The Silent Girl: An absolutely gripping mystery thriller full of suspense, page 7
“Bend your arm,” he says. I do, and, feeling a twinge, squeeze my lips together, breathing out through my nose.
“Hurts?”
“No.”
“Yeah, it did.” He casts a look my way that’s more confused than anything else. “It’s a piece of glass. You can come inside and wash it—”
“No, thanks,” I interrupt.
“—if you want.” Nathaniel pauses. He’s only offering, and I realize I’m bordering on making this worse. I’d rather take this piece of glass in my arm with me than stand here in front of him. But I can see that it’s going to make more of a scene to refuse any help.
“Okay.” I follow him up the steps, gritting my teeth. The door opens into a foyer; there’s a dining room to the right, a living room to the left. We walk through the dining room and, in the hallway that adjoins the kitchen, Nathaniel opens a large china cabinet, taller than I am. Each shelf is lined with supplies, too many to name, though I see a row of disinfectants—iodine, hydrogen peroxide, isopropyl, chlorhexidine. An assortment of bandages and plasters and gauze. Sterile scissors in plastic wrappers. Surgical tape.
“Lincoln mentioned you had a first aid kit.” I don’t need to voice the next half of that thought.
“Yeah, well, we’re far from everything out here.” He turns a furtive glance at me over his shoulder, then away. “It’s good to be prepared.”
“Right,” I say, as if it’s anything but strange. He scans the shelves, plucks out a few items. “That’s a good point.”
“I was in the military when I was younger,” he says, still shuffling items in the cabinet. “I guess if you see enough injuries you can’t fix, it makes you want to be ready for the ones you can.”
“Makes sense.”
“Anyway, Lincoln’s nearsighted,” he says. “Very nearsighted. But the doctors don’t want to prescribe contact lenses until he’s eight, so we’ve got a couple years left with glasses.” I realize he’s changing the subject, so, feeling just a hint of empathy, I follow along.
“It must be tough keeping up with the right size,” I say, “while they’re growing so fast.” Nathaniel agrees with a curt nod of his chin and turns into the kitchen. With spotless countertops and appliances, it has the look of a place that’s usually very clean, but that has acquired some sudden clutter, in the form of a lunchbox and children’s toys scattered here and there. Nathaniel sees that the freezer door is ajar, pushes it shut with his foot. “Hey, Lincoln,” he calls, the deep volume of his voice startling me. “You been in the freezer?”
“Maybe!” Lincoln shouts back, his voice sounding from upstairs.
“If you eat up the ice cream, you won’t have any for after dinner,” Nathaniel calls back. He tilts his head, indicating for me to stand by the sink next to him. “He’s only here twice a month,” he says. “I try to make it fun. Terrible parenting, right? Ice cream before dinner.” He laughs, but I sense somehow that it isn’t a joke.
“I can think of worse things,” I offer, wondering if my mother would have let me eat ice cream before dinner.
“Yeah?” Nathaniel mutters, as if he almost expects me to challenge him. He pauses for a moment, and I see his thoughts reaching in several directions, upstairs toward his son, the first aid cabinet, my unlikely presence. And then, he seems to shrug it off, the hard line of his brow settling just a bit. “Me too,” he says, “I guess.”
He turns on the tap and dampens a paper towel. I take it from him, blot the cut off, then hold my arm under the running water. Nathaniel hands me a disinfectant, then another paper towel. I pat it dry, gritting my teeth again when I feel the bit of glass that’s still there. He unwraps a sterile set of tweezers and hands them over.
“It’s a pretty clean cut,” he observes, reaching to turn off the water. I exhale, closing my eyes in a long blink, remembering my shoulders are exposed, showing the healing marks across my right side. I feel like there’s a rock lodged in my throat. I pluck clumsily at the loose skin with my left hand. Maybe it hurts. I don’t know.
