She turned back to Lucy. She asked the child if her mother had ever spoken of the summer of nineteen ninety eight, and of the river, and of the jacket. Lucy nodded. She said her mother had told her that the family believed she had died that summer, and that her mother had let them believe it, because her father had told her she could never come home. She said her mother had told her that the jacket had been left by the river on purpose, and that the blood had come from a cut on her mother's own hand, and that her mother had been alive all the time, far away, and had thought of Victoria every day. Lucy said it without anger, only with the sadness of a child repeating what her mother had told her, and Victoria believed her, because no child of nine could invent such a thing, and because the locket in her hand was warm and real and fitted together perfectly.
The guests had gone very quiet. The music had stopped, though Victoria could not remember when. Someone near the back of the crowd began to cry softly, and someone else put an arm around her. Margaret Graham stood at the edge of the terrace, her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes fixed on Lucy, and her face was white.
Victoria bent down then, slowly, so that her eyes were level with Lucy's eyes, and the satin of her dress brushed the grass. She said that she believed Lucy, and that she was glad Lucy had come, and that Lucy was safe here now. She said it softly, so that only Lucy could hear, and Lucy nodded, and a small breath went out of her, as if she had been holding it since she had slipped through the garden gate. Victoria took Lucy's hand in her own, and the child's hand was cold and rough from the journey, and Victoria held it gently, and did not let go.
Edward said her name, sharply, and said that she must not promise the child anything, and that the police should be called, and that the whole thing should be looked into properly. Victoria did not answer him. She stood up, still holding Lucy's hand, and she looked around at her guests and saw that the party was over, though no one had yet said so. She felt, under the grief and the shock, a strange and terrible hope, that her sister had lived, and had loved her, and had sent her daughter home at last.
Victoria held Lucy's hand and led her a little away from the guests, toward the shade of the old oak at the edge of the lawn, where the two of them could speak without every ear in the garden listening. The grass was soft under their feet, and the music from the party sounded thin and far off, and the smell of the roses hung in the warm air. Victoria sat down on the low stone wall beneath the oak, and she drew Lucy up beside her, and she looked at the child properly for the first time, at the dust on her shoes and the mud on the hem of her faded blue dress and the tiredness around her young eyes.
She asked Lucy, gently, where she lived, and who looked after her now that her mother was gone. Lucy said she lived with Mrs. Alvarez, a neighbor in North Carolina, in a small house with a garden full of beans and a cat that slept on the porch. She said Mrs. Alvarez had looked after her since her mother grew too ill to get out of bed, and that Mrs. Alvarez had cooked for her and washed her clothes and sat with her mother in the evenings, and that Mrs. Alvarez was kind, but that she was old. She said Mrs. Alvarez had taught her to read the bus timetable and to count her change, and had told her that Charleston was a long way and that she must not speak to strangers on the road. She said her mother had told Lucy, before she died, that if anything happened she must go to Charleston and find Victoria Hale.
Victoria asked about Lucy's father. Lucy shook her head. She said she had never met her father. She said her mother had told her that her father was gone before she was born, and that he had been a quiet man who had loved her mother very much, and that Lucy had his eyes, or so her mother had always said. She said she had no picture of him and no stories beyond the few her mother had told her, and that she had stopped asking about him when she was small, because the asking always made her mother sad. Victoria listened, and she thought of the years her sister had lived in secret, and of the life Anna had built far away in North Carolina, and of the man who had loved her and died before he could marry her, and she felt the loss of it all settle over her like a cold shadow.
She asked Lucy how she had come all this way on her own. Lucy said she had come by bus. She said Mrs. Alvarez had put her on the bus in North Carolina in the early morning, with a small bag of food and a bottle of water and the locket around her neck, and had told the driver to look after her. She said the bus had carried her for hours, through towns she did not know and past fields and forests and rivers, and that she had sat by the window the whole way and watched the world go by, and that she had been frightened, but that she had kept thinking of her mother's words, that Victoria Hale would know her by the locket, and that the thought had kept her brave. She said she had watched the towns go by and had wondered which of them was Charleston, and that every time the bus stopped her heart had beaten faster, until the driver at last called out the name of the city and she knew she had arrived. She said the other people on the bus had been kind, and that a woman with a baby had shared her sandwiches, and that the driver had told her when to get off, and that she had walked from the bus station to Hale House on her own, asking the way from strangers, until she saw the lights of the garden party through the trees.
