Mr. Vanders is there, sitting in the enormous kitchen, his back to Jane, bent over messy piles of blueprints at a long table. Regular blueprints, not Ivy’s detailed ones. He’s muttering angrily.
Patrick mans a mountain of eggs and a pot of boiling water at an oversized stove with about a dozen burners. He’s rubbing his eyes and yawning, no doubt because first he and Ravi had a late night together—brooding, wasn’t it?—on the mainland, then he snuck around the house with the Okadas until dawn, being mysterious. Patrick’s jaw, Jane notices, is strong and elegant. He probably looks like a Bront? hero when he broods.
“Out until four in the morning with Ravi, two nights before the gala,” grumbles Mr. Vanders, “and all of us scurrying to find that damn thing. You owe Cook, young man.”
“How about I pay him back by cooking breakfast this morning,” says Patrick sourly. Then he notices Jane near the door. “Janie. Are you looking for Kiran?”
When Mr. Vanders hears Patrick’s words, he turns, pushes up from the table, and stares at Jane exactly the way his wife does, except that he does it from a dark face and under shaggy white eyebrows. Jane can just imagine their wedding photo, the two of them glaring out of it with withering expressions. Next, his gaze takes in Jane’s eclectic outfit.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Vanders,” says Jane.
“You might have some of your aunt Magnolia’s style,” Mr. Vanders announces gruffly, “but she had a subtlety you lack.”
Jane is thunderstruck. “You knew my aunt Magnolia?”
He waves a pen in an impatient gesture. “My wife wishes to explain it herself,” he says. “I think she went up to our rooms. Fourth door on the right. Either that or she’s on the third floor, east wing, beginning her daily inventory of the art. Or she’s dealing with the day staff, which would place her anywhere in the house.”
“How helpful,” says Jane.
“Hmph,” he says. “Your aunt was not sarcastic.”
Distantly, a noise begins, like a shrilling teakettle. It stutters, fluctuates so that it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from—the vents in the walls? The burners of the stove? In the very moment Jane recognizes it as a wailing child, it turns to a wild sort of laughter and she clenches her teeth. “What is that?”
“I should think it’s obvious that it’s a child,” says Mr. Vanders.
“Are there many children here?”
“It’s a large staff,” he responds. “Most people in life have children.”
“I saw a little girl digging in the garden yesterday,” says Jane.
Mr. Vanders freezes. Astonishment lights his face, then vanishes so quickly that Jane wonders if she imagined it. What could possibly be so significant about a little girl digging in the garden?
Pointing his pen at the exit, he practically commands, “Talk to Mrs. Vanders!”
“Well, geez. I hope she’s a better conversationalist than everyone else in this house,” Jane mutters as she turns away, amazed with the way some of the people she’s encountered here—Mr. Vanders, Ravi, Phoebe, Colin—provoke her most sardonic but also her most honest self. Jane may not be comfortable in this house, but she wonders if maybe this house makes her comfortable in herself. She feels almost as if she’s meeting herself again after a long absence. Aunt Magnolia?
“By the way,” Jane says louder as she reaches the door, “I’m the sultan of subtle.”
“I don’t think there’s a sultan of subtle,” Patrick remarks absently behind her. “It’s more an office for ministers and spies.”
*
In the receiving hall, a team of women drag lilac branches around, cutting and arranging them in pots. Jane climbs the steps quickly, trying to reach an altitude where the scent is less overwhelming. Every spring her campus town is choked with the smell of lilacs. It’s impossible to separate that smell from Aunt Magnolia.
She stops on the second level, noticing that someone’s given the suits of armor big bouquets of daffodils to hold in their arms. Jasper is on the opposite landing again. He stands in front of that tall painting of the room with the umbrella, watching Jane, whimpering. Thinking to give him a scratch, she moves onto the bridge above the receiving hall, but then the sound of a camera shutter echoes somewhere above.
Jane knows who it is. Leaning out, she cranes her neck to find Ivy on the bridge above. Her stomach is propped against the railing and she seems to be photographing the receiving hall.
For a split second, Jane considers pretending not to see her. If she doesn’t talk to Ivy, she won’t have to think about whether Ivy’s mixed up in something bad.
Then Ivy lowers her camera and sees Jane. She leans over the railing, smiling. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” says Jane cautiously. “What are you doing?”
“Taking pictures.”
“Of what?”
“Wait there,” Ivy says, then straightens and walks out of Jane’s sight.
A moment later, she steps onto Jane’s bridge. She’s wearing a ratty blue sweater and black leggings and she smells like chlorine again, or maybe like the sea. She looks like the sea. Beautiful, and unconcerned, and full of secrets.
“What are you up to?” she asks Jane.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Vanders,” Jane answers. “Why are you taking pictures of the receiving hall?”
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m photographing the art,” Ivy says, then opens her mouth to say more, then closes it, looking carefully casual, and Jane knows, immediately, through some instinct that touches the skin of her throat, that whatever’s going on, Ivy is involved.
“Ivy?” she says, with a sinking heart. “What is it?”
“What’s what?” says Ivy. “Look.” She shows the camera to Jane, scrolling through the last dozen or so shots. Every picture contains one or another piece of art in the house, though much of the art is obscured by members of the gala cleaning staff. Jane sees the women arranging lilacs, and the bucket-carrying man who walked through breakfast this morning. Several of the pictures feature this man, the art fading into the background.
“It must be hard to focus on the art when the house is so full of people,” Jane says, fishing again.
“Yeah.”
“Why are you taking pictures of the art?”
“For Mrs. Vanders,” Ivy says in that fake, nonchalant voice. “To help her catalog it.”
“Ivy?” says Jane, dying to ask her if she’s really taking pictures of the art, or if she might, for some reason, be taking pictures of the people.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing,” says Jane, biting back frustration. “It just seems to me like some of the people in this house are acting weird.”
“Really? Like who?”
Like you, with that fake innocent voice, Jane wants to reply. She wonders, what if she told Ivy about seeing Patrick and the Okadas? “Mrs. Vanders, for one,” she says. “She keeps giving me weird looks.”
“She does that to everyone,” says Ivy.
“Right,” says Jane with a touch of sarcasm she can’t hide. “I’m sure everything’s completely normal.”
Now Ivy’s studying Jane with wide-eyed surprise. “Janie?” she says. “Did something happen?”
“Morning, you two,” says a voice behind Jane.
Kiran’s on the landing, about to descend the steps to the receiving hall. “Sorry, Janie,” she says. “Did you get breakfast?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, hon,” Kiran says, flashing a quick smile at Ivy. “How are you this morning?”
“Good,” says Ivy distractedly, still watching Jane with puzzlement. “Patrick’s back. He’s probably looking for you.”
“Mm?” says Kiran, inflecting the monosyllable with disinterest. She starts down the steps. Just as her feet touch the hall’s checkerboard floor, Ravi appears at the very top of the stairs.
One after another, the servants in the receiving hall turn to look up at him, then smile. He’s showered, shaved, barefoot, and dressed in black, and up there on his stage, with those white streaks in his hair that make him look older than he is, sophisticated. He’s hard not to smile at. Kiran cranes her neck to him, her face suffused with light. When he sees her, he starts down the steps, singing her name, skipping, rushing. Reaching her, he enfolds her in a hug that makes Jane wish she had a twin brother.