“You want a hand?” he asks. I pass the tweezers over, quickly, noting that my hand shakes just a little, and stand still as he turns my arm in his hand. Something about the set of Nathaniel’s expression softens when he focuses. He’s younger than I had first guessed, even close to my age. Holding the tweezers, he draws close, then—it’s gone. I watch patiently as he rinses my arm under the tap, as if I’m standing across the room, not right here next to him.
“There you go.” He covers it with clean gauze. “Cover it until the bleeding stops, but take the bandage off when you sleep. It’ll heal better if it can breathe.”
“Thanks,” I answer. He’s still holding my arm, though, looking now at the blisters on my hand, a few on the pads of my fingers and on the slope between my index finger and thumb. Nathaniel moves back toward the cabinet, puts back some of the supplies, removes others: a box of Band-Aids, some antibiotic ointment. He hands me the Band-Aids and ointment.
“Thanks,” I repeat, putting them in my pocket. I’m grateful when Lincoln clatters down the stairs.
“Hey, Dove Girl!” he shouts. “How’s your arm?”
“It’s good,” I answer, smiling back at his contagious grin. “All patched up. See?” Lincoln never stops moving, his feet dancing a hopscotch pattern down the hall.
“When can we go, Dad?”
“Just a few minutes,” Nathaniel says. “I’m going to walk Sophie back and take a look at the window.” Lincoln leans around the corner as we walk out the door. “Watch out for dragons,” he hisses. I return a conspiratorial smile and wave goodbye.
As we proceed down the walkway and back into the yard, Nathaniel looks back toward his son with a bemused smile. I notice a dimple in his left cheek. “He’s usually pretty reserved. Seems to like you, though.”
“Seems like a fun kid.”
“He is.”
We walk in silence past the flowering hedges and across the footbridge. The air is cooler over the water. On the narrow bridge, I walk a few steps ahead. As we cross the other side of the gardens, a flock of doves scatters, and the tips of their wings whistle as they take flight. I hurry into my apartment, leaving the door open behind me.
“Right here,” I say, pointing to the window. “See—it’s not bad.”
“I’ll call a repair company.” Nathaniel looks over his shoulder back toward the house, as if he’s checking on Lincoln from all the way over here. “If you wait a couple minutes, I’ll get something to cover it until it’s fixed.”
“No need.” I linger near the door. “It’ll be fine for a few days.”
“Okay.” As Nathaniel turns toward the door, he passes by my sketchbook, which is resting open on the desk, red flowers fairly leaping off the page. “Wow,” he says. “This is beautiful. Are those poppies?”
“I… don’t know.” While I realize I sound unfriendly, it’s at least an honest response, and if it wards off further conversation, that’s okay with me too. He looks once again at the drawing of the blue-clad woman reclining in the flowers.
“There’s actually a couple of opium poppies growing here, in the grounds.”
“Really?” I scrunch up my nose. “Opium poppies?”
“Yeah. If you look on the other side of the plum trees past the trellises, they’re over that way—on the south side of the house. It’s just a few plants. But that many?” He nods at my sketchbook. “Nobody would grow that many poppies for a flower garden.”
“I don’t even know what a poppy looks like,” I stammer.
“Like these pictures,” he says, indicating my drawings.
“Why were they on the original estate?”
“It wasn’t uncommon back then. Medicinal purposes. Although,” he adds, “Mrs. Atwood was known to have had an opium addiction. The day she disappeared, her maid found several empty bottles of laudanum in her room.” I imagine the shifting colors in the stained glass and wonder what else they may conceal.
“You mentioned she left a note.” I reach one hand toward my sketchbook, inching it away from him. “What did it say?”
“Not sure.” His eyes flicker toward the desk, then back to my drawing. “I don’t think anyone even saved it.” It’s plain that he’s guarding this story. What I don’t understand is why it means so much to him.
“I see,” I answer, glancing between Nathaniel and the open doorway, hoping he’ll take the hint and leave. “Anyway—I finished clearing out those blackberries. What else do you have for today?”
“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” he asks. I don’t love the idea. “You said you were in a car accident,” he says. I tense. “Looks like you landed on your side?”
