Chapter 30
THIRTY
The sun was setting fast behind the red Gallagher barn, and the snow had turned to a sheet of ice on the front yard of the Gray House, gleaming beneath the onslaught of dusk.
Marlowe stepped inside the house and quickly hung up her coat. She was still mulling over what Ariel had said as she was leaving the wake. If the woods and hills really were haunted, as she had sometimes believed as a child, then wasn’t that the simplest explanation?
“Marlowe!” Glory called from the living room, holding up a cardboard box. “How old were you when you made these?”
The tree was up in the corner of the living room, and Henry was putting on the lights with care as the girls circled around him.
Dolly, her uncle’s bumbling assistant, was tangled up in the excess strings of lights.
The boxes of ornaments were spread across the floor.
Kat was admiring her favorites, the ones with paintings of Victorian people dancing on the orbs, while Constance bounced Frankie on her knee and sorted through smaller glass ornaments.
In the kitchen, Stephanie was pulling cookies out of the oven, setting them to cool.
Enzo sat in the big armchair with pillows tucked on either side of him.
He was half asleep, his head nodding. The room smelled richly of pine and cinnamon sugar.
Glory was holding the little dolls Marlowe had made from yarn. One was a cowboy, with brown boots and a tiny felt hat. Another was in a long scarlet ball gown with puffed sleeves. Marlowe lifted the third, a girl with yellow braids wearing simple blue overalls.
“Kat’s age,” Marlowe said. “Maybe a bit older.”
“Such talent.” Glory beamed.
“Marlowe has a gift.” Enzo had stirred awake with a wavering smile. “But gifts must be honed.”
Another phrase he was plucking from years ago, like a musician trying to play an old tune without sheet music.
“Another night of snow and we can dust off the toboggan,” Henry said.
Dolly gasped with excitement. “I’ll be in the front!”
“It’s not as thrilling as you think,” Marlowe said with a laugh. “I was always in the front, and I hated it.”
“You were never in the front.” Henry turned to her. A string of lights was draped over his arms.
“I thought I was.” Marlowe frowned. “The snow was always hitting my face, and I would get scared because I could see when we were headed for the trees.”
“You were too tall to be in the front.” Henry paused, stopping himself from saying more. “We had some good snows back then; not sure we’ll get the right conditions this year.”
Marlowe mulled over Henry’s contradiction.
He hadn’t needed to say her name—she remembered now.
Those were Nora’s blue mittens holding the looped twine in an iron grip at the front of the toboggan.
If Nate were present, he would set the record straight.
He’d loved those sledding days so much, he likely recalled every single run they ever made down the North Field.
“The snows were always better back then,” Marlowe said, but they had already turned away from her, absorbed in their tasks again.
“Marlowe?” Her father’s voice came from the study. “Is that you?”
Marlowe laid the doll on the table and walked down the hall.
“Hi, Dad, I was just out for a drive.”
Frank was at his desk, sifting through papers.
He looked up at Marlowe leaning against the doorframe and smiled.
“They’re praying for more snow out there, eh?” He chuckled and it sounded too close to a cough. “Remember how you used to sing ‘White Christmas’ over and over, because you thought you could conjure snow on Christmas Eve?”
“I remember.” Frank used to pick her up and swing her around as she sang, raving that she was so clever to know all the words. He had been so tall and fit and strong. “Can I get you anything, Dad? A cup of tea?”
“I must really look weak if my Marlowe is offering to serve me.” Frank grinned.
She smiled down at him in return. “Really, Dad, I’m going to make tea anyway.”
“It’s fine,” Frank said. “I’m just fine, here in this house, surrounded by all of you. It’s all I ever wanted.”
Marlowe nodded and turned to leave the study, thinking how she’d always been sad for girls who didn’t have fathers like hers.
Her father stopped her. “You love it here, don’t you?” It was a common line of inquiry from Frank, as if he wanted validation that they belonged on this land and in this house.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
He also seemed to want to know, the older he got, which of his children loved it the most. Frank was clear that he never wanted to divide up the land.
It was supposed to remain whole. But Marlowe had a theory that one sibling was going to get more and outweigh the other two when it came to decisions about the property.
One of them would have a head start on buying the others out, if it ever came to it.
“I’ve never been able to leave, not really,” Marlowe said. “Or at least, whenever I leave, I always know I’ll come back here, one way or another.”
