He gave her a hard look. “You do realize this property has never belonged to anyone besides your family? The White Lady would be none too pleased.”
“The White Lady?” Cordelia asked, confused, her mind filling with images of ghostly women—in her window, on the stairwell, floating in that disturbing photograph.
“Your aunt Augusta. I called her that on account of all thewhite hair. Though she wore mostly black. She used to say we could share a closet,” he said.
Cordelia’s blood slowed as the woman looking down from her dormer window flashed across her memory. White hair. Black dress. No smile.Imposingwas how the driver, Arkin, had put it.
Cordelia didn’t like being filled in on her relatives’ preferences by strangers, but she had her own mother to thank for that. It wasn’t Gordon’s fault. “To be fair, we haven’t actuallytoldBennett yet. But we’ll inform him tomorrow when he comes by. It’s all very standard, this estate business. I’m sure Augusta would understand.”
Gordon eyed her as if she’d just said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “I wouldn’t count on that.”
Cordelia frowned. She took a step back before turning to walk away. Her aunt would have to get in line behind all the other people, dead and otherwise, who wanted a piece of her these days. What concerned her more was the hulking groundskeeper and his bedroom eyes, the things he wasn’t saying more than the things he was, the effect he had on her. Men like that didn’t roll out of the womb covered in ink and defiance—they were damaged somewhere along the way. And Cordelia hated to admit just how much she yearned to know what his damage was. Considering how her marriage had turned out, she didn’t have the best track record for picking winners. But at least when it came to John she could plead deception.
Gordon, on the other hand, wore his troubles like a surgeon general’s warning, and Cordelia was certain he was going to be bad for her health.
CHAPTER FOURTHECRYPT
SOMEONE WAS SINGING.She could hear it behind her eyes like a memory, behind the pain that instead of lessening with the sky and space and sun seemed to grow. Stepping out of the cloistering atmosphere of the house was like taking the lid off a pot of rice. Everything boiled down to an essential simmer, except her headache. Cordelia tapped the bridge of her nose and listened, the song trailing to some distant point like a car driving away with the windows rolled down. She could just be imagining it. But after everything she’d already witnessed, she somehow doubted that. She headed into the garden.
She’d expected something formal with right angles—the remains of a hedgerow, a green and growing maze. Perhaps some topiaries. Instead, enormous shrubs and decorative trees mounded and clumped in a dizzying array of foliage. Fat, furry bees glided over brightly colored blooms, and weeds sprung up unhindered in a frenzy of life. Narrow paths spiraled through the chaos in no particular direction. Cordelia would start down one, straining to hear the voice up ahead, and find herself at a dead end. She’d turn back and take another only to arrive where she started.
It was messy and random, but there was a certain wild appealnot unlike the groundskeeper himself. A rough-around-the-edges type—realrough by her standards. She didn’t really do unpolished, not after all those years watching her mom drag home one fixer-upper after another that just wouldn’t fix. But something about Gordon made her curious. She assumed that, like a pendulum, she was swinging as far away from John on the male spectrum as she could and resolved to put him out of her mind.
Finally hitting a walk crowded with allium and lupine that spilled onto a wide-open lawn beyond the garden, Cordelia made her way down a set of slipshod stone steps among the dotted cherry trees and dogwoods in bloom, blissfully free of the choking plants and gingerbread. Here, the song spread out around her as if coming from many directions at once. Cordelia spun in a slow circle. “Hello?” she called, not really expecting an answer.
The voice dropped, the glade around her going unnaturally silent. Even the birds fell quiet, the grass running away from her in long, green stripes. Her eyes skirted the dark woods along the perimeter, and she shivered beneath the watchful gaze of the forest, reminded of the photo hidden in the broken frame. The trees seemed to reach for her, crowding together along the edge like men fighting at a fence, their limbs thrown out over the grass recklessly, grasping. Something about the lines in the grass meeting the upward sweep of their trunks distorted her perspective like an optical illusion, causing the land to bend and buckle, the trees to move in menacing arcs. Fighting the urge to shrink back, she looked away and willed herself forward.
Clearly, a lack of sleep, the long drive, and the shock of where they found themselves were sending her imagination into overdrive. She would feel infinitely better when she could put this whole sordid trip behind her. But a chilling question hovered in the back of her mind. What if this was her only chanceto know? In Texas, even if she paid all of John’s debts—and that wasa bigif—her mother’s fate still waited for her, every headache an unsettling maternal reminder setting off alarm bells in her mind. Cordelia had no intention of treading in Maggie’s mysterious footsteps, yet despite her best efforts, it seemed to be the very path she found herself on. One with a dark, distressing end. This place, with its gothic sensibility and family history, might hold the only answers she could hope to find about who andwhattheir mother was, why she left, and what happened to her. Answers that Cordelia might not survive without. Answers that terrified her as much as the questions which spawned them.
