by Audrey Keown
I laughed. “Yeah, it looks kind of like a claw-foot tub covered with a canvas sheet that has a hole cut out for your head.”
“I think I’ll have to see that another day. These two rooms may be all I can take in at the moment.” He stared through the doorway as if it could open the past to him. There was awe, but also frustration in his face as he tried to take in a hundred-odd years of history at once. He leaned against the doorframe for support. “I don’t understand. How did Mr. Fig know about this place when I didn’t?”
So Dad shared my sense of disconnection from the Morrows.
“Apparently your dad avoided the place and forbade anyone from coming down here, but his sister, your aunt, was still living in the house, and she brought Mr. Fig down here and told him about some things.”
“That must have been Tulia. She was a force to be reckoned with, always disagreeing and undermining my dad, but often with good reason. She had a little dog that followed her around, and she used to have him bite Dad’s ankles when she thought he was being unfair.”
I laughed.
He leaned against the doorjamb. “My mom must have respected my dad’s wishes and not shown me this place. But she told me the story of Ascanius anyway.”
“Sometimes it’s enough to bury the seed of an idea in a kid. I feel like you must have done that with me too, but less intentionally? Otherwise, why would I be so interested in psychology?”
“There’s more passed down in our DNA than I can understand,” he said. “Why are we so much like the people we’ve never met?”
“Your dad, though, wanted to ignore the particular ‘gift’ that had been passed down through our family tree, didn’t he?”
“And you see what a lot of good that did,” he said.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last year,” I said, “it’s that thinking positively about a problem and ignoring the way it affects you doesn’t make it go away.”
“Murdoch, though, he did his best for Lillian, to keep her out of those horrific asylums.”
“Yeah.” I took a long, deep breath. “He did what it took to keep her here, to take care of her … like you did for me.”
Maybe I was getting to the heart of what it meant to be a Morrow.
He sat down in the armchair, running his hands along the dusty, leather arms. “I’m trying to figure out what the right thing to do now is. I suppose we should let the owner know all of this is here.”
“But Clarista would open it up to guests, let them tour it and gawk at it. I can’t bear to think about that.” I felt more connected to my family right here than anywhere else in the hotel. I understood what this place meant, but other people wouldn’t.
“It’s her property.”
“Can’t we just … keep it between us for a while?”
His head wobbled. “No one else knows besides Mr. Fig?”
“Well, George.”
He exhaled slowly. “I don’t want you to get in trouble if someone else finds out. When someone else finds out.”
I bit my lip and let my eyes drift to the little table beside the chair Dad was sitting in.
I’d never looked at it from quite this angle before, and I saw for the first time that the wooden apron of the table was decorated with a small molding shaped like an eight-pointed star.
Dad followed my gaze and turned in the chair, bending down so his head was nearly level with the table. With an upturned hand and a thoughtful look, he felt the underside of the tabletop. “Huh. This is awfully thick.”
Was he thinking what I was thinking?
He knocked on it once, and sure enough, it thudded like a ripe watermelon. Hollow.
I reached out and pushed the star with a finger.
It shrank soundlessly into the wood behind it, and the table apron popped forward a centimeter or so.
A hidden drawer? Curiosity jolted me upright.
Dad looked at me, a question obvious in his eyes—did you know?
I shook my head.
“Do you want to …” He indicated the drawer.
“You go ahead.”
He wedged a finger in the top edge of the crack and inched the drawer out to half again the length of the table. Inside, on a felt lining the color of a dusky sky, lay a leather-bound book with a monogram embossed on the cover.
Dad’s and my eyes widened as we looked at each other. I reached in, lifted the book out gently, and ran my fingers over the grooves of the letters—MLM.
Multi-level marketing? I thought. Was my whole family the origin of some early pyramid scheme?
I cracked the cover and read from the inside flap. “Marigold Lillian Morrow.”
“My grandmother,” Dad said.
I handed the book to him.
He smiled, focusing on the elegant script. The pages fluttered in his hand.
“What is it? Her journal?” I asked.
He turned the next page over.
I held my breath.
Coming around behind him to read over his shoulder, I heard the staccato step of a high heel in the hallway outside the room and glanced up.
In the doorway, a pair of copper eyes blazed in an angry round face that was about to give voice to several complete sentences.
“Hi.” I swallowed hard. “Clarista.”
Also available by Audrey Keown
The Ivy Nichols Mysteries
Murder at Hotel 1911
Author Biography
Audrey Keown sets her mystery series in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the place she calls home. She lost her heart to the city in the early days of its downtown revival, and its bridges, coffee shops, breweries, parks, and people are its mixtape back to her. For ten years she wrote professionally for periodicals, sharpening her storytelling skills for cutting into fiction writing. Themes of redemption and connection to history often find their way into her work. Like her protagonist, she has battled anxiety and writes about mental illness in her fiction in hopes of helping lift the stigma.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Audrey Keown
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-734-3
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-735-0
Cover illustration by Alan Ayers
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
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New York, NY 10001
First Edition: August 2021
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