Chapter 16

16

Until Dr. Henson vanished, I hadn't taken much of an interest in my employer. She was the woman in the house, the professor, the one writing a book. A little supercilious, not terribly interested in teenagers.

A search told me she was born and raised in Clement Bay. Attended Syracuse, got her master's from Boston College, her PhD from Columbia University. She taught at Vassar, then Boston College, then Syracuse. She wrote papers and articles about the fascist movement, the Works Progress Administration, and a lot about the Nazi party in America—Nazi summer camps, Nazi rallies in New York, at Madison Square Garden...

She'd chosen to come back here, to the place where she was from, to help manage a house built by someone she clearly didn't like. Because of the yoga mat, I was the only person who could establish when she was still alive.

Eventually, my brain spun out from going down rabbit holes about terrible things. I don't remember falling asleep. I was only aware that my arm was being shaken.

"Hey..."

I peeled my eyes open and found that Riki was squatting next to my bed.

"Marlowe, wake up," she whispered. "I need you to do something with me."

I blinked. I was still holding my phone. Riki was tousled, her hair perfectly unruly, her cropped faded black T-shirt hanging just so over her midriff. She grabbed my cargo shorts from the chair where I'd left them and tossed them to me.

"Get dressed," she whispered.

"What time is it?" I asked, dragging the shorts under the blanket and pulling them on.

She flashed her phone in reply. It was 3:57 in the morning.

"What are we..."

She put her finger to her lips and signaled that I should follow her. This was when I noticed she was holding a bucket.

We crept out of the playhouse, me on actual tiptoe, like I was in a cartoon. I've never done much sneaking in my life. We were out on the lawn, under the velvet dark of the night sky, the grass slick with dew and the river softly hissing around us. She went straight up the front steps of Morning House, which was stern and dark and clearly didn't approve of what we were doing. She paused on the stone front porch to finally speak to me.

"I need your help with something," she said.

"Sure," I said. "What? Whatever... what?"

"Dr. Henson has a lot of research materials in her room. She's done work on the Ralstons for years for her book. And look... if she's missing and her board is floating out there on the river, that doesn't seem good. I think... I think she's not okay. If something happened to her, they'll probably take her stuff off the island—like, just box it up and send it away. We need to preserve what she did."

"What?"

Riki sighed in frustration, but softly.

"I know how much work she's put into getting all her research materials. Years and years of searching and talking to people and digging through archives, and if something has happened—what if that all ends up in some police evidence room? Or in some closet somewhere? It's not right. So we need to go and record it, for safekeeping. And I need your help. The others... we have issues. But I thought you would help me."

Did I mention that her hair was tousled just so? And her eyes—luminous, big and brown. She needed me. The girl with the big brown eyes and the spooky shit socks needed me.

Also, it was 3:57 in the morning. I wouldn't call that prime decision-making time.

"What...," I added as coyly as I could muster with my groggy voice, "is the bucket for?"

We went in through the front door, Riki opening it. The house was a dark, sleeping beast. She was more familiar with walking around it during the night, so I followed. As we went past, the Ralstons seemed to peer out at us judgmentally from their frames in the display case.

"Where are the cops?" I asked.

"They're staying on their boat for the night. No one's in the house but me."

I had the feeling that we couldn't be somewhere that big without something else being alive in there. Whatever was in Riki's bucket clanked around as we went up the steps.

"So you need my help—with what?"

"They locked the door," she said. "I need your help to get in."

"That seems... illegal?"

"What's illegal about it? Going into one of the bedrooms of the building we work in and you give tours of and I run a shop out of is not illegal. And I'm not going to take the stuff. I'm just going to take pictures so that it isn't lost."

She sounded so sure that I decided I believed her. It was probably illegal, though. Maybe? But probably in the way that you could argue that we didn't know was illegal, because I definitely didn't know. Did you have to know that something was illegal to get in trouble?

Look, I'll admit it. I wanted to be convinced.

"No one is going to know," she said. "Or care. They care if she's okay or not. They don't care if I see her notes about menus served here in 1932."

"So we're just going to go in, take pictures of research, and leave?"

"That's it."

That sounded all right.

"How are we going to get in if the door is locked? Do you have a key to her room?"

"There's another way in."

We went past Dr. Henson's room, up to the floor above. We stopped in an empty room that seemed to be above Dr. Henson's.

"Where's the passage?"

I looked around at the walls, trying to work out which panel we would push to reveal a staircase that went down to that room. I resented that no one had shown this to me yet.

"What passage?"

"You said there's another way in."

"There is," she said.

She pointed out the window to Dr. Henson's balcony, which was beneath us. Except Dr. Henson's balcony wasn't directly underneath—it was a few feet over to the left. But between us at this window and that balcony was a solid five feet of empty space and a long drop.

"But how do we get from here to there?"

"We do this..." She held up an emergency fire ladder. "This is the one from my room," she said. "No one will miss it."

Unfolding it, she tied the last rung of the rope ladder to the handle of the bucket, which, along with the ladder, had rocks in it.

"I'll swing this over to that balcony," she said, "and climb over."

