Riker wore a satisfied smile as he laid his napkin to one side. „So it’s a dysfunctional family.“
„A bit more bizarre than that,“ said Charles, filling Riker’s coffee cup and instantly forgetting all his lessons in brevity. „There’s no real family dynamic. They’re like islands, all of them. I had the distinct feeling that Sheldon Smyth was only going through the motions of playing a father to Bitty. Same thing with Cleo and Lionel. Correct responses without any matching nuances in tone or expression.“
„I got it,“ said Riker. „Like a pack of aliens imitating a human family?“
„Exactly. It suggests – “
„You haven’t mentioned Nedda yet.“ Mallory tapped her pen on the table. „How did she fit in?“
„She didn’t. I’d say she was more of a watcher on the sidelines. Though I did see genuine affection for Bitty. And there was a bit of tension with her sister and brother. Nedda never exhibited any aberrant behavior-if that’s what you’re asking.“
„But she’s been away for a long time,“ said Riker. „We think she’s been institutionalized.“
„Well, I could be wrong,“ said Charles, „but in a case like that, you’d expect to see more signs of – “
„Vm positive“ said Mallory, „and I know it wasn’t prison. We ran her prints. No criminal record.“
Charles pushed back from the table. „So you think she’s been in an asylum all these years? Well then – that dinner party should’ve made her feel quite at home. But she was the normal one at the table. And quite charming.“
He could see that Riker was also rejecting Mallory’s idea of Nedda as a certified lunatic with a bloody past. This detective was Charles’s only ally in the theory of an innocent runaway child. The man seemed very much on Nedda’s side, wanting to believe in her.
However, when the subject turned to an old deck of tarot cards produced at the dinner table last night, a deck belonging to Nedda Winter, the light in Riker’s eyes simply died.
A light breakfast had revitalized Bitty Smyth, and now she climbed toward the top of the house, almost cheerful as she led the expedition to the attic.
Following close behind her niece, Nedda Winter pressed close to the banister to avoid treading upon the corpses of her stepmother and her father. On the third floor, they passed the door to Henry’s room, where the budding artist, four years of age, lay dead among his sticks of chalk and pencils and drawing papers. Her little brother Wendell, only seven when he died, lay on the floor of the next room.
Upward they climbed, passing a hall closet where her nine-year-old sister, Erica, huddled in terror and absolute darkness, listening for the footsteps of a monster and hoping that death would pass her by. Nedda trod quietly past this door and fancied that she could hear the beat of a child’s wild heart.
I’m so sorry.
The staircase narrowed as they approached the last landing below the attic. Here she skirted a small corpse on the stairs. Mary had escaped the nursery in a two-year-old’s version of mad flight, and she had died in a toddle down the steps.
The dead were invisible to Bitty, who resided solidly in the present. Nedda lived much of her life in the past, where the nanny on the hallway carpet was more recently deceased, the flesh still warm, and the bit of blood on her breast had not yet dried. Nedda looked down at the face of this teenager, Gwen Rawly, who had previously believed that she was immortal. The girl’s lips were parted, as if to ask Why? Beyond the young nanny’s body was the door of the nursery.
It was closed in the current century.
Bitty and Nedda paused beneath the great glass dome that crowned the fourth floor and divided the two attics. Here the stairs were split like a forked tongue. The steps curving to their right led to the north attic used for storage. Bitty climbed toward the south attic, a repository for personal effects of the dead. This was a family custom begun in the eighteen hundreds.
Following her niece, Nedda entered the narrow room of slanting rafters and the old familiar smells of rotting history and dust. It was illuminated by a row of small gabled windows, and appeared to be unchanged. Early memories were clear pictures in her mind, all that she had had to feed upon for so many years.
She looked at the trunks stacked in rows and representing generations of her forebearers. The contents were the odds and ends of life on earth. Her eyes gravitated to her mother’s trunk. As a child, she had spent many hours counting up the dresses, lace handkerchiefs, hairpins and such, souvenirs of a woman who had loved her, a woman who had died when Nedda was too young to memorize her living face. This morning, she passed it by, following her niece between the rows of the murdered Winters, adults and children.
„You know what this place reminds me of?“ Bitty reached up to pull on strings that switched on the overhead bulbs as she walked the length of the attic. „Early Christian catacombs, corpses stacked up like cordwood. Of course, there are no actual bodies.“
All the brass plates on this row of trunks had been polished by a ringer through the dust, the better to make out the letters etched in old-fashioned script. Nedda knelt on the floor to read the names.
Bitty squatted down beside her. „I couldn’t find a trunk for Baby Sally. It’s not in the north attic or the basement.“ She looked up at her aunt. „Sally had a trunk of her own, didn’t she?“
„Yes, dear, we all did. I remember Sally’s trunk was at the foot of her crib.“
There had been no family conversation on this subject, no catching up on one more death in the family. She had asked no questions of Lionel and Cleo, not wanting to open the door to any more sorrows. And she had thought it unnecessary. An early demise had been foretold for the baby on the day she was born. Her heart ailment had been some grave defect in the bloodline of Quentin Winter’s second wife, Alice.
„You might find this interesting.“ Bitty reached behind the row of trunks and pulled out a canvas sack, yellowed and cracked with age. „Have a look.“
Nedda opened the drawstring and emptied the contents onto the floor. Among the clothing was a little girl’s sailor suit of rotted fabric. The years had been unkind to these artifacts stored outside of the cedar-lined trunks. The next item retrieved from the pile was a christening gown, and it fell apart in her hands. All that held together was the little bit of material embroidered with Sally’s initials. Nedda’s hand passed over small moldy stuffed toys and books of nursery rhymes. She tenderly picked through the rest of the clothing in the varying sizes of a growing child who had lived for three or four years following the massacre.
Bitty folded the child’s clothing and placed it in the sack. „My father said Sally ran away the year that Lionel turned twenty-one. So she would’ve been ten years old. But where’s her trunk? Can you imagine a ten-year-old girl dragging her trunk with her when she ran away from home?“
„No,“ said Nedda, „I can’t.“
Sally had never run anywhere. A legion of heart specialists had all predicted a very short life of invalidism. Did Bitty know this? Nedda could not ask, and there were other questions that would never be answered. Had Sheldon Smyth lied about Sally running away from home, or had someone, Cleo or Lionel, lied to him? Nedda had lost the heart to go on with this disturbance of the dead. „Where is my trunk?“
Bitty stood up and walked to the end of the row of murdered children. One trunk had been segregated from all the rest and pushed to the wall. „This one. You were never legally declared dead, but I guess they gave up on you after a while.“ She opened the lid. „But this isn’t where I found your tarot cards.“