Once built to look imposing, now Stökéwood looks like an abandoned castle from a postapocalyptic movie, well past the cusp of dereliction: It looks like a place where good goes to die.
The car stops short of the rotunda near the front door, and while Tai wrestles with her explosion of monogrammed leather bags, I slip the driver a few extra bills to linger outside the front gate. There’s no chance I’m staying the night here, what with the family apartment in Limatra—I have an appointment in town this afternoon to do research for my book, anyway. He refuses all of my cash politely, explaining he will simply wait outside the gate until I return. I watch him discreetly crane his neck to try to spy inside the house, but the overgrown five-foot spears of green foxglove planted in abundance block any view through the windows. Stökéwood sentinels, those foxít.
How is it that all of this still exists? Dried-out stone marlins wait in the rotunda’s fountain longing for some liquid to spit into the sky. Viney weeds sprout from between unkempt stretches of gravel and stone tile. The adjacent forest has eaten into the once well-manicured gardens around Stökéwood, seizing back its territory. Soon, the tangled roots of the chestnut trees will spread outward in the shallow soil like desperate fingers, buckling the stone that supports the house.
I’m afraid. Anxious, really. I can feel the coppery anxiety bubbling up from my gut and into the back of my throat, and I instantly feel a crawling urge to whip out my notebook and write through my thoughts until they subside. I couldn’t relax on the flight, much less write or read a single page. I spent the whole time thumbing through the lavender notebook Aunt Marion gave me, where I’d scrawled a list of all the places I remember from childhood in Limatra and Noxim, the town by Stökéwood. To write my book about Mama—the book that will snap back at the world’s view that she was just some dressed-up, made-up doll, the book that will show she ached and raged and loved—I need to visit these places again and log every memory of her. That’s how I’ll get to know my mother again: not by wallowing in the soul-sucking mystery of her disappearance, but by carefully exploring the many sides of her life.
Tai doesn’t know.
We find the spare set of keys behind the withered, potted gardenia plants by the front, as promised by Uncle Teddy’s assistant. The lock on the smaller wooden side door by the kitchen doesn’t seem to match any of the heavy iron keys, so we try the massive, intricate wrought iron front door (modeled after Rodin’s The Gates of Hell), which opens after much fumbling and a heavy-handed push. Tai switches into dusty sheepskin slippers in the shallow entrance, padding forward, and I follow suit, shivering as my feet slick in the dust.
“Hello?” she calls.
My eyes adjust to the dark. The entryway feels like an otherworldly cathedral, but it looks almost as I imagined it: walls of costly, imported marble reaching as high as the eye can see, studded with sconces, long-gone dark; the grand wooden staircase that once led up to our bedrooms but leads nowhere now, on account of the moth-eaten velvet rope threaded across its mouth; a heavy oak table, where Mama once placed five-foot-tall arrangements of flowering branches, lavender, and other wildflowers, bare now.
What’s most different is that the house beyond it … looks like a maze.
Its vaulted, awe-inspiring vastness is punctuated by gargantuan stacks of old paperwork on the ground—uneven paper stalagmites, blocking the way in and out.
I don’t dare to pick them up and read them.
In the year before Mama disappeared, I spied on my parents in this very hall from the top of the stairs. What am I to make of this? Mama asked him, holding up a tabloid I couldn’t read—recognizable only from its flashy, bright colors, and its big font. Mama always told us tabloids were rubbish when we passed them at newsstands.
It’s nonsense, Mireille, and you should know better than to believe it, Dad replied, moving to leave, and I thought the matter settled.
But she stopped him, latching a hand on his forearm. Don’t treat me like a child. And the way she said it, tremulous and soft, made me scared for her.
He just scoffed. If only you were as easy to manage as a child. If only you didn’t encourage the damned obsessives to pine after you. Did you think it wise to involve yourself with that bigoted snake Daria Grendl again? All she and her kind do is stir up trouble for us.
Trouble for us? she said, dropping his arm. You mean for Hero Pharm. You sound like Nítuchí’s puppet.
I crept into Mama’s bathroom later and found her crouching around a smashed bottle of perfume, her face swollen. I couldn’t find the nerve, the words to ask her what had happened. I only asked if she and Dad were okay, and she replied by urging me onto her lap with a sigh and telling me a story about a fox who becomes a man’s wife, a story I found incomprehensible and unsettling.
So I found the tabloid later that night, in the kitchen trash can: HERO A MURDERER? KILLER RUMORS SPREAD ABOUT HERO PHARM AND ECCENTRIC FOUNDER HENRY “HËRÓ” HAMMICK.
I would find other tabloids like it, over the years, and eventually I would understand what they meant. The rumors were that the God among men’s desperation to boost Hero Pharm corporate profits resulted in the hasty formulation of faulty medicines that caused thousands of deaths, many of them on Viloxin.
But those rumors, swirling for more than a decade, only hit mainstream papers two years ago when the Hero Pharm board refused to answer fresh inquiries and in a written statement pointed to our reclusive, eccentric dad as the responsible party for any and all formerly suboptimal testing procedures. Dad was forced to step down as CEO of his brainchild, and he locked himself into Stökéwood for good.
He wouldn’t even explain what happened; just like he did after Mama disappeared, he told me not to worry about matters outside my control, and to focus on my studies.
It was Aunt Marion who filled me in. She told me his first love was his work, even when Mama was around. She told me that a colleague of his deposited me and Tai on her doorstep with a huge check, some months after Mama left (I remember that much). Dad visited once, very early on, and the visit was so deeply uncomfortable—the three of us silently eating curried lentils at Aunt Marion’s cramped kitchen table, Dad quietly criticizing us for watching endless TV instead of studying—that both Tai and I were plagued with nightmares of Mama and pitched into despair for a month afterward. Aunt Marion had words with him then, and the visits ended before they could truly begin.
Sometimes the press would ask her about the Hero Pharm rumors coming out of Europe—or about us, the supposed heirs to Dad’s pharmaceutical company. But she never answered, and eventually they stopped.
She informed me, in a solemn tone, that Tai and I would have to participate in Hero Pharm corporate dealings one day, but she could offer no more information; Dad might not lie to anyone’s face, but he was, as always, extremely secretive.
Dad died without even telling us he was sick.
Tai steps forward and lifts a plate of withered fruit rotting atop one of the boxes of paperwork, left by God knows who and untouched for days or months. She grimaces at me, silent for once.
A voice echoes from the depths. I follow Tai down the vaulted stone hallway with its antique machíkíl cleavers pinned to the walls and its sagging Biedermeier chests—once prized but now riddled with termite holes—past the dining room with its twenty-foot-long dining table made from a single petrified tree and its three whimsical Murano glass chandeliers—handmade to depict the Greek Fates—past the oak-paneled library, its ladders ringed with fewer cobwebs than expected, and into a small, plain ground floor area I’ve never seen.