The Lost Girls Page 14

  She knew, then, how she would spend these snowbound hours. She would go through the house. She’d sort out what to sell, what to throw away, and what to keep. Hopefully she’d find Lilith’s ring, but she was more interested in what else she might find in the piles in the basement and the crowded closets. Maurie never kept scrapbooks or photo albums, so Justine had no record of her childhood. Maybe she’d find pictures of Maurie as a girl. Or of Lucy, Lilith, and the rest of the family she knew so little about. Maybe there would be things she could give Melanie and Angela, saying this was your grandmother’s, your great-grandmother’s. Things they could take with them when they left.

  The girls were watching SpongeBob. She made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and told them they could eat in front of the TV. Then she went to the basement.

  The basement was a low, dark room with a concrete floor and brick walls, and it stank of mildew and damp. The washer and dryer stood against the near wall, beside shelves filled with tools, canning jars, and other junk. Justine saw a snow shovel, too; a new one, with the label still attached. She didn’t remember seeing it before, but she was going to have to shovel the walk, so she was glad it was there. Magazines were stacked as high as her waist along the far wall, and in the back, beside an old water heater, stood mountains of cardboard boxes. The rest of the space was crammed topsy-turvy with chairs, tables, lamps, and other furnishings. Dust and cobwebs covered everything, and it was even colder down here than in the rest of the house.

  Justine shivered, momentarily daunted. But as her eyes adjusted to the dim fluorescent light, shapes began to emerge from the wreckage. In an armchair lay a wooden mantel clock, its brass face glimmering. A lamp shade with amber beading decorated an iron floor lamp. On a table was a stack of books. And the boxes in the back: she could make out the word EVANS on one, and on another, PHOTOGRAPHS. She felt a little thrill, suddenly, and started to pick through the pile.

  Much of the furniture, she was pleased to find, looked to be good quality. The tables were made of dark wood with pretty brass handles, the arms of the chairs were elaborately carved, and the lamps were brass or painted porcelain. She knew nothing about antiques, but they had to be worth something. Anything intact she put next to the staircase. Things she wanted to keep—the mantel clock, a pair of bookends, an ivory box with ELEANOR filigreed on the lid—she put on the bottom step. She opened every drawer, finding pencils and screws but no diamond ring.

  By midafternoon dust choked the room and caked her clothes, and she was sweating even in the chilly air. She’d sorted all the furnishings except the table of books, which she’d saved for last. She pulled over a chair, picked up the top one, and wiped the dust off with her sleeve: Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason. Underneath it was Critique of the Power of Judgment, and below that a number of other philosophical and religious texts, including Nietzche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, books by Hume and Hegel, and thick, ponderous tomes with titles like The Five Tenets of Calvinism; Grace, Free Will, and Perdition; and Predeterminism and the Rights of Man.

  Justine was disappointed. She’d hoped for fiction, even classics. She flipped through A Critique of Pure Reason, feeling the old paper stiff beneath her fingers. It was filled with underlinings and notes in the same small, neat script as in the Bible upstairs. “Yes! Damnation is not predetermined” read one. “We make our own choices!” read another. She turned to the inside front cover, on which was written, “Thomas Evans, 1918.” She picked up another book and another, finding the same name and approximate date in each one, and marginalia in the same hand.

  Thomas Evans. Her great-grandfather. Despite the neat handwriting his words were passionate—he’d clearly been a man of ideas, maybe a minister or a teacher. These books weren’t worthless; they were a treasure. They were a window into the mind of a man whose blood ran in her own veins.

  As Justine moved them to her pile of things to keep, she saw a yellowed envelope wedged between the pages of one of the Kant books. She pulled it from its place and opened it to find a series of newspaper clippings from the Williamsburg Gazette.

  The first was dated September 3, 1935, its headline large and urgent:

  WILLIAMSBURG GIRL DISAPPEARS

  Emily Evans, 6, daughter of Thomas and Eleanor Evans of Williamsburg, was reported missing from her family’s summer home at Stillwater Lake this past Sunday.