She supposed her brothers would say the same thing. The difference was, Marlowe didn’t have anything else. And if that made her father pity her enough to give her the extra percentage, she would take it gladly.
“I know,” Frank said with what looked like a twinge of sadness in his eye.
Marlowe leaned down and hugged her father before drifting out of the study and to the kitchen, empty now that Stephanie had joined the others by the tree.
Marlowe didn’t make a cup of tea. Instead, she poured two fingers of whiskey into a mug, then filled the rest with eggnog.
She carried the mug past the revelry around the tree and down to the basement, where she opened her computer.
There was an email from Mike Cameron, Nate’s old college buddy. She opened the message immediately.
Hello Marlowe,
Hope you are well. I can talk today. Let me know what time would work.
Best,
Mike
She quickly typed out a response, telling him that she was available now or anytime that afternoon, and she included her number.
Mike Cameron didn’t keep her waiting long. Within ten minutes, her phone rang.
“Marlowe, hello.” His voice was unrecognizable.
“Hi, Mike.” Marlowe cradled the phone against her ear and set down the eggnog. “I know my email might have come out of the blue.”
“It’s about Nora, isn’t it?” He got straight to the point.
He hadn’t been like that when he was young.
She supposed a few decades in the medical field would do that to a person.
“The detectives did reach out to me. I was glad to get your email, because I was feeling I should let someone in your family know.”
“Know what?” Marlowe’s throat went dry.
“I told them more this time,” Mike said. “More than I said back then.”
“That’s good,” she said. “That’s—that’s all I’ve wanted.”
He must have heard some fear in her voice. “I’m not saying I know anything; there were just little things, really. Things I never said. Because I was young and Nate was my friend, and I honestly wanted to forget the whole thing.”
“Can you start at the beginning?” Marlowe asked. “Can you tell me what you told them?”
Mike started on the drive up from the city, with Nate describing the weekend they were in for.
“It was clear he loved the place,” Mike said. “He’d been raving about it for weeks. How we were going to take a long hike through the woods and maybe swim in the river if the weather was warm enough. The big dinners we would have.”
The lost weekend.
“Nate talked about you guys too. And Nora. I was honestly curious to meet all of you.” Mike paused and heaved a great sigh that sounded like the crackle of a radio when the channel hit a spot of static.
“I’ve thought about that night a lot. I’m sure you know I was never close with Nate afterward.
That we drifted. I guess I tried to forget, but I never could do it.
That girl, disappearing—it stuck with me. ”
“It’s not something we can ever forget.” Marlowe’s voice was low, barely audible.
“Yeah.” Mike paused for a long second. “The thing is, I have three daughters now, and if it were one of my daughters …” Mike’s voice trailed off as he considered the unimaginable. “Look, I wish I could go back and grab my idiot younger self by the neck and tell him to do more. To say more.”
“To say what, specifically?” Marlowe was holding the phone so close to her ear that she felt it was going to leave an imprint on her cheek. She knew this was the moment Mike would tell her that Nate and Nora had been sleeping together.
“On the ride up there that Friday, Nate described the three of you. He’d mentioned his kid brother and little sister before,” Mike said. “He told us Henry was a riot, and that his sister was solid. But in that car, that was the first time he mentioned Nora.”
Marlowe was frozen in suspense, but a small part of her rankled at being reduced to “solid” by her older brother.
“Nate said the neighbor would be there, and he was tense about it,” Mike said.
“Look, I don’t know all the details, but he implied she was clingy, always hanging around.
Honestly, it just sounded like a typical neighbor situation to me, like something out of a sitcom.
But then he claimed that she was a little thief.
That’s what he called her: ‘a little thief.’”
Marlowe blinked. That was a secret.
“Nate wasn’t mad or anything. He just seemed put off by it,” Mike continued. “He didn’t go into detail, but he said he knew she had stolen a ring from his mother’s box, and some silver or something.”
There had been a ring, yes, and a pendant. A paperweight from her father’s office. Silver cuff links.
Small things. Things Marlowe had been quite certain her parents would never notice. Fallen behind a dresser drawer or misplaced somewhere. Left in the city, perhaps, or in a hotel room.
Marlowe helped Nora take them. Gave them to her. The Gray House had too much. Why shouldn’t it go to Nora, who needed it?