She handed Lulu the key, laid the drawing on the white wicker table. Kate stared at the signature, JH. The nude figure study was beautiful, showed Beth’s soft curves, her wavy hair falling loosely over her shoulders, the gentle heaviness of her breasts and slightly rounded belly.
“She’s pregnant here,” Lulu said, leaning closer. “But not very far along.”
“I thought that too,” Kate said, noticing that Lulu didn’t express surprise. It wasn’t the fact Beth had posed without clothes—when they were young, living in an art town, they’d all picked up a hundred dollars per session as models for the Black Hall Art Academy’s figure-drawing classes. It had been no big deal—a prestigious college, their family’s art lineage, their grandmother’s blessing. But Beth’s pregnancy meant she had posed for this within the last year, and that’s what Kate found surprising.
“It’s formal but also romantic,” Lulu said. “It doesn’t feel impersonal.”
“Who is JH?” Kate asked. “I can’t think of anyone with those initials.”
Lulu didn’t reply. She lowered her gaze from the drawing to the squat, almost square key. She lifted it up, bounced it in her hand as if judging its weight.
“Heavy little thing,” she said.
“Too small for a door, too wide for a safe-deposit box.”
“American doors, maybe. But it reminds me of a Paris door key,” Lulu said. “They’re shaped just like this. Don’t you remember?”
It was true, and Kate did remember. For her high school graduation, Mathilda had taken her, Beth, Lulu, and Scotty to Paris. They’d flown Air France from JFK at night, and while Mathilda and Ruth had sat in first class, the Compass Rose had occupied the first four seats in coach. Kate had loved the feeling of lift, the surge of big engines, the knowledge they were flying over the Atlantic, into the sunrise.
In Paris, they stayed in a large apartment in a Belle Époque mansion in the seventh arrondissement, on rue de Varenne. The house was owned by Hubert and Karine Millet, friends of Mathilda and Ruth. The Millets had gone to Greece for the summer. Hidden from the street by high stone walls, it had an interior courtyard with a stone fountain and was filled with Renoir paintings and gilded Louis Quinze chairs that Mathilda warned them were antique and priceless and not to be sat upon.
The graduation trip was a whirlwind of museums—the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Cluny, Musée Jacquemart-André, and Kate’s favorite, the exquisitely intimate Marmottan. Mathilda rented a car, and they drove out of town to visit Claude Monet’s home and gardens at Giverny and the port town of Honfleur, the site of so many Impressionist paintings. The vacation was centered on art.
They visited the Normandy landing beaches and stood on the cliff looking across the English Channel, imagining the boatloads of Allied forces ready to storm the beaches. Ruth took Mathilda’s hand. Instead of facing out to sea, they looked up at the sky where the Eighth Air Force bomb groups and fighters had provided tactical air support on D-Day.
Mostly they stayed in Paris. The Musée Rodin was a few doors down from their house. They had wandered for hours among its marble sculptures, orderly rose gardens, and reflecting pool, greeting the ghost of one of Mathilda’s most revered artists, Camille Claudel, Auguste Rodin’s model and thrown-away lover.
Lulu was absolutely right—the key to the Millets’ tall front door had been exactly like the one Kate had found in Beth’s drawer.
“Maybe Beth saved it,” Lulu said, fingers closing around the key. “From our trip. Maybe Mathilda gave it to her.”
“But Mathilda would have left it with the concierge—she wouldn’t have taken it home with her.”
“Then where’s it from?” Lulu asked.
“I have no idea,” Kate said, but a dream formed in her mind—one in which Beth could have been happy and still alive. A hideaway, someplace she went with the artist who did the drawing. Somewhere she could have escaped Pete and everything he had put her through.
Kate took the key from Lulu. The metal was warm from Lulu’s hand. Beth had held the key too. She had treasured it enough to hide it in the small box along with the drawing someone had done of her. The two objects radiated love. Through them Kate felt her sister’s passion.
“Who can this be?” she asked again, pointing at the signature on the drawing. “JH?”
Once again, Lulu didn’t reply. In the distance, they heard a car shifting gears as it climbed the hill, tires rumbling over gravel. Through a row of cypress trees, Kate spotted Pete’s big Mercedes sedan entering the turnaround.
“Here we go,” Lulu said. “In honor of Mathilda, bombs away.” Had she invoked Mathilda’s name as a way of distracting Kate from the fact that she didn’t want to answer her question about JH?
Kate put the key and drawing back into the envelope and headed toward the front of the house.
“Goddamn it!” Pete bellowed as he raced around tearing open the trash bags.
Pete’s reaction should have gratified Kate, but she was still mesmerized by the unfamiliar sense of desire—not truly hers but borrowed from her sister. The abstraction of passion filled her mind. Then it ran across her skin, a river of it. It made her shiver, and she wanted the feeling to last, to be hers, no one else’s.
Maybe the key wasn’t to a house where Beth had already been but to one she had planned to go. A place where she could have been in love.
But with whom?
22
Nicola had spotted Lulu on the beach, but they had avoided actually encountering each other. That was impossible here at the house. Lulu and Kate stood in the shade of an ancient copper beech tree, watching Pete ripping open the garbage bags.
“You’re only going to have to pack them again,” Kate said.
“This is uncalled for,” Pete said, sounding outraged.
“I don’t think so. I want you out. This wasn’t your house to move into.”
“Beth knew about it,” he said. “I’m not saying she was happy about the situation . . .” He glanced at Nicola. She had gotten out of the car with Tyler and was standing off to the side. She felt mortified to be there, facing Kate this way. “But she let them stay here.”
Them, Nicola thought. Not us.
“She was so caring,” Pete said. “She wanted the baby to have a good place to live until I could find somewhere else.”
“She had her own baby to think about,” Kate said.
“Your other son,” Lulu said.
“Please, stop,” Nicola said. The mention of Matthew made her go weak in the knees. “We’ll leave.”
“Hey, you stop,” Pete said loudly, practically yelling, scowling at her. “I’m dealing with this.”
Nicola flinched, and Kate saw. Nicola felt shame, having Kate hear him talk to her that way. Kate drifted closer to her and Tyler. She moved like a sleepwalker, close enough so Nicola could feel her warm breath on her forehead. She was staring down at Tyler. Nicola’s arms tightened around him. She felt Kate’s eyes casting a spell on him. Nicola shivered, thinking of Maleficent, but Kate’s expression was gentle.
“My sister’s baby didn’t get to be born,” Kate said.