“Yes,” I mumbled. That was somehow even more embarrassing, since it meant that I had been gripped by the strength of panic.
Maybe she can’t tell. My sleeves are loose, she doesn’t know how much muscle there is under them.
The two of us wrestled the trunk out of the way. I could see twin gouges on the floor under Mrs. Kent’s feet as she walked her end backward, but she didn’t say anything.
Andthen—“Lord have mercy!”
I followed her gaze to the bottom of the door.
An irregular blotch of dried blood and pale hair clung to the glass, and a thin crack had run through the middle. From the correct angle, the crack looked almost like an eyebrow over a bloody eye.
Mrs. Kent went down to one knee to look at it. I knelt down beside her, not sure if I wanted to crow with triumph or wince because apparently it had been just as bad as I thought it was.
“Looks like it very nearly got in,” she said. She sat back, shaking her head. “That’s a new one. Never hear of a possum acting that way.”
“Me neither.”
She got up and unbolted the door, pushing the unbroken side open. I felt a panicky rush of adrenaline, as if the possum might really be lying in wait on the balcony, eight hours later.
Is that so strange? It could understand doorknobs.I had left that bit out of my account. Even though I was pretty sure that it was true, I was not willing to offer that testimony to the jury of Mrs. Kent’s eyebrows. It had been much easier simply to saythat it had been jumping at the door so hard that it jarred the doorknob.
“Well,” said Mrs. Kent from the balcony, “it didn’t get too far afterward, that’s for sure.”
I scrambled to my feet and found her staring down at the corpse of a possum. Its mouth lay open, the jaw misaligned, and its fur was matted with blood.
“Is it really dead?” I asked weakly, not wanting to get any closer. “I mean, it’s a possum…”
“Since there’s flies on its eyeballs right now, I’m thinking so, yeah.”
God, she really must think I’m a ninny. Probably because I’m acting like one.I wiped my hands on my apron and stepped around her, then crouched down.
It was definitely dead. The tumor on the side of its face was strangely deflated, the skin hanging loose and bloody, like an empty sack. Fluid leaked from the closest eye, as if it too had deflated.
I fished a pencil out of my apron and used it to move the head to one side. The flies buzzed away in a panic, though I knew they’d be back within seconds.
There was another, similar hole on the back of its head, close to its spine. I wondered if there had been another tumor there, or what I had taken for a tumor, and I simply hadn’t seen it in the dark. “If it did have a disease,” I said, using the pencil to roll the poor creature over, “we should dispose of the body so that it cannot be spread.” The creature’s left side was clearly what it had been using to attack the window. Blood was crusted across its shoulder and I suspect that arm would have dangled if the body had not stiffened. The other lump, the one on its belly, had deflated much like the first one.
Mrs. Kent and I stared down at it, housekeeper and naturalist united in dismay. “I’ll have Jackson burn it,” she said finally. “And fix up the windowpane, though that’ll take a few days.”
“It’s fine,” I said absently. I set the pencil down beside the body. I couldn’t imagine drawing with it again. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. I don’t think I’ll be using the balcony for a while anyway.”
Mrs. Kent left me alone with a promise to send Mr. Kent up directly. I knew that I should get back to work, but I was restless and unable to settle. Carefully adding leg hairs to paintings of nearly identical flies seemed rather less important than it had yesterday. So Halder got his flies a day or two later than I’d hoped. Would he notice? Would he even care? He wasn’t going to praise me for having been early, that’s for sure. I was already failing to meet the deadline he’d set my predecessor, and never mind that he hadn’t bothered to hire a replacement for an entire year.
I paced through the studio, trying not to look at the cracked windowpane and failing miserably. When I found my gaze straying there for the third time, I turned away and told myself firmly to look at something else. Anything else.
My eye fell upon the chest, still standing in the middle of the floor. Why had it been so heavy, anyway? It hadn’t really occurred to me to open it, since I still felt on some level that I was a guest in a stranger’s room. But if it was full of my predecessor’s things, those were more or less mine now anyway. Maybe it was more paints, or brushes, or boxes of paper. (Come to think of it, it was just about heavy enough to be full of paper.)
I knelt down and flipped up the latch.
As it turned out, I wasn’t far wrong. The trunk was full of paper, though it was all contained between stiff covers. I picked one up and turned it over in my hands. The edges of the pages were wavey and stained from watercolor washes.Are those…?
Sketchbooks.
The spine made a cracking noise, stiff from disuse, when I opened to somewhere in the middle. A page of faces looked back at me, quick gesture sketches with nothing like theprecision of the insect illustrations. Yet I could see the same hand at work—something in the use of color, maybe, or an echo of a beetle’s carapace in the line of a cheekbone.
I was startled to recognize Phelps among the faces there. But of course, Mrs. Kent knew him, so there was no reason that the artist wouldn’t.Asa Phelpswas written next to his image, in the familiar handwriting, reminding me irresistibly of the scientific names written under insects in the other sketchbook.A. phelps, type specimen collected in North Carolina…I snorted.
Then I turned the page and laughed out loud. There was Mrs. Kent from multiple angles, looking younger but with the same skeptical expression that I was learning so well. One had been worked into a watercolor study. The artist had mixed indigo into the shadows of her face and the hollows of her neck, a hint of warm yellow ochre into the highlights, so that she glowed on the page.