  The Evanses were set to return to Williamsburg that morning, but the child wasn’t in her bed when they woke up. Search parties have found no trace of her in the nearby woods.

  Williamsburg sheriff Merlyn Llewellyn believes the child ran away from home. Some of her clothes are missing, as well as other personal belongings, he said. According to Agnes Lloyd, wife of Mayor Robert Lloyd, whose family was vacationing with the Evanses, the child has tried to run away before.

  Anyone who can help with the search should contact the Williamsburg sheriff’s office.

  The other articles described beneath progressively smaller headlines how searchers dragged the lake and combed the woods with search dogs until mid-October. Finally in early November a short article declared SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL SUSPENDED DUE TO SNOW. The last clipping was dated December 30, 1935:

  LOCAL MAN FOUND DEAD

  Thomas Evans of Williamsburg was found hanged from the chandelier in his living room on Christmas morning by his neighbor, Theodore Williams.

  Mr. Evans’s evident suicide is the last in a series of tragedies to strike the Evans family. Mr. Evans’ six-year-old daughter, Emily, disappeared from the family’s summer house on September 1, and no trace of her has been found. Mr. Evans had also recently suffered financial difficulties. His home is in foreclosure, and this fall he was forced to sell his family’s business, Evans Pharmacy, now Lloyd’s Pharmacy, in Williamsburg.

  Mr. Evans was the grandson of Dafydd Evans, one of Williamsburg’s founding fathers. He was also a member of the Elks Club and the Williamsburg Chamber of Commerce. He is survived by his wife, Eleanor, and his daughters, Lilith, 13, and Lucy, 12. No plans for a funeral service have been announced.

  There was one final paper, a piece of thick cream stationery with a single sentence written in the now-familiar hand:

  Let the wicked be ashamed,

  and let them be silent in the grave.

  Justine held the papers as though they might disintegrate. The books at her feet spoke differently now. They were no longer the living record of a curious mind; they were the hollow echoes of a man doomed to the worst of tragedies: his child, his home, his livelihood, all lost. And his life, taken by his own hand. “We make our own choices.” His words, so exuberant in the pages of Kant, seemed like an epitaph now.

  The day Lucy told her about the girl in the painting, that summer Justine and Maurie had lived here, Justine had asked what she thought happened to her. Lucy smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I used to pretend she was living somewhere safe,” she said. “That she was happy.” Then she shrugged her shoulders in her thin blouse. “But she’s dead, of course.” Her voice casual, certain.

  Justine put the papers back in the envelope and set the envelope on top of the stack of books. She pulled the box marked PHOTOGRAPHS from the pile in the back and hauled it up the stairs to the kitchen. Then she went to the living room. The girls’ eyes were dull from the television. “I have something to show you.”

  They shuffled in, Angela obedient, Melanie reluctant, already prepared to be bored. Justine waited until they sat at the table, then opened the box. Dust puffed into the air, making her sneeze. It was filled with leather photo albums.

  “These are pictures of our ancestors,” she said. “I’ve never known what they looked like, or even what their names were. I think we should find out.” She opened the top album and turned it so Melanie and Angela could see.

  Its pages were thick vellum with oval cutouts. Below each black-and-white portrait was the subject’s name in Victorian script: “Sarah Pugh Evans, 1881,” “William Evans, 1883,” “Dafydd Evans, 18
90.” Justine scanned the unsmiling faces. Although most had dark hair like Melanie and a few had fair curls like Angela and herself, she saw no obvious likenesses. Yet something snatched at her eye, and as she reached the end of the book she realized what it was. They were all fragile of frame, like her and her daughters. Their collarbones were fine beneath high-necked blouses, and their hands were dainty in their laps. In the dark rooms where they posed in formal black, their skin as white as chalk, they looked like china dolls, easily shattered. It was a legacy of frailty.

  “Who are they?” Melanie asked.

