Chapter 34
The color of the month was unclear.
The girl who answered the door wore a loose summer dress, the grayish-green of dried sage.
The walls of the hallway behind her were more radiant.
Verdigris? Viridian? I’d learned a profusion of color names from Hiromi.
Gertie had lived here since late May, but the stifling air prickled with the sting of turpentine.
They’d repainted more than once.
“Is she home?”
“Good morning, Jessica.” A curtsy. “Let me go and check.”
“Yes, do that.” I shut the door behind me.
The girl scampered away barefoot, dress billowing. I followed.
The hallway was decorated with Gertie’s drawings of Helshire—Ogden, Ridermore, Dewitt, all in meticulous detail. I recognized Sebastian’s Terrace House, his window on the second floor, a faceless figure staring out.
The room where he’d sewn my stitches, where we’d promised to tell each other everything. But I hadn’t, and now he told me nothing.
The first door along the hallway opened on a sewing room, where four podmates were at work on a quilt. Two boys, two girls, they wore last-century dresses in mismatched greens and looked up at me with intense smiles.
I kept walking. Two small bedrooms, a study, and a corner room stuffed with antique armchairs and couches. Just like the one in the Great House, which my elders called “the den.”
This apartment was huge, and not Morton-owned. I wondered what form of chicanery was paying the rent. Maybe Gertie was printing her own money.
But I hadn’t been offered tea or cookies. Standards were slipping.
The girl who’d first greeted me reappeared, curtsied again.
“Gertie will see you now.”
Swathed in black chiffon, she waited in an enormous kitchen, the morning light slanting in on cracked linoleum and floating cat dander. Uncle Max was on the floor beside her, splayed in a sunbeam, motionless except for the twitching whiskers of some murderous dream.
Two podmates, who’d been sifting flour onto a large kitchen island, scuttled out of the room. The shelves were untidy. The coffee grinder looked broken.
I recognized the farmhouse table where Gertie sat.
“You brought this monstrosity with you,” I said. “To a sixth-floor walk-up?”
She looked up from her drawing—an arched stone doorway. “Home is where the heart is.”
“Gertie. That saying means you don’t have to haul your shit everywhere.”
“That seems wrong, because one does.” She went back to her work. “Besides, people who never visit aren’t allowed to comment on decor.”
“Did I miss an invitation?”
“You are always welcome, cousin.”
I took this as permission to sit.
Still no tea. The kitchen was hot, even with the windows wide open. Perhaps air-conditioning was counter to the aesthetic.
“The new color scheme is lovely,” I began. “We need to talk about Sebastian.”
“The hallway isn’t the right shade yet,” she said. “What about him?”
“Would you call it jade? Just this morning, Bianca Lindqvist showed up and told me about his little revenge.”
“It’s malachite.” Gertie looked up from her work. “And you pulled this trick last time—making one assume you knew all about a thing when you, in fact, did not.”
I kept my smile steady. “I’m pals with the Lindqvists now. Xavier gave me his Hefnd speech. But I didn’t expect Sebastian to wreak vengeance in Albany.”
Gertie gazed at me, trying to read my face. “Do you think the family will figure it out? Some state senator having a heart attack, a few weeks after our cousin shows up?”
A little thrum went through me. Sebastian had killed someone. He was angry at me, at the family. A Hefnd was the most unMorton thing he could imagine. His own homage to Peter.
“Heart attacks are easy to cover,” I said. “They’ll never guess.”
Gertie shrugged. “No motive, except that the honorable gentleman was a cock-wallop. One gathers that’s fairly common up there.”
I wondered how I’d missed this, searching on Albany and a hundred synonyms of mayhem. “What was his name again?”
“Seymour…Butts?” A smile drifted slowly onto Gertie’s face, followed by a spurt of laughter. “He’s not real, silly—I was tricking you!”
I stared at her. “Shit.”
“Such a simple girl. Bianca wouldn’t tell you secrets in a million years. No one tells you anything. Also, I don’t like your hair!”
“I don’t like your cat,” I said.
“That reminds me.” Gertie produced a little silver bell and rang it furiously. In his sunbeam, Uncle Max twitched a little.
“Why are you mad at me, Gertie?”
She ignored this, crossing her arms and glaring at the hallway. A moment later a boy in olive shorts appeared.
“Snacks!” she commanded.
He went to the refrigerator, three feet from Gertie, and pulled out a glass-covered china plate. He set it before her with a bow.
“Flounce,” she said with a wave of the hand, and he did—out of the kitchen and down the hall. As she pulled the cover off the plate, Uncle Max’s eyes opened. “This is what you get for tricking.”
Gertie tossed a strip of anchovy at my feet.
Uncle Max roared to life, claws scrabbling before catching on the cracked linoleum. The beast hurtled across the room to crash into my ankles.
