Picture the Dead

Creeping along the corridor, I freeze at the sound of Mavis muttering in her bed. But no, she’s only dreaming. It turns my heart imagining what rebuke had been meted at Mrs. Sullivan’s ready hand once she’d discovered I wasn’t home and that Mavis had been lying to her.

Dear Mavis, she’s lost half her hearing to Mrs. Sullivan’s punishing blows, and yet when I press her she’ll swear one more knock doesn’t matter. I’ll have to think of a way to make it up to her.

Outside, the snow sticks four inches deep and continues to fall. In seconds my head and shoulders and back are wet. Hesitant to use the lantern, I let the watery moonlight guide me down the lawn. Almost immediately I’m soaked from my slipping, skidding shoes. My feet are two numb chunks of ice wrapped in soggy wool, and there’s hardly any point in lifting my dragging hem, though it seems to catch on every twig. My dress is all but ruined, but nothing could turn me back now. My photograph has given me hope, and I will doggedly cast my last coin in its wishing well.

A spy advances on every opportunity.

The butternut tree marks an otherwise desolate part of the property. Its branches haven’t been climbed in many years. Its knotted rope swing is too frayed and thin to support a body. But it’s not the swing that interests me.

At the base of the tree I drop down to all fours. My blind hands search and find the nicks and grooves where we have carved our initials: T. P. L., Tobias Pritchett Lovell. W. F. P., William Franklin Pritchett. Q. E. P., Quincy Emory Pritchett. J. R. L., Jennie Rose Lovell.

And then, two summers ago, Will had taken his fishing knife and joined his initials with mine, fencing them together inside a single, exuberant heart. I see it now, cut thick like an artery into the wood’s black bark, shaped like a spade with a kited tail.

An identically shaped heart has been inked into my photograph.

The heart that marks the spot.

My hands crawl at the patch of soft soil directly beneath the heart, at the wedge that divides the tree’s two largest exposed roots. I can feel that the earth has been turned over recently. My breath is short, my hands scrape like a dog, raw, burrowing. Grit flies into my eye. I wipe at it, streaking more wet dirt across my face and lips. It leaves an icy taste of mineral. Tomorrow it will be impossible to explain away the state of my clothes and shoes. But I cannot stop until I have found what William has intended me to find.

The physical sensation of pulling it up is not unlike the complicated pull on the tangle of a winter root loosing its grip in the ground. As if it, too, had been connected to the earth and sustained by it.

Even though I know what it is, a small sound escapes me, a euphoria trickling through the flood of my grief. A knowledge that calms me.

My frost-blunted fingers wind through the chain. My necklace, my locket. Returned.

21.

Snow has muffled the outside world, but sunshine eventually starts a gurgle down the drainpipe outside my window. I wake blinking and see that Mavis has already visited my room and taken my ruined dress to salvage. What’s more, the floorboards have been wiped clean of my footprints, my water pitcher is freshly filled. A washcloth hangs on its hook beneath the basin. Pleats knife-creased and collar starched, my Sunday dress is draped over my chair, and my boot buckles are shined and ready for church.

Back in my room last night, I’d tucked my locket beneath my mattress. This morning I pull it out and rinse off the encrusted grit before I dry the necklace link by link. Then I fasten the clasp around my neck and tuck both chain and locket inside my collar, out of sight.

Quinn must have brought home the necklace after all. Whatever his reasons for burying it, I need to find him. I have to hear his story whole, and not just in the pieces that I’ve stitched into a quilt of guesswork. No matter how much he wants to protect Will, his silence conjures up the worst of my imagination. Nothing Will had done could be so bad that I can’t endure it.

Mavis is clearing the breakfast things when I appear in the doorway of the empty dining room. “Where is Quinn? Where are my aunt and uncle?”

She freezes, a platter balanced in each hand. “Good morning, Miss. I believe they decided to set off without you.”

“Services don’t start until a quarter past eight. Why’ve they gone already?”

“Oh, I can’t say, Miss.” But Mavis’s gaze drops.

“Was Mrs. Sullivan unkind to you last night?” I ask. “No, don’t answer, for I know she was. I’m very sorry, Mavis. I’m in your debt.”

“Wasn’t anything that hasn’t happened a hundred times before, Miss,” she murmurs. Somehow it is the routine of cruelty that seems a worse offense to me than the recent blow Mavis surely suffered at Mrs. Sullivan’s hand.

“Things will get better, I’m sure of it,” I promise.

Mavis nods. She looks more wobblingly upset than usual.

“What is it?”

With the barest of movements, she jerks her head toward the front door. “They are just leaving now, Miss,” she whispers. “Go catch ’em outright.”

A spy must retain at least one loyal alliance.

I tear down the hall and through the front door just in time to see the carriage turning. Without pausing to think, I dash out to step in front of it, slipping on the shoveled ice and bringing the driver to a cursing stop.

We exchange a look, and then he relents with a small nod, letting me run around to the side to jump onto the foot step and rap my fist against the carriage window. Uncle opens the door, allowing Aunt to lean across him so that she might make excuses for them both.

“Such a ruckus, Jennie!” Aunt’s face is so close that I see the ash of burnt match she uses to darken the gray in her brows and the talcum powder that cakes the pores of her nose and ringed crinkles of her neck. The lie of her smile tenses her lips.

“Why are you leaving for church without me?”

“I thought we’d discussed this.” Into my stony silence, she continues. “When all is said and done, Jennie, you aren’t Episcopalian.” Aunt sniffs, gaining confidence. “In fact, your father, if I recall correctly, was Universalist.” Aunt speaks this word as if she has called my father a heathen. “Mr. Pritchett and I thought you might want to join his old congregation today. It might be a sure fit, we hoped, with your background and beliefs.”

But I understand the implication at once. Aunt and Uncle don’t want me to attend church with them. They don’t want to appear in public with me, as their ward. I look to Uncle Henry, who is scrutinizing his watch face.