Kate, Beth, and their mother had been tied next to one post, the rope looped around and around, anchoring them to the building. They had tried changing positions, this way and that. They tried to saw the ropes against the rough edges. Each of them stretched as far as possible, trying to wriggle free. Kate’s left side had been scraped raw. To this day, she had fine, threadlike, horizontal scars on her hip from scraping against the ragged concrete.
She walked over to the pole now, leaned against it, and stared at the floor. She pictured her mother, blood streaming from her nose, vomit from choking on the gag. Kate and Beth had struggled to get free so they could save her. The harder they’d thrashed, the deeper the ropes had cut into their wrists.
“Do you remember what it was like that day?” she asked Conor.
“Yes, everything,” he said. “Do you?”
“I think so. It’s hard to tell whether the memories are real or dreams. Sometimes I think I turned into a ghost that night. That I left the earth.”
“You didn’t,” he said, reaching for her hand. “You’re not a ghost. You’re right here.”
“I don’t always feel alive,” she said, staring at the way his fingers were clasped with hers. “But I want to.”
After a moment she pulled her hand away and turned around. A framing workshop occupied the basement’s east wall. A pegboard with hooks for tools hung above a long rustic workbench. Vises, a mortar board, and saws covered the wooden bench. The family had scoured estate sales for antique frames, often with inferior paintings still intact. The canvases, if they weren’t interesting, would be cut out and discarded. Several large, ornate gilded frames leaned against the wall.
“He made himself useful at one thing,” Kate said.
“Who?” Conor asked.
“Pete. Building frames.”
Standing by the bench, Kate noticed a print by Thomas Nason. Beside it were four lengths of black-painted wood, corners mitered, ready to become a frame. Conor leaned over to examine a wood engraving of a Colonial house on a low hill, surrounded by pine, maple, and birch trees. Kate found it haunting; she wondered if Conor did too.
Kate remembered how Mathilda had told her Nason had etched thousands of fine lines in the block of wood to create depth and shadows. He’d then rolled the block with a thin layer of ink and printed the work. The print was painstakingly detailed, right down to the textures in pine needles and maple bark, the house’s shingles, a glint of dying light in the window glass.
“Looks as if Pete was in the middle of building a frame for this one,” Conor said. “It’s Mathilda’s house, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Kate said. “The artist used houses and barns and land along the Connecticut River as his subjects.” Just as Ben Morrison had used the island and the brook.
“Did Nason know your grandmother?”
“Yes. She said he was the most poetic artist in America. She meant it literally. Some of his prints illustrated books by Robert Frost.”
“I can’t picture Pete feeling the poetry, working on this,” Conor said.
“Trust me; he didn’t. But Beth . . . ,” Kate said.
“Beth, yes. She would,” Conor said.
Kate nodded. “Frost was her favorite poet. His poems evoke New England, the places we grew up and loved.”
And then it hit her: Frost’s “West-Running Brook.” Beth had always been haunted by it, the poem about contraries in love. Most brooks ran east toward the ocean; one streaming west was rare. Kate knew Beth had related the poem—with its dialogue between a couple questioning what they were to each other, whether to follow expected routes in life—to their parents’ difficult love. She pictured Morrison’s painting of the brook, so close to Beth’s desk she could touch it. The stream that ran past Jed’s tent. Beth’s contrary love for him. Everything was connected.
“I’m glad we came down here,” Conor said. “It helps me with Pete’s state of mind.”
“In what way?”
“I think this is where he formed the idea to kill Beth,” Conor said, chasing away any feeling of redemption. “Working on the frames right here in the space where your mother died. Where the three of you suffered. It got him thinking. Even though your father hadn’t intended Helen to die, he had made a plan to get himself out of a situation. Pete did something similar, only murder was the whole point.”
“Let’s go upstairs,” Kate said. The cellar was closing in on her, the damp smell filling her throat and choking her like the gag.
Turning fast, she bumped into the post where she’d been tied. The boiler was halfway between it and the stairs. She tripped on a wooden crate, kicking over bottles of chardonnay and pinot noir, served at gallery openings. One shattered, and when she looked down, she saw glass shards, red wine streaming across the floor. It was just like blood, just like her mother’s.
“Kate?” Conor asked, catching her arm. “What is it?”
She didn’t reply. The floor had a slight tilt, built that way in case the basement flooded, and the wine trickled downward toward a narrow drainage trench cut along the south wall. Kate followed the flow. She blinked hard, remembering a time long before the incident, before her mother died.
She and Beth had come into this basement alone. She could see her sister, nine years old, frustration in her eyes.
“You have a hiding place,” Beth had said. “It’s not fair; I want one too.”
Set into the wall was a massive and long-unused stone fireplace and beehive oven with a heavy cast-iron door. Cut into the wall was a metal grate to allow heat to escape, and by wiggling the grate, Kate had been able to remove it and hide her treasures there: Revolutionary War–era coins, a tarnished silver spoon, a speckled black rock she was convinced was a meteorite, and three arrowheads she’d found in the rose garden alongside Mathilda’s house.
“Okay, we have to find you a hiding place,” Kate said, hugging Beth so she would feel better.
“Like yours,” Beth said.
“Yes,” Kate had said. “How about this?” She had walked over to the beehive oven, but when she had tried the cast-iron door, it had been locked. There had been a keyhole but no key.
Now, with Conor, Kate walked to the beehive oven and touched the lock. She felt hypnotized, as if the poem, the painting of the brook, the melting ice, and the old memories had put her under a spell. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the key she’d been carrying since she’d found it in the box in Beth’s desk drawer.
How could she have not known until now? The heavy square key found its way into the lock, and Kate turned it. The iron door clanged open. She stood staring into the murk, at first not seeing anything.
“Beth’s hiding place,” she said.
Her fingers brushed spiderwebs as she reached inside. She brought forth a dusty packet of letters written on onionskin paper and tied with a blue ribbon. She held them in her hand, gazing at them as if unsure how they had gotten there. She glanced at one, saw that it was signed J, the same script as the signature on the small nude of Beth. All the way at the back of the oven was a brown cardboard mailing tube.
She felt Conor’s eyes on her as she pulled it out. Peeking into the tube, she saw that a canvas with ragged edges had been rolled up, stored inside. She reached in with two fingers and carefully withdrew the small furled painting. It felt weightless as she carried it to the workbench, laid it flat, smoothed the sides.