While my life was already anything but banal next to most of my friends’ lives, things took a turn for the truly extraordinary one morning when I opened my post.
My father had come to pick me up at the airport after an assignment in Costa Rica. I’ve been told that thirty-five is a little old to be so attached to my father. Although I’m fine when I’m away, as soon as I come home and see my father’s face in the sea of people waiting at arrivals, I instantly revert to the sweet bliss of childhood. Try as I might, it’s useless to fight off that feeling.
My father had certainly aged since Mum died. His hair looked thinner and his belly rounder, and there was something heavy-footed about his stride. And yet he was still just as wonderful, dignified, brilliant, and wacky as ever. For me, nothing was quite as comforting as burying my face in Dad’s neck when he wrapped me in a big bear hug. Call me a daddy’s girl all you want, but I was happy to be one as long as I could.
Not only had the trip to Central America been utterly exhausting, but I’d spent the whole way back crammed between two sleeping passengers whose heads bobbed and lolled onto my shoulders every time we hit turbulence. Seeing my tired and wrinkled face as I washed up back at my dad’s flat, I could understand how they might have mistaken me for a pillow. Michel came over for dinner and my sister joined us halfway through the meal. My heart leapt back and forth between the happiness of being all together again, and a strong desire for some time alone in my childhood bedroom. While I hadn’t officially lived there since I was twenty years old, in truth, I’d never really left. I rented a studio flat on Old Brompton Road, on the west side of London—rented solely on principle and out of pride, since I almost never slept there. On the rare occasions when I was back in England, I preferred staying under my father’s roof, right where I grew up.
The day after that particular trip, I did stop by my studio to check my post. There, amid the myriad bills and junk mail, I discovered a strange letter addressed in elegant and ornate cursive handwriting, with flourishes and thick and thin lines, as though it had been written a century ago.
The letter inside revealed parts of the secret my mother had kept from her family for years. It hinted at something hidden among her belongings that could help shed light on the person she once was. But the anonymous letter writer—the “poison-pen,” as I immediately began to think of him—didn’t stop there. The letter seemed to imply that Mum had taken part in a masterful crime committed thirty-six years ago. The letter gave no further details, but there was enough information given to be alarming, and it just didn’t add up. First off, thirty-six years ago put us in the year leading up to my own birth—it was difficult to imagine a woman pregnant with twins as a criminal mastermind, let alone my kind, rational mother . . . The anonymous letter called on me to seek out the truth, to follow a trail which would take me to the other side of the world. Lastly, the poison-pen implored me to destroy the letter after reading, and not to mention its existence to anyone—especially not Maggie or my father.
How in hell did this stranger know so much about my family, down to my sister’s name? This was also rather alarming.
I had just buried my mother the previous spring and was far from finished with the grieving process. I knew my sister would have never played such a cruel joke on me, and it didn’t seem likely that my brother would even be capable of fabricating a story like that. Flipping through my address book, I couldn’t find a single person who would ever dream of doing such a thing.
So . . . think about it. What would you have done in my place? Well, you’d probably have made the same mistake that I was about to.
2
SALLY-ANNE
October 1980, Baltimore
Sally-Anne left the loft and peered down the steep stairwell.
One hundred and twenty steps to the ground floor. It was a harrowing descent, down three dark and dingy levels with exposed light bulbs casting halos of light into the abyss. Those stairs were a death trap. The way down was treacherous, and the way up a grueling climb. Sally-Anne endured both, morning and night. The freight elevator had long since died, its rusty gate swallowed up in the dingy landscape of dust and brick.