I didn’t look down at the oily, joyful smacking of jaws, the scent of brine.
“Sebastian is not himself,” I said.
“Because he hates you,” she said, flinging another fillet.
The cat swiped at it, a single claw hooking the leg of my linen pants. There was a brief struggle, a tearing sound, then more of the awful smacking.
I ignored the furry little body’s passion against my legs. “Has he killed someone?”
“Hah. You know nothing!” She tossed another anchovy, this time at my lap.
I backhanded it away and it landed on the kitchen island. The cat leapt in pursuit, scattering the sifted flour in all directions, calamitous and insatiable.
There were sudden tears in Gertie’s eyes.
“Sebastian hates you because you killed Peter.”
“He told you that?”
“No. You just did.” Her anger faded. “Two can play at tricking.”
“You could’ve simply asked.”
“You could have simply told.” She was watching Uncle Max, still at work on the piece of fish. Flour rose up in tiny, ragged clouds as he chomped, set adrift by the breeze from the open window. “Did you think I wouldn’t care?”
“Loyalty has no care.” I looked down at my pants. They were in need of Sebastian’s needlework. “I was under orders to keep it secret.”
“You’re always under orders, Jessica.”
I didn’t answer: We all were.
“It’s like you don’t remember that day,” Gertie went on. “No one ever told us an adult could just do that. No one came to help. Only five of us walked out of there—and Peter was one of them.”
“That’s why he was damaged.”
“That’s why he was ours!” she cried. “Our little family within the family.”
I stared at Gertie, her silver bell, her color coordination. What was the pod if not another family? Or worse.
“Gertie. Do you think you’re infallible?”
“Infallible? One can’t even find the right shade of malachite.”
It struck me that Faraday’s cult quiz might be incomplete. “Tell me what Sebastian did.”
“Only because it will make you sad.” Gertie threw the cat another piece of fish. “He spilled to Bianca about Yvonne, Tobias, Tillie, Zachary, Olive, and Ramsey. Every blow, every scream, every drop of blood.”
Something heavy landed in my stomach. “Why?”
“Hefnd,” she said. “On the Mortons. On you. For Peter.”
I closed my eyes—Bianca would tell her elders, and they would tell the other families. The Mortons were weak, touched by madness.
I remembered Arabella’s words. “Elizabeth will have his skin.”
“No. Bianca promised not to say who.” Gertie tossed another fish, this time on the floor beside the table—the cat thumped down. “Or maybe she’ll say it was you. She owes you a bit of inconvenience for burning down Halcyon.”
“They won’t believe her,” I said, my eyes drawn to the creature as it shredded and gobbled.
“Because Jessica is the prodigy. The one who does the culling.”
“That’s on you and Sebastian.”
“Because we allowed the Lindqvists to corrupt our dear cousin,” she said in a singsong voice. “Yes, Sebastian told me about Peter’s bomb. How he used my little forgery to purchase naughty toys.”
“You gave matches to a pyromaniac because you thought it was amusing.”
“Amusing?” Her eyes flashed. “It was what he needed. It was who he was!”
“Then he was always going to be culled.”
“You and Sebastian were our saviors, Jessica. You stopped the swinging axe!” She hurled an anchovy at my head—I ducked, and it hit the wall behind me with an oily slap, sending the cat skittering again. “You don’t get to switch sides, and become one of them!”
“There’s no them,” I said. “We’re all Mortons.”
At these words, Gertie closed her eyes, balled up her fists, and let out a piercing shriek. From behind me, a horde thundered down the hallway. A dozen of them piled up outside the kitchen, peering in.
“Coventry!” Gertie screamed at them.
The footsteps retreated again, and the sound of slamming doors echoed down the hallway.
Her voice went quiet, cold. “Don’t you dare blame this on me and Sebastian. You were the one in red at Peter’s funeral.”
I shook my head. “If he’d turned his roommate, he could’ve made it all four years. But Sebastian wanted to play politics with the Lindqvists, and you wanted to be a little brat.”
“You threw Peter off a fucking building.” Gertie raised the last shiny sliver of fish. “You finished what your father couldn’t.”
She threw it at my chest—I caught it midair.
“What did you just call him?” I asked.
Gertie didn’t answer at first, luxuriating in the stretching quiet that comes before violence. Uncle Max sat in the middle of it all, gazing up at the morsel in my hand.
“Sorry,” Gertie whined. “Should I have said daddyyyyy?”
I threw the fish out the open window. The beast pursued—one leap onto the sill, another into the hungry void of the airshaft.
Two seconds of humming silence, then a thump from six stories down.
I stood and turned from Gertie, heading to the front door. Moving away from chaos toward sunlight and fresh air—and Hiromi, waiting at her studio.
From behind me came Gertie’s laughter, as bright and clear as her little silver bell.
“You killed Uncle Max!” she called. “You got him again!”