At last she worked up the nerve and lifted the lid.
Edgar Allen Poe’s raven looked back, his shiny eyes alive and knowing. Would it tell its secrets?
Nevermore.
Putting the box top aside, she grasped him in both hands, lifted him free, carried him to the bookcase and placed him on the top shelf among her best beloved books. At eighteen inches tall and twenty pounds, the nineteenth-century black cast-iron bird carried the weight of Baltimore literature, art and history on his feathers. More important to Kateri, he exuded the intelligent, devious spirit that Native Americans worshiped. For all that, he deserved a tall perch.
Returning to the couch, she seated herself and pulled the box toward her. She lifted the faded album, wondering how she could be so brave in the face of danger and so terrified by a bunch of old photographs of her father and her mother together. She smoothed the leather cover, picked it up and smelled in the scent of old paper and dust … and was transported back to that moment when she had first seen it, first held it, first opened it and thrilled to the contents.
Stupid, stupid child that she had been. She had danced downstairs to her father’s study, knocked as she’d been taught, anticipated his summons. She walked sedately across the hardwood floor, over the luxurious Aubusson rug to his desk and waited for him to acknowledge her—which he did after an appropriately lengthy wait.
But this time, she didn’t care, because she knew a secret.
*
His cool, disinterested voice: “Katherine, what do you want?”
She burst out, “I want to say—I found the album and it’s … I’m so glad you loved Mama with all your heart.”
His already stern face froze into steely lines. “What are you talking about?”
“About this.” She pulled the photo out from behind her back and thrust it toward him.
He took it by the edges, never touching her fingers, and looked at it.
At first, she didn’t notice the way his angular face seemed to be carved of harsh stone, unbreathing, unmoving. She was too intent on babbling, “I know that beach where you took those pictures. Did Rainbow take them? She was in some of them, so I thought it had to be her. Uncle Bluster was in one, too. He’s dead now, Mama said he drank himself to death, but for a long time, he was like a father to me.”
Her real father lifted his heavy-lidded gaze from the photo and stared at her.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have said that. To cover up her faux pas, she rattled on. “You were picking up driftwood in one picture, and I recognize that piece. Mama always keeps it in her room on a shelf lined with shells. She said she used to like to collect shells but now she—”
“Where did you find this … picture?”
Something was wrong. He wasn’t pleased. “I told you. In the album.”
“Where is the album?”
“In the attic.”
“What were you doing in the attic?”
She swallowed. Hiding from my sister. Hiding from your wife. Hiding from the servants. Hiding from my loneliness. She couldn’t say any of that. “I don’t know.”
Her father put the photograph in the right-hand bottom drawer of his desk. “Don’t go up there again.”
“But—”
“Nothing up there is of any concern to you.”
“Pictures of you and my mom!” You do remember my mother, Mary Kwinault? You loved her once.
“They are none of your business.”
“I want that picture. Give me that picture!” She wanted to lunge at him, hit him, strangle him until he was dead.
At the same time she feared him, feared that icy control, those cold blue eyes, the cruelty that lurked beneath starched white shirts and in ruthless fingers that without remorse could—and did—tear a screaming child out of her mother’s arms and carry her away forever.
He picked up his pen. “Is there anything else?”
Kateri choked on bile, on hate, on impotent fury. “You’re the most awful father in the whole world. No one loves you. And I hate you!” Whirling, she stomped toward the door. Stomped, when she wanted to run, but she wouldn’t allow herself to show fear for that man who hurt her so casually.
His voice stopped her before she stepped over the threshold. “Katherine.”
“What!”
He didn’t answer.
She faced him. “What?”
“Put on your shoes before you return to my office.”
“I’ll never come here again.” She had never meant anything so much in her life.
“As you wish.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Shut the door on your way out.”
“My name is Kateri!” She did shut the door, as hard as she could, but the heavy oak and well-oiled hinges did no more than make a muffled thump. She raced to her room before bursting into loud sobs swiftly muffled by her hands, the blankets, the pillows. She fell asleep crying and when she woke up, it was dark and late, she was starving, and she was determined to get up to that attic and take that album. He didn’t care about it. She did. Those were her parents, and that was the only image of her mother Kateri had ever seen with Mary looking radiant and happy.
She slid out of bed and headed up the narrow servants’ stairs, two flights toward the wooden attic door. The stairway was cold, airless. She didn’t turn on the lights; with no windows she had to grope her way along the bannisters, feel the steps with her bare feet, and all the time, a sense of being stalked grew. She got to the top, slid her hands down the door until she wrapped them around the knob. She turned it slowly, in growing anticipation—but the door wouldn’t yield.
It was locked, and remained that way for all the rest of her years trapped in that cold Baltimore mansion.
*
Rainbow said that in the album Kateri would solve a mystery, and so at last Kateri opened the leather-bound album and leafed through the pages, looking at each photo, seeing her mother young and happy, her father … looking happy, too.
Odd. In all the years she had lived with him, he had never been anything but grim and distant with a lurking cruelty that terrified the whole household. While with her mother he seemed almost human. Maybe in his way he had loved her. Maybe.
But what did it matter? He had broken Mary’s heart then. Later, when he took Kateri from her, he had broken Mary’s spirit. He had been her mother’s frog god, shaking the earth and breaking the sea and changing her life from a bright shining eagerness into the long, dim tunnel of hopeless years.
Kateri had forgiven him. The frog god had demanded it. Nevertheless, she was sure he burned in hell.
The album’s last pages were blank, black sheets of dull paper filled with nothingness, and Kateri had not yet solved any mysteries.
The very last page wasn’t black or dull; it held a sealed tan manila envelope inserted into the binding. Kateri squished it between her fingers. Not much inside. Tearing the envelope, she pulled out—
From the doorway that led into the kitchen, a woman’s voice spoke. “You found it.”
Kateri came to her feet. She looked up to see Lilith staring at her. Sneering at her.
Kateri looked down at the header and the ornate green border on the mottled security paper.