The Lost Girls (16 page)

Mr. Evans was the grandson of Dafydd Evans, one of Williamsburg's founding fathers. He was also a member of the Elks Club and the Williamsburg Chamber of Commerce. He is survived by his wife, Eleanor, and his daugh
ters, Lilith, 13, and Lucy, 12. No plans for a funeral service have been announced.

There was one final paper, a piece of thick cream stationery with a single sentence written in the now-familiar hand:

Let the wicked be ashamed,

and let them be silent in the grave.

Justine held the papers as though they might disintegrate. The books at her feet spoke differently now. They were no longer the living record of a curious mind; they were the hollow echoes of a man doomed to the worst of tragedies: his child, his home, his livelihood, all lost. And his life, taken by his own hand. “We make our own choices.” His words, so exuberant in the pages of Kant, seemed like an epitaph now.

The day Lucy told her about the girl in the painting, that summer Justine and Maurie had lived here, Justine had asked what she thought happened to her. Lucy smiled, but it was a sad smile. “I used to pretend she was living somewhere safe,” she said. “That she was happy.” Then she shrugged her shoulders in her thin blouse. “But she's dead, of course.” Her voice casual, certain.

Justine put the papers back in the envelope and set the envelope on top of the stack of books. She pulled the box marked
PHOTOGRAPHS
from the pile in the back and hauled it up the stairs to the kitchen. Then she went to the living room. The girls' eyes were dull from the television. “I have something to show you.”

They shuffled in, Angela obedient, Melanie reluctant, already prepared to be bored. Justine waited until they sat at the table, then opened the box. Dust puffed into the air, making her sneeze. It was filled with leather photo albums.

“These are pictures of our ancestors,” she said. “I've never
known what they looked like, or even what their names were. I think we should find out.” She opened the top album and turned it so Melanie and Angela could see.

Its pages were thick vellum with oval cutouts. Below each black-and-white portrait was the subject's name in Victorian script: “Sarah Pugh Evans, 1881,” “William Evans, 1883,” “Dafydd Evans, 1890.” Justine scanned the unsmiling faces. Although most had dark hair like Melanie and a few had fair curls like Angela and herself, she saw no obvious likenesses. Yet something snatched at her eye, and as she reached the end of the book she realized what it was. They were all fragile of frame, like her and her daughters. Their collarbones were fine beneath high-necked blouses, and their hands were dainty in their laps. In the dark rooms where they posed in formal black, their skin as white as chalk, they looked like china dolls, easily shattered. It was a legacy of frailty.

“Who are they?” Melanie asked.

“I don't know. Great-great-grandparents, maybe?” Justine closed the book. The next one was newer and filled with snapshots held in place by yellowing tape. Now Justine smiled. “These are pictures of Aunt Lucy and Grandma Lilith.” She pointed to a photo of two girls sitting on a set of porch steps, a baby on the older girl's lap.
Lilith, Lucy, and Emily, 1931
said the caption. The girls wore dresses and white socks above black Mary Janes and the baby was swaddled in white from her lace hat to the hem of her crinolined dress. The smaller girl's hair was a tuffet of curls as in the photograph upstairs, but her face was younger, about the same age Angela was now.

“She looks like you, doesn't she?” Justine said to Angela. As her daughter frowned she added, “Of course, you're much prettier.”

Melanie tilted her head. “I don't think she looks like her.”

Just then the doorbell rang. Justine thought about ignoring it, but it was obvious they were home. She wiped the dust from her hands. “Wait here.”

Matthew Miller stood on the porch. His boots were clumped with snow and his coat was covered in it. Behind him, through the screened porch windows, the storm was a wall of white. Justine couldn't tell how much snow had already fallen, but the wind raged and it was clearly going to snow for the rest of the day and all through the night. She really should have stopped at the Safeway.

“I wanted to make sure you were all right. In the storm.” Deep lines ran from the old man's hawkish nose to the sides of his mouth. His cheeks sagged into jowls, and his eyebrows bristled almost comically, snowflakes clinging to them.

