“I would assume.” Joel wrinkled his nose at the woman. “She looks like a shrew.”
Ivy tipped her head to stare into the woman’s painted eyes. Something in them moved her. It touched that part of Ivy that always connected with people, where others just saw the surface. “She seems haunted. As if grief and trouble defined her life.”
Joel and Ivy gazed at the painting a while longer before Joel turned and entered the third bedroom. Ivy reached up and touched Myrtle Foster’s face, drawing a deep breath. Yes. The woman had not been happy. There was no joy in this painting.
Ivy followed Joel into the room. Memories assailed her. Joel watched her carefully, as if at any moment something would come back to her in a rush and she would identify Gabriella’s killer and her attacker. But, there was nothing. No further recollections beyond the last ones she shared when they’d stood in this bedroom over a week ago. Ivy went to the bedside, looking down at the moth-eaten coverlet.
Ivy knelt by the bed and bent to peer under it. Nothing.
Joel spoke from above her. “There has always been something amiss with this house. I am beginning to fear Gabriella stumbled upon the truth of whatever it is.”
She ignored propriety and sat on her rear, lying down with her back against the wood floor.
“Ivy, let me.” Joel’s offer to scoot under the bed for a better look was chivalrous, but Ivy had already pushed her feet against the floor so that her head and shoulders moved beneath the bed’s shadows.
“I used to hide my diary between the slats and the mattress.” Her voice echoed around her like she was in a tunnel. Dust tickled Ivy’s nose. Her dress would be ruined after this. “I figured you and Andrew would try to find it.”
“We did.” Joel’s chuckle was distant, muffled by the bed that she had squeezed under.
“You did?” She hoped not.
“Unfortunately for you.”
Ivy stopped her scoot and looked up at the dusty slats of the bed frame. Her mind raced with her childhood scrawling. They had mostly been about Joel, how she would marry him one day, and Andrew would live on their property, and the three of them would be blissful in their adulthood. She coughed from the dust. Oh, how dreams were thwarted by tragedy.
Her attention was snagged by a piece of paper wedged between the mattress and a slat that stretched across the frame. She gripped the paper and pulled it free.
There wasn’t enough room between the bed and her arms to maneuver the paper to where she could see it. Sliding out from beneath her confines and staying decent was going to prove difficult.
“Turn your back, please.” Ivy instructed, clutching the paper in her hand. She fought the urge to scurry out from under the bed, regardless of propriety, so she could see what it was she’d found. “Am I safe?”
“Yes.”
She hoped he was telling the truth. Ivy pushed herself from beneath the bed, then sat up and righted her skirts. Joel’s back was turned in a gentlemanly fashion, his hands in his trouser pockets. He stared through the open doorway toward the hall where Myrtle Foster watched over them.
“I found something,” Ivy announced. She twisted onto her knees by the bed in the position of prayer and laid the paper on the mattress.
“May I look?” Joel still had his back to her.
“Yes.” She unfolded the paper gently, her heart pounding. The words on the page were typeset. It was a page torn from a book.
“What is that?” Joel crouched next to her.
“I knew it,” Ivy breathed.
Only God. He brings me hope. Where darkness swallows and death nips at my heels.
“It’s written on a page from Great Expectations,” Ivy whispered, the moment too surreal to speak in a normal tone. “See? I told you.”
Joel took the page and turned it over. There was another line of handwriting.
Lord, save my baby from this pit that hints of hell.
His jaw tightened. Ivy watched his mouth contort with some unspoken thought or emotion, then he tossed the page onto the bed. Joel cleared his throat and sniffed, running his finger under his nose. The words distressed him as much as they had Ivy. Neither of them spoke as they stared at the page on the bed as if it would begin to speak and Gabriella’s story would start to unfold. But there was nothing. No words. Just the silence of Foster Hill House screaming Gabriella’s cries.
Joel marched past Myrtle Foster’s portrait.
“Where are you going?” Ivy’s dress rustled as she hurried after him.
“The orphanage.”
“Whatever for? Mr. Casey said there were no unaccounted-for babies.”
He didn’t respond but hurried down the stairs. Ivy gathered her skirts to hurry after him.
“We’re not going to find anything at the orphanage that we haven’t already heard from Mr. Casey.” She couldn’t follow Joel’s line of reasoning, nor his urgency.
Joel yanked the front door open, then stilled, his shoulders drawing upward in a heave of his breath. He turned, and his eyes drilled into Ivy. “But he has orphans there. A baby was left there, remember? What if we’ve allowed ourselves to overlook something just because Mr. Casey’s description of the girl who left it there doesn’t match Gabriella?”
Ivy lifted her hand to reach for him, but dropped it as he glared at it. The situation was becoming even more personal to Joel. Something inside him was warring against his past, just as she was.
“But the baby at the orphanage wasn’t Gabriella’s. It was her own mother who left her there. She told Mr. Casey the baby was hers.”
“I’m no longer convinced, Ivy.” Joel charged out of the house, leaving her to trail behind in a flurry of skirts.
“Joel, wait!” She rushed after him. He arrived at the carriage they had brought to the house and untied the reins. Ivy helped herself into the carriage. Joel hoisted himself up and onto the seat next to her.
The horse responded to the slap of the reins on its back. With a toss of its head, the gelding snorted and started forward. Joel eyed the hollow oak tree at the bottom of the hill. They rolled by it, and he pulled back on the reins.
“What are you doing?” Ivy glanced over and noticed the white knuckles and how the reins were gripped in his fists. His jaw clenched, and a muscle in his cheek twitched.
“Gabriella.” Joel’s voice was hoarse as he stared at the tree, the girl’s tomb. “I’ve never felt so helpless, Ivy.” He paused, then added, “Not since Andrew, and not since I was a kid.”