The Silent Girl: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller full of suspense, page 13
They shall take up serpents.
With so much lightning and thunder right overhead, I think the storm clouds must have snagged themselves right on this mountain and become stuck there.
And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.
I rest my face in my rain-slick hands, squeezing the damp hair away from my forehead. I didn’t need to come over here. I was already soaked through. I wanted to sit. Something in me was looking for shelter. Isn’t that what I always do?
They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
Sure enough, I know these words, the flavor of something biblical about them. But why, and why does the voice that speaks them in my memory sound so familiar? Though any name other than Miles eludes me, I remember seeing a man bitten by a copperhead. Remember that he didn’t go for help, even when his leg swelled to double in size. I remember sitting through the night, coaxing him to drink tea, keeping a cool cloth on his forehead. I don’t remember if he lived.
Like a riddle, I sit there mouthing the words into my hands, staring at the falling rain. It crosses my mind to wonder, the same as Detective Radford had: is it possible that I’m dangerous? You gave someone hell. The nurse’s words echo across my mind. But I got twice as much, and if I was harmed, or injured, as in the verse that comes to my memory now, I did the better part of recovering on my own. It isn’t done yet. I hear the whisper, and I recognize it from my dreams: Zenaida Atwood with her riddles. What isn’t? Recovering. But, I want to hiss, I’m doing it on my own, all the same. And I imagine her staring back, as always, as though she knows exactly what I’m hiding from, gracing me only with riddles and fragments. I’m still mouthing the words into my knit hands, chin resting on my thumbs, when I sense somebody’s nearby. I start to scramble to my feet, then see Nathaniel as he takes a seat a few feet away from me.
“Hey.” He looks at me for a moment, brushes raindrops from his forehead with the back of his wrist, then nods out at the weather. “You were right.” I manage a smile and a nod.
“Did you get the railing?” I ask, eager for something else to talk about.
“No,” he answers. “It wasn’t finished. He says he needs another week. Just be careful, if you use the bridge, until it’s done.”
“Right,” I answer, staring out toward the pond.
“No snakes?” he asks.
“No.” This time I can’t force a smile, just sigh into my hands, bringing them back toward my face. I can feel Nathaniel watching, waiting for me to speak. “What would happen,” I murmur, then turn to him with a hard set in my jaw, “what do you think will happen, if nothing ever comes back to me? Would I have a way to get a birth certificate? What about a driver’s license?” I’m curious now, but it’s not idle curiosity.
“I’m not sure,” he answers. “But—”
“What is it?”
“Nothing—but it seems like you wouldn’t be wondering about that, if…” He’s studying me openly now, brow darkening as his eyes trace over the marks on my arms, the scar on my temple.
“If what?” I press when he hesitates, inch closer, as if I’m making a demand. When Nathaniel speaks again, his voice has dropped almost to a whisper.
“If you wanted to remember.” His eyes soften as he looks at me, and his hand moves close to mine, close enough that I could stretch out my fingertips and touch his. “Maybe you don’t want to go back.”
“Well, I—” This hadn’t occurred to me, and I’m stunned into silence, anger and frustration like a swarm of bees between my ears. I scoot back again, away from the warmth in his eyes. I could fall right into that space, but it would mean admitting I’m afraid. I imagine a man with a scar across his eyebrow. More poppies than you could hope to count. “Of course I do. That’s what I want the most. It just—” Nathaniel stops me with a gentle shake of his chin.
“That’s alright.” He gives an unassuming shrug, though I can tell he’s choosing his words with care. “I don’t know you. I’m just saying, if you didn’t want to go home—if there was something you didn’t want to go back to—there’s help for that, too.”
“I didn’t say that.” My voice comes out in a low, warning breath. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. I just need to find my brother.” He places a hand on my wrist, leans forward so that I can look at him without moving from my hunched posture.
“Sophie.”
“Nathaniel,” I say, rolling my eyes a little. He’s undeterred.
