“It’s nice to meet you, Danielle. I’m here from a museum to take care of the bird collection inside.”
“Miss Birdie is gone,” Danielle murmured. “Miss Birdie is gone.” Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Yes, she is. I’m so sorry. Was she your...?” Elsa wondered if Danielle was the daughter of a servant or of a relative who was supposed to wait a few days before coming to claim Mrs. Van Tessel’s belongings. “Are you here with your mother or father?”
Danielle stopped short, looked at Elsa’s shoes, frowned, then peered into her eyes for the first time. If those deep blue poolswere the windows to her soul, they were locked tight and the shades were drawn. All Elsa could see was disapproval.
At once, she realized why. “Oh, pardon me. I’m in your way, aren’t I?” Taking a step back, Elsa sat on a bench and let her pass with the rake. “Is this better?”
Danielle raked over the slight impressions Elsa’s shoes had left. She reached the place she’d started in the circle and noticed her own footprints again. Danielle’s eyebrows knit together as she looked behind her and before her, as though she were trying to work out how to rake them away without stepping on the lines she’d already drawn. Her knuckles went white on the tool’s handle. Elsa didn’t know why the lines in the pebbles were so important, but it was obvious that they were critical to the child, at least for this moment.
“I have an idea,” Elsa said. “Why don’t you step over here, and then we can reach over and connect the lines from here. What do you think?”
Without meeting her gaze, Danielle followed her suggestion. When she struggled to reach the rake far enough without it dropping, Elsa held out her hand. “May I try?”
She surrendered the rake, and Elsa managed to complete the task. “Better?”
Insects rattled. Danielle’s attention snapped sideways, and Elsa followed it. A chickadee had landed on the edge of the fountain. He dipped in and out of the water and shook his wings.
The girl mumbled something, and Elsa asked her to repeat it.
“Oh!Poecile atricapillus. That’s right!” Elsa corrected Danielle’s pronunciation, but the child had gotten the scientific name right. She’d probably read it in a book and had to guess at how to say the Latin. “You’re a girl after my own heart. I’ve loved birds since I was your age, and younger, too.”
Another bird cheeped, and then another. Without looking for either, Danielle said, “Cardinalis cardinalis. Agelaius phoeniceus.”She had identified a northern cardinal and red-winged blackbird based on their sounds alone. Remarkable.
At last, the girl took the rake back from Elsa, her gaze swiveling to the mansion. “Those are Miss Birdie’s birds. You can’t take Miss Birdie’s birds. They don’t belong to you. They stay here, like me. We stay.” She thumped her palm to her chest as she said this, then pointed to Elsa and motioned toward the road.
Rain began to fall. Danielle took her rake, climbed onto a bench and hopped from one to another, careful not to disturb the pebbles, then leapt from courtyard to lawn and dashed away.
———
Elsa slipped back inside the mansion and closed the door on the strengthening rain and wind. After drying her glasses and replacing them, everything came back into focus. Silver braided streams ran down the windows and poured from gargoyle downspouts. The grooves Danielle had traced into the pebbles shone with collected water. The girl had left a trail of questions in Elsa’s mind. How well had she known Birdie? If she lived here, where were her parents? She was clearly determined to stay, but what would they do once the county took over the estate? Regardless, Elsa hoped she would see Danielle again.
Chafing her arms, Elsa sneezed, and the sound bounced off the vaulted ceiling. She reminded herself she wasn’t alone here. It only felt that way.
It was not a feeling she cared for. At the museum, she often worked on her own, but she could always take a break and stroll through the galleries. Mingling with patrons always eased the tension in her shoulders. Interacting with them refueled her before she returned to her office.
“No offense,” she muttered to the yellow birds in the parlor. “But you aren’t much for conversation.”
In truth, she wasn’t convinced that Mr. Dupont would be much better. But if he was tearing the mansion apart, he might haveseen more field guides. She couldn’t begin tagging birds without the details within those pages.
Leaving the parlor through the rear hall, she crossed into the adjacent room and found herself in a dark, wood-paneled library. Floor-to-ceiling cases held leather-bound volumes, and crown molding rimmed the ceiling. On a table between two wingback chairs was a camera, a floorplan drawing of the room, a notebook, and two of the largest tape measures she’d ever seen. But there was no sign of man or beast.
Exiting the library, Elsa followed a marble hallway through the empty dining hall and into the four-story stair tower. Her leg ached just looking at the winding steps.
“Mr. Dupont?”
No answer.
She summoned her strength. She had climbed stairs before, for goodness’ sake. She could take it slowly.
By the time she reached the second floor, however, her lungs bothered her as much as her leg. Anger flared, but it wasn’t strong enough to mask the dread that sparked it. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t be getting worse.
After a few moments to regain her composure, she continued her search on the second floor, determined to focus only on finding another human being. “Hello? Is anyone up here?” Still slightly out of breath, her voice didn’t carry like she wanted it to, but she resolved to ignore that fact.
Through one grand bedroom after another—each with its own color theme and matching birds—Elsa searched. It felt like a game of hide-and-seek, with a niggling suspicion that she was the only one playing.
When she reached the art gallery, she rested on a bench and stared at the stained-glass windows, if only to anchor herself in the present time and place. She was no longer the child she’d been at boarding school, trying to keep up with the other girls andfailing, laughter ringing in her ears. She had been playing hide-and-seek with her classmates, only to realize they’d broken the rules and left the agreed-upon boundaries. They left her alone to wander in vain until her weak leg collapsed. The matron had sent her to bed, where she’d stayed for three days to recover. Three more days alone when she desperately longed for companionship. Her parents, who lived less than five miles from the school, did not come to visit her, either.
