“I think there’s a connection,” Eustace told her. “With this place.”
Cordelia set her coffee cup down. “Are you saying the house killed our mom?”
“No,” Eustace told her, ruffled. “But I can’t unsee that mark in the wall, the way it resembles her tattoo.”
“But what does that have to do with the headaches?”
“You always said the medical examiner would have no reason to lie to us,” Eustace reminded her. “So then there has to be a connection between the aneurysm and the mutilation. And if there’s a connection between the tattoo and this place, then it stands to reason there’s a connection between the headaches and Bone Hill too. Like a triangle.”
Of speculation,Cordelia thought, but she couldn’t deny that they were only scratching the surface of a vast network of family secrets. She wasn’t sure the headaches were a mystery Bone Hill could solve—hers had only gotten worse since arriving—but she desperately needed it to.
A knock sounded, and they saw Gordon filling up the doorway in a striking black suit. His hair was slicked back into a tight ponytail, and his neck tattoo seemed to leap off his skin against the stark white shirt and black tie. Cordelia reflexively looked away, a rise of panic and desire warring within her. He looked damn good in that suit, commanding and dangerous.
“The others should be arriving soon,” he told them as he came in.
There was only the faintest hint of light outside, filtered through a miasma of fog, so that the trees and plants were as vague as smudges of charcoal.
“I thought you might like to have this,” he said, passing them an embossed, hinged frame. A small button at the side released it, revealing a pink lining and dreamy tintype—a portrait of a young bride. Her face was framed in silk rosettes and her dress cut straight across her shoulders, a bouquet of ribbons over her heart. The skirts were a whipped-up froth of chiffon. But it was her face that caught Cordelia’s attention. Heart-shaped, like her own, and guileless, with a rosebud mouth and coy eyes. Cordelia knew her instantly as the shining woman at her bed last night—Arabella.
“Where did you get this?” Eustace asked.
“I found it in the carriage house when I was remodeling it,” Gordon answered. “I tried to give it to your aunt, but she told me some things were better left where they lie. Whatever that means.”
“Thank you,” Cordelia told him. “I know who this is.”
The screech of the doorbell signaled the arrival of Bennett Togers, his nephew, Arkin, the hearse bearing their aunt, and a gentleman from the funeral home. The headlamps of the hearse cut a line through the gloom, illuminating murky swirls.
Cordelia swung the front doors wide, but Bennett refused to enter.
“We’ll proceed from here,” he told her. “On foot.” He waved in the direction of the men.
Cordelia shot Eustace a wary look. It would be a long way to carry a coffin in the dark, but how could she argue?
Gordon moved past them, and the men pulled their aunt’s casket from the vehicle, resting it gently on the ground before the porch steps like a dish being served. The shape struck Cordelia—long and narrow, wide at the bottom like a treasure chest, a foot at each corner carved into talons.
Bennett pulled a folded satin pall from inside his suit jacket and unfurled it over the casket. It was embroidered with a skull sprouting wings and the words,Silens in vita, in morte vocalis.
Cordelia recognized them from the crypt. “Your family motto,” he told them, before gesturing to the men again. With Bennett and Gordon on one side, Arkin and the third man from the funeral home on the other, they lifted the casket from the ground by iron rings welded to the sides. Without a word, they began walking.
Cordelia gripped her sister’s hand as she and Eustace followed mutely, Bennett the head of their meager procession.
A loud caw startled her, the shape of a crow in the branches of a nearby tree. Soon, she spotted more crows and numerous otherbirds, large and small, lighting in the trees overhead, circling and flitting like shadow puppets against a slowly brightening sky.
Cordelia’s head began to buzz, and she cursed herself for forgetting her pills. She tugged on her sister’s sleeve, pointing up. Eustace squinted at the gathering flock and breathed in sharply.
The procession wound a serpentine trail through the congested gardens, stalks and flower spikes emerging from the gloom like spears, Bennett knowing instinctively which paths to take until they found themselves beneath the cherry trees and dogwoods, birds filling up the branches like stuffing in medieval pie. Just as the hill came into view, he gestured and the men stopped, setting the coffin on the ground. To Cordelia’s surprise, they turned to face her and Eustace, then picked it up again, proceeding backward to the crypt.
Burning with a million questions, she squeezed her sister’s hand. But her tongue was stuck fast to the bottom of her mouth, awed by something she couldn’t define.
The trees moved beside them, crowded by feathered bodies. The rising sun took the sky from black to gray to eggshell. The fog parted around them, thick with eyes. Beyond the pain, Cordelia could feel the familiar hum, low and deep like a note held at the base of the throat. The hill loomed, stoic, the roses so vibrant they hurt her eyes.
Some quantum of blood within her understood that this was the denouement of a great and commanding woman. This white-haired lady boxed in black that hovered at the edge of her life like a conjured spirit. A shift was taking place. A changing of the guard. As day gives way to night, sun to moon. And she and her sister would be forever changed by it. Beside her, she sensed that Eustace felt it too.
As they entered the shadow of the crypt, the breeze danced in whorls around them, causing the birds to flap their wings with irritation. The crypt doors blew open as the men set the casketon the ground before it. Cordelia gasped, and Eustace clutched her arm.
The man from the funeral home stumbled back a step, and Arkin flinched, but Bennett held steady, as if it were all unfolding on cue.
Recovering the casket, they hoisted it high onto their shoulders, backing into the darkness like they’d been swallowed whole.
