My eyes flew open.I can’t ignore the truth.Clare’s death. Faye’s mother’s illness. Madame Usher’s strange behavior. It all came back to one question – why?
Madame Usher usually handled her own dirty work, but this time she’d entrusted three broken muses. I’d make her regret that decision.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Faye
After the disastrous recital for Hans and my confrontation with Dorien, no one in the house spoke to me for a week. Good. I didn’t want to speak to them either.
The eyes of the Muses followed me everywhere I went – itching across my shoulders, boring into my soul. Perhaps they suspected I was responsible for putting Ivan’s coke in his violin case. Not that he got any kind of punishment for it. I refused to acknowledge them in any way – if they wanted to treat me like a ghost, I’d become one.
I gathered the pieces of my ruined violin. In my room, I laid them out under the window on top of my father’s fairy tale book. As the moonlight cast its glow over the shards and splinters, I cried all the tears I’d held inside ever since Mom went into hospital. It was a bloodletting, and afterward, I felt better. I wrapped the remains in a scarf my mother gave me and took them outside. I found a shovel in the woodshed and dug a hole in the dirt behind the gazebo.
I opened my door on Monday morning to find a brand new violin on the landing – a beautiful Venetian instrument in the style of Sanctus Seraphin. I dragged it inside and turned it every which way, hunting for a label that might say who it was from, but there was nothing. My mind flickered to the three Muses, but that was ridiculous. They were the ones who destroyed my violin, so why would they replace it?
I didn’t want to accept the gift without knowing who it was from, or why they’d given it. But I wouldn’t get far at Manderley without an instrument, and Madame made it clear that the pieces in the school’s collection were off-limits to me. So I held the instrument to my chin and played until my fingers bled, until the music had seared determination for revenge into my soul.
I refused to eat in the dining room with the other students. Instead, I’d set the table and retreat to the kitchen. At least there I could cling to the belief that the silence was of my own choosing.
No one acknowledged me or the new instrument when I walked into class on Monday morning. I held my head high as I took my seat in the corner. I channeled my mother. I wouldn’t let their scorn get to me.
I held that new violin to my chin, and I played every note flawlessly.
But it wasn’t enough to repair what had shifted when I picked up that Becker violin. Not even Master Radcliffe would acknowledge me in my private lesson. He jabbed his finger at the sheet music he wanted me to play. I was left to interpret his frowns. It was an inferior way of learning. After Monday’s lesson, I decided to save us both the agony and skip classes to practice my Sibelius and Paganini alone in my room.
Someone got to Harrison, because instead of his usual jovial greeting when he brought the wood in, all I got was silence and a pitying stare. I didn’t realize how much I desperately needed his kindness until it had been taken from me.
The Muses did this.
They hate me this much. All because I… what? Existed?
Their ghosting shit was getting insane. My senses worked overtime. I fancied I heard footsteps following me as I moved around the house. Groans and creaks followed me inside the walls. Yet every time I turned around, the hallway would be empty.
Eerie violin music wafted into my room at night, keeping me awake. Hiding under the sheets from a resident ghost was not as fun as the movies made out. Even through my noise-canceling headphones I caught snatches of the same haunting tune, played over and over.
By the end of the week, I was a zombie. I dropped a glass at dinner and Madame Usher screamed that my mother raised me as an animal. I sat at the kitchen table, fighting back tears as I devoured an entire package of Red Vines.
As I stacked the dishwasher, I noticed a figure moving across the back porch. Odd. Titus couldn’t have come through the kitchen, because I would have seen him. I cupped my hands over the window and squinted into the gloom. The window to the Yellow Room was pushed all the way up, the curtains flapping in the wind. He must have slipped out there. But what was one of the Muses doing sneaking around in the dark? They usually stomped about like they owned the place. Titus jogged down the path toward the woodshed, looking over his shoulder at the house as if he didn’t want anyone to follow him. A large, rectangular case slapped against his leg.
Hmmmm.
He hadn’t come back to the house by the time I finished the dishes. Curious now, I peered at the clock above the fridge. Nearly 8PM. I could hear the others laughing and playing music in the Blue Room. Why wasn’t Titus hanging out with them?
Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Titus wandering around the house in the evenings. Was he sneaking out to the woodshed every night? If so, what was he doing out there?
A rising rage seethed inside me. Thanks to those guys, I’d lived through a hellish week. They took pleasure in making me look like I flouted Madame Usher’s authority at every step, when reallytheywere the ones running circles around her.
Maybe it was time I turned their cruelty back on them.I bet Madame Usher would be interested to know where Titus goes at night.
I grabbed my coat from the hook by the kitchen door and pushed it open as silently as I could. The wind was up tonight, howling down the valley and scraping the branches across the walls.
I closed the door as silently as I could and darted through the kitchen garden, pausing at the gate to check no one was coming from the main house. The coast was clear. I unlocked the gate, wincing as the creaking hinges pierced the night. The wind whipped the sound against the house. If Titus knew I was coming after him, it wouldn’t be because of that sound.
I slipped through and crept down the path, keeping close to the house. I reached the woodshed with its open bay where Harrison stacked firewood to dry and stored his rusting garden machinery. I couldn’t see Titus anywhere.
Behind the woodshed was another outbuilding – I’d never noticed it before, but then I didn’t spend much time out here. It was long and low and made of brick, hidden by the overhanging trees. A faint light flickered at the dirt-smeared window.
Gotcha.