“When you get hurt this badly, something’s wrong. You know that—I see it. What else is going on here?”
“They said it might have been random.”
“But maybe not, right?”
“Ugh!” Though I wave a hand at him, as if to shoo him back, he stays right here, close enough I could grab hold of his arm and pull myself close to him. Lean on his chest and let it be okay, even for a fraction of a second. With another sigh of annoyance, I scoot further back an inch or two.
“When I find Miles, everything will be fine,” I insist. “That’s all I know.”
“If you’re hiding things from yourself—telling yourself you’re fine, things are fine, when you know inside that they’re not? That kind of a disconnect is not going to help you.”
“What do you know about it, anyway?” I’m trying to push him away, but I whisper the words into my hands, barely louder than the sound of the rain around us. He crosses one knee over the other, stretching his legs out, and turns his face toward mine.
“Is that a question you’re asking me? Or are you telling me to shut up?” When he speaks softly like this, I can hear a touch of his accent, the g disappearing from his present participles. “I’m just saying, pay some mind to what you’re feeling.” Maybe I would, I think, but I don’t know how. I’m too ashamed to admit it out loud, but this anger, this fear, is too big to stand up to.
“Crying relieves stress. It’s a scientific fact.”
“I’m not stressed.”
“And being angry? It—”
“I am not angry!”
“I’d be angry, if I were you.” Though he speaks gently, I sense he’s nudging me toward something. “I’d be angry if somebody beat me to a pulp and left me for dead. Your anger is coming from the part of you that knows what happened to you was wrong.”
“Yeah, well, life’s not fair,” I say, anger flickering in my throat like a candle. “Life’s never been fair.”
“It’s almost like you’re protecting someone,” he says, looking at me curiously.
“Trust me.” Now I find some certainty behind my words. “When I find my brother, he’s going to find whoever hurt me, and he’s going to make them pay. There is no protecting about it.” I shoot a furious glare at him, then close my eyes. This wall, this brittle strength, is part of me, I can feel it. I wonder if I’ve ever been able to let myself swear or cry or feel angry, to drop this exhausting optimism. I can’t do it now, that’s for sure.
“The thing I don’t get,” I say, “is that nobody’s looking for me. Not even Miles. Why?”
“It’s only been a few weeks,” he says. “You could have a husband, a family.” He steals a glance at my lips as he speaks, and I see this isn’t the first time the thought has occurred to him.
“Come on.” I purse my lips, shaking my head a little. That alternate reality seems too much to even imagine. A time when there was a different me, one without these scars. Maybe before, they were better hidden. “You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
I don’t answer him right away, but something tells me I’ve always been alone.
“What’s inside, here?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Ballroom.”
“Ah.” I peek into the dark window, partly covered on the inside with heavy velvet curtains the length of the walls, and see a massive piano in the corner and imagine, for a moment, the sound of stringed instruments. What it might have been like to arrive here in the winter, for a party, by carriage. “She have a lot of dances?”
“No,” Nathaniel answers. “No, she pretty much kept to herself. I don’t know why, but I think she liked the quiet.” But I think he does know why. I see that he’s thought about it a great deal. A person choosing to be alone with this big house, with all its shadows, isn’t just someone who wants to be alone, but someone who, maybe, needs to be. There’s a reason Nathaniel doesn’t talk to me about Mrs. Atwood unless I push him to. There’s something they share.
“Of course,” I agree, studying him intently now, as if I’ve figured something out. I see a patch of clear sky on the horizon and point to it wordlessly.
“Weather changes fast up here,” he says.
“I see.” As I turn to look at him, I rest my head on my knees. I don’t bother smiling. He’d know it was fake. “I’m going back to that pond.”
“You can take a break sometimes, you know.”
“Some people need quiet,” I remind him. “Some people need to keep busy. Everyone has things that keep them sane.”
“Okay, Sophie,” he says. “Meet you on Friday?”
