Three steps down the back stairs was the door, which had become so familiar to her that Portia knew every nick and imperfection in its face. She opened it carefully, to keep its voice from sounding. She reached to her right, where she had stacked some of the boxes she had already explored, and her fingers caught hold of the small box of matches and the stub of a candle she’d jammed into a discarded beer bottle (collected from the side of the road on her way back from town—Mister indulged in no such habits). She lit the candle and, wetting her finger against her tongue, squeezed the tip of the extinguished match to make sure it was well and truly out. The tiny sting of its hot head between her fingers woke her to her task.
It seemed that no matter how many boxes she looked through, there were more and more beyond, as if the room did not end but stretched itself beyond the edges of the house. In order to keep track of which boxes were done and which had yet to be opened, she had helped herself to one of Mister’s green-lined ledgers, in which he recorded his financial gains and losses and other tallies that made less sense to Portia, who was, of course, not their intended audience. In her own stolen pages, she recorded the years and alphabetical designations for each box, as well as certain names that caught her storyteller’s heart.
Annika Merrithew
Daisy Sinclair Creamer
Ruby Ledwith
Alice MacEvoy
Evelyn Rose Rossiter
Hazel Danforth
Josephine Ibbotson Tolley
Aside from the constant nagging fear of being discovered, Portia found the work almost soothing. The rhythm of pulling a file from a box, flipping its dusty pages, letting her eyes roam the melee of words typed and scrawled and scratched into paper, letting her mind wander and imagine where these dozens of girls had gone on to.
But there was that urgency, that anxious wondering, that buzzed at the back of her brain all the time. The fear of being caught, and more than that, the fear of not finding her own name on any one of the thousands of pieces of paper hidden in the darkness.
Scraps
The day after the funeral, Portia was ordered to sort through Caroline’s belongings.
“She was your friend, after all,” Mister said, his voice oily and thick. “You knew her better than anyone.”
There was a condemnation wrapped inside the words, a reprimand. Again Portia heard them: You should have known she would do this. You should have stopped her. Saved her.
Mister leaned in. “If you find anything . . . that might further grieve her family . . . bring it to me.”
Portia didn’t imagine she’d find anything that could be worse for Caroline’s family than the fact that the girl had poisoned herself—and if she did, she would never turn it over to Mister. But she nodded and went upstairs.
The room still smelled like Caroline, like the rose-scented soap she used, the only comfort her mother had ever sent aside from her letters (which weren’t, in the end, very comforting at all). Portia closed her eyes and imagined that when she opened them again, Caroline would be there, in her bed, pale and alive.
Portia, she would say, I’m feeling better now. Let’s go for a walk in the orchard. And they would put on their sweaters because the orchard was chilly at night, and they would link their arms together, and Portia would let Caroline talk about the parties at home, listen as she described her dresses in excruciating detail, and never call her silly.
But even as she opened her eyes, she knew it would not be true. There was only the empty bed, which Delilah had made up with fresh sheets as soon as the body had been taken, and the empty room, and the silence. A few plain cotton dresses in the closet, a nightgown and some underthings in the dresser, a yellow sweater, a cream one—Portia folded everything neatly and put it in Caroline’s blue suitcase. Her mother might send for it.
There was a small stack of books on the nightstand, wholesome stories that had been donated to The Home by local church ladies. Stories of redemption for the inspiration of wayward girls. Portia preferred the books in Mister’s library, wholly inappropriate for young ladies, but Caroline hadn’t been willing to risk getting caught where she didn’t belong and so she’d settled for the church ladies’ choices.
Portia put the books in the suitcase as well, just in case it was requested by Caroline’s family. At least her mother will see she was trying to be good, she thought. Might help, somehow. Though, if she was being honest, she didn’t feel much like Caroline’s mother deserved to feel better.
Not if Portia had to feel so bad.
She looked around the room again, totally empty now, and was about to shut the suitcase when her eyes settled on the nightstand drawer. Almost as if someone else were lifting her arm, her hand went to the handle and pulled it open.
It was filled with torn paper.
Torn paper like strips of birch bark, with black writing on every piece.
The letters.
Caroline had shredded them, every one from her mother, laid them in the drawer like a bird’s nest. Her last act of defiance.
Good girl, Portia thought. And then she gathered the paper scraps into her arms, sat down on the bed, and wept hot, bitter tears.
When she was finished—for she allowed herself only a few minutes of such behavior at a time—she gathered the shreds of the letters and laid them gently in the suitcase, spread them across Caroline’s clothes, tucked them into each corner. Then her eyes caught sight of her own name, written by this stranger’s hand, and she had the sudden urge to seize it. As she folded the lone piece of soft white paper into her pocket, her fingers touched something stiff. She pulled it out.
It was the slip of cardboard from the red truck.
She looked more closely now. Down the left-hand side of the card, there was a list of names. Towns, she realized. Not Brewster Falls, of course, but others that were not far away. Next to the towns there were numbers—dates and distances.
