand near the shoreline and began digging with her hands. The silt wedged up under her fingernails and the crashing black water sprayed until her dress was sopping and heavy. She shivered but continued on. She had a job to do, one she’d neglected for too long—unforgivably too long. She finished one hole, judged its size as correct, and pulled the sack of items toward her. She took out the matches first, then the awful doll. Perhaps charm was more accurate? Or talisman?

Alex, her Alex, had been right: fire was the thing. Burn these cursed items to ash and then let the tide carry them out and away from Brookhants. She would set fire to each of the doll’s selves on its own, just as Alex would have.

And then she’d burn the book, each page. And then the orchard, every tree.

And finally, if she had time, if nothing stopped her: the tower.

This was her plan. And now to accomplish it.

The wind took the life from the first match as soon as she struck it. It did the same to the next.

She cupped the third until it caught and lasted, and then carried that cupped palm to the largest doll, the one with blackberry brambles wrapping her throat and a pile of stripped flesh at her feet. It took the fire as soon as she pressed the match to its side.

As it burned, it produced flames of purple and green among the orange. It hissed and writhed in the silt hole where she’d dropped it, as if in death throes, until only a mound of black ash remained. Libbie swept more silt over that ash, filling the hole until it wasn’t there any longer. And now the waves could do their work.

She dug another hole in the silt for the next doll, the Clara look-alike. Her fingers ached with cold.

As she worked, she thought of the story she’d never told Alex. She’d never told anyone.

When Harold had told her the story, which he’d done the first time he’d brought Libbie to Brookhants, she had dismissed it as silly and false: a relic from an unenlightened age. Or she’d wanted to do this, anyway. She’d told herself that’s what she had done.

But the story didn’t care about that. It simply was, whether or not she chose to believe in it.

* * *

The curse at Brookhants, Libbie knew (and now believed), had not started with Flo and Clara and a book by a provocative girl from Montana. It traced much further back than that, to the Rash brothers and their Spite Tower, though not as in the historically sanctioned version of that story, the oft-repeated anecdote. That version, as with so many of the stories we tell about our history, erased a woman^*—a plain, bad heroine—in favor of a less messy and more palatable yarn about two feuding brothers from New England.

According to Harold, there had long been gossip about this woman, since even before the arrival of the brothers. These were enigmatic accusations, whispered primarily by locals on the rare occasions when they spotted her. (Or when misfortune fell upon them.) The kinds of things insinuated about her were exactly what you would expect to be said of an unmarried woman living alone in that era.

She lived in a cottage on what is now Brookhants land, though back then it was her land. After the death of her parents, the entire estate had been (quite unusually, for the time) left to her and her alone. The girl’s parents were French immigrants and they had no close relations in America. (And were never very eager to discuss those that they’d left behind in France.)

The small family lived happily and peacefully in the cottage on the water that the parents, both parents, had built by hand. The girl grew. She was bright and passionate. She was educated by both of her parents about things near and far, but what she cared most about in the whole of the world was this land on the water where she lived. And about this place she knew every single thing, everything there was to know.

Years later, one of her parents died and the other too soon followed. It would be cliché to tell you that it was of a broken heart, and yet . . .

After, the woman’s world remained as small or as large as that. She had no siblings and did not seek a lover. She lived simply in her cottage. She fished and hunted, sewed and painted, read and wrote and thought, and made her way alone. Sometimes she went into town to buy or barter for things she needed, but most often she did not.

She was not unhappy. But she was alone.

Her parents had once seen so much of the world, they had lived in it. But when they’d taught her about what they’d seen and done, it had not made their child want to seek it out for herself. She was content in this cottage on her own land by the water.

Into this picture, enter the Rash brothers: Samuel, the elder and more pragmatic, and Jonathan, the more ambitious and with a temper to match. The brothers were full of belief in themselves and their masculine industriousness. Fueled by a generous allotment from their own father’s estate, they moved to the area expressly to buy and cultivate two large parcels of land adjacent to the woman’s property.

And seeing as her property was wedged like a splinter between those parcels, the brothers thought they might offer to buy hers as well. As a condition of their offer, they would allow her to continue to live in her cottage as long as she wished.

A few of the locals warned the brothers not to do business with this woman, that her lineage was unnatural and that she was not to be trusted. (That she was, maybe, even worse than that.) The Rash brothers scoffed at such old-fashioned superstition. They joked about how amusing it was for two farmers from Connecticut to be the men to finally bring modernity to the region. Samuel even made reference to the lessons of Salem.

