Whatever Jane’s crime was, she was sure the punishment was too great to fit.
“I don’t remember that one,” Ruth murmured. She flicked the light switch next to the door—nothing. “Shit. That should have been on by now.”
“We are absolutely going to be murdered,” Jane said.
“This is not an Agatha Christie novel,” Ruth replied sensibly. “Get your cell phone out.”
Jane took her phone out of her pocket and checked it. “Great. No service. We are definitely going to be murdered.”
“Stop being so dramatic and turn the flashlight on.”
Jane did.
In the soft beam of the light’s glow, the foyer looked even spookier than it had a few minutes ago.
There was a faded Oriental carpet running the length of the hall; a wide, open staircase spun upward and disappeared into shadow; and the banister and entranceway table were covered in a thick blanket of dust.
Jane couldn’t imagine this house filled, as it once was, with people—let alone her mother as a child, her mother as a baby, her mother as a teenage girl, attending school and kissing boys and doing homework and playing games.
“It’s cold in here,” Jane said.
“The heat was supposed to come on with the lights,” Ruth replied.
Their house in California hadn’t even had heat. Jane looked over at her mother. She seemed to have shrunk two inches; her shoulders were hunched and sagging, her arms folded on her chest like she was trying to make herself as small as possible.
“How are you holding up?” Jane asked.
Ruth shrugged. “Not sure. You?”
“Not sure,” Jane repeated.
Ruth took a step forward. She rubbed at a spot on her left wrist, then she reached her hand out and placed her palm flat on the banister. “I broke my wrist on this staircase,” she whispered. “I slid down the whole thing on a trash-can lid.”
“Sounds unsanitary.”
“My mother almost killed me. I think she would have, if she hadn’t first needed to drive me to the emergency room.”
Jane had only met her grandmother three times. Emilia North had visited for Christmases when Jane was four, eight, and twelve. They had never gone east to see her.
She doesn’t like visitors, Ruth had explained once.
“Where should we start?” Jane asked.
“This way,” Ruth said, and walked through an open doorway into a big sitting room. Someone had taped cellophane over the broken windowpanes, and some bigger pieces of furniture were covered with dusty, yellowed sheets. Jane could make out the shape of a piano in one corner; a large bookcase or hutch against one wall; a long, low sofa in the middle of the room.
“Who played the piano?” Jane asked.
“My father.”
Jane had never met Chester North; he had passed away when she was just five years old.
She wondered, now, whether it had hurt her mother to lose her father as much as it had hurt Jane to lose hers—
It must have.
“That’s a 1925 Steinway,” Ruth said. “We could sell it. It would probably pay for your first year of college.”
They walked into the next room. And the next room. An endless stretch of rooms, each with its collection of sheet-covered furniture, each alike in its feeling of loneliness.
They kept walking until they reached a room at the far end of the house. An enormous fireplace took up much of one wall. “We’ll sleep in here tonight,” Ruth said. “We’ll light a fire. We should be nice and toasty.”
“Are there doors?”
“Mais oui. Observe.” Ruth hooked a finger into the pull of a pocket door and slid it out of the wall.
“So fancy,” Jane said.
“I know, that’s why I said it in French.”
“So we’ll just sleep on the floor?”
“It’ll be like we’re camping.”
“We hate camping.”
Ruth sighed. “Yes. I know we hate camping.”
“But a fire will be nice,” Jane added quickly. “Can we get stuff for s’mores?”
“Now you’re talking. Come.”
She led Jane through a door to a dining room at the back of the house, a dining room bigger perhaps than their entire house in California, with a long table made of dark wood and tall, wide windows that overlooked the backyard.
“Fancy again,” Jane said.
“I hated eating in here,” Ruth replied. “We only used it for company. Boring dinner parties. When it was just the three of us, we ate in here—”
And she darted off to the left, through another set of open pocket doors that led into a large, roomy kitchen—high ceilings and a double oven and a fridge you could fit an entire person inside. There was a recessed nook at the back of the house with a little kitchen table and chairs. There was enough light back here that Jane turned her flashlight off and put her phone back in her pocket. She wandered around. She opened a cabinet and found a dusty set of antique china. Another drawer held various kitchen utensils. Another drawer held a set of delicate glass mixing bowls.
North Manor had become like a time capsule, she realized—unchanged and preserved in the absence of occupants.
There was something in the air here, some smell that came in through a broken windowpane, where the cellophane had come unstuck and was flapping in the breeze. It was a sweet smell, an out-of-place smell, the smell of…
“Is that roses?” Jane mused aloud, walking over to the window and peeking out.
“Hmm?”
“I think I smell roses.”
“It’s not the season for them,” Ruth said distractedly, running a finger across the table to see how much dust had accumulated there.
“You don’t smell them?”
Ruth came over to the window. She wiped her hand on her jeans, then ran her fingers through Jane’s ponytail.
“I hate roses,” she said.
She walked out of the kitchen, through a bare pantry to a hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back. Jane followed.
Ruth paused in front of a heavy wooden door with an enormous brass handle. She tapped it.
“This was my father’s study.”
She opened the door.
It was darker in here—the two windows at the back of the room were covered in thick green, velvet curtains. Ruth went and opened them, and Jane imagined the room hissing at being exposed to light after all those years.
The walls were covered with dark wood paneling and the air had a lingering smell of old tobacco. There was a massive desk that took up most of the space. The walls behind it contained floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, completely stuffed with old hardcovers.
Jane felt a twinge in her gut. Something deep stirring inside her. A longing for comfort she tried her best to ignore.
“I was never allowed in here,” Ruth said, smirking a little.
There was a pen case on the desk. Jane opened it and pulled one of the pens out; it was an expensive-looking black, heavy thing that said Montblanc on the side. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to see if it might be worth something, but she still didn’t have service.
She raised the phone above her head, moved to the window, did a little dance—
“I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Ruth said.