Dear James,
Three more fires last week. People were running from their homes to see, as if it were a party, the sounds of hooves beating the road—an enormous blaze. All was chaos. The more talk of war and discontent, the more anxious and violent people seem to become.
I ran outside and was astonished to see so many simply standing and looking on as our neighbor’s yard caught light from the torches that had been thrown there. I was running back to my parents’ house when I saw George.
I told him I couldn’t believe we had people like this living in our midst. And he comforted me. He said not to worry, we’d rout them all out. I went home and listened to my parents up talking in the parlor. Their anxiety was clear in their hushed voices. Especially my mother. When I looked around the corner at them, she was standing in front of the mirror nervously pinning her hair up and crying.
But by the next day the whole town was silent again, which seemed even stranger. One of the houses had burned; the other two had visible damage, just one family, going about moving the charred wood from the torches out of their front yard.
We think we are so civilized. But what’s the price we pay for our quiet lives?
If either of our families knew what we were doing, James, they would be shocked, and even if they’d felt the same things themselves, they would tell us to stop.
With all of this happening I feel claustrophobic. I feel an even greater hunger for meaning and learning. I have your brave example to thank, as you are the only person I know who has ever left Mayville.
Sincerely,
Fidelia
TEN
THEY STAYED OUT ON THE PORCH FOR A LONG TIME, talking about her mother and travel and vintage clothing shops.
“I know you’re pissed,” Esther said. “I know it. I can see it. Hell, even I’m pissed and worried, I know it’s nothing like what you’re going through. . . . But listen, sweets. You got so much from your mom. Mona was a curious girl like you. And I bet you can remember a lot of other good things if you let yourself.”
“Mona,” Gretchen said, her mother’s name like a laugh or a sob caught in her throat. “She was so tough but so sweet, you know?”
Esther nodded. “I do know. She could get completely absorbed in what she was doing and just go off on her own. This last time she came to visit, she didn’t even say good-bye.”
Gretchen winced. No one had gotten a good-bye. And she was done trying to think of nice things about Mona.
“I woke up and the study door was wide open and she was gone. I thought maybe she’d gone over to Shadow Grove.”
“What’s Shadow Grove?” Gretchen asked.
“A spiritualist colony,” Esther said. “Which is a nice way to say, a bunch of kooks who made their own little town out here in the country.” Someone as eccentric as Esther calling people a bunch of kooks made Gretchen laugh.
“She’d been back and forth between here and there that last visit,” Esther went on. “But nobody there saw her after she’d disappeared. You must know all this already. The police and that psychic your mom’s friend hired were putting together a timeline.”
Gretchen turned away and looked out into the woods. She had been sheltered from many details in the aftermath of Mona’s disappearance, but now as Esther was talking, she remembered people in and out of their apartment, looking through her mother’s things. She remembered seeing a story on the cover of the Post that said The Lady Vanishes and had a picture of Mona standing in front of one of the gallery’s most recognized acquisitions—a photograph by Michelle Manes of ghostly children playing in front of a tombstone shaped like a lamb. She remembered her father whisking the paper out of her hand. Telling her it was garbage. That’s she shouldn’t read those things.
What Gretchen wanted least to remember was this: after two months the detectives and even the psychic said the same thing. There was no foul play. All evidence pointed to Mona leaving on her own accord. She’d abandoned them, the gallery, everything. She didn’t want to be found. The psychic said she saw Mona with a second family, and that it was a struggle and she missed Gretchen and her father, but that she was needed where she was. The police said there was nothing to do without a motive or a body.
Gretchen also didn’t want to remember the grief her father had gone through, or how he quit his practice in the city and started taking medical assignments in the developing world—gone for months at a time—and then came home and spoiled her, buying her whatever she wanted. The only saving grace of that time period was living just two floors above Simon.