When they’re out of sight, I enter the house quietly and leave the door ajar behind me, to allow for a swift exit. At first, I don’t know what I’m doing, why I’m here—or what I’m hoping to find. Maybe some proof that Levi knows more than he’ll admit. So I walk into his office, keeping my footsteps light.
The interior of his office is filled with dark wood furniture, and the heavy cotton curtains are drawn closed. I’ve never spent much time in here—I’ve never had reason to—but now, I eye Levi’s mammoth desk: a thing that was here long before Pastoral was founded, the kind of solid antique desk that will last another hundred years, with thick wood legs and a smooth, lacquered top.
I move around it, where the wood chair sits pushed forward, and I begin opening drawers, peering into the cavern of each one. I find another bottle of whiskey, a few books on native plants, a box of keys—car keys that once powered the abandoned vehicles now decaying in the parking lot to the south. Nothing relevant. Nothing to explain any of the questions clanking around inside me. In fact, I’m not even sure what the right questions are, what I should be looking for.
I leave the office and step back into the living room.
The fireplace burns low, candles lit along the mantel, and I think of Alice Weaver—still out celebrating her recent marriage to Levi, while her husband is in his house, upstairs with another woman. And I realize suddenly that I don’t want to be here.
It’s time to leave before I get caught.
But as I move to the open door, my eyes jerk twice over something in the fireplace. A thing I dismiss at first, then glance at again.
Something rests among the burning logs—square, manmade.
I move away from the open door and kneel down beside the fire, my left temple throbbing with strange little pulses. I use one of the heavy iron pokers to dislodge the thing from the fiery logs and watch as it rolls out onto the floor.
It’s a wood box.
Its edges are still burning so I push it back into the ash of the fireplace, putting out the flame. I blow the soot away, waiting a moment for it to cool before I lift it up. It’s small, about the size of my palm, and it’s still warm, but not enough to burn my hand. This is what Levi tossed into the fire when I watched him from the porch. I had thought it was only a scrap of wood—I couldn’t see it clearly through the window.
Now, I have spared it from the flames. The hinges have melted some but I manage to pry open the lid, ash falling away from the cracks.
Inside is a heap of metal.
Shiny, silver.
My eyes vibrate for a moment, certain I’m not seeing it right.
I pull out the thing inside, holding it in my palm: a necklace. And hanging from the long silver chain are four charms: four tiny books with numbers stamped onto their covers.
Levi had tossed the box onto the fire, he had tried to burn it—maybe he thought the necklace would melt inside the wood box—be reduced to a puddle of shivering metal.
But it didn’t burn.
And there is something else in the box. Folded and pressed into the bottom. I pry it free: a piece of paper, a note, unburnt. My hands begin to shake as I unfold it quickly, my eyes darting over the words. I already know what it is. What I’ve found.
It’s the third page from Travis Wren’s notebook.
The last missing note.
BEE
It’s a mistake coming here.
I open the back door, the divot in the wood floor familiar as I step into Levi’s kitchen. It smells of candle wax, and a fire is burning from the fireplace at the other end of the house, the snapping of embers like little bursts in my ears.
Levi is alone in the house—Alice Weaver isn’t with him, I heard her clear buoyant laugh back at the party as the others swirled around her, running their envious fingers down the fabric of her dress, a gown that’s been worn by many women in the community on their wedding days. A dress that I’ve been told is no longer a pure white, but the color of hen eggs, speckled along the hemline from the stains that refuse to be washed out.
Alice Weaver absorbed their praise and admiration, she breathed it into her lungs as if it was always meant for her. But it should have been mine.
I slither like a cold, autumn shadow into Levi’s house, my words waiting at the back of my throat, the things I will say to him, the venom burning a hole in my trachea.
But when the door clicks closed behind me, I hear footsteps across the hardwood floor, the heavy breathing of Levi after he’s drank too much.
I say his name into the dark. “Levi?”
He is suddenly in front of me, alcohol on his breath, a hand grabbing my arm, fingernails pinching my skin. He is sloppy, heavy limbed, rougher than he would normally be.
“Come with me,” he slurs against my ear.
I feel my body go limp, a strange acquiescence cascading through me, as though my skin is unable to resist his touch—all the while my mind screams against it, against him. But I allow him to lead me up the stairs. And from some distant echo in my ears, I hear someone else: someone on the front porch, leaning close to the exterior walls of the house.
I was wrong when I thought Levi was alone: Someone is watching him through the window.
But then we are at the top of the stairs, and I don’t resist. I feel only a tingling in my toes, the tips of my ears, a storm of thoughts crashing against my skull—yet they seem unable to form into anything that might resemble words. I am mute.
A girl who has forgotten why she’s come.
We are in his bedroom before he finally releases my arm, and I sink onto the foot of his bed. The room smells like cinnamon, cardamom—like Alice, this room where she has slept. And yet, the fury I had felt walking to Levi’s house, my cheeks burning hot, has now left me. I find myself suddenly unable to say all the things I had planned to—unable to resist any words he might whisper against my ear.