It was here that Cordelia felt the strange hum from the car return. Radiating up her calves from the earth, it called to her in a kind of throaty vibrato, like singing without words. Not the voice from the garden, but queerly familiar, it was subtle but growing, making her legs itch with the desire to move and her head buzz with a burgeoning awareness, an idea taking shape inside it, coming together like bits of rolled clay.
She closed her eyes and followed the sound, shutting everything else out, letting the sensation carry her forward. Heady with trance, she realized it wasn’t someoneas it had been before but many, a harmony of wordless voices, without shape or context, throats without tongues. Across the back of her eyes, she saw the swiftly passing clouds of a brilliant sky, bluer than the water that reflected it, sharper than the mountains straining to pierce it, and she felt the tingle of winter on her cheeks, like freckles of ice. It was so vivid that she forgot herself entirely until she crashed into something pungent and prickly, backed by hard earth and cold stone.
Her eyes flew open, and the chorus she’d been hearing with her bones, the vision she’d been dreaming while awake, vanished as swiftly as they’d arisen. She was standing before an enormous hill. Too big to simply be a part of the natural landscape, itemerged from the glade like an unwanted growth, a pox on the land. It was shaped and mounded like a giant’s sandcastle, primitive and pagan, a shrine to things unholy. Their very own Silbury Hill, with beautiful doors of iron grating set into it and bricks of stone to either side holding up a wide, peaked roof. Chiseled beneath the roofline was her surname—Bone. Chilling when set adrift, detached from the people who humanized it. And beneath that an inscription in Latin:Silens in vita, in morte vocalis.Dead languages always did give Cordelia the creeps, amputated from their time and place in history. The immortal past lumbering on, undeterred, as out of place as a butterfly in the snow.
She was looking at the family crypt.Herfamily crypt. But the usual symbols of comfort that adorn cemeteries could not be seen here. No angels or crosses or doves. Epitaphs to lives well-lived. Suggestions of a bespoke afterlife, sweet as cream, carefully arranged like furniture. Just those letters, gouged from the stone, and the unfeeling hill rising over them, and the rosebushes scrabbling up either side that she’d walked into—dark with squishy centers. The very same that sprung up at the Veranda house when they were girls, seemingly overnight.
Cordelia huddled in the shadow of the hill, dwarfed by the scale of the mound and the secrets festering in its dark. She imagined lancing it like an infected pustule, fearing what might pour out—curses and grave dirt, crimes of passion, the sins of all their fathers. But an unmistakable fact was also occurring to her, one she couldn’t reconcile with the disconcerting place she now found herself. Her headache had miraculously dissolved, as if an invisible hand had reached out and cleared the cobwebs in her skull. She couldn’t remember ever having one go away so quickly before, and certainly not without drugs. To draw some kind of connection was irrational, and yet she couldn’t shake the sense that there was one, buried here with all her relatives, like cable under the ground.
Emboldened, she climbed the low stairs to the doors. Wrapping her fingers around the unseasonably cold iron, she gave a hard tug, but they were locked fast. Darkness greeted her inside, and a faint, musty smell—the echo of rot. She pressed her face against the bars, squinting into the woven-linen blackness, looking for explanations. She could see only the cut-stone walls and negative space, the mausoleum ambling into the shadows as if it went on forever, no horizon line to anchor it.
Why hadn’t their mother asked to be laid to rest here with her family? Why deny them even that opportunity to know who they were, to have someone beyond each other?
Eustace had taken her ashes when she was cremated. They couldn’t bring themselves to bury her after her lifelong avoidance of cemeteries. She’d spread them in the mountains of Colorado, closing that dark chapter of their lives.
Cordelia stepped back and picked a petal from one of the roses, crushing it between her fingers before rubbing it beneath her nose. It was late in the season for them to be blooming, too late really. Veranda Street wafted back to her, hot and sour and full of bad memories, like orange juice after it’s turned.
A chill pushing through the woods beyond the hill snaked under her collar, making her feel vulnerable. Her eyes scanned the dark brush warily. Something about the tops of the trees in this part of the property made her uncomfortable, the way they rustled without wind, scraggly and disordered. She decided it was time to go back to the house.
She turned to leave, but a stroke of movement inside the tomb caught her eye, like someone passing behind the grated doors.
Cordelia stumbled back, but it had evaporated.An animal,she told herself, disbelieving, briskly walking in the direction of the house. It was only when she dared a look over her shoulder that she realized the hill of the crypt had no peak. It had beenleveled off at the top, flattened as if shorn with a mighty ax. Beheaded.
For what, she couldn’t imagine.
CORDELIA FORCED HERSELFup the stairs, casting her eyes down to the baseboards. It was an uneventful climb, but she was still grateful to get off at the second story. She wandered down the hall, bobbing her head in and out of opulent rooms until she found Eustace behind a door at the very end. Her sister was standing before a dressing table covered in old photographs, so engrossed she’d scarcely noticed Cordelia’s absence.
Eustace lifted the nearest frame and held it up. “Do you think this is Augusta?”