“Friday? Oh,” I remember. “You were going to show me the house. I didn’t forget—I just thought—” I begin to stumble over my words, standing up in a hurry. Once again, I think, one or both of us ought to be drawing back, drawing a line between us. And instead we’re sharing this foolish smile. “Friday afternoon, right?”
“Sure,” he says. “I’ll meet you here.”
Twenty-Six
I’ve spent, now, the better part of two months studying this house from the outside. Watching pieces come together: the roof Nathaniel repaired, the windowpanes replaced here and there. Even so, I haven’t given myself time to wonder what the interior might be like. He’s joked about it being haunted, but, as I follow Nathaniel through the massive front doors, into the cavernous entry hall, I’m struck with a lingering feeling of sorrow. It feels more mournful than ghostly. The room rises all the way up, a series of skylights and rounded windows letting sunlight in. The walls are carved with wooden paneling and adorned with paintings. There’s a fireplace taller than I am.
Nathaniel points out the carvings of cherubs with doves that line the fireplace. There’s something slightly spooky about the gravity of the room, and I realize that it’s not perfectly square.
“How much of this restoration did you do yourself?”
“Most of it was hiring people, keeping everything organized. Budgeting.” He turns around to face me, smiling. “A lot of it was cleaning. The house itself was surprisingly intact. It seems like even the high schoolers who snuck in here to get high had a sense it was worth taking care of.”
In the center of the entry hall, a grand staircase leads up to the second-floor landing, where the steps branch to either side.
“It’s like a maze,” I breathe. Around the landing on the second floor, a columned walkway looms in shadow, which appears to connect to the third floor, and from there to the fourth, at points that follow no logical sequence. It seems, almost, designed to disorient. I follow slowly up, tracing the amber-tinted marble of the banister. At the top of the stairs is Zenaida’s stained-glass portrait. I feel as though she smiles at me, and I tiptoe toward my left to stand in awe in the patchwork of tinted sunlight falling through the glass.
“It’s impressive,” I say, “even more so up close.”
“I see you studying it, sometimes.”
“I like it,” I admit. “It isn’t just the window, but the way it’s located on the house, on the land.”
“Catches the sunset.”
I smile and nod.
I follow down a set of stairs that curves into a flourish, down into the ballroom, that I saw from the outside only a few days before. While Nathaniel stands on the stairs, I slip past him and walk down into the near dark. There is just enough light from the windows on the opposite wall to make out geometric patterns in the tile flooring. I trace them with my feet: it’s blue and white stone, an abstract interpretation of a night sky, stars under my toes. I turn back to where he waits on the stairs. I always have this impulse, when I see something beautiful, to turn to the nearest person as if to say, have you seen this? Of course he has. He’s seen it a thousand times. Yet he looks in my direction, as if he’s studying something intently. I feel my pulse start to hammer in my veins and grasp for something to talk about, something to fill this silence that begins to feel dangerous. “Tell me again,” I ask, “when was the house built?”
“It was finished in 1907.” I take a step forward, and, as if reading my cue, he proceeds up the stairs, while I follow him back to the first floor.
“The tourist center in town has a display,” I say, feeling as though the space commands me to whisper. “It says it was their summer home.”
“There’s a little bit more to it than that,” he answers, as I walk behind him again, across the towering entryway, toward the opposite wing. Here, just above ground level, there’s what used to be a conservatory. I can imagine that it was once like stepping into a rainforest, a greenhouse, but with the windows dusty and lined with cracks, an army of unnamable vines creeping through the windows, it feels like standing in the midst of a huge spiderweb. I recognize an ivy leaf, but none of the others.
“This is going to be a custom repair job,” he says. “I had to have architects and historians come consult on it. I cannot begin to tell you,” he continues, with just the hint of a mischievous smile, “what an absolute pain in the ass this house has been.” In the way his eyes light up, I see that he loves it. “It’s not even done yet, and I can honestly say I preferred it in ruins.”
“Will there be plants in here?”
