Ben used to know them all by name, but now they looked out at him in anonymity. When he was younger, he and Soleil would make a game of it. One stolen scone from the kitchen for every aunt, uncle, or cousin whose name they could guess right. At some point, they could name them all, and the scones were shared. He smiled at the memory. It used to be good fun, but then he was alone, his sister too grown up to play childish games.
Then came the portraits of Ben as a young boy. He ignored them, inching closer to the end of the hall where the gray light of the day hit Soleil’s bedroom door. Marked with her name on a faded plaque, its handle was dusty and untouched. He tried to open it, unsurprised to find it locked. It was a silly thing to think that she’d unlocked it for him the night before.
All she really did was show me the way, he thought. The rest is up to me.
Beside him, Jacques cleared his throat. “Is that it? Can we eat now?”
Ben scoffed. “We can get in without a key.”
Jacques shuffled backward and watched with interest.
Ben held the knob firmly and lifted it slowly, grinning when he felt the familiar shift in the hardware, sliding sideways and away from the lock. The door stuck against the frame, but with a forceful shove, Ben shouldered his way in.
Behind him, Jacques whistled. “How intuitive.”
“I was a thief as a boy.” Ben chuckled, swinging the door open. He breathed in a cloud of dust as it unsettled from the hardwood floor. His eyes watered, his lungs and throat sore from coughing by the time he caught his breath.
Her room was perfectly preserved. Though her spirit had been bright in life, Soleil’s room was full of dark grays, earthy greens, and simple decor. She kept oil paintings and sketches hung in frames on the walls and poetry books stacked in dusty corners. A few dresses lay at the foot of her bed, a sewing kit left beside them, as though she would return at any moment to mend their frayed hems.
A dull twinge pulled at Ben’s heart, knowing she never would come back.
“What a rascal you were,” Jacques said, bringing Ben back to the present.
“Yes.” He smirked. “They did their best to keep me out, but neither my father nor my sister ever knew how I did it. My mother, however, was keenly aware of my antics.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Jacques asked, covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief he pulled from his jacket pocket. He was already scouring the room’s surfaces and drawers.
Ben wandered to her writing desk, the same place she had exploded into a cloud of smoke the night before. He went through its drawers quickly, spying only junk and a box halfway hidden beneath ribbons. He picked up a discarded needlepoint project left unfinished from the chair and gave it a quick once over.
A thick sheet of dust covered the surface. He wiped it away, revealing a clump of little purple flowers—ugly smudges of thread all hastily worked into a misshapen form. She was always sewing or writing, anything to keep her hands busy. For as much time as she spent on her hobbies, she never was any good at sewing. She was much better at skipping rocks and hitting bottles with pebbles from thirty feet with Ben’s slingshot. He used to tell her as much.
It never failed to bring her joy to hear his praises, no matter how silly they were. Months before their mother died, Soleil would let him in her room to read or play while she practiced her needlepoint or wrote poems. In the weeks leading up to her passing, however, she had closed herself off more and more. It had pained him to see how his sister faded away to little more than skin and bones.
This house has a way of draining away life. He thought then of Remi and how, on the day he returned, she seemed more like a ghost than a person. Her visage resembled that of the peeling wallpaper, worn out and sapped of color. Not unlike his sister.
“I see notes here,” Jacques announced loudly as he sifted through papers on her bedside table. “Nothing fully coherent, though; just scratches here and there, some broken sentences.”
Ben came to, emotion lodged in his throat.
“Anything you can make out?” Ben sniffed as he set the needlework back down. Suddenly sentimental, he used his clean sleeve to wipe away the dust on the surface of the desk.
“Words, mostly.” Jacques’s voice filled in the background. “She says ‘need more,’ ‘where else,’ and a handful of names. I think.”
“What names?” Ben stopped wiping when his sleeve snagged against a rough dip in the wood. He leaned down to observe it, brushing away more of the filth until the lines made sense. Inside a heart, two letters had been sloppily scratched in. He followed the grooves of the first—an ‘S’—but could not determine the second. A...R, or is it an H?
“Leyda Leone.”
Ben straightened. “What?”
“Did you not hear me?”
Ben shot Jacques a confused look. “No. What did you say?”
His friend’s shoulders sagged, reflecting the bow of his mouth. “I said ‘Arthur, Verity, Helena, Benoît, and Leyda Leone.’ Is it family?”
“Yes, but...” Ben ran his fingertips over the letters again. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
“Those names. Everyone on that list has been dead for decades,” Ben said. “Except me. As far as I’m aware, I’m the only Benoît in the family.”
“What could it mean?”
Ben shrugged, instead tapping his fingers to indicate his own findings. “She carved some letters here. There’s an ‘S’ and another, but I can’t tell what.”
Jacques tucked his notes back into the drawer by Soleil’s bed and inspected the little message on the desk. Like Ben, he leaned in until his nose was inches from brushing against the wood. He squinted but could not discern what it was.
“A love letter?” Jacques offered. “Was there anyone courting her at the time?”
“No.” Ben shook his head. If his sister had closed herself off to him, there was no doubt in his mind she’d done the same for others. But the heart and the letters mean something.
“That you know of,” Jacques said. “If I may be so bold, it looks to me like your sister might have been keeping someone a secret.”
“But why?” Ben’s brows creased.
“Who knows.” Jacques shrugged. “Why do any of us keep secrets?”
Ben grimaced. Between Soleil’s cryptic notes and carving on the desk, he couldn’t be sure what she had been up to. The dream he’d had the night before—the memory—made him wonder about the day she died. If someone had truly pushed her, could it have been the person whose initial she’d embossed into the wood? He thought about the betrayal in her eyes, the way it shone so clearly in her gaze. Was it possible that she trusted someone enough to give him her heart? If she was seeing someone, it made sense that she would search for a way out.
