fishy must be going on, if what you say is true. Blossom I could chalk up to illness and Rooster to duty and Miss Christina to work. But none of them have been taking a comb to the undergrowth, and . . . and shouldn’t we ask why?”
Rocking on his heels, Maximilian gives a defeated shrug. I can’t blame him. These are his friends.
It took me years to question my friends, though, and look where it got me.
Max sighs. “I’ll search the woods. It’s plenty light enough now. And you go through the cabin for whatever else you can find. Food scraps. Crayon or pencil shavings—the squirt loves to draw. A goddamn shoelace. Anything to confirm what I been saying. All right?”
I make a quick salute. “I know what I am about, sir. Trust in me.”
Max looks at me, really looks for the first time since he told me about his lost wife. “I do, you know. Kinda figure that makes me nuts, but. I do.”
Blinking, I accept this statement. It makes me feel considerably more like whoever Alice James is becoming these days.
“Go forth, handsome swain. Search the mouseholes and neglect not the birds’ nests.”
The door shuts, and I’m alone.
First I toss my wrinkled chemise and frock back on lest Max prove lucky enough to return with a little boy in tow. Then I start flinging open cupboards and growing intimate with nightstands. There’s a simple larder of nonperishables like tinned fish, powdered milk, coffee, rice, some flapjack flour. A small shelf of books, mostly travel and guides to fishing or carpentry, the rest in French and therefore Greek to me. The straightest row of folded socks a woman could ever wish for. A phonograph with a predictably large and thorough collection of ragtime, blues, jazz, and classical, doubtless purchased in dozens of cities. A photo of him in uniform that leaves me flushed for minutes, not on display but neatly hidden under a set of sheet music catalogs.
Nothing whatsoever of use to us.
So I start doing what I used to when looking for Rye’s heroin syrup, after he’d sworn to discontinue the medication and instead started wedging the stuff in loafers and sugar bowls: I snoop. Salt cellars, laundry hampers, cleaning products.
When hark ye: I reach into an empty vase on the mantelpiece and encounter a slip of paper within.
I unroll it. It feels quite new. The handwriting is crisp and clean, the language terse enough to make me suspect it deliberately cryptic, lest somebody—or Nobody—stumble upon the thing.
To Those Concerned,
The exchange has been made, and all is satisfactory. First payment safely in receipt. Subsequent installments may be delivered to the same address.
I remain,
At Your Service
Minutes pass as I stare at words I shouldn’t be seeing. This note, then, must have been left by whoever brought Davy here. And was to be retrieved later by someone with access, when Max was flying over rail ties. But who?
And far more important, why? Is this a ransom note? What in God’s name are payment installments? Can this be some sort of blackmail? Or worse yet, the twisted indenture of a child?
My skin goes cold.
Miss Christina has secrets. Oppressive ones. And an arrangement.
Blossom needs money. Badly. And wasn’t jazzed over finding me prying.
And neither of them having been out searching for Davy since that first night, I remind myself.
Impossible.
It’s an instant rejection. Both women were with me that afternoon at the Elms. Yes, it ought to be further evidence damning them, but the opposite is true—they were destroyed when Davy disappeared.
I have to quit the cabin or else perform the Alpine summit routine on its walls. So I steal one of Maximilian’s cigarettes and occupy the front porch. The morning air is misty, rich with soil and conifer, clearing my head even as it obscures the trees. I still have Evelina Vaughan’s scarf and I snug into it, wondering how she fares. Then my hackles rise again.
Evelina Vaughan.
Rigid with the force of my discovery, I think back upon several small clues. Others less smallish than they are perfectly gargantuan. It’s another twenty minutes before Maximilian arrives back, boots crunching through the fallen debris, and by then I’ve calmed. He greets me with his slumped shoulders already rising in apology, and I can see he has nothing to tell.
He can see that I do, however, and his steps quicken.
“What’s the story?”
I pass him the note. As he reads it, he exclaims, “For Christ’s sake, Alice—you done found this in my cabin? Where?”
I