“We're okay.” Justine tightened her hand on the doorknob, planning to thank him and close the door. Then she thought of him walking back to the lodge, a stooped black figure leaning into the wind and whirling snow, and she found herself saying, “We have tea. Would you like some?” She regretted it immediately, and willed him to decline. But he stomped the snow off his boots and stepped inside, hanging his coat in the closet as though he'd done it many times. Which he probably had. How many years had he, his brother, Lucy, and Lilith lived out here, just the four of them?

He took up a lot of room in the small kitchen. Without his coat, his shoulders were broad and his arms were wiry and strong. Angela and Melanie looked at him and he stared back in the intense way he'd stared at them in the car, and at the top of the stairs, the day they'd arrived. Justine hadn't liked it then, and she didn't like it now. The noise of the television drifted in from the living room. “Angie, go turn off the TV,” she said, and as Angela scurried away she fought the urge to send Melanie after her. He was just an old man, and he'd walked through a blizzard to check on them.

She put the water on and brought two of Lucy's delicate cups and saucers to the table along with the tin of tea bags. She went to move the photo album, but he had his hand on the picture of Lilith, Lucy, and Emily on the porch. Gently, he traced their faces with one square-tipped finger. In the softening of his craggy features
Justine thought she saw something of the young man he'd once been.

“You knew them then,” she observed.

“You look like her,” he said to Melanie.

Melanie leaned closer. Lilith's image was blurred, by the lens or by time. “She does have the same color hair,” Justine said.

“Not her.” Matthew touched the face beneath the fair curls. “Different hair. But she has her face.”

Lucy was smiling a wide smile, and for this alone Justine thought she bore no resemblance to Melanie. Beside her the baby sat like a doll on Lilith's lap, her features indecipherable between the lace of her bonnet and the froth of her collar, as though she'd been erased. “Were you here the summer Emily disappeared?” Justine asked.

“Who's Emily?” Angela had come back into the room. Now she leaned against Justine, looking at the picture.

“The baby. She disappeared one summer when they were here at the lake.”

“She ran away in the night,” Matthew said. “She got lost in the woods.”

Angela's mouth dropped open. “In the woods?”

Justine smoothed her hair. “It was a long time ago.”

“What was she like?” Melanie asked.

Matthew met her level gaze with one of his own. “She was the favorite.”

Justine thought that was strange—both that he would know it, and that it would be the first thing he would say to describe the missing girl. Melanie shook her head. “Not Emily. Lucy.”

Matthew paused again. Justine wondered if all of his conversations were this deliberate. At last he said, “She was loyal.”

“Loyal?”

The longest pause yet. “Lilith had a baby, and the father died in the war. She couldn't go anywhere after that. A single mother,
unmarried. In those days, that's how it was. So Lucy stayed here with her.”

Melanie considered him. Then she nodded. “That was cool of her.”

“Yes.” Matthew smiled. “She was cool.”

Melanie's interest in Lucy pleased Justine. The sense of belonging to a family, even one with a tragic history, was the one good thing she'd found here. The kettle whistled, and Justine filled their cups. “How long do you think the storm is going to last?”

“All night. Tomorrow, too. Do you have what you need?”

She glanced at the pantry door. “We can get by if it's just for a couple of days.”

“When it stops I'll plow a path across the lake.”

“When will they plow the road? I don't think our car can drive on the ice.”

“Lucy's can.”

Justine didn't know where the keys to the Subaru were, or whether it would even start after all this time. She chewed her lip. Matthew said, “I can plow the road for you.”

“Thank you.” She'd misjudged him, she decided. He was odd, with his quiet manner and his silences. But Lucy had lived here for years with no other company—no doubt she'd depended on him through the long winters. Surely Justine and her daughters could do the same. Until they left, she reminded herself.

They finished their tea, talking more about the weather, which Justine had learned long ago was something you could talk about with anyone, anywhere. What she learned from Matthew about northern Minnesota winters made her feel even better about her decision to leave. When they were done, Justine walked him to the door. He told her to let him know if they needed anything. “You'll find a shovel in the basement,” he said, and as he opened the porch door Justine remembered the shovel she'd seen by the washer. He
had put it there, probably sometime in the past two days, while they'd been in town. Which meant he'd kept a copy of the house key he'd given her, and he'd used it to let himself into the house. Perhaps more than once. She rubbed her arms as she watched him walk down the steps and disappear into the storm.

