Oscar looked down and toed one tiny sneaker against the ugly carpet.
Jemima turned to Kate. “I found a secret,” she declared.
“Where’s your dad?” Kate asked.
“I dunno. Working?” Jemima jogged in place, fizzing with excitement. “Come on. Come see.”
Kate considered. Theo was MIA. The kids were bored. She was bored, after picking through tollbooth receipts all day. And she did love secrets. Ferreting them out, dusting them off, seeing where they led. She remembered how bare the Murder Solvers thread had been, and she closed out of the finding-aid spreadsheet on her laptop and got to her feet.
Oscar and Jemima led her through the living room and up a narrow set of stairs. The rosebuds on the wallpaper puckered like a row of kisses. In the kitchen and bathroom, Kate had seen other signs of the house’s age. Teal tiles, gold handles on drawers. The living room was painted mustard. Theo hadn’t said anything about renovating the house before selling it, or about what he would do with all the furnishings, and Kate doubted buyers would like the house’s current condition.
Oscar and Jemima led her around the second-floor landing and up the next flight of stairs. They had turned the bend in the staircase and almost reached the third floor when Oscar stopped and crouched down, so fast that Kate nearly tripped over him.
There was very little light in the narrow stairwell, and at first Kate thought there was a pattern along the molding—some kind of decorative stencil. Then her eyes adjusted to the shadows, and she saw that it was a long strip of pencil drawings, six or seven inches high, like an ancient Mesopotamian frieze.
“What…?” She knelt down beside Oscar.
Some of the drawings were jagged enough that they could have been done by a child, but others were more detailed, certainly the work of an adult. Asterisks and lightning bolts, triangles and spiraling clouds. Over and over, a woman’s face, roughly drawn, her eyes filled with two Xs and her hair pouring like serpents from her head. There were letters, too. MB, MB, MB, repeated again and again, over which Oscar’s fingers hovered reverently.
“Mab,” he pronounced.
“They’re initials,” Kate said automatically. “M.B.”
A small, contented sigh. “Em-bee.”
Jemima slithered up the stairs to sit next to Oscar. Her thin calves, covered in a fine layer of down, poked out from the hem of her sundress. She touched one of the faces, tracing her thumb over the line of the woman’s neck, which terminated abruptly in a shimmering starburst of lead.
“I think she is sad,” Jemima said.
Sad, yes. Frightened and frightening. Secret, the kids had said, and now Kate understood why. There was something private about the drawings. You could tell just by looking at them that they hadn’t been made for anyone else’s eyes. Her throat went tight. She was excited, she was astonished—
“What’s going on?”
Theo. Kate jerked backward, hitting her head on the handrail. He was standing a few steps below them. Now that Kate heard how his voice sliced through the air, as sharp as it had been that first day out on the lawn, she realized that he had been softening toward her over the past week. It had been so gradual she hadn’t noticed.
Sensitive to the undercurrent in his father’s voice—treading it, without understanding where the waves had come from or why—Oscar gripped the back of her knee. Kate resisted the urge to reach down protectively. Whatever she thought of Theo, she shouldn’t encourage his own kids to be afraid of him. But her own pulse was still racing.
“Who is she, Daddy?” Jemima asked. Either she didn’t sense his anger or she didn’t care. “Is she a ghost?”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Theo said.
“I heard a ghost,” Oscar said. “Last night. It was making weird noises. Like woo-oo-oo…”
Theo sighed. “That was the wind. It makes those noises when it goes through the trees.”
Oscar looked unconvinced. “Never went woo before.”
“Definitely a ghost,” Jemima said, giggling. “Come to eat you!”
Theo was unimpressed. “Why are you up here? You know you’re not supposed to be.”
Jemima wiped the smile off her face and adjusted her posture to project innocence. She was clever. “You said we couldn’t go upstairs,” she said. “You never said not up the stairs.”
Theo gave her a look. “Jemima. You knew what I meant.”
“Oscar’s little” was her second attempt. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. And I was … helping him out.”
The ploy was so transparent, Kate couldn’t believe it would work. Theo was