12

That afternoon, Sarah focuses on throwing vases. Fat-bellied vases and skinny vases and amphoras and triple bubbles and whatever shapes her fingers find. She chokes their necks until they can each hold just a stem or two, a single rose or perhaps a spray of wildflowers. She likes the idea of repetition on a theme, and it’s a challenge to make them all utterly different and yet similar enough to work as a set. When she’s done, ten vases are lined up on her shelf. Yesterday’s pots are still wet, so she loosens their plastic to help them dry and harden.

There’s no sign of Bernie, thank goodness. Well, there are signs he’s been here—an apple core, a beer can, that stupid boombox surrounded by a stack of cassettes. His mermaid sculpture is indeed busty, her hair as big as the girl in a Def Leppard video. He’s begun another one, this version on her back with her tail in the air, and Sarah is already bored. How did he get past the selection committee, when his work is so eye-rollingly sexist and derivative? What was his Artist’s Statement, “Yay, boobs!”? Why should she have to share the studio with a slob who thinks an army of horny mermaids is making a statement?

She cleans her station and hangs up her apron before heading back outside. Curious about the other buildings, she peers into the window of Reid’s studio. Fortunately, his back is to her, straining as he reaches into a fire with big tongs and pulls out a piece of metal. He’s sweating, wearing safety goggles and big gloves and boots, wailing at his anvil with a hammer. His studio is full of big machines she can’t name, dozens of tools hung neatly on pegs. It’s tidy but dim beyond the reach of the fire, almost primal, with just a leather messenger bag and a notebook on the table beside his coffee mug.

Next she moves on to Antoinette’s calligraphy studio—the printing studio. At first, she’s worried Antoinette will notice her watching, but the older woman’s sole focus is on her work. The studio is all white inside, bright and clean. There are shelves and presses around the walls and tables down the middle, and Antoinette sits at a light box in the center of the room, carefully drawing lines with a pencil and ruler. Her paper is in neat stacks, her pens in a handmade cup, her inks nestled in a beautiful wooden box. Sarah is envious of how it must feel to work in this space—everything where it belongs, bright lights, the gentle burble of jazz.

Everyone else, it seems, has their studio set up to their own liking even though they’ve only been here for one day. Resentment pings in her heart, that Bernie’s culture has already smothered her own in the studio. Entropy and cruelty win again. She tromps off.

When she looks in the next window, the music studio is a little different from the other all-white spaces, with thick burgundy carpet and walls covered in gray foam. Sarah is as fascinated by the egg chair and record player as she is by the variety of instruments set up around the edges of the room—guitars on stands, cases for stringed instruments, and a gleaming black piano. Lucas is in the egg chair, tucked up like a spider and smiling with big headphones over his ears. Good for him, she thinks. The poor kid deserves a cozy sanctuary.

Next door, the stained-glass studio is a one-woman factory, with color-coded piles of iridescent cut glass and perfect lines of half-finished suncatchers marching down the tables. Kim is wearing AirPods and moves from station to station like a nervous bee trying to hit all the flowers. Sarah wonders how she got into the program, because Gail doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would respect industry over art, but she admires Kim’s drive to succeed and her willingness to spend that much time doing the same work over and over to win back her family. Maybe Gail does, too.

By contrast, Gertrude Rose’s studio has a comfortable sort of chaos, an overstuffed room filled with sewing mannequins and looms and spinning wheels and stacked bolts of fabric and boxes of notions. The costumer is muttering to herself, her teeth clenched around several pins as she sticks them into the rich damask hanging off a dummy’s waist. Looking up, she sees Sarah watching and smirks, giving her a bow as if to suggest that Sarah should be honored to catch her at her work.

Beside the fiber studio, Sarah finds a rabbit hutch, surprised to see two enormous white rabbits with long, puffy hair. She sticks her fingers through the wire mesh, and one rabbit hops over to nibble at her in a curious manner. Is Gertrude Rose going to shave the rabbits to make yarn, she wonders, and did she bring them herself? If she asks Gertrude Rose, she will be here for hours, so she bids the rabbits farewell and continues on to her current home, ignoring the photography studio completely. With a couple of hours before dinner, she’s got time and light to really look around her cottage closely in a way she hasn’t bothered to before.

The wallpaper is old and well stuck, but she runs her fingertips over the walls and around the corners, looking for a seam or the telltale bump of a door or bricks or something to denote a cover-up or possibly a “Cask of Amontillado” situation. She can’t find anything, not in the main room or the bathroom. She wonders for a moment why there’s no kitchen or even a little kitchenette, but then it occurs to her—whoever lived here wouldn’t have needed to cook. They could’ve taken their meals up at the resort, where someone else did all the work. If Ingrid is indeed correct, it makes sense that a doctor would choose to build his home here, just a little removed from the hotel and his—well, patients is really the only word that serves. But he would most likely need his own office at home, a place with a desk and files.