“Yeah, I don’t really know.” I answer with short, sharp syllables. He refuses to tell me about her letter, a woman’s final words, left in the very room I live in, and in the next breath asks me about the story behind my own skin. Finally, I’m more annoyed than I am overwhelmed. “I don’t know, and I don’t remember asking you in to look at my drawings, either.”
“Sorry, Sophie.” He takes a step back, but not before I’m snatching the book away. Part of me can’t bear to be so unfriendly, but I don’t have the energy to explain. I want to thank him for the Band-Aids, but I can’t even manage that. When I look up again, he’s once again a stranger: his frown businesslike, eyes distant. “Won’t happen again.”
I wait to hear the door close, then sink into the chair, miserable. My stomach growls and I remember I’ve eaten nothing other than a few stray blackberries. “Idiot,” I sigh, angry with myself for several reasons now. And now I’m supposed to sit in a car with him for an hour on the way into town tomorrow. Even the sketchbook seems to laugh at me, the words What Sophie Knows more ironic with each day I fail to remember anything meaningful. I flip open to the familiar drawing. There, the figure in the blue dress rests, bounded by an expanse of tall red flowers on all sides. If they’re really poppies, it’s enough to put someone to sleep forever.
Seventeen
Despite instructions to take the afternoon off, I know I can’t sit still until I’m properly tired out. I eat a small lunch and return to the blackberry patch, where I stab at the dirt with a spade, digging out the last bits of stubborn root. After a few hours, I walk to the little row of flowering plum trees, buzzing with honeybees, and then past a row of foxglove. It takes a few minutes, but I find it: the flowers from my vision, leaning this way and that, caught on a breeze I can barely detect. There are only a few blossoms, but I sink to my knees as if on instinct and rest my hands on the ground. Here, they’re almost eye level with me, shimmering red with a kiss of black in the center. I wonder what it would feel like to float in an ocean of them, an entire field. Nobody would grow that many poppies for a flower garden.
One of the red blossoms is fading. The petals are delicate, and when they start to wilt, it’s already almost over. I watch the poppies in front of me, and imagine, in a series of images almost like a film reel, the process that begins when they wilt. The petals fall back to expose a pale seedpod. I can almost see a woman who stands next to me, a willowy figure with a long, dark braid. Her graceful hands score the pods with a little blade, leaving a strange sap that darkens as it dries. It looks like blood. I blink my eyes. Some kind of fever dream. Pure hallucination. It has to be. And yet, I see that woman so clearly, I almost feel as though she could have been my sister.
The sun is setting, so I begin the walk back to the apartment. As I pass through the west yard, I feel eyes on my back, turn on my heel and hold back a shout, a dare: If you know me, come and get me. My eyes land on the stained glass again, and I feel certain Zenaida Atwood is watching me with a narrowed eye. That’s all it was, of course, the eerie figure on the side of the house, shining from the corner of my eye. I want to throw my hands up, to ask her what she’s looking at, but it seems that she already knows. I imagine a ring at the bottom of a pool, scattered bones throughout a forest. I study the figure in the glass and wish I could touch her, caress her like those arms of ivy that adorn the window. Why did you do it? What happened? As the sun slips below the trees, I hurry inside, locking the door as if the window isn’t broken to invite the night in.
* * *
This is one of the nights that I only go to bed because I know morning will come early. I toss and turn. My arm is warm under the gauze, and I imagine not bandages, but armor. It seems that other people are a danger even when they’re not: they’re one thing, but then, perhaps, something different, just when you’re getting used to the first idea. I tell myself I can make myself bulletproof, assemble whatever I find in the world around me like an invisible exoskeleton.
You won’t, though, will you? You’ve already tried that once. The voice that I hear is gentle, and I look up to see a soft-limbed, ethereal figure, with doves perched on her shoulders. I shrug off her stare and she continues: It’s braver to live without armor. She waits for my response, and I know she’s figured me out.
I grip the bed sheets, half waking with a jolt. Zenaida’s image wavers and resettles; only half-conscious, I search for her again and find her. But someone stands behind her: it’s a young girl, with dingy hair, a large purple bow behind her ear. Something smells like smoke. Something’s beating against the rafters. The doves have taken flight; her arms are empty. I look for the little girl and see Zenaida instead.
