“Thank you.” I breathed. “Thank you so much, Auntie.” I thought, then, of Aunt Maude, sturdy and solid, of her uncanny ability to take a complicated mess and sort it into something orderly and structured. I felt relief wrap itself around me, tight and comforting in its insistence.
“Alice,” she said, her voice cutting into my thoughts. “I want you to promise me something.”
I nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“I want you to promise me that you won’t speak to the police. You said they don’t know about John’s disappearance yet, and I want you to promise me that you won’t go and tell them.”
I nodded again, though she could not see me. “Of course,” I promised. I knew that it would not be hard to keep, for the thought of going into the station on my own, against the advice of that man with the scar from earlier, of reporting John’s disappearance and trying to explain everything that had happened, caused me to pale. “I promise, Auntie.”
“Good,” she said. “And if they come to question you, I want you to tell them that you won’t speak without your guardian.”
Again, I nodded. I still had several months left of my guardianship, and though I had felt the chains of it rankle at times—eager to be in charge of my own finances, my own life, to feel as though I was no longer a child—now, I was grateful to still be tied to Maude in a way that was legal and binding. For while I knew that she was my aunt, that she was my family, I had always sensed a distance between us, a confusion on Maude’s part toward the girl she had been forced to raise upon her brother’s death. She had never wanted children, and though she had never complained about her duties as my guardian, a part of me often wondered whether she had resented having to take me in. I brushed aside my concerns. We made a plan to speak soon, and I was just about to place the telephone onto the receiver when I heard her voice again: “I said, did your friend ever get in touch with you?”
I frowned. “My friend?”
“Yes, what was her name? I noted it here somewhere.” Aunt Maude paused, and I thought I heard the rustling of papers. “There. Sophie Turner. I ran into her on the streets of New York, oh, it’s been months now, but she said she was trying to get ahold of you. Did she ever manage?”
My fingers grasped the telephone. I had never spoken a word to Sophie Turner during my years at Bennington. And there was only one person who would have recognized Aunt Maude. Lucy. She had admitted, just the other night, that she had worked at a publishing company in the city. It had to have been her. I had wondered how she had found me, but then, Lucy had always managed things that others couldn’t.
“Alice?”
“Yes, yes, she did,” I replied. My voice dropped to a whisper as I looked around the room, convinced that she was listening. It was as if I could feel her presence, breathing, just there, on the other side of the door, so that I shot a quick, harried glance over my shoulder. I turned back to the telephone, still clasped between my fingers.
At first I had thought to warn Aunt Maude about Lucy, to tell her that she was in Tangier and that it was happening all over again—that the fog had lifted and I had remembered everything I had wanted to forget. But the words felt too dangerous to speak aloud, the walls too thin, too tenuous. I worried that even the telephone connection might not be safe, that it too held the possibility of being altered and changed. After all, there were telephone operators stationed in Tangier. Perhaps Lucy had befriended one and convinced them to keep her apprised of any conversations that might pass between me and others. I shook my head. It was mad—and yet. I paused, an idea growing. Perhaps if I told Aunt Maude about Sophie Turner, a sort of code for the real Lucy, the explanation would come easier once she was in Tangier. She would be able to see, then, just how devious, how manipulative Lucy Mason really was, for there would be nowhere to hide.
I took a deep breath and said, “In fact, she’s here now.”
“What, in Tangier?” my aunt questioned. I could hear the surprise, the confusion, evident in her voice. “I hadn’t known she was planning a visit. She didn’t mention anything of the sort.”
“Yes,” I replied. “It was all very sudden. I was quite surprised as well.”
There was a pause. “Well, I suppose at least that means you’re not entirely alone there. Sophie must be a great source of comfort to you at the moment.”
I squeezed my eyes together. “Yes, Auntie, of course.” I hated to lie, to make her believe something that wasn’t true. But it was necessary, I told myself.
“Don’t worry, Alice,” my aunt said, her voice once more slow and measured. “I’ll be there soon enough and I’ll take care of everything. I promise.”
I thought of the words she had once spoken to me at Bennington, how eerily similar they were to the ones she had said just now.
When I placed the telephone back onto the receiver, my hand hovered for a few moments in the empty space above, shaking.
Twelve
Lucy
SHE WAS AN IMPOSTOR. THE THOUGHT CAME AS I LAY ON THE bed, a cigarette held between my fingers, the hot ash threatening to spill onto the sheet below me. It was a strange idea, a ridiculous one, I knew, and yet my mind lingered over the possibility, thinking once more of the look she had given me only moments before—as if I were a stranger, someone she didn’t know, someone she was frightened of. Before, I had attributed her words, her behavior, to John’s presence, to his influence, but now that he was gone, there were no more excuses.
I sat up, ash scattering onto my blouse. I brushed it away, impatient.
Perhaps that was it—the reason for her curious behavior. She did not yet know that he was gone, not for sure. Perhaps I had only to tell her—what I had done, for her—and everything would go back to how it had been before. But then something pulled, something tugged, and I wondered what that word before actually meant and just how far back we would have to go—before John, before Tom, before all of the madness that had encircled us.
The sound of voices interrupted my thoughts.
Creeping to the door, I placed my ear against the wooden frame, curious. It was Alice, her voice unmistakable, but she was not singing, like she had that first night, was not simply muttering aloud to herself in the empty space of her room. No, it sounded as though her words, a steady stream of them, were directed toward someone else, as if there were another person in the apartment with us.
The telephone, I realized.
Opening the door—hesitantly, at first, so that the turn of the brass knob was all that I could hear, my ears ringing with the violence of it—I made my way carefully out into the hallway. My feet bare, I stepped over the damaged floorboard just outside my bedroom door, its texture stained and weathered. Her voice was clearer now, though still muffled. I frowned and moved toward her bedroom door. She was quiet again and I waited, my breath held, before—yes. I could hear her, though the shape of her words were still hidden. A second passed and then another, my frustration mounting before I remembered the telephone that I had seen in the sitting room, tucked away just behind the sofa. I did not hesitate, fearful that even a fraction of a second lost would be enough to lose the conversation.
Lifting the telephone from the receiver, I placed one hand firmly across my mouth, determined they would not hear my intrusion. There was a pause and for a second I worried that I had been caught out. But, no—there was Maude, I realized—speaking to her niece in a plaintive tone, demanding to know what was wrong, what had happened.