And so undeterred by local nonsense, they visited the woman at her cottage and she greeted them warmly, invited them in. Her rooms were small and spare but clean and warm—the cottage had a good fireplace. There were bookshelves on one wall and books on those shelves. She served them tea with honey and milk. She was much more refined in her manner than they’d been led to expect, and also, in the firelight, less plain and dour.

Their mugs drained, the brothers made their offer. The woman listened carefully and asked to consider it for three days. Jonathan and Samuel agreed to grant her the time she wanted and said their goodbyes.

It is as good as done, they told each other.

Three days later they returned to her cottage. The woman was, perhaps, a bit chillier toward them than during their previous visit, though still polite when she invited them in. She did not offer tea. Instead, she asked if they had offered her a fair price. They said yes, they had. She then asked if it was the same price they’d have offered her if she was a man. The brothers said of course, just the same figure.

The woman considered this answer for several silent moments. She then told the brothers about her parents and how much they’d loved this cottage, how they’d picked this place for its views of the glittering water and the lush surround of the trees. She told them how happy they’d all been here.

The brothers listened without hearing.

When she was finished, she asked them, a final time, were they sure they had offered her the fairest price for her land? An honest price?

The Rash brothers said, Yes, yes we certainly have. We would not cheat you. We are honest men.

Then I cannot sell to you, she told them. You’ve lied to me. And still you lie.

They insisted that this was some misunderstanding, that they were honest men and true to their word, but the woman would not hear these insistences. She showed them to her door and wished them well in their work. Eventually, and with Jonathan still sputtering protestations, they left.

Of course, you already know, Readers, that the brothers had not given her the fairest price. In fact, they’d purchased a lesser piece of land for almost twice what they’d offered her. It was good business, after all, to try to get the best deal.

It’s also true that the woman could have simply told them that she knew this and asked for more money.

But she had asked for something: the truth. And they had not given it to her.

At first, the Rash brothers were angry, Jonathan most of all. But they had too much work to do to dwell on their anger for long. They consoled themselves with the belief that while they were sure to thrive in this new venture, the woman who had refused them would only grow weaker and more alone in her old age. Once their farms were prosperous, this same woman might even come begging them to buy her land. And when that time came, Samuel told his brother, they should take pity on her, for they were not only wise and strong, they were decent and God-fearing men who wouldn’t turn away a feeble old woman unable to care for herself, even if she had turned them down first.

Jonathan was, for a time, appeased.

The brothers were busy. Their undertaking was large and difficult. For more than six months they lived peacefully with their sandwiched neighbor as they cleared large swaths of woods for their crops, dug their wells, and built their houses. They would see her often but not always and she was unfailingly polite. Her own cottage she kept immaculately, every repair in order. And her gardens, though meager in comparison to their grand own farming plans, were lush and healthy. She gave them useful tips on clamming at the rocky beach and both Jonathan’s and Samuel’s wives found her pleasant and harmless if also rather odd, but then wasn’t that to be expected given her unusual circumstances?

In the fall she brought them a crock of her blackberry jam, which was delicious. During that visit, she also gave each of their children small papier-mâché figures she’d made: an apple and a tree, a yellow jacket and a flower. They were beautifully constructed and painted, delicate and fine—it was clear she was an artist. The children loved these objects and treated them with care. Samuel returned the woman’s kindness with a gift of smoked pheasant.

For six months all was well enough. Or so it seemed, though perhaps Jonathan Rash had been silently stewing the entirety of those days.

He was the brother who had been the most unhappy about the woman’s refusal to sell her land. And by the following spring, as the days grew longer and their work more challenging, he began to blame every other setback or delay on this refusal.

For instance, they’d been forced to build the service road between their two parcels of land out beyond the farthest edge of the woman’s parcel, which extended their travel time between. This was something Jonathan found particularly aggrieving at the end of the day, when he had been working Samuel’s land and was now heading home to his own.

Jonathan also saw that the woman’s land contained what could be better grazing meadows for their cows, and richer soil, and generally more favorable conditions—and yet she wasn’t even taking advantage of those conditions. She let most of her land sit feral, and wasn’t that itself an affront to God: to waste the resources He’d provided?

Jonathan came to talk so much about this that Samuel began to tease him, saying that since he’d already made the woman’s land the Garden of Eden in his mind, he might do well to remember the snake that lived there.