Victoria stared at her. A child of nine, alone on a bus for hours, alone on the streets of a strange city, alone in a garden full of strangers. She thought of her own comfortable life in Hale House, of her twenty years as its owner, of the parties and the fine dresses and the quiet routines, and she felt ashamed of how safe her own life had been while her sister's daughter rode a bus alone with nothing but a locket and a promise. She squeezed Lucy's hand, and Lucy squeezed back, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Lucy's face clouded, and her lower lip trembled, and she told Victoria about the backpack. She said she had carried a backpack on the bus, with her clothes and her mother's letter inside, the letter her mother had left for Victoria, written in her mother's own hand. She said that at the bus station, in the crowd, a man had come up behind her and taken the backpack from her shoulder and run, and that she had cried out, and that people had turned to look, but that no one had stopped him, and that he had vanished into the crowd before anyone could catch him. She said she had lost everything in the bag, and most of all the letter, and that she had stood in the bus station and wept, because the letter was the one thing her mother had asked her to carry to Charleston, and now it was gone.
Victoria felt anger rise in her, sharp and sudden, at the man who would steal a child's bag in a crowded station, and at the world that would let such a thing happen. But she kept her voice gentle. She told Lucy that the letter was not the only proof, and that Lucy herself was proof enough, and that the locket was proof enough, and that no thief could steal the truth of who she was. Lucy nodded, though tears stood in her eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand, and she said she had been so afraid that Victoria would not believe her without the letter, and that she had almost turned around and gone back to North Carolina, but that she had remembered her mother's voice, and had come on to the garden instead.
Victoria asked what else her mother had told her to do, and Lucy reached into the pocket of her faded blue dress and took out something small and bright, and held it out on her open palm. It was a small brass key, old and worn smooth, with a plain bow and a short stem, and it glinted in the sunlight under the oak. Lucy said her mother had given it to her on the last night, and had told her to keep it safe, and to show it to Victoria, and to ask about the room behind the blue wall.
Victoria went very still. The words struck her like a blow, though Lucy spoke them innocently, as a child repeats a message she does not understand. The room behind the blue wall. Only three people in the world had ever known of that place: Victoria herself, and Anna, and their father. It had been their secret since childhood, since the day the two sisters, one eleven and one twelve, had found the hollow stretch of wall in the narrow attic hallway in the oldest wing of Hale House, and had pressed their ears to it and heard the emptiness behind. Their father had caught them and locked the room and forbidden them ever to return, and Anna had stolen the key, and neither sister had ever spoken of the room to another living soul.
Victoria stared at the small brass key in Lucy's palm, and her breath caught in her throat. The key was the very key Anna had stolen all those years ago, she was certain of it, though she could not have said how she knew. It was the same worn brass, the same plain bow, the same short stem. She reached out with a trembling hand and took it, and it was warm from Lucy's pocket, and it sat in her palm like a coal from a fire long thought dead.
She asked Lucy what her mother had told her about the room. Lucy said her mother had told her very little, only that the room was behind the blue wall, and that the key opened it, and that Victoria would know what to do with it, and that what was inside the room would tell Victoria everything. She said her mother had made her promise to ask about the room, and not to let anyone else take the key, and to give it only to Victoria Hale herself. Lucy said she had kept the key in her pocket through the whole bus journey, and through the walk to Hale House, and that she had been afraid the man at the bus station would take it too, but that it had been in her dress pocket and not in the backpack, and so it was safe.
Victoria closed her fingers around the key. She thought of the narrow attic hallway, and the blue wall, and the room behind it, and the old papers of her grandfather that lay inside, and she thought of her father locking the door and warning them away, and she wondered what Anna had hidden there, and what her father had hidden there, and what the key would unlock after twenty eight years. She felt fear and hope together, tangled in her chest, and she did not know which was stronger.
Behind them, Edward Hale had followed, and he stood a little way off, watching, with his face pale and his mouth pressed into a thin line. Victoria saw him from the corner of her eye, and she saw the exact moment when Lucy spoke of the room behind the blue wall, and she saw the flash of fear cross his face, sudden and naked, before he smoothed it away. It was gone in an instant, but she had seen it, and it told her more than any words could have told her. Edward knew about the room. Edward knew about the key. Edward knew far more than he had ever admitted, and his fear was the fear of a man who had guarded a secret for a very long time and now felt it slipping from his grasp.