  “I don’t know. Great-great-grandparents, maybe?” Justine closed the book. The next one was newer and filled with snapshots held in place by yellowing tape. Now Justine smiled. “These are pictures of Aunt Lucy and Grandma Lilith.” She pointed to a photo of two girls sitting on a set of porch steps, a baby on the older girl’s lap. Lilith, Lucy, and Emily, 1931 said the caption. The girls wore dresses and white socks above black Mary Janes and the baby was swaddled in white from her lace hat to the hem of her crinolined dress. The smaller girl’s hair was a tuffet of curls as in the photograph upstairs, but her face was younger, about the same age Angela was now.

  “She looks like you, doesn’t she?” Justine said to Angela. As her daughter frowned she added, “Of course, you’re much prettier.”

  Melanie tilted her head. “I don’t think she looks like her.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. Justine thought about ignoring it, but it was obvious they were home. She wiped the dust from her hands. “Wait here.”

  Matthew Miller stood on the porch. His boots were clumped with snow and his coat was covered in it. Behind him, through the screened porch windows, the storm was a wall of white. Justine couldn’t tell how much snow had already fallen, but the wind raged and it was clearly going to snow for the rest of the day and all through the night. She really should have stopped at the Safeway.

  “I wanted to make sure you were all right. In the storm.” Deep lines ran from the old man’s hawkish nose to the sides of his mouth. His cheeks sagged into jowls, and his eyebrows bristled almost comically, snowflakes clinging to them.

  “We’re okay.” Justine tightened her hand on the doorknob, planning to thank him and close the door. Then she thought of him walking back to the lodge, a stooped black figure leaning into the wind and whirling snow, and she found herself saying, “We have tea. Would you like some?” She regretted it immediately, and willed him to decline. But he stomped the snow off his boots and stepped inside, hanging his coat in the closet as though he’d done it many times. Which he probably had. How many years had he, his brother, Lucy, and Lilith lived out here, just the four of them?

  He took up a lot of room in the small kitchen. Without his coat, his shoulders were broad and his arms were wiry and strong. Angela and Melanie looked at him and he stared back in the intense way he’d stared at them in the car, and at the top of the stairs, the day they’d arrived. Justine hadn’t liked it then, and she didn’t like it now. The noise of the television drifted in from the living room. “Angie, go turn off the TV,” she said, and as Angela scurried away she fought the urge to send Melanie after her. He was just an old man, and he’d walked through a blizzard to check on them.

  She put the water on and brought two of Lucy’s delicate cups and saucers to the table along with the tin of tea bags. She went to move the photo album, but he had his hand on the picture of Lilith, Lucy, and Emily on the porch. Gently, he traced their faces with one square-tipped finger. In the softening of his craggy features Justine thought she saw something of the young man he’d once been.

  “You knew them then,” she observed.

  “You look like her,” he said to Melanie.

  Melanie leaned closer. Lilith’s image was blurred, by the lens or by time. “She does have the same color hair,” Justine said.

  “Not her.” Matthew touched the face beneath the fair curls. “Different hair. But she has her face.”

  Lucy was smiling a wide smile, and for this alone Justine thought she bore no resemblance to Melanie. Beside her the baby sat like a doll on Lilith’s lap, her features indecipherable between the lace of her bonnet and the froth of her collar, as though she’d been erased. “Were you here the summer Emily disappeared?” Justine asked.

  “Who’s Emily?” Angela had come back into the room. Now she leaned against Justine, looking at the picture.

  “The baby. She disappeared one summer when they were here at the lake.”

  “She ran away in the night,” Matthew said. “She got lost in the woods.”

  Angela’s mouth dropped open. “In the woods?”

  Justine smoothed her hair. “It was a long time ago.”

  “What was she like?” Melanie asked.

  Matthew met her level gaze with one of his own. “She was the favorite.”

  Justine thought that was strange—both that he would know it, and that it would be the first thing he would say to describe the missing girl. Melanie shook her head. “Not Emily. Lucy.”

  Matthew paused again. Justine wondered if all of his conversations were this deliberate. At last he said, “She was loyal.”

  “Loyal?”