Soon, Jonathan refused to travel the service road after finishing his workday at Samuel’s farm. Instead, he cut across the woman’s land. Twice the woman saw him do this and he saw her. Both times she said nothing. After that, Jonathan only traveled via this shortcut and encouraged his brother to do the same.

One night, in the silvery dark of dusk and after a particularly trying day, Jonathan was taking the shortcut when he glimpsed the woman moving through her woods toward the hot springs, which was yet another feature of her land that theirs did not share.

He froze in place to watch her. This time she had not seen him.

She was carrying a lantern and a cloth and he could guess her purpose: a starlight bath. Jonathan was tired and hungry, dirty and worn thin with stress over this grand endeavor that he and his brother were pursuing. Earlier that afternoon they’d had a plowing incident that had damaged two valuable machines: a plow and a horse. These damages would cost both time and money, neither of which they had to spare.

In the wake of this day of disappointments, the woman’s peaceful freedom, her seeming self-possession and purpose, enraged Jonathan.

So he followed her at some distance, through the woods to the springs, where she soon removed her dress under what she must have assumed was the cover of darkness on the privacy of her own land. Steam swirled from the hot springs as she slipped into the water.

He moved closer.

The woman was singing to herself, a song in French like a lullaby.

Jonathan recognized the song. A week or so before he’d come home early with an injury and found the woman laughing in his own vegetable garden with his wife. The woman had been offering her advice on how best to arrange the string beans for success, advice his wife had seemed pleased to take despite the fact that he, Jonathan, was the farmer. The next day, he’d heard his daughter singing the song and he’d wondered where and how she’d picked it up.

Now he knew.

The woman had brought a bar of soap with her and Jonathan watched her use it. He was fully aroused, and this made him hate her more. She kept humming her song.

He stepped out from behind the tree that had hidden him and strode, as loud as he pleased, to the water’s edge. The woman shrieked in shock and embarrassment. She cowered, trying to cover herself with her hands.

At first, he talked softly and awfully to her, telling her that he’d seen her watching him, wanting this. But when the woman screamed and screamed and demanded that he leave, he called her a whore and a temptress and crashed into the water, grabbing her and forcing his kisses and hands upon her.

As he worked to unbuckle his pants, the woman, with a strength he could not fathom, clawed his eyes and kneed him, and as he doubled over she pushed him into the water and climbed out onto the bank, hastily covering herself and telling him, as she turned to leave, to never cross her land again.

Jonathan Rash arrived home that night wet and muddy, with a scratch across his face and blood in one eye. He gave his wife a stupid story about an unruly goat near a stream. He then ate his supper in silence, plotting against the woman. He went to bed plotting and dreamed in revenge: plots that curled and twisted into each other like a cave of poisonous snakes.

When he woke in the morning and went outside, the woman was, as he expected she would be, on her slim wooden porch watching the sunrise over the water. The woman loved to look at the water. She especially loved the sunrise and sunset, but at all times of day she favored the view from her cottage. She stood still and breathed it in.

Jonathan Rash hated this about her, her stillness, her peace, as the first or last rays of light found her on that porch. And so he had made his decision: he would take this from her.

He could do so, he knew, if he built a structure just so. Her cottage was situated up and away from the water. Which meant that the view she enjoyed looked out over Rash land.

He could take the woman’s view and at the same time give himself the best one for miles.

That morning, plain as day, Jonathan went to her cottage to ascertain the angles that would favor him and hurt her. The woman hurried inside, barred the door, and was silent behind it. He ignored her, climbing onto her porch and lingering there while he took in the view he would soon be erasing.

He started his construction of the tower that same afternoon. He did explain what he was building to Samuel, but when pressed for a reason for the construction of such a folly, and why so suddenly, Jonathan would say only that he had now lived next to the woman for long enough to judge her wicked, and that if she would not sell them her land through reasonable means, she must be convinced through unreasonable ones.

Samuel (and also Jonathan’s wife) thought the tower was a waste of time and resources, but Jonathan would not be dissuaded. Eventually Samuel, who was plagued with his own burdens—including his father’s voice in his head telling him that he shouldn’t have entered into business with his hotheaded brother to begin with—decided it was more pragmatic to let Jonathan finish this madness quickly and be done with it than it was to keep arguing with him about it and getting nowhere.

But the brothers had no idea what was to come.

