And she couldn’t disagree. My sister, my lover, he had written. She had a vision of Alfred clutching her letters in his cell, one hand gripping the paper as the other hand pumped at his waist. You wicked little cunt, she had crackled in her third letter, a phrase by far the worst thing she had ever put in writing, and now she imagined Alfred reading that phrase over and over again. Little cunt, she heard him murmur, sweat glistening, right hand working. Perhaps just the sight of those words was thrilling for him. Perhaps this exchange would be, too.
And then there was this: There was no guarantee that she could trust him. Even she would acknowledge that. If correspondence with her was what Alfred wanted, he might simply string her along. On a dime, he would change the terms of their agreement. He would ask for more. He would give his word and then go back on it without a moment’s hesitation. He might toy with her for months on end.
But she also knew this: Already, she was making progress. She held the letter, and her eyes traced its script. His handwriting. Beautiful. Elegant. All his own. In the weeks before her disappearance, Jacqueline’s little bird wrote her letters, and although those notes had been destroyed long ago, Elisabeth still remembered their penmanship. How fine it was. How precise. She couldn’t be certain without a side-by-side comparison, but she felt as if she had something. Not evidence, perhaps. But the possibility of evidence. A lead.
And in time, she would gather even more. Would she comply? Would she respond? Absolutely. What choice did she have? Should she go behind Alfred’s back and involve York and the police? No. Even without Alfred’s warning, that wasn’t something she would do quite yet. For now, at this early juncture, this was something that she had to manage. That was the best way to think about it, she decided—a thing to be managed, a matter of business—and it was something she would manage without any help from York and his deputies. She didn’t need them. She could get her own answers. Her own leads.
In fact, she could start right away. Perhaps she didn’t have to say yes or no quite yet. She had to be coy. If he was going to play a game with her, then she had to play one, too. She took a seat at the vanity beside the bed and set down a sheet of blank paper. First, Elisabeth wrote, I need to know you’re not toying with me. You talk about proof, but I don’t have any proof that I can trust you in the first place. Prove to me that your “involvement” isn’t all a fabrication.
She didn’t sign the letter. She stuffed it into an envelope and filled out the address. Then she held the envelope in her hands for a long while.
“This is the right thing to do,” she whispered. “Just keep running. Just keep running.”
CHAPTER 14
Two days after visiting Jacob’s house, Jacqueline wakes you in the middle of the night. You open your eyes, and she’s standing over you in the dark.
“Emergency meeting,” she whispers. Her voice is roiling with excitement. “Meet me at the base in five minutes.”
Before you can speak, Jacqueline bounces away. You sit up. Rub the sleep from your eyes. Then you take the cigarette case from its place beneath your pillow, and you move it back to its hiding spot. You’ve cut an inches-long slit in the fabric of your mattress, and the case drops neatly between the springs.
Jacqueline is already waiting when you step into your father’s workshop. She’s kneeling on the floor in her nightgown, the fabric billowing around her like a cloud. An oil lantern sits on one of the worktables, and the walls of the shop ripple with dancing yellow light.
“It’s happening,” Jacqueline says. “It’s really going to happen.”
“What is?” But you’re afraid you already know the answer.
“The Plan,” your sister says. “Look at what I’ve got.” From beneath the canopy of her nightgown, she lifts two orange cards about the size of dollar bills. NEW YORK, SUSQUEHANNA & WESTERN CO., they read. Train tickets. “All we have to do is get to Lancaster,” she says. “The train leaves from there. It leaves on Friday.”
Friday. That’s four days away. You step forward. Your legs feel weak.
“You bought train tickets?” you say.
“Jacob bought them for us. But they don’t go to Philadelphia. They go to New York.”
“Jacqueline—”
“And I know that’s not what we agreed on,” your sister says, pushing herself to her feet, “but listen.” She sets the tickets on the worktable and walks forward, taking your hands. “Jacob’s wife arrives in New York this week, and we’re going to meet her. Isn’t that wonderful? We’re going to stay with her and Jacob.”
