She took the stairs quickly, wiping tears as she went, and reeled into the hallway at the top of the landing, throwing herself into the first room she saw. She slammed the door and sank to the ground, and then, for the very first time, Claire cried about the bad news.
The rejection.
The shattered future.
The forever loss of Ainsley and Excelling and what could have been.
TWENTY-ONE Murphy
Operation Memory Making was at a standstill.
And things had been going so well.
Last night amid all the “remember whens,” Murphy’s heart had filled with hope. She, Claire, and Eileen had shared a moment. They’d talked, really talked to each other, reminiscing on the past by firelight. It had practically been a scene from Little Women. Yes, Eileen had been sort of distant, but this was progress. A step in the right direction.
And now?
After Claire had run upstairs, Eileen and Murphy stayed quiet. What was there to say after that announcement?
Claire hadn’t gotten into college.
Bam. The big, awful truth had gone off like an explosion. Murphy wasn’t sure how to make a memory out of that.
So she lay on the couch, absorbing her sister’s news, while Eileen finished off the rest of the Pringles. When she was through, Eileen stood, crossed the parlor to the wall of boxes, took the open one she’d fallen asleep with, and began to go through its contents.
What was she searching for? Murphy wondered. The only thing those boxes were good for, from what Murphy could see, were proving that Uncle Patrick had been a big-time hoarder.
Murphy army-crawled to the side of the couch, peering over its edge.
“Looking for buried treasure?” she asked Eileen.
“Something like that,” Eileen replied.
“What makes you think it’s in those boxes?”
“A hunch.” Eileen sifted through papers, looking them over and setting them aside, one by one.
“They’re just bills and stuff.”
“No one’s asking you to look through them.”
“But why are you looking?”
Eileen huffed, throwing down a stack of newspapers. “Because all it takes is a letter, okay?”
“Uh, yeah. Okay.”
Clearly, Eileen didn’t want to talk to her. What else was new? Murphy couldn’t help wondering, though—all what took was a letter? A letter about what?
From her pocket, Murphy pulled out the rope trick. Over, under, tug through and out.
As her fingers fell into the practiced routine, she raised her eyes to the windows. Rain beat against them, sluicing down the glass, forming a stormy curtain between the house and the world outside.
You wouldn’t even know a world was out there, Murphy thought. And then, Maybe it’s not. We could be in a vacuum. A void. A nowhere place.
The thought sent a chill through Murphy. She wondered, if you were cooped inside a house long enough, could it drive you insane? To murder? Is that what had happened to Uncle Mark? Was that why Uncle Patrick had turned hermit?
Maybe this house possessed magic.
Not the good kind, though.
Not the kind meant for a stage.
Tragic magic.
The kind that snuck up on you, from behind, and slithered a noose around your neck before whispering, Ta-da.
The rope went limp in Murphy’s hands. She felt a little like hurling. Maybe that was because of the maggots.
And maggots made her think of death.
Murphy’s gaze flicked to the piano, Siegfried’s temporary funeral home. It wasn’t right, keeping him trapped in there. She looked again to the rain-sheeted windows, imagining what she couldn’t see: the ocean, bluffs, and sand. She bet it was pretty here, on a summer’s day. A turtle’s paradise.
Siegfried hadn’t deserved a smelly cage or a broken heating lamp. He’d deserved Rockport on the Fourth of July.
Sometimes you didn’t get what you deserved, though. Take Claire, for example, and college. If she couldn’t get into college, who the heck could?
Murphy was gladder than ever that her entertainment career wouldn’t require a diploma. When she turned eighteen, she’d be off to Vegas, and that was that. No applications for her, no tests, and no AP classes. She would attend the school of hard knocks, the way all performers did.
“Uh, Leenie?” Murphy craned her neck over the couch.
Eileen sifted through papers. She didn’t reply.
“Leenie.”
“For the love of God, Murph.”
“Should we check on Claire?”
“No. She wants to be alone.”
“Because it’s got to be cold upstairs. And she was crying really hard.”
“She’ll get over it. Leave her alone.”
Murphy huffed. She was over it. Over being overlooked.
She pocketed the rope and got to her feet, shuffling toward the door that led from the parlor to the