Jonathan finished the tower’s foundation, and the very next day, a field of soil that had been tilled and ready for planting was as solid as a floor of bricks and full of thick roots and weeds.

Jonathan built the tower’s first walls, and crops that had been thriving withered as if they’d been cut down by harsh frost (this in summer).

Jonathan built higher and higher, the tower taking its shape, and their new wells ran dry. And when more were dug, the water in them was unsuitable for use: brackish and filled with black algae.

Livestock disappeared or grew sick with strange symptoms—skinny white worms spilling out of their mouths and noses when they died. Or even before they died, when they were stretched and bloated skin sacks showing bones. Hens stopped laying, or worse, laid eggs filled with blood, dozens at a time. And once: an egg filled with tiny green snakes all knotted together.

The brothers fought constantly, and newly, with their wives and children. And those children, too often sick and improperly growing, sometimes saw strange and terrible things in the woods that left them unable to sleep at night, so they grew weaker and sicker still.

Worst of all—or so said Harold Brookhants, when he’d told this story to Libbie—was the plague of yellow jackets. Every time the brothers cleared a new field, they’d run into another nest, and then another. Several workers were stung so badly they would not return to work, and those who remained refused to tend certain sections of the fields or demanded wage increases for doing so.

And it wasn’t only the swarms of yellow jackets, the drifting, whirring black clouds that sometimes descended to kill a cow or a goat, it was how they littered the air like dandelion fluff. They were never not around: humming, buzzing, flicking about.

They seemed to be watching, the workers said. They said this especially when they visited taverns at night, or gathered on church lawns Sunday mornings.

Of course, some of this can be explained as part and parcel of the standard setbacks of the Rash brothers’ profession. It was hard work, and they were the men to do it. No profit without labor. God smiles upon the industrious. But as their troubles grew, week by week—never dwindling, always increasing—Jonathan’s conviction that the woman was at the root of them became more difficult for Samuel to dismiss. Especially when Jonathan began simply inventing things about her, such as claiming that one night he’d seen her spread a ring of salt around her cottage, salt she’d harvested from the bay.

Their children and marriages and crops failing, the Rash brothers finally took their queer troubles out for a drink amid the ears, and mouths, of sympathetic locals. They had never relied on spirits before, but this night they accepted pours from neighbors happy to ply them with more outlandish stories about the woman. And even happier to hear the brothers’ fresh tales of her.

Their reasoning was hateful and fearful and fully indulged in by the tavern’s patrons. Oh yes, they agreed: That woman has got the devil working for her, always has—and now he’s working against you.

The Rash brothers left that tavern drunk. And furious. And more frightened for their futures than they’d ever been before. It was very late once they returned to their land, her land, and the liquor had helped them grow brash in their fear and rage.

It was in that drunken rage that they found her, not at her cottage, but at the base of the tower, attempting to burn it down. And they acted. Together, the Rash brothers acted. She’d been able to fight off one, but both brothers, and in such a fury, were too much for her.

She ran into the woods.

They chased her.

Near the hot springs, they caught her and strangled the life from her.

Then they buried her there, right where they’d killed her.

Soon after, the troubles plaguing the Rash brothers ceased. The work went better, day by day. Their children again grew healthy and strong. Their laborers were mostly content, and the fog of yellow jackets diminished to only reasonable encounters now and again.

When the woman was infrequently asked after (before she was forgotten about), one of the brothers might say that he believed her to be visiting friends in a neighboring state. And once that rumor was spread and accepted, it didn’t take long for it to become she had moved away to Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or even sometimes to Delaware, to be with her only living relatives. And that was that. She was not particularly missed by anyone except for maybe one or two of the Rash children, and even then, it was only ever occasionally.

Things continued on.

Except now, between the two brothers was buried a rancid secret. And it was this secret, black and rotting, that fueled the feud between them. The local storytellers and their tales about Spite Tower got it both right and wrong. Jonathan Rash had not built the tower to block his brother’s sight lines, but the brothers had fought over it. Eventually they had. Once their lie about the woman’s departure was established, and she was no longer asked after, Samuel wanted the tower torn down. Jonathan refused to do so.

And from there, our lay historians’ tale of the Rash brothers is close enough.

Of course, they’ve left out so much to get there that they might as well be telling a different story entirely.

