“No,” Dr. Cliffton says. “Well, I don’t know,” he clarifies. “Let’s just hope Sterling treats them better than it treated Juliet at the end.”
The hair on the back of my neck prickles. I lean forward, pretending to look at my reflection in the fountain, waiting for him to elaborate.
But I don’t see anything. The water is cool and clear and dark. No stars or moon reflect above me. I wave my hand above the water, but it is opaque. Blank. As though I have disappeared.
I stumble backwards into the steadying bricks of the house.
What is this place?
“Juliet must not have wanted them to know, if she never told them,” Dr. Cliffton says. I gulp at the night air, barely able to hear his voice over the thundering of my own heart. “But now that they’re here, Sterling isn’t going to hold on to her secrets for long before it starts giving them up.”
Chapter Four
Date: 8/29/1940
Sketching of bay-breasted warbler
Bird: Warblers. Type of songbird (oscine).
Songbirds aren’t born knowing how to sing.
They learn by listening to their fathers.
The night I met Phineas, I’d been planning to jump in front of a train.
But I was thirty-three years old, and something made me want to see him first. So I took the train an hour’s ride to his house.
I’d actually tracked down his address the month before. Even went so far as to visit his street. But I’d ended up sitting on a bench that time, sketching song sparrows. Watching them as they flew up in sprays from the ground to land in branches. Like falling leaves, in reverse.
It’s possible that the very first seed of my idea was planted then, in those moments when I’d sat watching the birds, wishing for a hit of courage. Wanting to shoot it into my own veins like an inoculation.
But the night Phineas and I did finally meet, I didn’t need courage quite as badly. I had already decided to jump. There really wasn’t much left to lose.
So I went to the door and knocked.
I remember those endless moments waiting for him to answer. His house perched on the knife’s edge of a cliff, and I’d watched the ocean hurl itself onto the rocks below. Some hideous gulls had been pecking, flapping, cawing overhead. Gulls, I’d thought, remembering my encyclopedia. Flight patterns sometimes called a “dread.”
My nerves had jolted at the first creaking sound of his footsteps. I knew then that I cared more about his reaction than I wanted to admit.
And of course—?in that split second before the door opened—?I thought of Juliet.
He’d cracked open the door and squinted out at me. He was older than I had always pictured. His hair was gray, his eyes deep set and suspicious. I realize now that he probably thought I was a cop that night. Or a bruiser from the underground circuit, coming to collect on a debt. After all, who else would have been knocking at his door? Paying an unexpected visit, just as night fell, to the home of a convicted ex–grave robber?
“Hello?” I had cleared my throat to steady my voice. “Are you Phineas Shaw?”
His hand tightened on the edge of the door, ready to close it in my face at any moment. His skin was leathered, and his knuckles were notched with the type of tattoos you acquire in prison. “What do you need?”
“May I come in?” I asked.
“Not until you tell me who you are,” he said, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, I saw the strike of recognition. He knew.
“My name is Stefen,” I said, tasting ocean salt on my tongue. “I’m your son.”
When he hesitated, I thought he was going to turn me away. I remember hearing a train horn in the distance. Thinking that sound always means the beginning of a journey, or an end to one. And the longer Phineas waited, the more I was sure which it was going to be.
But then he surprised me.
He stepped aside and let me in.
Chapter Five
I don’t dream of Mother again that night. But that’s because, as the hours pass into morning, I hardly sleep at all.
Miles and I have to get out of here.
I’m out of bed as the sun rises. There’s no way I can take my suitcase without raising suspicion, but I grab my knapsack and stuff it as full as I can. I hum under my breath to calm myself. My toothbrush goes in, along with an extra pair of clothes. My dulled dart. The Robert Louis Stevenson poems. All the money Father left with us, more than enough to get us back to Gardner. We can stay with Cass until we figure out what to do next.
I want to take the Shakespeare book, but it is too heavy and impractical, and at the last minute I rest my hand on it in goodbye, then shove it under the bed.
I’m still not sure what I’m going to tell Miles. I knock on his door.
“Eat a big breakfast,” I say to him. When he heads for the bathroom, I slip some of his clothes into my knapsack. “And it’s okay with me if you put an extra pastry in your pocket this time.”
“Shall we take that trip into town now?” Mrs. Cliffton asks when I appear at the bottom of the stairs, trying to keep my overstuffed knapsack behind me. I am too nervous to eat and can barely look at her, smiling in her navy day suit and white crepe blouse as if nothing at all is wrong. She pulls on her driving gloves. “Come along,” she says, and motions for Miles and me to follow her.
Miles is oblivious. He ignores me completely, blooming under Mrs. Cliffton’s stream of questions about his breakfast and how he slept, if his bed was comfortable, what school subjects he likes, and I realize how much he has missed the careful attention of a mother. The distance between us has never felt greater than it has in these past few months, when I have understood so much and he so enviably little.
Without the rain, Mrs. Cliffton has better control of the car and I can look out at Sterling with a critical eye. It seems unremarkable. Forest and farms, houses that are neat and well maintained, but I notice this time that the front doors are all a variation on the same color: a taupe so bland and drab it is almost gray.
Mother had always insisted that our front door be the brightest in town: a cherry red, which my father would repaint at the very first signs of fading—?and at the thought of this I can’t stop myself anymore. The accusation comes bursting out.
“Mrs. Cliffton,” I say, interrupting her in mid-sentence. “Something’s very wrong here.”
Her back straightens, but she doesn’t attempt to look at me in the reflection of the rearview mirror. In fact, it seems to be there solely for decoration. I had realized, at the moment I leaned forward at the fountain ledge and failed to see my own face echoing back at me, why there are no mirrors to be found in my bathroom—?or any other room in the Clifftons’ house.
Because they would have been utterly useless.
I fight to keep panic from creeping into my voice. “Tell us about the mirrors.”