Chapter 12
The First World War was unkind to Helshire.
With so many unremarkable sons dead in the Argonne, the student body dwindled, becoming too small to justify stables and tennis courts. In search of new sources of tuition, the college embraced coeducation.
The Mortons approved, and we increased our presence. In that era, few things were more dangerous than an educated woman.
To my great-great-grandparents’ surprise, the Lindqvists began sending their offspring to Helshire as well. The college experience joined weddings, feasts, and archery competitions as a way to keep the fragile peace. How could there be open conflict among fellow alums?
These days, all the dormitories are coed, but Ogden was the first women’s house and still reflects the radical ideas of the 1920s. The rooms are organized into pods, each sharing a common kitchen, with members taking turns cooking. No Dining Commons waiters, no cleaning staff.
Egalitarianism has many versions, some less equal than others.
As I climbed the stairs of Ogden’s south tower, a face peeped over the rails above me, then ducked out of sight. I heard the news of my arrival scurrying upward. It had been months since my last visit.
Gertie’s pod occupied the highest floor in the tower. She was only a sophomore, but had already assembled a little tribe of legacy groupies. Most of us keep clear of ordinaries who fetishize our inherited clothes and dark reputations, but my cousin always took her own path.
At the top of the last stairs, a girl in a fluffy pink dress waited for me. I couldn’t recall her name—the podmates tended to blur.
She curtsied and said, “Good afternoon, Jessica.”
“Is Gertie here?”
“Yes!” the girl enthused, as if Gertie ever left. “She’ll be with you in a moment. Would you like tea?”
“I would.”
She led me to the kitchen, which smelled like cookies, bread, and jam. Two more of the pod were rolling out dough, working on a scarred old farmhouse table that must have taken ten people to carry up the stairs. These two also wore pink, clearly the color of the month.
Gertie liked to coordinate.
“Mint? Chamomile? Boba?”
“Caffeine,” I said. “No milk.”
A kettle went on the stove. No one made small talk, glancing furtively at me as they worked. I felt hulking and conspicuous, like a hangman visiting a school for ballerinas.
The tea arrived with a fresh-made cookie.
“Gertie will see you now,” the girl said and curtsied again.
I picked up my cup and saucer and followed her to the tower’s southwest corner—all the bedrooms in Ogden were the same size, but some had better views.
My cousin sat in an armchair, framed by a bay window open to the breeze. She wore an antique black dress I didn’t recognize. Mortons avoid the frippery of lace, ruffles, and bows—Gertie’s dress had all three. Only the barrette in her hair was pink.
“Jessica,” she said. “It’s been too long.”
“If only there’d been some sort of recent family gathering.”
“Don’t be cross. You know the pod doesn’t do well alone. One is wearing black, after all.”
The girl in the fluffy dress offered me a chair. I sat, balancing the saucer in my lap.
“How was everyone?” Gertie asked.
“The same.” I rubbed my finger, felt the last nubbin of cuticle. “Mary, more so.”
“It’s that name. Can you imagine how many Marys there’ve been? One suspects we’ll never see the last. And our little cousin who forgot his rabbit?”
“Thomas? Not so little anymore—we talked about him coming here next year.” I glanced at my guide, who was still hovering.
Gertie pointed at the door: “Cartwheel.”
The girl stretched her arms, then threw herself into a cartwheel that carried her out the door. Delighted thumps came from farther down the hall as she did another.
“Speaking of more so,” I said, wondering if this nonsense went on when Gertie was alone with the pod or was purely for my benefit.
“They love it. How’s your tea?”
I sniffed it, took a cautious sip. Sometimes the pod made tea from forage: nettles, dandelions, unknown mushrooms.
“It’s fine. Did you know that Peter had acquired some money?”
“So glad you like it. Yes, I did.”
“The cookie’s lovely too. How did he manage that?”
“Ghia bakes them. From the bank in town, thanks to a little legerdemain with your mother’s signature. One hopes you don’t mind.”
I dunked the cookie. This was what I’d expected.
The walls of Gertie’s room were covered with detailed renderings of Helshire buildings. The largest was the tower of Dewitt Hall, each brick a tiny pen stroke. She was minoring in Architectural Drawing, an adjunct to her focus on forgery and counterfeiting.
Gertie had been fabricating identities, signatures, and deeds for the family since she’d turned fifteen. This excused her eccentricities: collecting ordinaries, missing funerals, some modest embezzling.
“So the aunties found out,” she sighed. “Because of Peter’s accident, one presumes?”
“The family doesn’t know yet. I stumbled onto it and assumed you were involved.”
“Then one needn’t have confessed? You scoundrel.”
“Why would you help Peter get hold of money? He was a danger to himself.”
Gertie blinked. “He wanted to bail out some friends. When he got the money back, he was going to replace it.”
“He charged interest.”
“One was curious why he didn’t simply ask the family.”
“One didn’t inquire?”
“I counterfeit for amusement, Jessica, not information.”
I sighed. “You should put that on a pillow.”