It was never Spite Tower itself, or its rather silly and certainly incomplete local lore, that had interested Harold Brookhants. Instead, it was the bloody root of the brothers’ feud that lured him to this place, the act of murder that linked those men to a woman who once lived alone in a cottage by the water.

A woman, Madame Verrett had explained, with a mysterious and powerful lineage.

Once he’d acquired the land, Harold Brookhants had conducted all manner of occult practices in order to better understand that power. He consulted spirit guides and historians, geologists and diviners. (Harold had never had any compunctions about mixing his methodologies.) He’d even tried, on several occasions, to find the woman’s unmarked grave, but the mass of growth in the Tricky Thicket, and the yellow jackets that swarmed there, had thwarted those efforts.

Harold Brookhants believed that some of that woman’s power remained in the land that she had loved, the land where she had died too soon and violently. And he wanted to not only understand that power, but claim it for himself. (In this life and in any others to come.)^*

There was now only one of the Matryoshka dolls left to burn: the smallest. The Ava look-alike. And Libbie had already dug its silt grave.

Her fingers were so stiff that she could scarcely make them work to strike the final match. She fumbled with the box.

“Mrs. Brookhants?” Adelaide’s soft voice was like its own set of cold fingers, fluttering over the base of Libbie’s spine.

Between the digging and the burning and the ocean crashing, the yellow jackets’ hum, Libbie hadn’t noticed the maid’s approach. She looked up now to find Adelaide standing before her, over her. Too close. Adelaide was much too close.

“I do not require your assistance tonight, Adelaide,” Libbie said, keeping her voice steady. “Nor do I want it.” Libbie had not yet managed to burn this last doll, but for now, she buried it in silt so it stayed hidden from Adelaide’s view.

Libbie stood, Mary’s book in her hand. She backed away from Adelaide and her hip throbbed as she did. Her skirt was so heavy with water and sand that it seemed to pull her back to the ground.

“I spotted you from the tower and grew worried,” Adelaide said, coming closer, the exact amount that Libbie had moved away.

“I am no longer under the province of your worries, Adelaide.”

“Why are you being so cold to me? I only came to see if I could help you.” She stepped closer still. “Mrs. Brookhants?” She tried again. “Libbie?”

“Stay back!”

Adelaide looked like she’d just been slapped. And even now, knowing what she did—or thought she did, at any rate—Libbie was embarrassed to have shouted at her.

Libbie was still walking backward and without meaning to had drifted closer to the water, so that she was now in its thinnest edge, though right then she did not feel it soaking her boots.

She kept her eyes on Adelaide and made her voice as level as she could. “Please stay back. There are things I have to do tonight and if only you let me do them, then I’ll be gone from here forever and you can stay on as you like. For as long as you like.”

“What do you mean, you’ll be gone?” Adelaide asked, her eyes wide and confused. “You’ve only just returned! You’re to be better, now. And how would I stay here without you? Why would I?” She was still advancing, and so Libbie was walking backward, now sloshing through the foamy water as she went. “I thought we shared—”

“I share nothing with you,” Libbie said.

“But, Mrs. Brookhants, you know that isn’t true.”

Libbie could not counter this. She had shared things with Adelaide, intimate things, up in the tower during their tutoring sessions. She’d shared complaints about what she’d then chosen to classify as Alex’s increasing delirium, and her many worries about the school, and her sorrow to be missing the life Sara Dahlgren was leading. Even her regrets about Ava.

She had told Addie the truth about Ava. And Harold. And how she’d come to live at Brookhants. She had told Addie so many truths up in that tower, private truths, with Alex stewing away down below. Wonderful Alex, her Alex. And she had done more than talk to Addie, she had let Addie kiss her. And she had wanted to do much more than only that. Not since Alex’s death, at least, had she wanted this, though she knew that if she stayed, if she let herself live here with Adelaide, then perhaps . . .

“Please come back with me now,” Adelaide said. “We’ll warm you up, get you out of these wet clothes, and then we’ll talk. We haven’t had the chance to talk, really talk as we should, as we once did, since the awful night when Alex—”

“Don’t you say her name! You keep it from your mouth.”

At this, Adelaide stopped approaching. Libbie stopped, too. They looked at each other. Strands of Addie’s hair tossed about in the cold wind and Libbie felt the hum of the yellow jackets vibrate through the sand, up through her feet, and into her legs and core.