Edward stepped forward and said, too quickly, that the child was tired and confused, and that she should be taken inside and given food and rest, and that the party should go on, and that there was no room behind any blue wall, and that Victoria must not listen to a child's fancies. His voice was too loud and too bright, and his hands moved too much as he spoke, and Victoria watched him and said nothing, and let him finish, and then she looked down at the key in her hand and back up at his frightened face, and she knew that the room was real, and that the key was real, and that whatever lay behind the blue wall would change everything.
She told Edward, calmly, that Lucy would stay with her, and that they would go inside together, and that the party could wait. She told Lucy to stay close to her, and she took the child's hand again, and she slipped the small brass key into the pocket of her satin dress, beside her own half of the locket, and she felt the two pieces of metal rest together, the key and the locket, the past and the present, and she knew that she would open that door before the night was over, whatever lay behind it.
Victoria Hale stood in the garden and watched the party come undone. The musicians had stopped playing. The waiters were covering the dishes with white cloths. The guests were gathering their coats and their purses and moving toward the gate in a slow and puzzled stream, and the garden that had been full of voices and laughter only a short while before was now full of the sound of chairs being pushed back and glasses being set down. Victoria had ended the party forty three minutes early, and she had done it with a calm face and a steady voice, and no one in the garden had dared to ask her why.
She had spoken to the woman who ran the catering and told her to pack everything away. She had thanked the musicians and paid them and sent them home. She had walked among the guests and thanked each one for coming and told them that a family matter needed her attention, and the guests had nodded and murmured their good wishes and left, and now the long tables stood empty under the trees, and the lanterns still burned, and the evening air smelled of cut grass and roses.
Edward Hale stood at her elbow the whole time, and his voice was low and urgent, and he kept saying that she was making a mistake. He said the girl was a stranger. He said the girl was a runaway, and a liar, and a thief, and that no one knew where she had come from or what she wanted. He said the police should be called, and the child services people should be called, and that the girl should be taken out of the house before the night was over. He said it again and again, and each time he said it his voice grew a little sharper, and Victoria listened to him, and she watched his face, and she saw that he was not only worried. He was afraid.
Lucy Mercer was in the kitchen with Margaret Graham. Victoria had taken the girl there herself, and she had told Margaret to feed her and to keep her warm and to let no one else into the kitchen until she said so. Margaret had done as she was told, and she had done it the way she had done everything in Hale House for so many years, with quiet hands and a steady kindness, and now Lucy sat at the long kitchen table in her faded blue dress, with her muddy shoes set neatly by the back door, and a bowl of tomato soup steaming in front of her, and a grilled cheese sandwich cut into two triangles on a white plate beside it.
The child ate slowly at first, as if she were not sure the food was really meant for her, and then she ate with a hunger that made Margaret turn away and wipe her eyes with the corner of her apron. The soup was hot and red, and the cheese in the sandwich had melted and run to the edges, and the bread was brown and crisp, and Lucy tore off small pieces and dipped them in the soup and ate them one by one, and Margaret sat across from her and watched, and she said nothing for a long while, because she knew that a hungry child needed food before questions.
Margaret Graham was sixty seven years old, and she had worked in Hale House since Victoria and Anna were small, and she had known the house in every season, and she had known the sisters when they were girls, and she remembered the sound of their feet on the stairs and the sound of their laughter in the garden, and she remembered the summer when Anna had gone away and never come back, and she had never believed the story about the river, not entirely, not in the quiet of her own heart. She looked at Lucy now, at the soft brown hair and the tired eyes and the small hands wrapped around the bowl, and she saw Anna in the shape of the child's face, and she saw Victoria in the set of the child's mouth, and she felt her own heart turn over in her chest.
She asked the girl if she wanted more soup, and Lucy nodded, and Margaret filled the bowl again, and she cut another sandwich and set it on the plate, and she poured a glass of milk and put it beside the bowl, and she sat down again, and she said that the kitchen was warm, and that no one would hurry her, and that she could stay as long as she liked.
Lucy asked if the lady in the garden was really her aunt, and Margaret said that Victoria Hale was the mistress of Hale House, and that she had run the house for twenty years, and that she was a fair woman and a kind one, and that the girl had nothing to fear from her. Lucy asked if her mother had really lived in this house, and Margaret said that Anna had lived here as a girl, and that her room had looked out over the garden, and that she had loved the garden more than any place in the world. Lucy asked if her mother had been happy here, and Margaret was quiet for a moment, and then she said that Anna had been happy when she was small, and that she had been less happy as she grew older, and that the house had not always been kind to her.