“What are you talking about?”
“In New York,” she repeats, as if you hadn’t heard her the first time. “We’re going to stay with them for a little while, just at first, and then we can go to Philadelphia like we agreed.”
“When did you decide this?”
“Today,” Jacqueline says. “I got a note from Jacob. And the tickets. He’s invited us on a holiday. We’ve never been on a holiday.”
“We never talked about this.”
“I know, but I wanted—”
“I’m not going to New York with some strangers,” you say, yanking your hands away from her. You don’t feel shaky anymore. You feel angry. You feel tired. “I’m not going, and you can’t either.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not thinking,” you say, trying to ignore how much you sound like your father. “We can’t do this.”
“Why not? Of course we can.” She grabs the tickets from the table. Holds them up in front of your face. “And we have money, too. We have lots of money.”
“I don’t care,” you say. “We could have a million dollars, and I still wouldn’t run away to New York with you. I wouldn’t let you run away either.”
“But we made a deal.”
“To go to Philadelphia,” you say, as if you had planned on honoring that deal all along.
And your sister seems to believe that. She trusts in your devotion. Your word. She straightens. Squares her shoulders. She puts the tickets back down, and she takes a deep breath.
“We will go to Philadelphia,” she says. “But first, New York.”
“Why should we?”
“Don’t you want to go on an adventure?”
“But why are we meeting Jacob’s wife all of a sudden?”
“Because, why not? Don’t you want to meet her?”
“No. I don’t want to do any of this. I want to stay here, with Papa.”
At that, she turns away from you. She stomps across the workshop, balling her fists and beating them against her thighs. “I knew you wouldn’t really do this,” she says, whirling back around at you. “You’re a baby, Elisabeth. You’re a coward.”
“And you’re stupid,” you say. “You’re a stupid little girl.”
She rushes at you, both hands whipping, but you catch one of her wrists and the other crashes bluntly—almost painlessly—into the solid part of your upper arm. You push her away, and you storm toward the door.
“Don’t leave,” your sister cries. Her voice is trembling. She’s on the verge of tears. “Just wait. Please.”
And you do. You turn around. You’re panting, and you’re angry, but you wait for her to speak.
“I can’t—” she says. “I can’t go without you. I don’t want to. Please, Else. Please go with me. You told me you would.”
“But we can’t leave Papa.”
“Why not?”
“Because we just can’t.” We’re a family, you want to say. We’re a team, but you know how little that would mean to Jacqueline. “It’s just not allowed,” you tell her. “It’s illegal.”
“What’s illegal?”
“Running away. We’ll get in trouble. It’s an awful thing to do.”
“We’re not running away,” Jacqueline says. “We would be staying with Jacob and his wife.�
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“This isn’t right. I don’t like this.”
She lowers her head. Her shoulders sag.
“Why is Jacob doing this?” you say. “Buying us train tickets. Giving you money. What is going on?”
But Jacqueline doesn’t answer you. She’s staring down at the floor. Her hair glints in the dim light.
“And why didn’t he meet us?” you say. “Why wasn’t he there when we—”
“Did you take something from Jacob’s house?”
The suddenness of the question—and the question itself—catches you off guard. You’re silent.
“Tell me the truth,” Jacqueline says. She raises her head. Watches you. And suddenly, bathed in the jaundiced light of the lantern, her face looks deeply tired. The skin beneath her eyes is swollen and dark, and her lips are dry. It looks as if she hasn’t slept in days. “Did you take something from the basement?” she says. “Something from one of the boxes?”
“No,” comes the answer.
“You’re lying. You took something, didn’t you?”
“Jacky, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She watches you awhile, measuring your answer, but then she blinks and turns away.
“If you’re not going with me,” she says, “then I’m going by myself.”
“You’re not.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.” You try to sound strong, but you’ve never been the strong one, and you can hear how thin your own authority sounds.