You got hurt, she says.
No, I didn’t, I snap, churlish. It was a clean cut.
What happened to you was not a clean cut.
You don’t know what happened to me, I mumble.
It will heal better if it can breathe, she hums, dissipating into light.
As I sit up in bed, gasping for air, I hear the whisper of the sheets around me, and maybe, just maybe, something else. It’s a gentle sound that flutters away into the dark. I sweep the hair off my face and touch my arm, where, sure enough, I’ve forgotten to take the bandage off. I pull it away, stretch out, and recline again, slipping back into a deeper rest.
* * *
The next morning, I find that a dove has flown in overnight. Its soft coos call me down the stairs, where I see it sitting on the table, right next to the broken window.
“You had me thinking a ghost came in,” I say, sleepy but relieved. “Or something else.” The dove shuffles its feet, slightly annoyed at my presence, but it doesn’t seem frightened. As I heat water and prepare some oatmeal, I open the door to offer it an easier path out. Something drags under the door and I startle, not sure what I expect to see. I peer around the corner to find a set of gardening gloves, sturdy waxed cotton with leather panels on the palms. If Nathaniel meant this as an apology, it only makes me more ashamed for snapping at him.
The dove watches calmly as I heat water and stir the instant oatmeal. “It’s nothing special,” I tell it. Breakfast in hand, I walk to my only seat, the chair by the window. The bird takes a few preparatory steps and flutters out the way it came in. “Come back anytime,” I say, unsure whether I’ll be here to see the doves again after this afternoon. “This was your home before it was mine.”
Eighteen
When I walk outside, I see Nathaniel’s truck parked off the main path, near the willow grove on the east side of the grounds. I walk over to meet him, my discomfort at yesterday’s awkwardness soon overshadowed by my awe at yet another corner of this place that has, until now, escaped my notice. A semicircle of weeping willows shelters a shallow pool, made of stone, their draping leaves forming a curtain across the water. There’s a set of stairs built into the stone, walking three steps down to the base of the pool. There are a few inches of water in there now, clogged with leaves and muck, but the steps bring an image of dinner guests removing their shoes to cool their feet in the water. Around the edges of the pool is a border of freshly tilled soil, and I see as I approach that Nathaniel is unloading plants from the bed of the truck. I approach, holding up my gloved hands in greeting. “Thank you,” I whisper, almost just mouthing the words. He nods, expressionless.
“These are larkspur,” he says, indicating the taller flowers, big spikes of blue, then points to the smaller ones. “Lily of the valley.” That one, though, I already knew. “Plant the larkspur on the inside of the border, closer to the pond, the lily of the valleys on the outer edge.” I nod my head in answer, pick up two large flowerpots, one in either arm, and then go back to pick up a hand trowel. I walk to the far opposite end of the pool to start planting, and each time Nathaniel finishes a row and moves down, I hurry to catch up, working in the opposite direction. I’m making good progress until I slip, dropping my trowel into the water. It disappears under the surface with a trail of tiny green bubbles. “Ugh,” I sigh. I roll up my sleeve and reach in, using my left arm to keep yesterday’s cut on my right arm dry, pursing my lips with disgust. It feels more like a mud puddle than water, and the green pond scum on the surface drags. I reach around under the water, feel something brush my hand. Nathaniel has paused what he’s doing to glance at me, and I can’t quite read his expression. Then it hits me. I remember him saying they found her wedding ring, in a pool, by the willows. I suck my breath in, pull my arm back.
“I think I have another one,” he calls. But I stare into the surface of the water, focusing on something that might not really be there, and slowly dip my hand in. The trowel is right beneath my fingertips.
“Got it.” As I sit up on my knees to resume planting, the surface of the water stills, and I feel almost that it’s watching me, that I ought to thank it. Nathaniel looks at me with something like surprise and stands up, brushing the dirt from his hands.
