Betty makes a beeline for Nix, and in the scramble of cookies and curses, I duck out and head downstairs. Names are still scratching on the list in my pocket, but they’ll have to wait just a little longer.
When I reach the fourth floor, I run through the spectrum of lies I could use to get Angelli to let me in. I’ve only passed her once since she shut the door in my face, and earned little more than a curt nod.
But when I reach her door and press my ear to the wood, I hear only silence.
I knock and hold my breath and hope. Still silence.
I test the door, but it’s locked. I search my pockets for a card or a hairpin, or anything I can use to jimmy the lock, silently thanking Da for the afternoon he spent teaching me to do that.
But maybe I won’t need to. I step back to examine the door. Ms. Angelli is a bit on the scattered side. I’m willing to bet that she’s a touch forgetful, and with the amount of clutter in her apartment, the odds of misplacing a key are high. The door frame is narrow but wide enough to form a shallow shelf on top, a lip. I stretch onto my toes and brush my fingertips along the sill of the door. They sweep against something metal, and sure enough, a key tumbles to the checkered carpet.
People are so beautifully predictable. I take up the key and slide it into the lock, holding my breath as I turn it and the door pops open, leading into the living room. Across the threshold, my eyes widen. I’d nearly forgotten how much stuff was here, covering every surface, the beautiful and the gaudy and the old. It’s piled on shelves and tables and even on the floor, forcing me to weave between towers of clutter and into the room. I don’t see how Ms. Angelli can walk through without upsetting anything.
The layout of 4D is the same as 3F, with the open kitchen and the hallway off the living room leading to the bedrooms. I slowly make my way toward them, checking each room to make sure I’m alone. Every room is empty of people and full of things, and I don’t know if it’s the clutter or the fact that I’ve broken in, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. It trails me through the apartment, and when a small crash comes from the direction of living room, I spin, expecting to see Ms. Angelli.
But no one’s there.
And that’s when I remember. The cat.
Back in the living room, a few books have been toppled, but there’s no sign of Angelli’s cat Jezzie. My skin crawls. I try to convince myself that if I stay out of her way, she’ll stay out of mine. I shift the stack of books, a stone bust, and the edge of the carpet out of the way, clearing a space so I can read.
I take a deep breath, slide off my ring, and kneel on the exposed floorboards. But the moment I bring my hands to the wood, before I’ve even reached for the past, the whole room begins to hum against my fingers. Shudders. Rattles. And it takes me a moment to realize that I’m not feeling the weight of the memory in the floor alone, that there are so many antiques in this room, so many things with so many memories, that the lines between the objects are blurring. The hum of the floor touches the hum of things sitting on the floor, and so on, until the whole room sings, and it hurts. A pins-and-needles numb that climbs my arms and winds across my bruised ribs.
It’s too much to read. There is too much stuff in here, and it fills my head the way human noise does. I haven’t even started reaching past the hum to whatever memories are beyond it; I can hardly think through the noise. Pain flickers behind my eyes, and I realize I’m pushing back against the hum, so I try to remember Wesley’s lessons.
Let the noise go white, he said. I crouch in the middle of Angelli’s apartment with my eyes squeezed shut and my hands glued to the floor, waiting for the noise to run together around me, for it to even out. And it does, little by little, until I can finally think, and then focus, and reach.
I catch hold of the memory, and time spirals back, and with it the clutter shifts, changes, then lessens, piece after piece vanishing from the room until I can see most of the floor, the walls. People slide through the space, earlier tenants—some of the memories dull and faded, others bright—an older man, a middle-aged woman, a family with young twins. The room clears, morphs, until finally it is Owen’s space.
I can tell even before I see his blond head flicker through the room, moving backward because I’m still rewinding time. At first I’m filled with relief that there is a memory to read, that it hasn’t been blacked out along with so much of that year. And the memory suddenly sharpens, and I swear I see—
Pain shoots through my head as I slam the memory’s retreat to a stop, and let it slide forward.
In the room with Owen, there is a girl.
I only catch a glimpse before he blocks my view. She’s sitting in a bay window, and he’s kneeling in front of her, his hands up on either side of her face, his forehead pressed to hers. The Owen I know is calm to a fault, composed, and sometimes, though I wouldn’t tell him, ghostly. But this Owen is alive, full of restless energy woven through his shoulders and the way he’s subtly rocking on his heels as he speaks. The words themselves are nothing more than a murmur, but I can tell they are low and urgent; and as suddenly as he knelt, he’s up, hands falling from the girl’s face as he turns away.…And then I’m not looking at him anymore, because I’m looking at her.
She’s sitting with her knees drawn up just the way they were the night she was killed, blond hair spilling over them, and even though she’s looking down, I know exactly who she is.
Regina Clarke.
But that’s not possible.
Regina died before Owen ever moved into this apartment.
And then, as if she knows what I’m thinking, she looks up, past me, and she is Regina and not Regina all at once, a twisted version. Her face is tight with panic and her eyes are too dark and getting darker, the color smudging into—
A screaming sound tears through my head, high and long and horrible, and my vision plunges into color, then black, then color as something shoves up against my bare arm. I jerk back, out of the memories and away from the floor, but the stone bust catches my heel and sends me backward to the carpet, hard. Pain cuts across my ribs as I land, and my vision clears enough to take in the thing that attacked me. Jezzie’s small black form bobs toward me, and I scoot back, but—
A high-pitched howl grates against my bones as another cat, fat and white with an encrusted collar, wraps its tail around my elbow. I wrench free and—
A third cat brushes my leg, and the world explodes into keening and red and light and pain, metal dragging beneath my skin. Finally I tear free and scramble backward out into the hall, and force the door shut.
My back hits the opposite wall, and I slide to the floor, my eyes watering from the headache that’s as sudden and brutal as the cats’ touch. I need quiet, true quiet, and I reach into my pocket to fetch my ring, but my fingers meet with nothing.
No.
I look at the door to 4D. My ring must still be in there. I curse not so softly and put my forehead against my knees, trying to think through the pain and piece together what I’d seen before the onslaught of cats.
Regina’s eyes. They were going dark. They were smudging into black, like she was slipping. But only Histories slip. And only a History could be sitting in her brother’s apartment after she died, and that means it wasn’t Regina, in the way that the body in Ben’s drawer wasn’t Ben, and that means she got out. But how? And how did Owen find her?