"Yeah, I don't think that's going to work. That's not enough weight."

"It doesn't have to be enough weight, just some weight. It's not that far."

Riki unfurled the top of the ladder, grabbing the loose straps to secure them. The windows had been outfitted with firm handle grips for this purpose. She looped them through and tied them four times, then tugged and tested them. She leaned out the window and swung the bucket to Dr. Henson's balcony. The sound was about as loud as a shelf full of pots and pans landing on a pile of cymbals, and I reflexively ducked to the ground and put my hands over my head in surrender.

"It's fine," Riki said. "Marlowe, it's fine."

I tried to release the breath I was holding, but that wasn't happening anytime soon, because Riki was tossing the ladder slack over to the balcony and giving it a shake in preparation for climbing.

"What if the balcony door is locked?" I asked.

"Why would it be? Who's going to get in? It's not like anyone would use a rope ladder and swing down from the balcony above to try to get in."

She said this as she was backing out the window, hands firmly clawing the ladder. As expected, her weight caused the slack of the ladder to slip over the edge, and the ladder instantly flipped. She had wrapped her arms and legs around it, winding herself in it, so she was upside down but still secure enough. Somehow she skittered down a rung, then another, getting to the point where her knees were by the rail. She used the rail to pull herself closer, then with a final, nauseating lurch, dropped herself onto the balcony.

"See?" she said, pretending she was not freaked out at all.

"I'm not doing that," I said.

"Of course you aren't. I'll unlock the door."

I fought back nausea and ran down the steps, where Riki was waiting for me, door wide. She was wearing, I noticed, a pair of vinyl cleaning gloves and extending a pair in my direction.

"Gloves?" I said.

"There are boxes of them all over the place."

"But why are you wearing them? This isn't illegal, right?"

"It doesn't hurt to wear them," she said.

This didn't fill me with confidence, but she wasn't wrong. I put on the gloves.

Riki pulled the heavier curtain over the balcony doors and switched on the overhead light. I was in Dr. Henson's room for the third time in a day.

"So we're preserving her work," I said. "Which means..."

"I'll do the documents on the desk. Have a look around to see if she has more research stuff anywhere."

"What does research stuff look like?"

"Documents. Boxes. Folders. Research. "

She shook her head, then turned to the desk and began sifting through the papers there. I spun in place, trying to see if there was anything that screamed of being research material. She had loads of books. I took a picture of those, in case that mattered, or maybe just to do something.

"I don't see anything..."

"Check the wardrobe," she said, looking over her shoulder.

Now I felt like I was doing something wrong. I couldn't have explained what. I wasn't trying to take anything from Dr. Henson, or damage anything. I was here to help, really. But then again, I had bad luck being in other people's places. I balled my hands into fists, then opened the wardrobe.

I found what I would expect to find in there—half a Chico's, a fancy tartan wool wrap, shelves full of neatly folded yoga clothes, two more pairs of Hokas, rain boots, a box full of wires and chargers, and a rolled yoga mat. No boxes marked RESEARCH!

I was about to close the door when I had a second look. That was the yoga mat she had shown me, the one she kept upstairs. Why was it here? Maybe she had two. She seemed like the kind of person who did enough yoga to warrant two yoga mats.

Over by the desk, Riki was snapping pictures.

"Help me with this?" she said. "There's this whole pile to do."

She handed me a stack of photocopied documents. They were all clearly old. Some looked legal. There were some handwritten ones that I could barely make out. I took pictures of them all.

"Okay," Riki said as she finished her pile. She leaned over and examined the laptop. "Almost done with this too."

"With what?"

"Her hard drive. That's where most of her stuff is."

"You copied her hard drive?"

"I uploaded it," she said. "Because I'm trying to make sure we protect all of it."

"And what are we doing this for again?" I asked. It's important to ask these questions well, well after you've broken into the place and have filled your phone with evidence that you were there.

"I don't know. The university? Or the museum in town? Her family?"

"Wouldn't her family get this anyway?"

Seriously, I had not taken the time to go through this logically. Four in the morning. That's when you should ask me to do stuff, especially if you are a goth girl with remnants of smudged eyeliner. Apparently, I'll follow you right to hell.

"Like I said," Riki replied, barely hiding her annoyance, "in case the cops sit on it or lose it."

It was hard to imagine Dr. Henson's stuff getting lost in the vast evidence lockers of Clement Bay, New York, home of fudge and Jet Skis. But I was here, and again, this was not illegal . I was a staff member. Maybe this was my duty.

I would go with that.

"Okay," Riki said, closing the laptop. "Time to leave."

She went out on the balcony and got the bucket. Then she turned out the light and walked with me toward the door. I went out into the hallway, but she remained inside. She handed me the bucket.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Meet me on the balcony under this one. Bring the ladder that's in the closet next to the living room."

"Wait, what?"

"I have to lock this door behind you. They'll notice if it's open."

"Are you taking that ladder from upstairs?"

"No," she said.

"Then..."

She indicated I should come back inside so she could show me the thing she had planned on not letting me see. She had untied the bucket from the rope ladder and tossed the ladder over the side of the balcony. It still hung free from the upstairs window.