Not until her third perambulation does it occur to her that there’s a very obvious place where a door might be easily hidden: behind the bookcase. It appears to be handmade of solid wood, but it’s not a built-in; it’s pushed up in a corner, flush to the wall. The baseboard has been cut away to accommodate it, which feels like a clue. But before she unloads a ton of old books, she’s going to make sure she’s right.

Sarah steps outside, realizing that she’s never walked around this cottage, not any farther than it took to deposit the dead snake out of sight. Why would she? There’s one door, and it’s not like there’s a secret Jacuzzi out back. As she walks around the corner, feet sinking into the leaf litter, she’s surprised to find a knee-high black metal fence leaning crookedly, outlining a rectangular plot. Cold trills down her neck, bunching her shoulders.

This can only be a grave—maybe a family cemetery.

There are no headstones or statuary, and the ground is covered in years and years of leaves and pine straw. Gingerly, she steps over the fence, careful not to touch it, as it looks like the slightest breath of air could knock it over. There must be some kind of memorial—or else, why the fence? She once did gravestone rubbings in a middle school art class and remembers that sometimes there were plaques at the foot of graves from this period of time. When she gently probes around the logical place for such a thing, she feels something firm under her shoe. Rubbing away the years of neglect, she finds a tarnished brass plaque.

Elizabeth Calloway, it reads, 1861 to 1898.

Nothing else. No beloved wife or cherished daughter or even a sculpture of flowers or the winged memento mori skulls that were so popular back then.

“Elizabeth,” she murmurs. “What happened to you?” She wonders if this woman went by Liz or Beth or Bettie. And how did she die? It seems odd that the wife of a prominent doctor would pass away so young, at only thirty-seven, but there have always been so many ways to die. Tuberculosis was big back then and the reason so many people went to the mountains for fresh air. Even the most skilled doctor couldn’t cure that. Cancer, dysentery, being crushed by a horse.

The fenced-in plot is the right size for two graves, and yet there isn’t a plaque on the other side. Maybe space was left for the doctor, but he never joined his wife? So many mysteries.

With a nod of sorrowful respect, Sarah steps back out of the bounds of the fence and returns her attention to the cottage. There are windows around the second story, all boarded up…but one around back still has a few shards of glass clinging to the frame, which suggests that these were once real windows and not just set dressing. A thrill zips through her; now she just has to find a way upstairs.

She squints at the corner where the bookcase is, and she’s fairly certain the outer dimensions of the cottage don’t match up with the inner dimensions. Hurrying inside, she begins pulling the books off their shelves and stacking them lovingly, carefully, across the room. Some of the books, she sees now, are ancient, and when she opens an old leather Kipling, it is indeed from the 1890s.

Dust fills the air, and she turns on a playlist so there will be something to listen to besides the thump of books. She’ll have to show them to Ingrid, she thinks; they’d look great in black-and-white photos. Does Gail even know what’s in here? There are probably very valuable tomes hidden among the old copies of National Geographic and science-fiction paperbacks from the 1960s.

When the huge bookshelf is finally denuded, she takes a deep breath, sips from her water bottle, and considers the many ways this could all go wrong. Maybe the bookshelf is actually attached to the wall and all this work has been in vain and she is, as Kyle often suggested, crazy. Maybe she’ll start to pull on it and it’ll fall apart like Ikea furniture, leaving her with a huge mess and another reason for Gail to consider sending her away.

It doesn’t matter. She’s in it now. She has to know.

She grabs the side of the bookshelf and pulls, but it’s heavier than expected—not at all like Ikea furniture, actually. This wood is sturdy and hardy, hand-hewn and hand-joined. She has to brace herself and heave with her shoulder to make it budge at all while keeping it from toppling over completely.

The shelf is maybe two inches away from the wall now, and when she looks behind it, there it is: the open doorway. The framing has been removed so that the bookshelf can sit flush against the wall, leaving only a roughly sawn hole in the old boards, its interior a deep velvet black. She pulls the shelf out a little farther and can now see that the wallpaper behind the shelf is gloriously colorful, the delicate flowers picked out in butter yellow and blush and lavender, a far cry from the muted tones that now read as a uniform gold. The rush of satisfaction at solving this riddle bubbles in her blood, and she uses that energy to wedge the bookshelf away from the wall until there’s enough room for her to just barely squeeze into the hole that was once a door. Before she’s fully through that pitch-black void in the wall, she remembers her phone. Music off, flashlight on, she passes into the unknown.

The light reveals exactly what she’d expected: stairs.

They immediately turn left, then continue upward. She shines her light all around. The black board steps are still shiny with old paint, slightly worn in the center, the dull wood grain showing through. Sarah feels a sense of heaviness, or gravitas, almost like she should be carrying a candelabra or lantern instead of an iPhone. The walls are whitewashed, pebbly, and cold to the touch. Each step creaks underfoot as she tests its strength, and the space smells like an old man’s held breath. When she reaches the top of the staircase, she’s met with an open doorway. It’s freezing up here, motes of dust dancing in her phone’s light as she steps into history.