It was as if, in a collection of mere moments, Adelaide’s whole countenance changed. Gone was any pleading affect, warmth or confusion. It was replaced by a coldness that cast itself over Libbie like a shadow. Libbie shuddered. Adelaide was clearly now the one in charge. Perhaps, Readers, this had always been the case, since the day she’d arrived at Spite Manor.

Adelaide turned around for a moment, her back to Libbie as she looked down the beach from where they’d come. Something about how purposefully she did this made it more awful still. She had no need to hurry.

She turned to face Libbie again. “Ava’s doll took me weeks to make. She says she helped, I know, but really she only got in the way. She has no talent for that particular art. Not yet. But I do know she’ll be very upset to find it missing. What reason will I give her for its disappearance?”

“I’m sure you’ll find one that suits you.”

“I’m sure I will,” Adelaide said. “I could even tell her right now, if I wanted to. If she’d only open up to listen to me. But she’s young and still learning.”

“Do not say these things to me!” Libbie shouted. She had to shout over the terrible buzzing of the yellow jackets. They might now be the sand: millions of yellow jackets piled atop each other like humming grains of quartz. “I won’t listen.”

“I don’t think you have much choice,” Adelaide sang. “You can still come with me, sweet Library. Come and be with me. Everything here is ready for us to be together. The school could open again, little Ava is here. Come and let’s see how this might be for the three of us.” She extended her hand toward Libbie.

It was too close; she was too close—Addie’s twitching worm fingers nearly against her dress. In her haste to get away, Libbie twisted her foot in a dip and crashed backward, hard, landing in the cold water.

The surprise of this fall knocked the wind from her and made her see stars—though that might have only been because the sky was now full of them and she was looking up. She felt as if she’d slipped off the edge of the planet and not just a few feet to the ground.

But then she saw Adelaide still standing there, reaching out toward her. Libbie cowered, ducking her head into her shoulders. She waited for Adelaide to come down upon her, to consume her.

But this did not happen. Adelaide only took the book from her—Mary’s book. Libbie had forgotten she was still holding it. And now she wasn’t anymore.

“It’s certainly the worse for wear, isn’t it?” Adelaide said, turning it over in her hands. “It was pristine when I sold it to her. What a flash, your Sara. I wish you’d been able to convince her to stay tonight. We might have avoided this, the three of us together. Of course, we might have ended up here anyway. Who can ever say, at Brookhants?”

Libbie couldn’t understand. She did not want to. The buzzing now so loud that the crash of the waves was muted inside it. She was wet and shivering and her heart pounded. Horrid white snakes of sea-foam swirled around her. She could not understand what was to happen next, or why Adelaide was not upon her.

“I can hear you, too, Libbie,” Adelaide sang. “I can hear the thoughts you think are yours alone.”

“Stop it! Please, stop talking to me.”

“You don’t think this book is what’s to blame here, do you? You’d really give a child’s diary the credit when Brookhants has its own story, ripe as a peach? It certainly doesn’t need Mary MacLane’s.”

“Please stop,” Libbie said, now in tears. The sand was made of yellow jackets, she was sure of it—writhing and buzzing beneath her, so cold they stung her hands and made her shiver.

Adelaide knelt in that buzzing, so their heads were level. But still she did not touch Libbie. She said, “Your husband did not know her name, the woman who lived here. But I do.^* She was called Simone. You’re right to think of her tonight. Though poor Harold never had her story quite correct. He was such easy meat, your Harold. He so wanted to believe that he forgot to ask questions. Or never the right questions, at any rate.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, but you do.” Addie looked off toward the dark rim of woods, as if she saw something there, then she again looked at Libbie, who cringed beneath that gaze. “People said the girl, Simone, came here with her parents. Like everyone else, Harold assumed that meant a mother and a father. Not so. Simone lived with her mothers—two mothers—only one sometimes dressed and acted as a man because the world didn’t understand her when she did not do so, especially when she was with her wife. They had tried to live that way back in France and did not find it at all successful. And so, they got on a boat and left to make a new life. Simone’s mothers both built the cottage here. Simone’s mothers both made their life here with her. And it was a very happy life. Until it wasn’t.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Libbie said, the sand still stinging and the foam snakes swimming about her sopped skirts. “Please, I don’t want to know. You don’t need to tell me.”