I didn't see how this was a solution.

Riki looked around for a moment, finally getting on the floor and looking under the bed. She emerged with another rope ladder box. She tied the loose ends of the new ladder to two of the stone pillars of the balcony.

" We're not doing anything illegal ," I reminded her. "We can use the door."

"It'll be fine. This isn't that far off the ground. The ladder will reach."

Riki shuffled me in the direction of the door, and then out of it. I heard the snick of the lock.

I was alone in the vastness of the house. For the first time since I'd been here, I felt the presence of the Ralstons. They were somewhere in this air, in the squeak of the floorboards. I was a stranger in their house, a stranger with a bucket with rocks in it. Meanwhile, another stranger was outside, climbing like a spider, invading their windows and balconies.

Maybe this house didn't like interlopers. Maybe this wasn't a well house. Maybe it had a sickness that killed children and teenagers, that caused its makers to run from it. The ring of faces in the ceiling dome was dimly visible, but I could tell that their expressions weren't happy. I hurried outside into the enveloping dark, to find Riki already on the ground. The ladder swung from the balcony above her.

"Now we just have to take that down," she said. "I cut the top parts of the rope through halfway before we started, so it was strong enough to let me get down but would break if we pull on it hard enough."

I was out of words for Riki and her plan. I grabbed the ladder with her and we pulled with all our might, our heels cutting into the grass, sliding, swearing.

"It's not working," she said, putting her hands on her hips as she caught her breath.

"Did you really think it would?"

"Kind of," she said. "Or that it would break when I was halfway down. Halfway wouldn't be too bad."

"Oh my god."

"Look, all we need to do is cut it. The room below is Unity's. We'll get something long with an edge on it. There are long poles in one of the cabinets up here used to paint the ceilings. We'll get one of those and put a knife on it."

I was too far in to get out.

It took a bit of time to find the cabinet with the painting supplies, but we finally located it. We went down to the kitchen for the sharpest knife we could find. A search around the storage room for some duct tape was unsuccessful. We did find some twine, so we tied the knife to the end of the pole, like we were fashioning weapons to have some kind of battle. We climbed the grand Morning House stairs with our weird spear and entered Unity Ralston's pristine bedroom, with its lace screen and elaborate desk. Riki opened up the window and peered up and over to the balcony.

We had opened the telescoping pole to its longest length, which was about twenty feet. That is a ridiculously long way to try to maneuver a knife in the dark. I held the flashlight as Riki poked and sawed and swore (I also kept an eye on Riki, who was leaning farther out the window than she should have been). This knot was not giving up without a fight. Riki retracted the pole and sagged with exhaustion.

"Persist," she said, possibly to herself.

"Let me try," I said.

I took the long pole and leaned from the window. The ladder was dangling at an angle from the balcony. This was a stupid task, but not an impossible one. I could see the knot, and I didn't need the full length of the pole to reach it. I hacked at the knot until my neck was sore from looking up. And then, against all odds, the rope gave and the ladder tumbled to the ground.

We made a last circuit of the house, removing all the evidence of what we had done—the first rope ladder, the pole, the knife—everything was put back as it was. As we came down the steps, the dome above us began to glow in the first morning light. I sat down on the floor of the great hall and looked up at it. I could sense every dust mote, smell every floorboard waking up, expanding gently in the heat and releasing its ancient odors of forest and polish.

Riki dropped down next to me. "That is some locked room mystery shit we just pulled off," she said, her lips twisting ever so slightly into a grin.

"You have insane plans," I said.

"You did it too, though."

"That's because I also have bad plans."

"We make a good team."

Have you ever seen a goth girl in pure, soft sunlight? It rained down over Riki, saturating her oversized black T-shirt and shorts. I noticed for the first time the tiny glimmer of a nose stud. A new note had entered the aromas.

"Do you wear perfume?" I asked.

"No. It's Mysore Sandal Soap. My grandma always brings it to us from Chennai when she visits. They sell it here, but she's committed to making sure we always have about six thousand bars. It's good, though. I like the smell. Chennai has the best street food in the world. We go every few years and I eat dosa and kulfi until I get sick. Kulfi is like ice cream, but way better. It's thicker. You get a cream one, a pistachio one... you have another dosa, which is a super thin lentil pancake. My favorite ones are filled with potatoes, and you have a cup of sambal on the side."

Riki tipped back her head and imagined her perfect street food meal. Had she moved closer to me? Had I moved closer to her? I honestly couldn't tell you, but the space between us had lessened by a solid three inches.

I felt the tingle. It wasn't exactly like the night of the candle. Akilah was not here. But something sizzled inside me, and I was suddenly aware of my lips, of the air between us, of a lull in conversation.

Was this about to happen? Was I about to kiss Riki, or was she going to kiss me, or were we going to move at the same time, here, under the dome of light with thoughts of crispy pancakes full of potatoes on our brains? Were we just hungry?

"I'm..." She lingered on that statement. "... going back to bed."

She gave me a light pat on the shoulder as she rose and ascended the steps, back to her tower.