I’d stopped listening. Something in her story was bothering me, prickling in the tired depths of my brain like a burr caught in cotton. A question was forming, rising to the surface—
“To hell with all of ’em, I say,” Lizzie concluded. She screwed the cap back onto her vile brown bottle. “Time we got to bed, child. You can have the upstairs; I do my sleeping right here.” A pause, while the bitter lines framing Lizzie’s mouth softened. “Take the bed under the window, on the north side, won’t you. We always meant to get rid of the damn thing, once we understood she wasn’t coming back, but somehow we never did.”
“Thank you, Aunt Lizzie.”
I was two steps up the stairs when Lizzie said, “Tomorrow maybe you can tell me how a colored girl-child with a mess of scars and a mean-lookin’ dog ended up on my doorstep. And what took you so damned long.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I fell asleep in my mother’s bed, with Bad pressed against my side and the smell of dust in my nose and that shadowy question still looming, unspoken, in my skull.
I had that nightmare about the blue Door and the hands reaching for me, except this time the hands weren’t white and spidery, but thick-fingered and familiar: Mr. Locke’s hands, reaching toward my throat.
I woke with Bad’s nose snuffling beneath my chin and greenish sunlight filtering through the vine-eaten window. I lay for a while, stroking Bad’s ears and letting my heart thud itself quiet. The room around me was like an exhibit in a grubby museum. A stiff-bristled brush lay on the dresser with a few wiry white hairs still snarled around it; a framed daguerreotype of a chinless Rebel soldier sat propped on a dresser; a series of children’s treasures (a chunk of fool’s gold, a broken compass, a rock studded with dull white fossils, a moldy satin ribbon) perched in a neat line on the windowsill.
My mother’s whole world, until she ran away to find others. This was what she’d been sailing toward before she died, this shabby house that smelled of old woman and bacon fat. Her home.
Did I have a home to sail back to? I thought of Locke House—not the stupid, sumptuous parlors crowded with stolen treasures, but my favorite lumpy armchair. The little round window where I could watch storms coming across the lake. The way the stairwell always smelled of beeswax and orange oil.
I did have a home. I just couldn’t go back to it. Like mother, like daughter.
Lizzie’s breakfast appeared to be nothing but ferociously bitter coffee, boiled and strained through a black-stained scrap of cloth. I’d never tried drinking cyanide, but I imagined the sensation of hot liquid burning through your stomach lining is similar.
“Let’s hear it, then,” Lizzie said, and made a harassed, get-on-with-it gesture.
So I told her how an in-between girl ended up on her doorstep twenty-something years after her niece vanished.
I didn’t tell the truth—because then my only remaining relative would think I was insane, and I’d developed something of an allergy to people thinking I was insane—but I tried to make sure all the important bits were true. My father was a foreigner (“Bah,” muttered Lizzie) who met my mother by pure chance when he was passing through Ninley. They found one another again after years of searching, got legally married (“Well, thank God for that”) and lived on my father’s wages as a professor of history (skeptical silence). They were journeying back to Kentucky when there was a terrible accident and my mother was killed (that hit-in-the-chest sound again), and my father and I were more or less adopted by a wealthy patron (more skeptical silence). My father spent the last decade and a half conducting research all over the world; he never remarried (a noise of grudging approval).
“And I grew up in Locke House, in Vermont. I had everything any girl could want.” Except family or freedom, but who’s counting? “I traveled everywhere with my, uh, foster father. I even came here once, I don’t know if you remember.”
Lizzie squinted at me, then gave a little huh of recognition. “Ah! Didn’t think you were real. Used to be I’d see Adelaide all over the place, but it always turned out to be some girl with a yellow braid, or a man in an old coat. She used to wear my coat around, ugliest thing you ever saw… Well. When was that? How’d you end up here?”
“It was 1901. I’d come with my foster father to…”
The number 1901 echoed weirdly as I said it.
Lizzie had said last night that her mysterious property buyer reappeared in 1901, and wasn’t it rather strange that we were both in Ninley in the same year? Perhaps we were even here at the same time. Perhaps our paths had crossed at the Grand Riverfront Hotel—could it have been that governor with the skull collection? I tried to remember how my father’s book had described him: clipped mustache, expensive suit, cold eyes. Eyes the color of moons or coins…
My thoughts slowed, as if they were slogging through hip-deep syrup.
The question—that formless black ghost that had been haunting me all night—came suddenly into focus. And I knew as it did so that it was something I desperately didn’t want to ask.
“Sorry, but—you know the man who bought your back acres? What was his name, did you say?”
Lizzie blinked at me. “What? Well, we never got his first name, and isn’t that an odd thing, to sell your land without knowing a fellow’s Christian name. But he had a queer way about him, and those eyes…” She shivered, just a little, and I pictured a pair of glacial eyes pressing against her skin.
“But it says his company name right on the contract: W. C. Locke & Co.”
It’s hard to remember precisely how I reacted.
Maybe I screamed. Maybe I gasped and covered my mouth with my hands. Maybe I fell backward in my chair into deep, cold water and kept falling down and down, a final glittering stream of bubbles escaping back toward the surface—
Maybe I cleared my throat and asked my aunt Lizzie to repeat herself, please.
Mr. Locke. It had been Mr. Locke who had met my fifteen-year-old mother after Sunday church, who had interrogated her about ghost boys and cabin doors, who had purchased the Larson women’s back acres and closed their Door.
Are you really surprised? The voice in my head was tart and grown-up sounding. It made, I supposed, a fair point: I’d already known Mr. Locke was a liar and a thief and a villain. I knew he was a Society member and therefore dedicated to the destruction of Doors; I knew he had recruited my father with all the callous self-interest of a rich man purchasing a racehorse, and had profited from his torment for seventeen years; I knew his love for me was conditional and fragile, abandoned as easily as selling an artifact at auction.
But I hadn’t known, or permitted myself to know, that he was so cruel. Cruel enough to knowingly close my father’s Door not once but twice—
Or maybe he didn’t know the blue Door was anything special. Perhaps he never connected it to the strange, tattooed fellow he found years later. (This, I recognize now, was a desperate, absurd hope, as if I could somehow discover a clue that would redeem Mr. Locke and make him again the distant-but-beloved almost-father-figure of my childhood.)
I dumped out the contents of my reeking, stained pillowcase, ignoring Lizzie’s squawked “Not on my kitchen table, child!” I seized the leather-bound book, my father’s book, the book that had sent me on this mad, wandering trail back to my own beginnings. It shook slightly in my hands.