I desperately didn’t want to ask.
“Sorry, but—you know the man who bought your back acres? What was his name, did you say?”
Lizzie blinked at me. “What? Well, we never got his first name, and isn’t that an odd thing, to sell your land without knowing a fellow’s Christian name. But he had a queer way about him, and those eyes…” She shivered, just a little, and I pictured a pair of glacial eyes pressing against her skin.
“But it says his company name right on the contract: W. C. Locke & Co.”
It’s hard to remember precisely how I reacted.
Maybe I screamed. Maybe I gasped and covered my mouth with my hands. Maybe I fell backward in my chair into deep, cold water and kept falling down and down, a final glittering stream of bubbles escaping back toward the surface—
Maybe I cleared my throat and asked my aunt Lizzie to repeat herself, please.
Mr. Locke. It had been Mr. Locke who had met my fifteen-year-old mother after Sunday church, who had interrogated her about ghost boys and cabin doors, who had purchased the Larson women’s back acres and closed their Door.
Are you really surprised? The voice in my head was tart and grown-up sounding. It made, I supposed, a fair point: I’d already known Mr. Locke was a liar and a thief and a villain. I knew he was a Society member and therefore dedicated to the destruction of Doors; I knew he had recruited my father with all the callous self-interest of a rich man purchasing a racehorse, and had profited from his torment for seventeen years; I knew his love for me was conditional and fragile, abandoned as easily as selling an artifact at auction.
But I hadn’t known, or permitted myself to know, that he was so cruel. Cruel enough to knowingly close my father’s Door not once but twice—
Or maybe he didn’t know the blue Door was anything special. Perhaps he never connected it to the strange, tattooed fellow he found years later. (This, I recognize now, was a desperate, absurd hope, as if I could somehow discover a clue that would redeem Mr. Locke and make him again the distant-but-beloved almost-father-figure of my childhood.)
I dumped out the contents of my reeking, stained pillowcase, ignoring Lizzie’s squawked “Not on my kitchen table, child!” I seized the leather-bound book, my father’s book, the book that had sent me on this mad, wandering trail back to my own beginnings. It shook slightly in my hands.
I turned to the final chapter, the part where Mr. Locke miraculously shows up to rescue my grieving father. And there it was: 1881. A girl named Adelaide Lee Larson. Surely Locke had recognized the name and date. A trapped, panicky feeling rose in my throat, like a small child who has run out of excuses.
He knew. Locke knew.
When he met my father in 1895 he already knew all about the Larsons and their back acres and the Door in the field. He’d been the one to close it, after all. But he hadn’t said a word to my poor, foolish father. Not even—and this time I felt myself actually gasp, and heard Lizzie’s tongue cluck in irritation—not even when he found the Door open again in 1901.
If Mr. Locke had loved my father and me at all, he would have left my blue Door standing and sent him a telegram within the hour: Come home Julian STOP Found your damn door. My father would’ve skimmed across the Atlantic like a skipped stone. He would’ve burst into Locke House and I would’ve run into his arms and he would’ve whispered into my hair, January, my love, we’re going home.
But Mr. Locke hadn’t done any of those things. Instead, he’d burned the blue Door to ash, locked me in my room, and left my father stranded for ten more years.
Oh, Father. You thought of yourself as a knight under the generous patronage of some wealthy baron or prince, didn’t you? When really you were a bridled horse running beneath the whip.
The book was still in my hands. My thumbs were pressed bloodless-white against the pages. A suffocating heat gathered in my throat—a final, terrible betrayal, a swelling rage—and some distant part of me was almost frightened by the sheer immensity of it.
But I didn’t have time for rage, because I’d just remembered the letter I mailed to Mr. Locke. I’m going home, I’d told him. I had imagined, when I wrote it, that Mr. Locke would assume I was