“Find yourself? How many of you are there?”
She glared at him. “I felt kind of bad about bringing up Ralph Howell yesterday after I swore I wouldn’t. I don’t feel bad anymore.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Good. Now give me my rat back.”
“Goodbye, Fritz,” he said and relinquished him, she noticed, a little reluctantly. “I need to see everything you have on Shannon.”
“It’s all in the dining room. I’ll get the coffee.”
Emilie went into the kitchen and took two large white mugs from the cabinet. As she was adding cream and sugar to hers, she heard piano music. Live piano music.
They had an old upright piano, but Emilie rarely thought about it. Her mother had treated it like a second mantel, perfect for flower vases and picture frames. But Jeremy had opened the fallboard and was playing a few stray notes of some piece she didn’t recognize. It sounded like a spring storm to her—willows swaying in the wind, clouds racing across the sky, the waking earth eagerly drinking the dark gray rain…
His fingers paused on the keys, and he looked up at her as she stood in the doorway staring.
“Your piano is out of tune.”
“Neither of us played. It was Grandma’s. You’re good.”
“I’m crap compared to Mum. She was a classically trained pianist,” he said. “Concert level. Music professor at WVU. I never had to clean my room or do the dishes. All she ever asked of me was to get good grades and practice piano one hour a day.”
“Single mother?”
“Exactly.”
“Same.”
She gave him his mug, and they clinked them together in tribute to the women who’d spoiled them rotten.
“So…you find missing girls and play piano and you can guess where missing necklaces are…and…anything else I should know about? Olympic gymnast, maybe? Sew your own clothes? Parkour?”
“I ride horses. I can sword-fight. Fairly good at archery.”
“Sword fighting. Okay. You are unreal.”
“I had a strange upbringing,” he said.
“Apparently.”
“Shannon’s file?”
“Right, right.” Still dazed, she went to the sideboard and opened the front doors to where she’d stored her sister’s file and a large bankers box. She brought it all to the table and set it out.
He went for the folder she’d cobbled together from the copies of her sister’s police file and news articles she’d gotten through the library. The detective she’d spoken to had even sent her copies of photographs of her sister.
Jeremy ignored the police reports but arrayed the photographs in front of him on the table.
“I wish I looked like her.” Emilie leaned over his shoulder. “We have the same mother, but she got the cool nose.”
She pointed at a photograph of Shannon Yates and another girl holding small trophies while standing before a red curtain.
“Seventh-grade honor roll,” she said. “She’d made straight As on every report card. They gave her a trophy. I never got straight As. Mom didn’t care about grades.”
“You do look a little like her,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much until—” Whatever he was going to say, he stopped before he said it.
“What’s she like? Can you tell me that?”
“If I start talking about your sister, I’ll never stop.” He put the photograph down and picked up another one—her sister dressed for a school play. She was some sort of autumn queen in a red gown and a crown of antlers. “So you’re her sister.”
“Baby sister, I guess. I had gotten so used to thinking of her as my baby sister. Forever thirteen? But she’s ten years older than I am. If she’s alive, I mean. She’d be thirty-three.”
Emilie took the lid off the bankers box. “The detective put me in touch with a school friend of my sister’s. She’d kept a bunch of Shannon’s old things. You know, hoping she’d come back someday. When I told her I was her sister, she sent me everything she had.”
Jeremy began removing items from the box. He was careful with them and respectful, but she noticed his hands were shaking.
“Jeremy?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
She doubted that but didn’t argue as he laid out all her sister’s things on the table. The box contained all the stuff in it you’d expect from a dreamy thirteen-year-old girl. Fantasy novels—The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit, Dragonsbane, The Clockwork Raven. A plastic toy horse, black with gray and white painted spots, and a flowing mane. A single polished moonstone in a velvet bag, something she might have bought in a museum gift shop. Old VHS tapes with garage sale stickers on them—The Princess Bride. Matilda. Mulan. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The NeverEnding Story…
Fritz crawled out of her hood, down her arm, and trotted over to the piles of books and things. He tried to climb onto the horse toy but only managed to knock it over.
“Kind of breaks your heart a little,” Emilie said as she gently stroked Fritz. “Her sad little treasure chest. A rock. A toy. Some old fifty-cent VHS tapes from garage sales. Library discards falling apart.”
She ran her fingers over the ratty spines of her sister’s Chronicles of Narnia books held together with old rubber bands. She knew it was a seven-book series, but Emilie counted only six. A notecard tucked inside one book read, Discard, missing book. Her sister had gotten the series for free because one book got lost. Meanwhile, Emilie had owned the entire series in beautiful hardcovers, and she never even read them. Her mother had eventually given them away to a neighbor’s son.