It was the circus’s schedule for the summer, the map of their route. They had come from Jacksonville and were headed for Winchester, which was only a few miles away.
The first line said MAY 14—BURLINGTON—20 MILES— U.S. 61.
My birthday, she thought. Just over a week ago. She hadn’t even known it was her birthday until she’d accidentally seen the date on Mister’s newspaper, folded neatly on his desk. Portia wondered if there was a girl in Burlington who had turned fourteen that day, if she had gone to the circus to celebrate.
Something began to move in Portia’s memory, reluctant as a rusted wheel—the old story she had made for herself, in which Max had run off with the circus. How many circuses were there? Fewer, Portia knew, than there had been before. Movie theaters and dancehalls cropped up like pretty weeds, common and alluring, and without the strange elements that came with traveling shows. Mister had frequently lectured her on the topic of such distasteful forms of entertainment.
But Max loved a good time. And a circus was certainly that. Even if he wasn’t still with this circus, someone might have seen him, known him, heard about his beloved daughter.
Only a few miles away, Portia thought.
Even by bicycle.
One Last Chance
Once the idea of Max and the circus solidified in her head, Portia allowed herself to spend a small part of each day speculating about her future—when she would leave and how, where she would go, what she might find there—but she was careful not to overindulge. Mister had a kind of radar for these things, and she could not afford to have him sniff her out. She went on teaching Delilah how to cook, despite Delilah’s objections that she “didn’t need to know none of this kind of thing,” as she was going to be an actress someday and would never ever cook for herself or anyone else.
“But what if,” Portia said, “you need to play the part of a cook on stage?”
Delilah considered this and grudgingly agreed that it might be useful to know a few things, just for appearances.
“Nothing fancy, though,” she insisted. “I don’t want no o
ne mistaking me for a servant.”
Portia refrained from pointing out that unless Delilah started speaking like a lady, she would surely never be mistaken for that instead. “Of course not,” she said. “We’ll stick to the basics. Get the eggs.”
Tempting as it was to request another girl to help with the housework (since Delilah was generally preoccupied with observing herself in any and all reflective surfaces), Portia resisted for two reasons: she loathed the idea of asking Mister for any kind of favor, and she did not want to have to account for the whereabouts of another person in the house every time she crept into the secret room to search for her file. Between the cooking, the cleaning, the trips into town, and these covert missions, Portia was utterly exhausted by the end of the day and frequently slept so deeply that she could not muster any kind of dream onto the blank screen behind her eyelids.
But every night, just for a moment, she made herself remember when she was five, the air carrying stories from the garden, Max’s good-night kisses, the tail of his truck fading in the dust. She made sure that this room she had been given would never feel like home. She wouldn’t let it.
The list of names in her notebook grew longer, and the number of boxes she had yet to search through steadily waned. Still, she found no mention of Max, her family, anyone she knew, anyone who might care to find her or be found. She wondered if Sophia felt guilty for leaving her behind, then pushed the thought roughly away. She bowed her head, continued reading, writing down the names, recording the history of the man who she vowed would not keep her much longer.
It was a Tuesday.
It was raining.
Portia was dusting the downstairs hallway when Mister opened the study door. But he did not walk through it. He simply looked at Portia, unsurprised, as if he’d expected to see her exactly where she was, and then he crooked his finger like a fishhook and reeled her in.
“Portia,” he said, “may I see you for a moment?”
It was a rhetorical question. She was already walking to him.
He sat down behind his desk and gestured to the chair opposite him. “Close the door,” he said, “and have a seat.”
Mister’s speech, always, was clipped as neat as whiskers, and his voice did not waver. Never in anger, certainly never in grief. Portia thought of the Tin Man and how he rusted himself with tears. Mister’s metal was far tougher than that.
She sat perfectly still. She did not want to disturb anything, did not want to leave her impression in this place. It had bothered her, before, to think that she could simply disappear. Now it seemed necessary, the perfect first step of her escape.
“Portia.”
She hated to hear him say her name, but still, she didn’t move.
“I know you must be terribly”—he folded his hands on his desk, leaned forward—“sad. About Caroline.”
Was that all he expected? Sadness? What about guilt? The heart-wrenching weight of responsibility? She had brought Caroline here, had led her straight to the lion’s mouth and watched the horrible jaws close around Caroline’s hopeful face. Perhaps he did not know it had been Portia’s idea to move out of the bunkhouse. Perhaps Caroline had never told him.
“Yes, sir,” Portia said, primly as she could. She would not let her voice waver, either, even if it meant actually gripping her throat with her hand.
“It is difficult, isn’t it, to imagine that she’s gone,” he went on. “Poor girl. Taken from us so suddenly. I think she scarcely recognized me, at the end. Calling for her mother until the very last breath she took.”
As if Portia did not know. As if she had not been there, listening to that last breath.
As if she could not hear it still.
