“Thanks for breakfast,” I say before placing my coffee and another muffin atop the tray and carrying it up the service stairs.
At the halfway point, I’m met by Mrs. Baker on her way down. She’s dressed the same as yesterday: black dress, pale skin, red lips, glasses she lifts to her face to inspect my appearance.
“Good morning, Kit. I hope your first night here was pleasant.”
“It was,” I lie. “Thank you for asking.”
My gaze flicks to the jagged crack in the wall, wondering if Mrs. Baker’s noticed it yet. Surely she has. It’s very noticeable. Yet she acts as if nothing is wrong.
“And you’re finding your new quarters satisfactory?”
“Very. Although I do have a question about Mary’s things.”
“Things?” Mrs. Baker says with a schoolmarmish head cock. “You’ll need to be more specific, dear.”
“Her belongings. Everything’s still in my room.”
“Everything?”
“Her books, her clothes, even her medical bag,” I say. As I’m talking, a thought pops into my head. “Is it possible she plans on coming back?”
The notion should have occurred to me sooner. It makes more sense than anything else about why she left everything behind. It could be that Mary really was called away—by her family or some other pressing matter—and has every intention of returning.
“If Mary were to return, she wouldn’t be welcomed back,” Mrs. Baker says. “Not after leaving Miss Hope all alone like that.”
I let out a little huff of relief. At least I still have a job. “But she could come back for her stuff, right?”
“It’s been a week,” Mrs. Baker says. “If she wanted any of it, she would have done that by now.”
“So what should I do with it?”
“Just hold on to everything, if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Baker says, though in fact I do mind. This is literally a mansion, with dozens of empty rooms. Surely there’s somewhere else to store it all. “I’ll decide what to do with it all later.”
She acts as if that settles the matter, when in fact it doesn’t. She resumes her descent, forcing me to call after her.
“I have another question, actually.” I pause, waiting for her to stop, which she does with obvious reluctance after taking three more steps. “Were you in Miss Hope’s room last night?”
“Now that you’re here, I have no cause to enter Miss Hope’s quarters.”
“So that’s a no,” I say.
“Yes, dear. A definite no.”
“But I thought—” I look down at the tray, stalling. “I thought I heard someone walking around in there last night.”
“Walking?” Mrs. Baker couldn’t look more incredulous if I had mentioned aliens or Santa Claus. “That’s ridiculous.”
“But I heard the floorboards creaking.”
“Did you investigate?”
“Yes. I didn’t see anyone.”
“Then perhaps it was your imagination,” Mrs. Baker says. “Or the wind. Sometimes, when it hits the house just so, it makes all sorts of noise.”
“Does anyone else go into Miss Hope’s room on a regular basis? Like Archie? Or Jessie?”
“The only person who’s supposed to frequent Miss Hope’s quarters is you,” Mrs. Baker says. “So I suggest you get back there before she wakes.”
“Yes, Mrs. Baker,” I say, feeling the urge to curtsy the same way Jessie did yesterday. I’d probably do it, too, if not for the tray in my hands. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
I head into Lenora’s room, finding her awake in a triangle of morning sun that gives her a disconcertingly angelic glow. Rather than squint like I did, Lenora appears to luxuriate in the light. She has her head tilted back, mouth slightly open, from which escapes a contented sigh.
The patch of sunlight slowly moves across Lenora’s bed as I prop her into a sitting position and feed her oatmeal with her morning pills crushed in. By the time I get her cleaned, changed, and through her circulation exercises, the sunlight’s slid off the mattress and onto the floor in a tidy rectangle. Lenora eyes it from her wheelchair as I check her vitals and make sure the bruise on her forearm continues to heal. When that’s over, her gaze slips to the typewriter.
She remembers last night.
Part of me thought she’d forgotten.
A bigger part of me wishes she had.
Because whatever she intends to type, I still haven’t decided if I want to see it.
Lenora’s mind, though, is made up. She moves her gaze from the typewriter to me, giving me a look that’s half anxious, half hopeful. One without the other probably wouldn’t have been able to sway me. But the combination of the two makes me realize this has nothing to do with what I want.
It’s what Lenora wants.
And right now, she wants to type.
I still have no idea why. I can’t think of any reason she’d wait so long to talk about that night. If she was innocent, she would have told her story decades ago.
Unless she thought no one would believe her.
Yesterday, Mrs. Baker told me Hope’s End was a place where young women are given the benefit of the doubt. That’s not true everywhere. It’s true hardly anywhere. Perhaps Lenora tried to tell her story all those years ago and no one believed her. Or, worse, no one even listened.
Maybe she thinks I will.
And that I’ll believe she’s innocent.
Because she thinks the same of me.
That idea—that Lenora’s urge to talk stems not from shared guilt but possibly shared innocence—is ultimately why I wheel her to the desk, where the page from last night sits next to the typewriter. Even though I don’t remember removing it, I must have. I wrack my brain, trying to recall the events of last night.
Lenora offering to tell me everything.
Finding Mary’s belongings.
The wind and the waves and the creaking floorboards.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I left that page in the typewriter.
“Lenora, was someone in here last night?”
She responds with a single-tap no against the wheelchair armrest.
“Are you sure?”
Two taps.
I stare at Lenora. She stares back, looking utterly guileless. If she’s lying—and I see no reason why she would be—she hides it well. And even though I’m close to certain I didn’t move that page, I’m also aware someone else could have done it while Lenora was asleep. Mrs. Baker slipping in to do some snooping, for instance. Or Jessie coming in bright and early to tidy up.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, because it truly doesn’t. What matters is that Lenora is about to reveal all. And my job is to help her do it.
In a desk drawer, I find a partial ream of paper and insert a new page into the carriage. I then place Lenora’s left hand on the typewriter, wondering if this is the start of something wonderful or something I’ll regret.
Or if it will end up being anything at all.
Lenora’s fingers twitch atop the keys, almost as if she’s unable to keep them still any longer.
I inhale, exhale, nod.
Then we begin.
THIRTEEN
The thing I remember most--the thing I still have nightmares about--is when it was all but over.
That’s what Lenora typed first, hours ago, when the sun was still rising over the Atlantic. The full sentence took me by surprise. Until then, she’d only typed fragments, ignoring rules of capitalization and punctuation. It took a few confused seconds from me and a few exasperated taps from her before I realized she wanted me to press the shift key while she typed that first capital T. It took even longer for us to settle into some semblance of a rhythm. We got there eventually, though.
And that’s where we remain, even though the sun has left the sky and the murky light of dusk now settles over the ocean outside. Lenora uses her good hand to brush against mine, a signal she needs me to press the shift key. When the typewriter dings, I hit the return bar, bringing the carriage back to a new line. She types some more and nods, the sign I’m to nudge it again and start a new paragraph.
We keep the door closed so no one will bother us. Lenora insisted, although I don’t know why. Other than Archie, who delivered lunch with a terse rap on the door, I haven’t heard anyone moving about the second floor. And while it feels as if Lenora is an afterthought in her own estate, it might be because I’m now here. Her caregiver. A role I try to continue while doubling as a secretary.
After each page, I massage Lenora’s left hand, make her take a sip of water through a straw, and ask if she wants to continue. The answer is always two eager taps against the typewriter. There’s an unmistakable zeal to her typing. She rarely pauses to think about what she’s going to write. The story simply crashes onto the page, as if Lenora had written it all in her head years ago and is just now setting it free.
What that story is, I still don’t know. Between responding to Lenora’s signals, constantly tapping the return bar, and removing and inserting pages into the typewriter, I haven’t had much opportunity to see what she’s writing.