“Orchids, mostly,” he says. I try to picture it, to imagine the opulence of a room filled with rare, tropical flowers. In one corner, near a fountain, there’s a tap extending from the wall: brass, I think, stepping over to swipe a finger in the dust.
“Gold plumbing fixtures,” he says. “In the bathrooms, too. At the time, finished indoor plumbing was cutting-edge. Not to mention the cost.”
“Jay Gatsby would’ve been right at home,” I say.
“Mrs. Atwood wasn’t much of a Gatsby,” he answers.
Neither, I think, are you. “Maybe that’s why she spent so much time outdoors,” I offer.
“And in her study. With the doves.” Nathaniel holds the door as I walk back into the entry hall, then moves past me to approach one of the two grand staircases leading up either side of the room. His hand brushes the back of my shoulder, as if he’s saying, come this way, and, I think, it ought to be a perfectly innocent gesture, but I’m following him now like I’m on a string. “You said it was a gift,” I reflect. “Do you mean, you don’t think she liked it?”
“I’m not certain she did,” he answers. His hand trails the banister, that striking red marble, and I can almost feel the warmth of his fingertips where mine trace after his. “Colonel Atwood promised to build her a house here as a wedding gift. But by the time he built it, they’d been married six years. Living apart for three.” I walk through a ladies’ parlor. The walls are marked with pale, square-shaped blotches, as if it was once adorned with large paintings. Now, only one remains. A Pre-Raphaelite, siren-like woman stands in the frame, feet in a stream, hair bedraggled. It’s lovely, in its way, but all I can think is that, between her dress and that long hair, she must feel awfully weighed down. The parlor is divided by a spacious corridor from a salon, where I imagine men in suits with cigars drinking hard liquor.
“What happened?” I ask. He doesn’t answer me for a few seconds, and, as we walk from the salon into the library, I sense he’s dodging something I’ve asked a bit too directly.
“Whatever I can guess is from census records, newspapers, family letters.”
“Okay,” I say. “So? What’s your account?”
“Early in their marriage, there was a stillbirth. I think that was where the opium came in. Laudanum prescription, probably.”
“Oh, the poor girl.” I cross my arms tight, wishing I could throw my arms around her. “Was she very sick after?”
“Don’t know,” he says. “He got rid of all her diaries. But it’s just as likely they prescribed it for hysteria.” I wince, taking into consideration in a new light the size, the shadows of this estate.
“My guess is, they grew apart, in the sense that her husband left her to herself too much. There were rumors of affairs,” he says, pulling back a curtain to allow some sunlight onto the dozens of bookshelves. “Her family said she wrote letters, detailing that he was distant, unkind. They spent holidays together, society events, but that was it. Whatever it was—”
“She was young.”
“And not from money. Even for that time period, they weren’t on an equal footing,” he says, finishing my thought. “It’s almost like fulfilling what he promised her was a play to get back what he’d already lost.”
“How long did she live here?”
“She moved here for the summer in 1907, as soon as it was ready,” he says. “And never left. Until she disappeared. There aren’t any clear records, but it was the end of July, or early August—”
“August 1, 1910.”
“Why’d you say that?”
“It’s on the desk,” I tell him. “You’ve seen it.”
“No.” Now he’s intrigued.
“Under the desk, on the right side. Her initials, and the date. August 1, 1910. You haven’t seen that?”
“No,” he says. “No, honestly, we didn’t do a lot of renovations in there. It didn’t seem right.”
“It still doesn’t seem right, sometimes,” I add, “staying in there. Then, other times, I think she wouldn’t mind me there.” I walk away from him, eyeing the dust-coated spines of books. Feeling oddly at home, I drop into a cloth-covered armchair, a cloud of dust rising around me like spirits. “You know I have to ask you,” I say, laughing, waving a hand in front of my face and trying not to cough.
“Ask me what?”
“What did the letter say? You said it was a riddle. That she left it on the desk.”