As Gertie tittered at this, I sipped my tea and wondered why I’d bothered climbing all those stairs. My Behavioral Econ class was learning about addiction and impulsivity without me.
But I was here, so I pulled out the keys from the library stacks.
“Do you know what these are?”
She leaned forward—intrigued, then disappointed. “Alas, no.”
We held each other’s eyes a moment. More than usual, the tower was filled with an air of performance, as if she’d been expecting my visit.
In the silence, a large white cat emerged from beneath Gertie’s armchair. It crept up, sniffing at my shoe.
A flex of my ankle sent it skittering back to Gertie. It jumped into her lap and began to rub its head against her chin.
“That’s new,” I said.
“We smuggled him in last week. Isn’t he darling? His name is Uncle Max—are you okay with that?”
“It’s a Morton name,” I said.
“We’ll see if it fits. Would you like to watch him eat?”
“Do you mean cat food?”
“If a cat eats something, it’s cat food,” Gertie said and then called out, “Ghia! Snacks!”
I stood, remembering why I didn’t visit Gertie very often.
“One of the saviors of her generation,” she said with a smile. “And yet so squeamish.”
“Playing with one’s food is unMorton.”
“Don’t tell Uncle Max.”
I gave the cat a long look, wondering if there was a personality behind its eyes, an inner self of some kind, or only the primal machinery of hunger and violence.
It stared back at me, licking its lips.
“You should ask your old flame, Xavier Lindqvist,” Gertie said into the silence.
I looked up at her. “About the keys? Or Peter’s money?”
“All of it.” She waved a hand. “Sebastian can take you. He’s going tonight.”
“Going where?”
“Somewhere he shouldn’t,” Gertie purred. “Sebastian is complications all the way down, and you’re such a simple girl. That’s why no one tells you anything.”
The girl in the pink dress came in, dangling a mouse by its tail.
Uncle Max tried to bolt from Gertie’s lap, but she was ready for him. Her fingers dug into his fleshy sides.
A long, greedy moan unspooled from the cat’s mouth. A sound that could have passed, in a dark room, for human.
The mouse squirmed, swung.
“Take care, cousin,” Gertie said as I turned away. “With Peter gone, there’s only three of us left.”
There were, in fact, only three Mortons at Helshire now.
The small size of my generation sometimes led the other families to think we were in decline. But it was only a passing shortfall, the result of events a decade earlier—one of our family secrets.
Sebastian and I were ten years old. It was the dead of winter, a week after an ancient family tradition, Quilting Day.
Uncle Max was coming home from an assignment, something to do with children, gone messy. He was about to turn forty. In Psych 101, we learned that ordinaries find round-numbered birthdays stressful. Uncle Max was no ordinary, but he turned out to be very unMorton as well.
He didn’t tell anyone he’d arrived in Upper Falls, just walked from the train station to the estate in the January cold. He came straight to the woodshed, where we kids were learning how to pick locks from Aunt Agnes.
Uncle Max came in, calmly took one of the axes from the wall, and killed Agnes with a blow to the back of her head.
The woodshed has only one door, no windows.
My cousins Yvonne and Tobias tried to get past Uncle Max, but he stopped them both with a single swing.
Tobias was dead instantly, and Yvonne sunk down in the doorway, staring at her left hand on the floor.
At some point she crawled off into the woods to bleed out.
The rest of us crowded into the back of the shed, yelling for help, trying to barricade ourselves behind the long tables covered with locks and clockwork.
Peter was frozen, his arms tight around Mister Fluffernutter, so I took the throwing knife from his boot.
But Sebastian told me we needed something bigger.
I handed him the knife and looked at the padlocks on the table.
The two biggest were grade-four Abloys, their stainless steel as shiny as mirrors. I clicked their shackles together and picked them up.
Three pounds of metal.
By this time, five more of our cousins were dead—Zachary, Tillie, Ramsey, Katie, Olive—and Uncle Max had lost his stone-cold calm. Blood covered his axe, his arms, his bared teeth, the walls, the wooden floor.
He was coming at the five of us.
I’d spent the autumn practicing with a sling, and took a full wind up before I threw the padlocks at Uncle Max’s face.
They shattered his mouth, flattened his nose. A handful of teeth skittered across the floor like dice.
We rushed the door, Gertie in the lead, Peter still holding Mister Fluffernutter. Then Thomas, who left Doctor Pickle behind and had to start over with a new rabbit. Sebastian and I came last, with him pausing to stab Uncle Max’s hamstrings.
Uncle Max limped after us to the archery range, where Arabella, only fifteen, became the first Morton blooded with a bow in half a century.
The next day, Garrett came back from New York to teach us how to pick locks and peel eggs, and the woodshed smelled like sulfur for a year.
That was when Sebastian and I began to be spoken of in the same breath. We were not only the prodigies of our generation but its saviors. Me with my perfect throw, Sebastian covering our retreat. After that day, however, I had to work even harder to prove myself.
Uncle Max was my father, you see.
We Mortons can be quite lax with family terms.