“You do want to know,” Adelaide said. “And I do need to tell you. Is it worse, do you think, to not tell her story at all than it is to tell it poorly, to start it at the wrong place? Why give it over to the brothers Rash? Yes, they killed her, but who did they kill? The real trouble, the trouble that claimed this place and claims it still, was that one of Simone’s two mothers had left a family of diverse and powerful talents back in France. You can say that she escaped that family, if you like, but in any case, its remaining members were not happy when one of their own absconded to America to make her life anew and raise her child here without their guidance. That is not what members of the Verrett clan did. That is still not what we do. Not without permission.”

“I can’t,” Libbie said again. She could not look at Adelaide, who was then grinning horribly. Instead, she looked out across the water at the glinting lights of Newport. She thought of Sara at a party there, she tried to make her mind speak—

“Just now, Sara Dahlgren is drinking gin and flirting with a Rockefeller. I’m sure you can guess which one. She can’t hear you. She doesn’t want to, anyway.”

Libbie closed her eyes to this mad talk. She felt the buzzing enter her body and hum there.

Adelaide continued on. “What story might I tell you, now? Which will make you contented as a fat baby in a crib with jam on your lips? None of these stories, alone, are the truth, but they do add up to something close to it. For instance, I could tell you that I tried to warn your Alex at the fair. I did try, with the doll. I wanted to scare her, too—just a little, you know, for sport. But I did try to warn her as well. I liked her. I thought she could do better than you.”

“She could have,” Libbie said.

“It didn’t matter in the end—my warning. They got to her on the train. Did you know that?” Adelaide wrinkled her face like she was thinking. “I can’t remember if you do know that. Harold and my aunt—they got to her to get to you, two worms in your apple before you even took the bite.”

Libbie tightened the close of her eyes to shut her out. It didn’t help. Adelaide had waited to deliver this soliloquy. And she would now take her time in full.

“Or I could tell you about Simon Everett, if you like. Tell me, does that name strike you as more or less familiar, Library, than it did a moment ago? Do you remember your night at the fair with him? Simon Everett, Simone Verrett?” Adelaide laughed as though what she’d said was funny. “I know you’re wondering about the extra r. It is, perhaps, a question worth asking—but you make such a mess of your French anyway. We didn’t think you’d mind.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Libbie said. “I believe you. I believe all of it.”

But Adelaide wasn’t finished. “You shouldn’t blame yourself as you do, Library. You were only ever a means to an end. Swarms of yellow jackets, poisonous flowers, a too-steep staircase built by a brute out for vengeance? I should think there’s ample room for accidents in each of those.”

They were not accidents! Libbie thought like a scream. Adelaide heard this thought perfectly.

“You’re right about that,” she said.

Libbie’s whole self buzzed.

“Come with me, Library,” Adelaide now whispered. “Take my hand and come and I’ll tell you this story as it wants to be told, in each of its variations. I’ll write it on your body with my tongue so that you’ll always remember. You won’t be able to forget. None of the dead girls are gone from here, not really. You just don’t know how to see them. We could be three here, again—in our house by the sea. Two mothers for little Ava.”

At this fresh horror, Libbie opened her eyes and tried one final time: “Please, please—I don’t want to be here a moment longer. Please.”

Adelaide, with, was it a glance of sorrow—could it really be that?—stood and brushed the sand from her skirts. “I know you don’t. And that being true, I suppose it is now time for a bath, Mrs. Brookhants. And oh, I’m sorry about that. I’ve been watching for such a long time—but I did like watching you best. I think you know that.”

She gave Libbie a final, appraising look, almost a shy sort of smile, and then she turned and began to walk back down the beach toward the wooden stairs that would lead her up to the house and away. Her steps were unhurried and light as air. Indeed, she seemed to walk atop the sand without sinking into it at all.

Libbie did not understand how she had escaped, or why. For now, she cared only that she had been left alone and alive.

She waited until Adelaide was ten yards away, twenty, twenty-five—far enough so that Libbie would be able to run with a good head start if Adelaide turned back toward her. Only then did our Libbie move to stand.

She could not.

It wasn’t painful, at first, only confusing.

She tried again to push her palms down into the sand—which was again sand and not yellow jackets—and to situate her legs beneath her. But her body refused her efforts. She could move her head and neck, and she could still feel her limbs as if they belonged to her, but they would not do the things she was telling them to do. It was as if her body was now a marionette that she did not fully control. She tried again and then again. Again. And now her futile efforts did feel painful, until she was wincing and panting with them, and still no movement came.

It was then that she felt the first tickle of black seaweed pushing against her, its rotten stink clouding the air.

