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.

“That’s fine, then,” I respond calmly. “I’ll find my own way to church. But aren’t you forgetting Quinn?”

Aunt Clara’s smile curdles. “Rather, Quinn is forgetting us. He’s nowhere to be found, and I’m sure Reverend Meeks will inquire after him. It’s really quite embarrassing, and rather a snub, besides. If you see him, Jennie, please inform him that if he didn’t want to go church, he had only to tell us.” Aunt seems entirely unaware, as she clamps the door shut, that in attempting to sneak off to church without me, she has snubbed me in the exact same way.

When I reenter the house, the absolute quiet is disconcerting. I run to the back of the house and downstairs to the kitchen, still warm with the aroma of soda-bread biscuits, which Mrs. Sullivan bakes every Sunday at dawn. When I call out, my voice reverberates lonely through the passage. No answer. So the servants, too, have left me behind. While Mrs. Sullivan has not yet? reported to Aunt my trespasses of last night, she is making her disdainful point and dragging poor Mavis along behind her.

“No matter.” It’s a mile walk to First Parish. I’ll sit in a pew by myself.

But it does matter. The silence in the house feels reproachful.

Any consecrated space, Geist had said. Surely First Parish is as consecrated as any other church.

Upstairs, my Bible rests on the hall table by the coat closet. As I approach, my step is stern as a schoolmistress, and I’m bothered with a sensation that I’m not all alone here after all. Like an object that is in sight but briefly, a shimmer caught in the corner of an eye, the sound is faint. A shift. A whisper. And then, more clearly, I hear smothered laughter.

The echo of my footfall dies. I approach with caution. The sound has come from behind the closet door the very same hideaway spot where Toby and I’d whiled away the hours when we wanted to be alone. In the darkest corner, we’d hidden notes to each other; jokes and riddles and Rules for Spies, folded beneath the jars of strawberry and plum preserves that we’d devour, scraping to the bottom the treat made all the sweeter for being stolen out of Mrs. Sullivan’s pantry. Even after my twin’s death, I’ve come upon his notes to me folded and wedged into the closet’s floorboards. It is as if Toby knew, even then, what the future held. As if he was training me.

“Who’s there?” I grasp the doorknob and pull. And pull again, more forcefully, rattling the knob. Odd. There’s no way to lock the door from inside. The hinges must be stuck.

Behind the door, silence. But a resonant silence, the kind that holds the air after the final note of a concerto has been played. In my mind’s eye, I see myself and Toby huddled among the cloaks and galoshes, my teeth chewing at my knuckles as Toby used both hands to keep a firm grip on the knob before sitting back with a victorious haw! once the servant on the opposite side had given up.

But I’m on this side of the cupboard. Not that side.

“Open up!” I call. I stamp my foot and kick the door, scuffing it, to no avail. “Who’s in there? Tell me! For I can hear you!” I’m nearly wrenching the doorknob from its plate. My palms are slick, my mind wheels to steady me, to find the logic. Lotty’s little sister, perhaps? Or one of those innumerable Hodge children from down the road, sneaking out of Sunday school?

Yet now the quality of silence has changed. Emptied. Gone. I release my hold. Stand and rub my eyes with the heels of my hands.

I’m dizzy. I feel a sudden melting in the core of my body, an itch in my eyes when I blink.

My unexpected reunion with my necklace and the turmoil of the past few days have all wound me up too tight. Nothing darker than my imagination is hiding in that closet. The door sticks sometimes. Especially when it hasn’t been opened in a while.

I step back, done with it, but then pull the door in one last, vigorous wrench. It swings open with a creak that sounds like a laugh at my efforts. The new weightlessness behind the handle trips me off balance.

“Hello?” I call.

Nothing. There’s nothing inside the closet but winter wraps and the heavy smell of camphor.


22.