Reaching the magazine box at last, I shut my eyes as I placed my fingers around the rusted latch.
It opened easily.
But it was … empty.
I scrabbled around the bottom, sure I was missing a compartment, and I knocked the flashlight off the ledge with my elbow. The jolt of it hitting the marble floor below broke me into sobs, thick, hot, wet tears that streamed out of me because I no longer cared if I was found. My hunch, the one I had so carefully tended, was wrong.
Mama had left me nothing.
It was one of the students from the institute—a part-time assistant to the family—who found me crying up there. In those days, they helped Dad with us, with everything, and he called them all Boy, which I recognize now was colossally fucked. This young guy helped me down, and I made him swear on his life he wouldn’t tell anyone about the secret tower. He shrugged, probably thinking I was just some silly kid, and ruffled my hair before helping me off to bed.
The whole experience rattled me. I never snuck back into her bathroom again, at least not before we were shipped off to the States.
But if Dad did see Mama, and she had been back to Stökéwood since …
She might have left a message there for me. Where she knew only I—not Dad, not Manon—could find it.
So, as soon as Manon ditches me—as I suspected she would—I blast disco music saved on my phone and I slink around the stacks of moldy paperwork and make my way up the creaking grand staircase, past the moth-eaten velvet rope used to keep visitors away. It’s actually cleaner than I thought, besides the nasty plate of withered fruit in the hallway and an actual shag carpet’s worth of dust. The electricity works, even if some of the bulbs flicker. What’s spookier is that the upstairs furniture has been sold off, but you can see the stained divots in the carpet, where the legs stood. My empty bedroom has been repainted asylum white, and everything in Noni’s bedroom has been replaced with just two crisp white cots that could probably only fit me with my arms folded over my chest like a mummy. I find an old Spirited Away poster of Noni’s rolled up in her closet, next to a useless, yellowed wall calendar with horrible, off-kilter drawings of old Viloki castles from 1988. Stökéwood is Miss December. Blasting ABBA, I prop both against the wall for pizazz, before edging toward Mama and Dad’s bedroom.
The door is stuck—not locked, I don’t think, but jammed—which sends a shivery ache through me. It also smells like a small animal died from starvation in the vents while watching endless seasons of Love Island. I raise the music’s volume to keep the wrong kind of ghosts away.
The good news is, I can still access Mama’s closet because it has a separate entrance on the floor. That’s how big-ass it was. Most of its once-sparkling contents have been stripped away and auctioned off, but I can actually smell lavender in the cedar corners if I close my eyes. I find the secret cabinet that seamlessly blends into the wood, and it clicks open softly, revealing a couple of halfway-decent vintage pieces, forgotten for all these years. They probably need major dry cleaning, but I still spend too long running my fingers over their intricate beading and imagining that maybe she was the last person to touch one of them.
Then, with the feel of those nubs still imprinted on my hands, I push through to her private bathroom for the first time in a decade.
Her personal effects are gone—some went to me and Nons, like the glass bottles and gilded jewelry bowls and luxurious signature cosmetics, for us to spritz and spread onto our prepubescent bodies, to feel her close for just a minute even though that was probably a giant waste of La Mer—and others were just disposed of, I guess. The green-veined marble, which always looked like frog skin to me, is so cool to the touch. I turn the golden fleur-de-lis-shaped sink handle with a rusty squeak: The water spatters amber for a minute, then runs clean.
With my fingers, I work my way under the sink, toward the latch behind the false panel.
It’s still there.
My nerves are the size of elephants in my stomach. I could vomit, but I don’t want to clean, so I swallow five times, then take a quick yogic breath of fire and press down on it. And wait.
I hear a clunk overhead, and the panel in her ceiling exhales and cracks open half an inch.
Jammed.
When I was young, the panel would drop open like an unhinged jaw, and a woven rope would fall through the air, tonguing at the top of Mama’s head. A sick monster is licking you! I would squeal. No, I’m climbing up Rapunzel’s marvelously thick yellow braid, Mama replied, tugging on its greasy length to bring down the ladder.
I run for a broom, for a stick, anything to help me smack at the panel. I find an old chair in the hall. Straining on my tippy toes, I just make it, and with a shooooomf, years’ worth of dust swirls through the space and blankets me, transforming the bathroom into a disgusting and magical space in the low light. Coughing, pulsing with adrenaline, I yank down the rope and ladder, which now seem small—as if made for children.
I feel disembodied as my palms and fingers close around the first rung. The flaking metal stings the skin on my palms. I don’t know if it’ll hold my weight. But it held hers, so I begin to climb, limbs shaking.
The windows in the tower above my head are dark with grime, so it’s impossible to see out as I pull myself up, up, up. I feel, by memory, the first ledge by the window. That’s where she sometimes lay down the blanket for us both to relax on.
“Our tree house,” she whispered to me, and then she would find one of the books we stashed in the black metal magazine storage box, so they wouldn’t get wet if the windows broke when a storm rolled through.
I step onto the ledge, feeling my way around the dark, and that’s when my foot hits something with a clang.
The magazine box.
I feel faint.
Leaning toward it, I fall into a sneezing fit and almost tumble through the hole, down to the marble. I steady myself, head swimming.
The box is too heavy for me to carry. I take a breath, wondering if I can steel myself and manage anyway, like how moms stop cars barreling toward their children on TV. I peek down at the marble floor of her bathroom, and my nerves make a choice for me, shoving the magazine box straight through the opening.
It lands with a clattering banging BOOM that would wake the dead, and I scramble back down the ladder, knees wobbling.
The magazine box hasn’t cracked the marble, but the marble has cracked it open. Spilling out are blackened pages, bound together.
My vision fizzes out as I fall to my hands and knees and start crying.
Because I see it.
Two words on the cover page:
White Fox.
“You fucking did it, bitch,” I sob, clutching the script to my chest. Never in my life have I been more elated and frightened and buzzing full of these conflicting feelings, buzzing full enough to burst open wide, guts and heart pouring onto the filthy marble floor.
I win. I did it. I knew her. I found it.
The girl with the mark of luck does it again.
NONI
As soon as I arrive at the Limatra apartment, I take a searing-hot bath, hot enough to peel the skin right off me, turning the rest as satiny pink as a newborn’s. I do this sometimes—usually after I binge-watch Mama’s early movies for hours on end, after the banshee in my head starts to wail, See this fresh young thing? She’s dead; she’s gone; she’s dust. I dunk my head under the water, sweating and burning, and give myself permission to cry, since Tai isn’t around and doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon.