furtive investigations took her into the last room in the Brand house: Theo’s bedroom. Once Jake and Miranda’s. The room had walls the color of smoke. The furniture was all pine, like a Swiss chalet, more traditional than Kate would have expected. The sheets were tangled on the bed where Theo must have kicked them away upon waking. On the floor were a couple shirts and a pair of black boxer briefs. Kate stared at these for a moment, then flushed and turned away. The closets and dresser drawers were empty except for his clothing, an unremarkable mix of monochrome T-shirts and jeans.
On the nightstand were two books. The Alienist and a copy of Miranda Brand: The Collected Works. Theo’s copy was shiny and new, the glint in Miranda’s eyes unmarked by pen. A couple pages were dog-eared. One about Jake and Miranda’s move to California. Another in the middle of an essay about Hal Eggers and how he had shaped Miranda’s career, discovering her young, pricing her high even when others scoffed. There was a photo of them deep in conversation at one of Miranda’s early shows. Hal must have only been in his early thirties, but he was already paunchy and thin-haired. Miranda wore a patterned dress and gestured broadly with a plastic cup of wine.
Kate set the catalog back down as she had found it and opened the nightstand drawer. Aside from a vial of eyedrops, the only thing inside was a small blue notebook. The cover was leather and embossed with a starfish. It was the kind of notebook you could find at any stationery store, displayed next to hand-stamped birthday cards and jars of fake beach glass. What was strange about it, what set Kate’s skull buzzing before she even picked it up, were the dark spots on the cover—the same foxing that had ruined entire batches of photographs down in the dining room.
She lifted the notebook out of the drawer and opened it. Its pages rippled like gooseflesh under the pressure of all colors of ink, black and blue and red. The handwriting was Miranda’s. Bold, spiky, with a surprisingly curvaceous lowercase s. Kate had seen so much of that handwriting; she had noticed the other day that the shape of her own k had begun to shift in an unconscious imitation.
Reading Miranda’s handwriting was always a struggle, and much of the notebook’s ink had blurred, making it borderline illegible. But the book was divided into entries, and each entry was dated.
March 30 1982
March 31 1982
April 2 1982
April 3 1982
April 4 1982
A diary.
Miranda’s diary.
Kate sat down on the bed. Her muscles had gone slack. She felt light-headed, nearly faint. She locked her legs together, positioned the notebook on her lap, and stared down at it. 1982. The year Theo was born. Miranda would have been twenty-six. Kate tried to remember what she had been doing when she was that age. Spending her tiny paycheck on nightclub covers, mixing rice with sriracha and calling it a meal, taking time off work to go with college friends to Costa Rica, where she spent most of the time making out with someone’s brother in a grimy hot tub. And here was Miranda, same age, becoming a mother. Writing this diary, not knowing what would come next.
Kate had been right after all: Theo had been holding something back from her. Not just something, but the thing.
She checked her watch. It was 3:11. She needed to go back downstairs. She had an irrational urge to take the notebook with her. After all, the stairwell drawings had vanished in a matter of days. A notebook was even easier to eradicate.
Why had he painted over those drawings? Kate had come up with some possible explanations, but none felt sufficient. Fine, the house eventually had to be salable. But those drawings had been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now they were gone forever beneath a sloppy coat of Benjamin Moore. And he had hidden away this diary specifically so Kate wouldn’t find it.
She had been trying not to think about the rumors, but now she let herself take out an idea and consider it, as if she were trying to distinguish salt from sugar by touching it to her tongue. Theo had killed his mother. No, that sounded too harsh, like it had been intentional. Theo had pulled the trigger. No, that was wrong, too. It lost Miranda altogether. Kate didn’t know how to phrase the action without starting to come