The girl finished the soup and wiped the bowl with the last piece of bread, and she drank the milk in small sips, and she folded her hands in her lap, and she looked at Margaret with eyes that were far older than nine years, and she said that her mother had told her to come here if anything happened to her, and that her mother had said Victoria Hale would know what to do. Margaret reached across the table and took the small hand in her own, and she said that Victoria Hale would indeed know what to do, and that the girl was safe here, and that no one would take her away while Margaret was in the kitchen.
In the library, Victoria questioned Edward Hale. She had closed the door and she had stood with her back to the fireplace, and Edward had stood near the window, and the room was dim, and the portraits of the family looked down from the walls, and the air smelled of old books and wood smoke. Victoria asked him when he had last seen Anna, and he said he had seen her at the house in the summer of nineteen ninety eight, and that she had been a bright and lively girl, and that no one had known she was unhappy. Victoria asked him why he was so certain that Anna had died, and he said that the search party had found her jacket on a branch downstream, and that there had been blood on the rocks, and that the river had taken her, and that everyone had accepted it. Victoria asked him why he had never asked for more, why he had never wondered, why he had never looked again, and Edward said that grief had made them all blind, and that he had been young, and that he had trusted what the family had told him.
Victoria asked him about the key. She asked him why he had gone pale when Lucy had shown the small brass key, and why his hand had shaken when the girl had spoken of the room behind the blue wall. Edward said that he had been surprised, and that the key had meant nothing to him, and that the room had been locked for years, and that no one had thought of it in decades. Victoria watched him as he spoke, and she saw the way his eyes moved toward the door, and the way his fingers drummed against the window frame, and the way he kept glancing at the clock on the mantel, as if he were waiting for something to happen, or for someone to arrive.
She asked him why he wanted the police, and why he wanted the child services people, and why he wanted Lucy out of the house tonight, and not tomorrow, and not after a proper meal and a night of sleep. Edward said that the girl was a stranger, and that strangers brought trouble, and that the family had a name to protect, and that Hale House could not take in a child who had walked in off the street with a story no one could prove. He said that Victoria was letting her heart rule her head, and that she would regret it, and that the girl would turn out to be a fraud, and that the locket was a trick, and that the whole story was a lie told by a clever child.
Victoria listened to all of it, and she said nothing, and when he had finished she asked him one more question, and it was the question that mattered most. She asked him if he had known Anna was alive. Edward went still. His hand stopped drumming. His eyes stopped moving. For a long moment he said nothing at all, and the clock on the mantel ticked in the silence, and the fire crackled, and Victoria waited, and she watched his face change, and she saw the fear move across it like a cloud across the moon.
He said that he had not known, and that he had believed what everyone had believed, and that he had mourned Anna as they all had, and that he had carried her memory for years. He said it too quickly, and too smoothly, and Victoria heard the rehearsal in it, and she knew that he was lying, or that he was hiding something, and she did not press him further, because she did not yet know what the truth was, and she did not want to warn him of what she would do next.
She told him that Lucy would stay the night, and that no one would call the police, and no one would call the child services people, and no one would take the girl out of the house, and that if he called anyone himself she would know, and she would not forgive it. Edward stared at her, and his face flushed, and he said that she was making a grave error, and that the girl would bring ruin to the house, and that she would see it in time, and that he washed his hands of the whole affair. He left the library without another word, and the door closed behind him with a soft click, and Victoria stood alone in the dim room, and she listened to his footsteps fade down the hall. She thought of the key in her pocket, and of the blue wall upstairs, and of the room that had been locked for so long, and she knew that she could not rest until she had opened it and seen what lay inside.
She went to the kitchen then, and she stood in the doorway, and she watched Lucy finish the last of the milk, and she watched Margaret clear the plates, and she saw the small half moon locket lying on the table beside the empty bowl, where Lucy had set it down while she ate, and she felt her own half warm against her skin beneath her satin dress, and she knew that the night was only beginning, and that the house held secrets she had not yet faced, and that the blue wall waited upstairs in the dark.
Victoria Hale left the kitchen and climbed the stairs. The house was quiet now, and the quiet was deep, and it settled over Hale House the way dust settles over furniture that no one has touched in years. The guests had gone. The garden was empty. The lanterns still burned outside, and the long tables still stood under the trees, but the voices were gone, and the music was gone, and the only sound in the house was the soft fall of her own shoes on the wooden stairs and the ticking of the clock in the hall below.
