“You need something, sweetheart?” the trooper asks.
“Not from you,” I say, tacking on a sarcastic “sweetheart.”
At the Lodge, I pound on the red front door, not even trying to be discreet about my arrival. I want the whole fucking place to know I’m here. The pounding continues for a full minute before the door swings away from my fist, revealing Chet. A lock of hair droops over his bloodshot eyes. He pushes it away and says, “You shouldn’t be out of your cabin, Emma.”
“I don’t care.”
“Where’s Mindy?”
“Asleep. Where’s your mother?”
Franny’s voice drifts to the door. “In here, dear. Do you need something?”
I push past Chet into the entrance hall and then the living room. Franny is there, cocooned in her Navajo blanket. The antique weapons on the wall behind her take on new, sinister meaning. The rifles, the knives, the lone spear.
“This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” Franny says with faked hospitality. “I suppose you can’t sleep, either. Not with all this unpleasantness.”
“We need to talk,” I say.
Chet joins us in the living room. He touches my shoulder, trying to steer me back to the door. Franny gestures for him to stop.
“About what?” she says.
“Peaceful Valley Asylum. I know it was on this land. Vivian knew it, too.”
It’s easy to see why she went looking for it. She’d heard the story about Lake Midnight, possibly from Casey. Like me, she probably considered it nothing more than a campfire tale. But then she found that old box by the water’s edge, filled with scissors that rattled like glass. She did some digging. Searching the Lodge. Sneaking off to the library. Eventually she realized the campfire tale was partially true.
And she needed to expose it. I suspect she felt a kinship with those women from the asylum, all of them likely drowned, just like her sister.
Keeping that secret must have made Vivian so lonely and scared. She hinted at it in her diary when referring to Natalie and Allison.
The less they know the better.
Vivian wasn’t able to save them. Just like her, they had learned too much after finding her diary. But she had managed to keep me safe. I understand that now. Her mistreatment of me wasn’t an act of cruelty but one of mercy. It was her way of trying to protect me from any danger her discovery created. To save me, she forced me to hate her.
It worked.
“The only people she told were Natalie and Allison,” I say. “Then all three of them disappeared. I doubt that was a coincidence.”
A dainty china cup and saucer sit in front of Franny, the tea inside steaming. When she reaches for them, the cup rattles against the saucer so violently that she sets it down without taking a sip. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“You can tell me what happened to that asylum. Something bad, right? And all those poor girls there, they suffered, too.”
Franny tries to pull the blanket tighter around her, the noticeable tremor still in her hands. Veins pulse under her paper-white skin. She loses her grip, and the blanket drifts to her sides. Chet rushes in and pulls it back over her shoulders.
“That’s enough, Emma,” he barks. “You need to go back to your cabin.”
I ignore him. “I know those women existed. I saw their pictures.”
I march to the study, heading straight for the desk and its bottom drawer. I yank it open and see the familiar wooden box right where I had left it. I carry it into the living room and slam it down on the coffee table.
“These girls right here.” I open the box and grab a handful of photos, holding them up so Franny and Chet see their haunted faces. “Charles Cutler made them grow their hair. Then he chopped it off and sold it. And then they vanished.”
Franny’s expression softens, turning from fear to something that resembles pity. “Oh, Emma. You poor thing. Now I know why you’ve been so distressed.”
“Just tell me what happened to them!”
“Nothing,” Franny says. “Nothing at all.”
I study her face, looking for hints that she’s lying. I can’t find any.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“I think perhaps I should explain.”
It’s Lottie who says it. She emerges from the kitchen wearing a silk robe over a nightgown. A mug of coffee rests in her hands.
“I think that might be best,” Franny says.
Lottie sits down next to her and reaches for the wooden box. “It just occurred to me, Emma, that you might not know my given name.”
“It’s not Lottie?”
“Dear me, no,” Lottie says. “That’s just a nickname Franny gave me when I was a little girl. My real name is Charlotte. I was named after my great-grandfather. Charles Cutler.”
I falter a moment, buzzing with confusion.
“His mother was insane,” Lottie says. “My great-great-grandmother. Charles saw what madness did to her and decided to devote his life to helping others who suffered the same way. First at an asylum in New York City. A terrible place. The women forced to endure horrible conditions. They didn’t get better. They only suffered more. So he got the idea to create Peaceful Valley on a large parcel of land owned by my great-grandmother’s family. A small private retreat for a dozen women. For his patients, Charles chose the worst cases he observed in that filthy, overcrowded asylum. Madwomen too poor to afford proper care. Alone. No friends. No families. He took them in.”
Lottie rifles through the open box, smiling at the photographs as if they were pictures of old friends. She pulls one out and looks at it. On the back, I see the words Juliet Irish Red.
“From the very beginning, it was a struggle. Even though he and my great-grandmother were the only employees, the asylum required so much money. The patients needed food, clothing, medicine. To make ends meet, he came up with the idea to sell the patients’ hair—with their permission, of course. That kept things afloat for another year or so, but Charles knew Peaceful Valley would eventually have to close. His noble experiment had failed.”
She pulls out two more photos. Lucille Tawny and Henrietta Golden.
“But he was a smart man, Emma,” Lottie says. “In that failure, he saw opportunity. He knew an old friend was looking to buy a large parcel of land for a private retreat. A wealthy lumberman named Buchanan Harris. My great-grandfather offered the land at a discounted price if he was given a position in Mr. Harris’s company. That was the start of a relationship between our families that continues today.”