Jacqueline can hear it, too. She scowls at you, tightening her lips, and in that moment you’ve never felt so distant from her.
“I’m going,” she says, “because I want to, and because I said I was going to.”
“Then I’m going to tell on you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am.”
But she’s unfazed by your threat. She grabs the tickets from the table and pushes past you, opening the workshop door and stepping into the yard. The insects are buzzing in the fields, and the air is warm and wet. It smells like rain.
“Jacqueline,” you say, watching her walk across the lawn. “Jacqueline!”
But she doesn’t look back at you. She marches toward the house, and her footsteps leave a trail of prints in the dew-covered grass.
Friday. You have until Friday to stop this. And you will. Starting here, starting now, you have to be the tough one. You have to be the strong one. You’ve never felt so small and so alone, but you clench your teeth and shut your eyes and try to feel in control.
CHAPTER 15
Elisabeth didn’t have to wait long for Alfred’s response; a second letter arrived the following Monday, just one week after the first.
Elisabeth had spent the past few days in a trance of busywork. The contact she had finally made with Alfred gave way to a lapse in her obsessive detective work—after six straight weeks, she allowed herself to breathe—but, as soon as she tried to relax, she found that she couldn’t. Like the grief-stricken trading a fit of weeping for a fit of frantic housework, Elisabeth occupied herself in other ways. She caught up on planning for Margaret’s lessons. She treated the outhouse with a new layer of hydrated lime, and she dumped a week’s worth of trash in the woods. She patched clothing for the winter. She cooked. She cleaned. She walked Delma four times a day. With the energy of a drug-addled manic, she cut an entire cord of wood by herself.
Currently, she was rushing around the kitchen. Margaret’s birthday was the next week, and Elisabeth had decided that she would celebrate with a strawberry whipped cream cake. But summers in Tanacross posed some difficulties when it came to baking cakes. In the winter, the entire town was refrigerated, but in the summertime, eggs and cream and fruit spoiled fast. To complicate matters further, baking in the wood-burning stove could be difficult; last year, she had botched two cakes before finally succeeding, and it was purely a serendipitous mistake that Mr. Glaser had delivered enough butter and eggs for Elisabeth to make a third. And those were simple pound cakes. A strawberry whipped cream cake, she knew, would be a different matter altogether.
“If cream cakes are so difficult,” John had asked the night before, “why in the world are you making one?”
“Because it’d be nice,” she had said. “It’s an old family recipe.”
She could have gone on to say that it was the same cake her aunt Ethel used to bake for her and Jacqueline’s birthday, but she didn’t feel like mentioning that. Frankly, it made her feel kind of hokey, yet even worse, Elisabeth knew that explaining the root of her motivation would render it so pedestrian that she might never bake a cream cake again.
So she had left it at that. After surveying the kitchen, she jotted down her order for Mr. Glaser: one pound of flour, half a pound of butter, four pints of strawberries, a bag of lemons, vanilla extract, a dozen eggs, heavy whipping cream, and, finally, mascarpone.
“Masca—what?” Mr. Glaser said, staring down at the list. “I don’t even know what that is.”
They were facing each other on the landing strip. She had headed him off. The mail she wanted so desperately to peruse now sat in a box on the gravel between them.
“It’s a soft, creamy cheese,” Elisabeth said, but Mr. Glaser only blinked at her. Then she added, a little stupidly, “It’s from Italy.”
Mr. Glaser shook his head. He couldn’t have been much older than Alfred—late forties, early fifties—but his face was fat and he wore a moustache as large and unruly as the tail of a squirrel. Together, these features made for the look of a man who could have been her grandfather.
“I’m not sure you remember,” Mr. Glaser said, and his moustache drooped into the crescent of a frown, “we’re in Alaska. I think you’ve got as much chance of finding this cheese as you do a dodo egg.”
