“Do you remember this place? When you first came here?” he says out of nowhere, his eyes leveling.
“Yeah...why are you asking me that?” From down the hallway, I hear the loud clomping of Raelean’s heels on the stairs. An urgency kicks in my chest as our time together is slipping through my fingers like sand.
Rook turns and steps backward toward the sliver of broken window at the top of the root cellar. A panicked desperation floods me, causes me to step forward. I don’t want him to go. His eyes clip to the door, then back to me. “Adaire wants you to remember,” he says. Rook drops back into the dark as Raelean walks in.
“Girl, you’ve gotta see this.” Raelean’s voice injects itself into the room, just as Rook’s form fades to black and feathers unfold. “Holy shit!” Raelean ducks as the crow flaps and flutters over our heads, then out the cracked window. She stumbles against the worktable, scattering its contents. The tin canister she’s carrying gets knocked from her hands and rolls across the floor. “What the hell was that?” She eyes the window Rook just escaped through.
“I—I think it was a crow.” Worried, I watch her face, trying to see if she saw more than a bird. “Its nest must have been in the window.”
“That scared the bejesus out of me.” She rights herself, a hand pressed against her bosom like she’s recovering from a heart attack. “Good lord, girl, do you always chat it up with wildlife?”
“What? I wasn’t...” I squat down to pick up the notebooks she knocked over, trying to avoid the curiosity in her eyes. A stingy, desperate need to keep him a secret—my secret—riles up inside me. It’s one thing for people to believe you can talk the death out of the dying, but start telling them you know a man who is sometimes a crow...that’s too big a leap. It was for Adaire.
“I heard you talking to someone—unless you were talking to yourself?” She pops a questioning brow, like maybe she’s misjudged my sanity.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I was just reading aloud.” I flap one of the notebooks I retrieve from the floor. Scraps of paper fall from between the pages and flutter to the ground. A photo lands face up. I tilt it toward the light. It’s a picture of my mom. She’s younger, maybe early teens. She stands next to a little girl, holding her hand. They wear shapeless shift dresses with a drop waist. My mother’s is navy with a white collar and sleeve trim. Reminds me of the clothes they wore on old episodes of Laugh-In. But it’s the protective way my mother clutches the Bible to her chest that feels so weird to see. My mother looks so...wholesome, compared to the woman I grew up knowing—the handful of times she bothered to be my mother. The little girl has an unsettling gaze, in contrast with the smile on her face. She’s not someone I know.
I flip it over to the back. “‘CFI Baptist Conference, me and Gabby Newsome,’” I read what my mother wrote on the back.
“Holy shit.” Raelean snatches the picture from me. “Is that crazy Gabby?” She leans in to get a better look.
“You know her?” I stand and take the photo back.
“I’ve heard of her. How have you not? She’s the sister that lives on the third floor of the Rutledge mansion. I’ve seen her up in the window before, standing there like a damn ghost. They say she’s got more than a few screws loose.”
“Stone Rutledge has a sister?” I ask, confused.
She waves a dismissive hand. “No, his wife’s younger sister. You know Becky, out at the Watering Hole? Last year, she worked at the big house—and damn, if they don’t get paid a fortune to keep quiet about what goes on there.” Raelean picks up the tin that rolled across the floor. “They brought Gabby home after she’d been ‘abroad’ for a few years—I think she was locked up in a looney hospital. Becky says Gabby is always running away. A few months back she went streaking, buck naked down the hill into Clementine’s.”
“That was her? I heard about that, but someone said it was one of the bus tourists.”
“A lie the family used to cover it up. It’s impossible for the staff to keep tabs on her. They aren’t even allowed in her private quarters. They don’t want anyone to know anything about her. Rumor has it she offed her pet canary at Christmas dinner last winter. Fine china, big-ass candelabra kind of feast.” Raelean fans her hands wide. “Ripped its head right off. The rest of the family politely smiled and continued to eat their Christmas ham, like decapitating pets was an ordinary thing.”
“Jesus.” I study the picture again. They look happy, standing formally next to each other in front of a group of kids. What made my mom go from a church mouse on the honor roll to an absentee parent with an insatiable wanderlust that I’ve always known? It’s like I was born and a switch inside her flipped.
“Maybe. Look what I found upstairs.” Raelean sets down a faded brown button tin with an Easter lily on the front. “It was hidden in the top of a closet. Don’t ask me how I managed to get it down, almost broke my neck. Get a load of this...” She peels off the tin lid, and inside is a single piece of paper. I recognize Adaire’s chicken-scrawled handwriting immediately.
If you find this, then I was right.
The riddled tongue will guide you to see.
Ask her about the droplet of rain.
“It’s Adaire’s handwriting,” I say as I pick up the piece of paper.
“Oh, wow. Really?” Raelean leans on the workbench, getting a better look. “Why couldn’t she just say ‘here’s everything you need to know, now go clear this whole mess up?’”
“Because there was nothing to see yet. Hell, she couldn’t see clearly around her own death. I don’t think she knew Stone would die, or Ellis for that matter, or if she did, she didn’t tell me. She just said I’d need to be ‘set free.’ And it seems she learned something about why.”
“Huh.” Raelean works a piece of gum between her jaws, sifting through the items on the table like leftovers at a garage sale.
“I don’t know. Maybe Adaire was scared to tell me what she found out,” I say absentmindedly. Remember this place. Remember when you first came here. That’s what Rook said. “But whatever she figured out has something to do with my mother, the first time I came here was with her. Something about this house—and this little girl—” I flap the picture “—led Adaire here. This Gabby knew my mother, maybe knows more.”
“Hey, look at this,” Raelean says. “It fits.” She holds the faded button tin over a spot devoid of dust on the workbench. “It matches up exactly.” She sets the tin down to show me, then picks it up. Down again, up again. “What do you think it means?”
“It was moved.” I state the obvious. “Adaire moved it on purpose.” A thought occurs to me. “Where did you say you found this tin again?”
“The bedroom with those paper-thin curtains. Freaking room has a creepy vibe if you ask me.”
It’s the room where the woman gave birth—misbirth—to those twin babies. Adaire is the only one I’ve ever told about that horrible night. What if those babies’ deaths are what gets me in trouble?
“Why did she move it?” Raelean knocks the dust off her fingers.
“The better question... What was in it before? Whatever was here, Adaire thought it important for me to find.”
Raelean studies the lone note in the empty tin. “You think whatever it was will clear your name?”
“Maybe. I hope so. What do you think she means by this—the riddled tongue will guide you to see?” I swirl the phrase around in my mind: riddled tongue, riddled, tongue. “What if she’s talking about her?” I point to the picture.
Raelean quirks her head. “Gabby?”
“Yeah, I think maybe it could be.” The idea of this feeling more right as I consider it. “She has to be the riddled tongue Adaire’s referring to. Don’t you think?” I look to Raelean for confirmation that I’m on the right track.
“Maybe.” Raelean shrugs. “If she’s as crazy as they say she is, I bet she’s full of nonsense. My nana had dementia and she was always talking in circles. A riddled tongue, so to speak.”
“Stop calling her crazy, we don’t even know her.”
Raelean sighs, nodding in agreement.