She did not go to her bedroom. She went up past it, up the narrower stairs that led to the oldest wing, where the ceilings were lower and the air was cooler, and where the walls were painted a deep and faded blue. The attic hallway was narrow, and it ran the length of the wing, and it was lit by a single small window at the far end, and the moonlight came through it in a pale slant and fell across the floorboards. Victoria walked slowly down the hallway, and her hand trailed along the wall, and she felt the old paint beneath her fingers, and she stopped at the place where the blue was darkest, and where the wall sounded hollow when it was tapped.
She stood there for a long time, and she did not move, and the memories came back to her the way they always came back when she stood in that hallway, slowly at first and then all at once, like water finding a crack in a dam.
She had been eleven years old, and Anna had been twelve, and it had been a hot summer afternoon, and the two sisters had been sent upstairs to stay out of the way while their father met with men in the library. They had wandered through the oldest wing because it was the one corner of the house where no one ever went, and they had been playing a game of their own making, tapping on the walls and listening for the places where the sound changed. Anna had found it first. She had tapped a stretch of blue wall near the end of the hallway, and the sound had come back hollow, and she had called Victoria over, and the two girls had pressed their ears to the paint and knocked again, and they had heard the emptiness behind it, and they had looked at each other with wide eyes, and they had known that they had found something secret.
It had taken them the rest of the afternoon to find the way in. They had searched the wall with their hands, and they had found a seam in the paint, and a small panel that moved when it was pressed, and behind the panel there had been a door, and behind the door there had been a room. The room was small, and it was full of dust, and it held their grandfather's old papers, stacked in boxes and tied in bundles, and spread across a desk that stood under a narrow window. The papers were yellow with age, and they smelled of ink and damp, and some of them were written in a hand that neither girl recognized, and some of them bore seals and stamps, and Anna had lifted one and read the first lines aloud, and Victoria had told her to put it down, and Anna had laughed, and she had said that the room was theirs now, and that it would be their secret, and that no one else in the house knew it was there.
They had gone back to the room many times that summer, and they had sat on the floor among the papers, and they had read what they could understand, and they had invented stories for what they could not, and they had hidden small treasures there, a ribbon, a button, a smooth stone from the garden, and they had sworn to each other that they would never tell anyone, and they had sealed the promise with the locket, each sister wearing one half of the silver moon, and they had believed that the locket would keep them together forever.
Their father had caught them in the autumn. He had come up the stairs without a sound, and he had found the panel open, and he had found the two girls sitting on the floor of the secret room with papers spread around them, and his face had gone white, and then red, and he had shouted at them in a voice neither girl had ever heard from him before. He had ordered them out of the room, and he had locked the door, and he had taken the key away, and he had forbidden them ever to return, and he had said that the room was not a place for children, and that the papers were not theirs to read, and that if either of them spoke of the room again there would be consequences neither of them could imagine.
Victoria had obeyed him, because she had been eleven, and because she had been afraid. Anna had not obeyed him, not in her heart. Anna had watched their father, and she had learned where he kept the key, and one night she had taken it from his desk while he slept, and she had hidden it in the pocket of her coat, and she had shown it to Victoria in the garden the next morning, and she had said that the key was theirs now, and that the room was still theirs, and that their father could lock a door but he could not lock away what they knew.
That had been the last summer before Anna vanished. The winter that followed was the longest winter Victoria had ever known. The house went quiet, and the garden went bare, and the river ran cold and grey beyond the trees, and Victoria wore her half of the locket under her dresses, and she touched it whenever she was afraid, and she told no one about the room, and she told no one about the key, because Anna had taken the key with her when she went away, and Victoria did not know where it was, and she believed she would never see it again. Her father never spoke of the room, and he never spoke of the papers, and he locked the door to the oldest wing some nights, and he walked the halls as if he were listening for something, and Victoria learned not to ask him questions, because his answers were always short, and his eyes were always cold, and the house learned to be silent around him. The years passed, and Victoria grew up, and she took over Hale House, and she ran it for twenty years, and she kept the locket against her skin through every season, and she never went back to the blue wall, and she never tried the door, because she believed the room was empty of everything but dust and old papers, and because opening it would have meant remembering Anna alive, and remembering hurt more than forgetting. The next summer, when Anna was twelve, their father had said there had been an accident near the river, and the search party had found her jacket on a branch downstream, and there had been blood on the rocks, and no one had ever found her body, and the house had gone quiet, and Victoria had worn her half of the locket against her skin, and she had never taken it off, not once, not in twenty eight years, and she had never gone back to the blue wall, and she had never spoken of the room again, because the room belonged to a time when Anna had been alive, and going back to it had felt like opening a wound that had never healed.