But he promised that he would see what he could do. The grocer in Fairbanks, he said, sometimes ordered items from Seattle, and who knew what sort of things might turn up in Seattle? Elisabeth paid him, thanked him, waved good-bye as his plane gathered speed down the runway. Then she set to doing what she had waited to do all day, and soon she was holding an envelope with that familiar sweeping script.
It was beautiful handwriting—it truly was—and, as Elisabeth opened the envelope with one finger, she heard her aunt Ethel’s voice echoing through the channels of her mind. If you really want to know a man, she had told Elisabeth when she was a teenager, look at his penmanship. You can learn all you need to know by the shape of a man’s letters: if he’s kind, if he’s graceful, if he’s a cheat, and she had said that last word with an extra snap—cheat—drawing it out as if it contained entire volumes of implications, a world of womanly information that Elisabeth, in her youth, had simply yet to grasp. Then, blinking, she shook the memory away, and the letter was open a moment later.
Proof. She had asked for proof that he wasn’t leading her on, and the note inside the envelope addressed just that—and one thing more.
Your proof is waiting in my aeroplane. And if it meets your satisfaction, let’s begin our exchange. Send me your body: a photograph, a lock of hair, and a portrait in your own hand. For that, I’ll bring you one step closer to your sister. But first, your proof. Look in the aeroplane.
Did he know that she’d be reading his letter on the landing strip? Because she lifted her eyes and then, as if on cue, she was staring at it: Alfred’s Fairchild 71. Since the day after the murder, it had sat in a ditch between the landing strip and the wild bush beyond. Months ago, in an attempt to move the plane to an impound lot in Fairbanks, the police had flown in a mechanic—a haggard, stooping old man who was missing his lower jaw from war or disease or God. What was left of it dangled by his neck like the snood of a turkey, and for a whole afternoon he had pinched and rubbed at that dangle, pacing around the plane and, on occasion, glancing at its engine. He couldn’t fix it. Alfred had disassembled
too much.
So the plane couldn’t fly, and instead it stayed in Tanacross. Elisabeth was walking to it now. As she moved, she glanced all around her, scanning the area for watchful eyes, but the north side of Tanacross was surprisingly desolate. Briefly, and inadvertently, Elisabeth looked at Mack’s chicken-wire kennels, which now sat silent and abandoned. A twist of guilt and grief squeezed at her stomach, and she looked away, walking faster.
The plane was locked. She tried both doors of the cockpit, and then she tested the big sliding panel that opened the cabin. Tight as tight could get. She even tested the windows, but only one was capable of opening and its lock felt as secure as the doors’. Peering through the cupped circle of her hands, Elisabeth looked inside the cockpit, and soon her eyes adjusted to the shadowed dimness within. Gauges. Dials. Meters. The cracking leather of the pilot’s seat. The shaft of the control column, its twin grips as smooth as ossified antlers. The crooked elbows of cigarette butts. Discarded matchbooks. Drifts of ash, dirt, dust. A few papers spread haphazardly across the floor and, centered atop the instrument panel and mounted on a wooden peg, the skull of a wolverine gazed through the darkness. Its mouth opened wide, and its incisors shined so brightly that they looked wet, as if the animal’s jaws might spring back to life at any moment and clamp mercilessly shut.
Elisabeth stepped back. Then she walked around the plane, testing its doors once more for good measure. Finally, she pulled a rock from the dirt beside the landing strip, and she steadied herself beside the pilot-side window.
It’s going to be loud, she told herself. It’s going to be an explosion.
But it wasn’t. The glass split, and it fell to pieces like broken ice. Elisabeth reached inside and felt around the door, and soon she had it: the little lever that released the lock. She pulled the door open and, carefully angling around the scattered glass, she moved inside.
At a glance, there wasn’t much she hadn’t already seen. The papers littered on the floor were nothing much: records of deliveries, a sprawling list of towns and times that dated back to May, each line written in Alfred’s elegant print. Free of its final delivery, the cabin was entirely empty. Crouching, she searched it nonetheless, but found nothing.
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