  The longest pause yet. “Lilith had a baby, and the father died in the war. She couldn’t go anywhere after that. A single mother, unmarried. In those days, that’s how it was. So Lucy stayed here with her.”

  Melanie considered him. Then she nodded. “That was cool of her.”

  “Yes.” Matthew smiled. “She was cool.”

  Melanie’s interest in Lucy pleased Justine. The sense of belonging to a family, even one with a tragic history, was the one good thing she’d found here. The kettle whistled, and Justine filled their cups. “How long do you think the storm is going to last?”

  “All night. Tomorrow, too. Do you have what you need?”

  She glanced at the pantry door. “We can get by if it’s just for a couple of days.”

  “When it stops I’ll plow a path across the lake.”

  “When will they plow the road? I don’t think our car can drive on the ice.”

  “Lucy’s can.”

  Justine didn’t know where the keys to the Subaru were, or whether it would even start after all this time. She chewed her lip. Matthew said, “I can plow the road for you.”

  “Thank you.” She’d misjudged him, she decided. He was odd, with his quiet manner and his silences. But Lucy had lived here for years with no other company—no doubt she’d depended on him through the long winters. Surely Justine and her daughters could do the same. Until they left, she reminded herself.

  They finished their tea, talking more about the weather, which Justine had learned long ago was something you could talk about with anyone, anywhere. What she learned from Matthew about northern Minnesota winters made her feel even better about her decision to leave. When they were done, Justine walked him to the door. He told her to let him know if they needed anything. “You’ll find a shovel in the basement,” he said, and as he opened the porch door Justine remembered the shovel she’d seen by the washer. He had put it there, probably sometime in the past two days, while they’d been in town. Which meant he’d kept a copy of the house key he’d given her, and he’d used it to let himself into the house. Perhaps more than once. She rubbed her arms as she watched him walk down the steps and disappear into the storm.

  “Can I turn the television back on?” Angela asked.

  Justine closed the door. “Go ahead.” So much for interesting her children in their ancestors. But when she went back to the kitchen Melanie was turning the pages of the photo album. Her face was open with interest—and the rarest of invitations.

  “There’s more pictures of them.”

  Justine kept her face composed, as if Melanie were a horse that might startle. She sat down, careful not to touch her arm, and together they looked through black-and-white windows at two little girls who lived in a Victorian house and celebrated Christmases and birthdays and
first-days-of-school with the pale woman and the philosopher who were their parents, and the baby sister who would turn into a sober-eyed child and disappear.

  That night Justine brought the box of Emily stories into her daughters’ bedroom. “These are stories Aunt Lucy wrote. I thought it might be nice to read one. As a bedtime story.” She wasn’t going to say anything about Melanie reading one of the books last night. Melanie didn’t say anything either, but she turned onto her side and rested her head on her hand in a listening posture, so Justine began to read.

  She picked the story in the oldest book and the youngest hand, because it was a sort of origin story for all the others. In it Emily was a princess who lived in a castle with her parents, and she was happy. As she grew, word of her beauty spread far and wide, and the queen feared the kings of the neighboring lands would steal her away for their sons to marry. So on Emily’s sixth birthday the queen sent her to live in a cottage deep in the royal forest, where she would be safe. But although the cottage was cozy and the queen visited often, the little princess was very lonely.

  Then one day, a prince stumbled upon her secret home. Taken by her beauty, he chased her so far into the forest that she became lost. As darkness fell, she sank onto a bed of moss and began to cry. The forest creatures gathered around: deer and chipmunk, fragile sparrows and shy foxes. The bravest of them, the mouse Mimsy, stepped forward and, to Emily’s astonishment, began to speak. She said Emily had entered an enchanted forest, where fairies lived and all the animals could talk. Emily asked if Mimsy could help her find the way back to her cottage, but Mimsy shook her head sadly. No one who entered the enchanted forest could ever leave. This is your home now, she said, but don’t be afraid, for we will keep you company. And Emily dried her tears, for she knew she wouldn’t be lonely anymore.