“Yes, it’s very sad.” Mister sighed. “But we must move on, mustn’t we?”
Oh, his voice was smooth, oily as warm butter.
“I don’t mind telling you, Portia, that I have achieved some measure of success with my . . . enterprises. The orchards are thriving, and now that our army seems to be mobilizing for action in Europe, I expect the need for uniforms will be greater than ever.”
Portia imagined an army of carefully hemmed trousers, marching across the nations of the world, and had to swallow a laugh.
“I want to speak with you, Portia, about your future.”
He stood up then and walked halfway around the desk, sat on the corner, and crossed his legs so one knee was dangerously close to Portia’s. And went on talking as if he had not moved.
“You get on very well with the other girls, don’t you? Telling them stories and jokes and such? Keeping their morale up?”
So Caroline had told him a few things.
“You are an intelligent girl, Portia. One might even say an unusual girl.”
She watched the space between them, saw its borders shrink a bit more.
“You are not the kind of girl to let an opportunity pass you by. Am I correct?”
“That depends, sir,” she replied, “on the conditions of the prospect.”
Mister smiled, curling his lips carefully, as if he were imitating something he’d seen in a picture.
“Fair enough,” he said, and leaned a little closer. “I would like for you to be my assistant.”
“Like Caroline was?” She did not mean to sound snide. It was, mostly, a question of fact.
“Not precisely,” he said. “I have no interest, for instance, in marrying you. I don’t believe I’ll make that mistake again.”
Portia fought the ripple of revulsion that crawled up her spine.
“I will employ you to manage my work force and organize my accounts, for which I will provide you a salary.”
What sort of buffoon considers a bunch of rejected girls a work force? Portia thought.
“Furthermore,” Mister purred, “you will report to me on the . . . shall we say, conduct of the young ladies, and bring any insolence, rebellion, or idleness to my attention immediately.”
“You want me to be a rat,” Portia said. “Pardon my language.”
“Does that offend you?” Mister asked.
“Not necessarily,” she said. “But I might require some further compensation.”
“Such as?”
“I want my file.”
He drew back. “Portia,” he said, voice low and wary, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“My file,” she said, matching his tone. “I want it.”
It was not a request she expected he would grant. She was not asking for a favor. She felt she could afford to reveal that she knew a secret and was not afraid to speak of it. It was a gambit, a tip of her hand. After she was gone, he would know that he had not controlled her.
Mister stood up then and returned to the other side of his desk, sinking into his chair with an almost imperceptible smile.
“I understand the importance of one’s family history.” He waved one hand stiffly toward the wall of books next to him, without breaking Portia’s gaze. “This entire house, after all, is my family legacy. Where would I be without it? Where would any of us be?”
A whole lot happier, Portia was tempted to say.
“But understand,” Mister said, “that it is at my discretion to tell you what you need to know about your family. You must trust me, Portia. Haven’t I treated you well?”
“Better than you treated Caroline, maybe.”
Mister shrugged. “Caroline was a troubled girl,” he said, “and I do feel badly about the way things . . . turned out. But that proves my point, don’t you see? She wrote to her mother about our marriage without telling me, and she suffered because of it. Had she only asked, I would have told her to wait. I would have found the right time, and we could have avoided the entire mess.”
Portia remembered trying to straighten Caroline’s twisted, bloated fingers and nearly gagged.
“I’m not Caroline,” she said. “And I deserve to know where my father is.”
“Don’t you mean, where your parents are?”
“I mean wha
t I mean,” Portia replied. She had long since absolved herself of any guilt she felt whenever she thought only of Max. Her mother had simply melted into the landscape like the ghost she had always been.
“Regardless of semantics,” Mister said, sneering, “what is the point of this pursuit? They don’t care to know anything about who you are or what you want. They left you here, my girl, and they are not coming back for you. Surely you know that by now.”
“You’re wrong.” Portia forced the words past the tremendous weight she felt in her chest, her throat, everywhere. “My family is looking for me.”
“But Portia,” Mister replied, his voice false and sweet, “I am your family now.”
It was then Portia knew that she was right to leave, because if Mister found a way to claim her, she would never get away. She would spend the rest of her life in this limbo state, floating invisibly through Mister’s haunted hallways. And worse than becoming one of Mister’s possessions, worse than spending the rest of her days as a wayward girl, Portia knew that if she stayed, eventually Mister’s words would tunnel through her skin and enter her veins like a virus. She would come to believe him.
She would give up.
Portia stood—carefully, as if she might shatter by moving too quickly—and made her way to the door. Mister did not stop her. There was nothing more to say, after all. He had led Portia to a grim realization that, he expected, would tamp out the last flicker of hope she carried. As he had done for Caroline. For so many girls.
Hope, Mister believed, was a waste of time. And it made girls so terribly willful.
He felt he could almost see through Portia now, see the hope draining out of her like water through a sieve. It thrilled him from top to toes. He could barely keep himself from clapping.
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