She is in a small hallway. Not a drop of daylight shines in through the boarded-up windows. There is dark, and then there is a darker dark, the sort of dark that is almost solid. Only the bright-white light of her phone makes it bearable to be here. She steps up to the first room and finds an office. There’s a wall of wooden bookshelves, a worktable, and a desk with a chair. A terrifying form on the table turns out to be an old ceramic model of the human head, but the skull beside it is truly a skull, and, she’s certain, a real one. A rag rug nearly trips her as she steps up to touch a ledger spread out on the worn wood desk.

There are so many books and papers and files that she could spend hours investigating the tiny space, but for now, she wants to know what else is up here. The room is cramped and dark and still, and she can’t help feeling like she’s being watched, like someone is very close nearby and holding their breath so she won’t feel a breeze on her neck. She spins, but of course there’s no one there. There would be no way to mask the sound of feet creeping up those creaky, croaky steps.

She knows, at an intellectual level, that it’s perfectly safe. No one is here, and no one has been here for many years. If someone did approach, she would hear it, thanks to the utter absence of sound. The floors seem solid, the structural integrity of the cottage intact. And yet, at an animal level, every cell in her body is screaming danger, urging her to run down the stairs and burn the entire cottage down.

Silly animal body, she thinks to herself. Silly cells.

This is fine.

There is no danger.

Back in the hall, she goes to the next open door, the middle room. This one features opulent wallpaper with big, blowsy roses and a bed made up with a pretty mauve coverlet and ivory pillows. She can’t believe no animals have wriggled into this secret upstairs to chew paper and burrow in the soft blankets, but everything appears untouched, as if someone just boarded up the windows and walked away one day, leaving everything perfectly preserved. In addition to the bed, there’s a small armoire and a vanity with a mirror and ewer. A hairbrush rests on the table, and Sarah picks it up and holds it directly under her flashlight. Long, dark hairs cling to the ancient bristles, glistening in the artificial light.

There’s a creak behind her, and she drops the brush with a clatter and spins, pointing her phone’s flashlight back toward the door.

There’s no one there.

Because no one could be there.

It’s simply not possible.

Feeling foolish, all the hairs on her arms standing up, she squats to pick up the brush and then carefully replaces it on the vanity, right where she found it. She hurries out of the room without opening any of the vanity drawers or the doors of the armoire. The air is too cold, too still, as if this moment were captured in an icy shard of glass.

It’s warmer in the hall, somehow, and she moves to the last door, the only door that’s closed. There’s no lock on it, at least, and it pushes open silently, as if someone has taken great care to oil the hinges. She shines her light around the room and takes a shuddering breath, almost a gasp.

This—it was a nursery.

Not the sort of rambling nursery from Fanny Price’s neglected youth at Mansfield Park, but a little cubicle the size of a walk-in closet with barely enough room for a tall, spindly wooden crib, a narrow dresser, and a rocking chair. The wallpaper is striped in yellow and cream, and a few oiled wooden toys sit atop the dresser—a rattle, a ball, a horse. They look untouched, as if someone painted them just yesterday and listed them in an Etsy shop.

Sarah stands over the crib, gazing down at the carefully folded afghan within. She can’t stop herself from reaching out to touch the soft wool, half expecting it to turn to dust under her fingertips. It doesn’t. Things used to be made to last. Like the toys, the blanket looks like it was never used.

More curious than ever, she opens the top drawer of the dresser. There’s a dish of big diaper pins, several stacks of linen. The next drawer has long, white gowns. She pulls out the top one, marveling at the perfect embroidery around the neck and the tiny buttons. Amazing that babies were once dressed so formally, so fussily.

When she holds the tiny dress up to her nose, it smells like cedar and bleach. There’s not a single mark or stain on it.

Nothing here, it seems, ever served its purpose.

Sarah holds the tiny dress to her chest as sadness washes over her like a wave from far away that has traveled an eternity just to lap at her heart. Something happened to either the baby or the mother or both. Whatever happened, it wasn’t good. Lovingly planned nurseries full of beautiful, handmade clothes and toys don’t just get hidden away behind closed doors for no reason. The dresses should be stained, the rattle riddled with the marks of perfect tiny teeth. A tear slips out as she carefully, carefully refolds the gown and puts it right back where it’s been for more than a hundred years.

Now she can’t help thinking back to the small, homely cemetery out back. Elizabeth is there, dead earlier than she should’ve been. There’s no grave marker on the other side of what’s clearly a two-grave plot. Is her child buried there? Or did Elizabeth die giving birth?

All the answers fill her to the brim with pain, squeezing her throat shut with sorrow for these forgotten lives locked up long ago.

“I’m so sorry,” she says to the empty room.

The house seems to sigh in response.

And then—a knock.

She startles, but this is no haunting. Someone downstairs is knocking on her door.