“Can I turn the television back on?” Angela asked.

Justine closed the door. “Go ahead.” So much for interesting her children in their ancestors. But when she went back to the kitchen Melanie was turning the pages of the photo album. Her face was open with interest—and the rarest of invitations.

“There's more pictures of them.”

Justine kept her face composed, as if Melanie were a horse that might startle. She sat down, careful not to touch her arm, and together they looked through black-and-white windows at two little girls who lived in a Victorian house and celebrated Christmases and birthdays and first-days-of-school with the pale woman and the philosopher who were their parents, and the baby sister who would turn into a sober-eyed child and disappear.

That night Justine brought the box of Emily stories into her daughters' bedroom. “These are stories Aunt Lucy wrote. I thought it might be nice to read one. As a bedtime story.” She wasn't going to say anything about Melanie reading one of the books last night. Melanie didn't say anything either, but she turned onto her side and rested her head on her hand in a listening posture, so Justine began to read.

She picked the story in the oldest book and the youngest hand, because it was a sort of origin story for all the others. In it Emily was a princess who lived in a castle with her parents, and she was happy. As she grew, word of her beauty spread far and wide, and the queen feared the kings of the neighboring lands would steal her away for their sons to marry. So on Emily's sixth birthday the
queen sent her to live in a cottage deep in the royal forest, where she would be safe. But although the cottage was cozy and the queen visited often, the little princess was very lonely.

Then one day, a prince stumbled upon her secret home. Taken by her beauty, he chased her so far into the forest that she became lost. As darkness fell, she sank onto a bed of moss and began to cry. The forest creatures gathered around: deer and chipmunk, fragile sparrows and shy foxes. The bravest of them, the mouse Mimsy, stepped forward and, to Emily's astonishment, began to speak. She said Emily had entered an enchanted forest, where fairies lived and all the animals could talk. Emily asked if Mimsy could help her find the way back to her cottage, but Mimsy shook her head sadly. No one who entered the enchanted forest could ever leave.
This is your home now,
she said,
but don't be afraid, for we will keep you company.
And Emily dried her tears, for she knew she wouldn't be lonely anymore.

Justine's voice started thin, but it gathered strength as she read. Angela and Melanie listened without moving. Even the air in the house was still. It caught her words and held them as if they were tufts of milkweed.

“I liked it,” Angela said when she was done. She looked so small beneath the quilt. Before she could stop herself Justine pictured her lost and alone in the forest—the real forest, not the fantasy of Lucy's story—and saw again the ragged pile of bones and cloth she'd imagined when she first read the books.

“I did, too,” she made herself say. She brushed a curl from Angela's forehead.

“Is it about her sister?” Melanie asked. “The one who disappeared?”

Justine looked at her in surprise. “Yes.”

“Are all of them about her?”

“I think so.”

“That painting in the living room. Is that her, too?”

“Yes.” Melanie looked thoughtful, and Justine felt again the tenuous connection they'd shared when they looked through the photo albums. Though they'd declined Lucy's invitation to live here, she thought Lucy would be pleased to know they were reading the stories she'd written about the little sister she'd loved.

“Can we read another?” Angela said.

“Tomorrow night.” Justine slid the book in among its companions and put the box beside the girls' dresser. She would read a story to them every night, she resolved, and they'd take the notebooks with them when they left. This had been the best half hour she'd spent with her daughters in years.

When she closed their door she stood for a moment on the landing. The overhead light flickered; there must be a short in the wiring, or maybe it was the storm. A web of fine cracks lined the plaster around it like the glazing on a ceramic plate. She went to the door opposite and opened it. The little room smelled old and shut in, but when she turned on the light the lavender walls bloomed. The twin bed had the same white quilt she remembered. Above it hung a print of a young woman in a long white dress walking across a golden field, a straw hat in her hand. Justine remembered that, too, just as she remembered the crocheted curtains on the window, the plain dresser, and the rag rug on the floor. She remembered this room better than any other room she'd slept in as a girl.