“I didn’t know you were coming by today,” Ingrid calls from the kitchen. “You should have told me. I would have baked something. Banana bread, or...” And her voice carries on, but I can’t hear a thing because I’m stuck on the librarian’s revealing words—newsy and gossipy. Ingrid Daube used to live there, she had said to me as I stood there, mouth agape, in the old library. That was her house. She was a Vaughan until her husband passed, you know, and then she returned to her maiden name of Daube. It’s Dutch, I think, Daube. Of course, no one really makes mention of the fact that that was Ingrid’s home. Such a tragedy what happened there. You do know about her little girl, Genevieve? The librarian had continued to jabber, but by then I’d already begun to run, realizing that for all those times Pearl sat at the café window, staring out across the street, it was never Dr. Giles’s home she had her eye on.
“I’m not hungry,” is all I manage to say. I force myself upright and begin to plod into the kitchen, one foot in front of the other, one hand dragging along the wall for balance. The room spins in circles around me. There’s the strongest urge to drop my head between my legs and force the blood back up into my brain. I’m light-headed, dizzy, hardly able to breathe.
But Ingrid doesn’t seem to notice.
I’ve taken less than four steps when the sink faucet turns off and the home becomes still, and that’s when I hear the humming of a song, a morose song, a gloomy song, one I’ve heard Ingrid hum before.
A day or two ago I would have said I didn’t know the song, but now I know: I’d recognize that lullaby anywhere.
“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,” I say, my feet standing on the line between kitchen and foyer, eyeing Ingrid as she stands before me with my glass of water in her hands. I say the words, but I don’t sing them, my voice trembling, though I try to mask the rippled effect with a plumb posture, like a scared cat arching my back so that I’ll look big.
“You know that song?” Ingrid asks of me with a pleased smile, and when I nod my head in a nebbish, submissive sort of way—exhausted, scared and confused all at the same time—she confesses, “I used to sing that to my girls when they were young,” and without missing a beat, she trills aloud, “Go to sleep, my little baby,” and all I can see is Pearl clutching that old cloth doll to her chest, the gentle hip sway as she oscillated back and forth on the dilapidated floorboards of the old home. Ingrid’s old home.
Before her eyes can reveal too much, Ingrid turns her back to me and continues the low drone of a somber little lullaby she used to sing while she rocked her baby girls to sleep in her arms. At the kitchen sink she goes through the motions of washing dishes as I stand slackly by, fighting still to catch my breath, completely unsure what to say or do. Do I say anything? Do I do anything? Do I tell Ingrid about the young woman squatting in her old, dilapidated home, the one who dug an empty casket out of Genevieve’s grave and sings the same lullaby that Ingrid now sings?
Or do I turn and slip away, pretending not to see what’s there before my eyes, the way the dots connect, the way the pieces correlate?
My folks gave me up, Pearl had said as we walked lazily around the street, but now I’m not so sure.
It’s midday now, the sun at its highest point in the sky, the time of day it lets itself in uninvited through windows. A cold flurry of air sweeps around the side of Ingrid’s house as Ingrid and I stand in the kitchen. Over the stream of water running from the kitchen sink I hear the front door squeak open against the weight of the wind, causing the walls of the home to whine.
“The door, Alex,” says Ingrid with a jolt. The terror takes over her eyes. “You closed the front door. You locked it.” But whether I did or didn’t, I don’t know.
As a scalloped dinner plate slips from Ingrid’s wet hands and shatters into a million pieces on the kitchen floor, she screams. “Esther,” she says, staring over my shoulder as a low moan escapes from her throat and she beats a hasty retreat from the room, across the shards of glass. The water continues to pour from the faucet, rallying together a thousand polished bubbles in the sink, which threaten to overflow. Bubbles like a bubble bath. “Oh, no,” Ingrid moans, a hand groping for her throat. “No, no, no.”
I turn and there behind me stands Pearl.
“Alex. It’s so nice of you to come,” she says, but never once does she look at me, for her eyes are lost on Ingrid.
“You look just like her,” bleats Ingrid, her voice far away as if she’s underwater, as if she’s drowning in the kitchen sink. “You look just like her. I almost thought you were...” As she steps forward and past me, she reaches out a gutless hand to stroke the rippled locks of ombré hair.
Pearl smiles the most pleased smile, like a child who’s just made a brand-new friend. She runs a hand along the length of the bleached-out hair and offers an ostentatious curtsy so that the hemline of her checkered coat falls down to her knees. “I thought you’d like it,” she says, beaming. “She always was your favorite, after all. I thought you might like me more if I reminded you of her.”
And then she reaches for a knife.
Quinn
When I get to the end of the note, I let out an unsuppressed cry. I can’t help it. It just comes. A hand goes to my mouth with instinct.
In my hands, the note shakes like a leaf in the wind. I can’t stop my hand from shaking. I try to process what I’ve just read, to reread the note, but the words blur before me until I can no longer tell my a’s from my o’s or pronounce the words. The letters and words meld together before my eyes, becoming one. They flit and dart on the typed page, sneering at me: You can’t catch me.
But there are two takeaways that I do gather from the letter: whoever this EV is, she killed Kelsey Bellamy, and quite possibly she’s done something to hurt Esther. She’s pretending to be Esther, running around town, looking and acting like Esther. Who is she? The letter makes mention of family: You took my family away from me, it says, and yet it doesn’t seem like something Esther would do. Esther never talked about her family to me; if it weren’t logistically impossible, I’d say she didn’t have one, that she was raised by dwarves in a woodsy cottage with a thatched roof. Esther shied away when I asked questions; she snapped the lid back on the box of photographs I’d stumbled upon at the storage facility, family photographs, and when I asked who those people were in the pictures, she said to me, No one.
But it was clear that they were not no one. And now I feel desperate for another look at those images, longing to see a visual of Esther’s family, wondering whether or not the person who penned this note is in those photographs. I need to see. I run through the memories I’ve stored away in my mind, but they’re nowhere. I can’t dredge up the pictures, not that Esther gave me much of a chance to see, anyway, that winter day we stood in the storage unit, looking for the Christmas tree. It was cold that day and outside the snow came down in gobs. We stood in the cold storage facility and, though heated, the concrete walls and floors didn’t do a thing to keep us warm. I think it’s over here, said Esther, meaning the Christmas tree, but instead I lifted the lid off a shoebox of photographs. I was snooping, yes, and yet it didn’t feel like snooping with Esther in the very same room. I didn’t think she’d mind.
But she did mind.
And now, my heart beats fast as the room fades in and out before me, the rose sofa drifting away before drawing near. The windows are suddenly so close I can touch them, and then, just like that, they’re gone. My hearing is fading in and out, too, as if I’m trapped beneath water or have a bad case of swimmer’s ear. I can’t hear.
I never would have discovered that I was already dead.
The line runs over and over again in my mind. What does it mean?
I peer down at the items spread across the floor before me, and there I see Esther’s keys, the three of them, three nickel-plated brass keys on a beaded ring: a key for the main walk-up door, a key for our apartment door, a padlock key for her storage unit.
A padlock key for her storage unit.
I push myself up off the floor and, bringing Esther’s purse along with me, start to run, thinking of one thing and one thing alone: those pictures. I have to see those pictures.