Once again she worked to stand and once again found she could not. She refused to scream the scream now reaching up her throat. More tangles of black seaweed, those awful nests of hair or snakes, floated against her, around her.

Soon the seaweed was wrapping around her and tugging her out. Libbie did not notice this at first, that she was drifting away from the land. She was so consumed by her immobility, and the mounting horror of the seaweed, its stench and increasing presence, that she did not sense this larger movement around her.

She could not tell, at first, that the shoreline was no longer beneath her.

She was being pulled out to sea, but her body still faced her house and its tower. And the woods. And the school that lay beyond those woods.

Too soon she felt the water creeping higher and pushing harder, and now she was in the breakers, the waves with their white teeth smashing up into her nose, salting her eyes, black water and white foam collapsing upon her so that she had to remember to catch and hold her breath, and then to breathe in ragged chokes when her mouth at last found air. And then to do it again. And again.

This was the only thing she could do, Readers, the only thing she could control. She might as well have been Houdini in a straitjacket giving an ocean performance, for our Libbie still could not move a thing but her head and neck. She was pushed under, her face smashed hard against the sand, the bay bottom filling her ears and a piece of stone gouging an eyebrow, before she was rolled back up to breathe and glimpse the sky and then be smashed again.

She grew so waterlogged and delirious that she felt she wasn’t in the water at all, but somehow inside the yellow jacket buzz—as if that noise, that awful noise, was the thing churning her around and smashing her about and filling her up with its blackness.

But the stinking seaweed she was tangled in tugged on, pulling her body farther out, and eventually Libbie cleared the breakers and was again upright, drifting, bobbing, rocking up and down on the cresting black waves.

She was like a bobber, now, floating upright and mostly atop the waves, out and out and out into the dark—black sky, black water, black weeds wrapping her like a package sent out to sea. Death was certain, but it was not imminent.

She did not scream. She did not even try to do so.

It may be that our Libbie accepted this fate as punishment for what she knew to be her previous inaction, or perhaps as something foretold by a curse that she now believed in her very marrow she could not outrun.

It also may be that she was only trying to save her breath.

Either way, it is a horrible ending for our Libbie Packard-Brookhants. (No more horrible than any of the other endings you’ve endured in this story, it’s true, but plenty horrible nonetheless.)

Oh, Readers, I know you’ll cling to this next thing I tell you. You’ll want to tether all your hopes to it.

I’ll let you.

Libbie Packard’s drowned and lifeless body should have drifted over to at least Portsmouth, maybe all the way over to Newport, to shoreline belonging to one of the gilded summer cottages there, perhaps to then be spotted by the member of the house staff sent to rake the beach early the next morning.

But this did not happen. Our Libbie disappeared that night, it’s true, never to return to Spite Manor. But her body was not found. Not the next morning, or the one after that, or even to this day.

Is it possible that Libbie Packard did wash up somewhere, and upon reaching this non-Brookhants land found that she had regained the use of her body and so now used it to simply shed the black seaweed like it was snakeskin and walk up the sand and into a new life far away?

Almost certainly not.

And yet . . .

There is a known photograph of Sara Dahlgren in Paris sometime around 1920. In it, a group of women are gathered in some elegant apartment with high ceilings and mullioned windows flung open to the sidewalk trees and sun. They are joyous, these women. Some of them are kissing each other. One is sitting in the lap of another. They are, almost without exception, smiling for whomever is taking their picture.

The woman who makes the exception is one near the back of the group. She is not smiling. She is not scowling, either, but was in the midst of turning her head when the photo was taken. Turning her head and beginning to raise a hand to shield her face. She was not quite fast enough to escape the camera, though. It caught her. She is lovely, this woman, likely somewhere in her forties, maybe fifties, and very elegant. She is standing beside Sara Dahlgren.

And she looks more than a little like Libbie Packard’s mother in photos of Mrs. Packard at that age.

This photo is one in a series of photos from that gathering of women in that apartment that day. But the woman in question, this aged Libbie look-alike, appears only in the photo I’ve described.

Make of that what you will, Readers.

One thing I do know is this: as she drifted out and away from Brookhants, if our silent, bobbing Libbie had looked not at the black weed and water around her, or at the stars above, but instead back up the beach, across the terraced land, to the house with the reaching arm of Spite Tower, she would have seen her own Ava in one of its lit windows, looking down at her.^*

Death was certain, but it was not imminent.