“Right,” Nora said.
Ben might not have seen his own role in her thievery. But to her, it was clear as day, and sometimes she felt an urge to point it out to him. To ask how it was exactly he thought thatshe, who, after all, had grown up in the same neighborhood, was able to give him such items as the luxury watch she gave him for his birthday.
She figured that his response could go either way: He could be disappointed in her but not entirely surprised, which would make sense; the signs had all been there all along. Or—and she thought this the more likely option, considering how good Ben was at compartmentalizing—he could be totally shocked. Angry, even, that his fiancée would even think of partaking in something so reckless.
Nora’s desire to see his reaction, to jolt him from his comfortable state of denial, to force him to act, was almost enough to make her tell him, especially after a few glasses of red wine.
But she didn’t. She never did, because if Ben were to act—if he were to call her on her dangerous behavior—they would have to, at the very least, have a serious talk, and she would be forced to admit she had a problem, maybe a bigger problem than he did. And Nora wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
It was Ben, of course, who told her about the coal chute he had seen in Ms. Martin’s basement. Back when coal had been used to heat the house, men would deliver it through a little door out back, and it would travel down the chute into a coal cellar.
Nora took this to mean that, assuming that little door hadn’t been sealed off, a petite person like her could potentially use it to get inside.
When she got there, though, she saw that it was less of a door than a hatch the height and width of her pillow. It was down on the ground, built into the foundation, hidden behind a tangle of vines in the overgrown yard. As she crouched on the ground, the weedy grass came up over her head. The whole place was surrounded by a high wooden fence, plus it was after midnight, so Nora wasn’t at all worried about being seen as she lifted the hinged iron door and wriggled herself into the darkness inside.
There wasn’t room to crawl, so she had to slither on elbows and thighs, cold metal walls pressing in on all sides as she followed the chute’s downward slope beneath the earth. She was doing all right at first, focused on her breath, but then the tiny tunnel seemed to go on for longer than it should, and a spark of panic in her gut threatened to bloom into a blaze.
She tried to move faster but she couldn’t, hips wedging themselves between the narrow walls, threatening to stick, and her slithering turned to thrashing as a scream roared up her throat. It was just before it exploded from her mouth that the chute gave way and she plunged headfirst onto concrete.
Saw stars.
The impact took her breath away, and when she got it back, she smelled stones, cold earth, and old coal. She tasted its dust on her tongue. Carefully touching her head, she was relieved to feel that her skull was still intact. But when she turned on her phone’s flashlight, she saw that her fingers were red with blood.
She winced. Slowly made her way to her feet, out of the coal cellar, through the stone basement, and up the wooden stairs, where she paused to kiss the faded saint on the gold vermeil pendant she wore (not because she believed in saints but because the necklace had belonged to her dead sister Gretel).
Then she stepped into the dark hall. The kitchen was to her right, and to her left a staircase Ben had described asgrand. That was where she went now because Ben believed, based on footsteps he’d heard, that Ms. Martin had been directly above where he was in the kitchen, walking slowly back and forth while on the phone with Lee at the museum. So Nora set out to find whatever room was directly above the kitchen.
She found the stairs to be grand indeed. The first few led to a wide landing where two stout plants stood in brass pots that flashed in the light of her phone. Passing between them, she looked up and saw nothing but darkness on the second floor, but a heady smell drifted down, smoky and woodsy. It got stronger as she climbed the stairs, and she thought that it must be some kind of incense, maybe pine.
She’d assumed Ms. Martin would be asleep by now. And if she wasn’t, Nora could only hope that she was hard of hearing. The woman had, after all, been old twenty years ago; by now, she had to be ancient.
Still, Nora paused here, halfway up the stairs, one hand on the carved wooden railing, and listened for what felt like a long time. Her head began to throb, and she prodded it again with her fingers, felt the warm blood, and reminded herself that head wounds always bled a lot. She could ice it when she got home.
A wave of dizziness made her reach for the railing again, and she held on to it a moment before realizing her mistake. Here she was about to steal something of such great value that it belonged in a museum, and she’d left her bloody fingerprints all over the railing. So she knelt and lifted the hem of her shirt to use it as a rag, only to find that, in the light of her phone, her blood was the same color as the wood.
Doing her best to wipe down everywhere she’d touched, she marveled at the vines and leaves carved into it. It was sculptural, this bloodred railing; she’d never seen such craftsmanship in any of the other houses around here. Her curiosity about Ms. Martin was by now almost as great as her desire for the spider silk scarf. Who exactly was this extremely old woman, hiding out among such treasures, burning incense deep into the night?
Nora crept slowly down the hall back in the direction she’d come from, that of the kitchen. She passed a window overlooking the front yard with three more plants in pots on the sill. She knew almost nothing about plants but could see that these were healthy and well tended, their lustrous leaves blocking out almost all the moonlight. Whoever Ms. Martin was, she clearly cared about her plants, and this little bit ofhumanity threatened to make Nora feel guilty about what she was doing.
She didn’t think of herself as a bad person.
She had simply refused to accept that, because she was born poor (and was, statistically speaking, almost certain to die poor too), she didn’t deserve nice things. She stole only from the rich and never from anyone she knew.
But now an impression of Ms. Martin was forming, that of a person afraid to leave her house but who had managed to bring the beauty of the outside in. Nora couldn’t help but feel for (and admire) that person.
She’d come too far for that kind of thinking. Clenching her jaw, she continued slowly along, then faster, as, like the coal chute, the hall began to feel like it was going on for too long, without any doors on either side, and she had the dizzying sense that the house was somehow bigger on the inside than it appeared from without. She began to feel slightly out of breath.
As she passed another window on her right, another row of windowsill plants cast shadows that made the carpet look like the forest floor. She had been moving closer to the burning-pine smell this whole time, but now that it had reached what felt like its peak, she detected another smell beneath. Something rotten. Wrong.
(Dead.)
And she couldn’t help but think of the old stories, the ones about Ms. Martin being behind the disappearance of many a local pet. The theory being that she’d eaten them. It was ridiculous, of course.
But then what was that smell?
Suddenly, without meaning to, Nora stepped on something that let out a loud crack!
She froze and lowered the feeble light of her phone to her feet and saw that she’d stepped on a forked twig, snapping it in half. Like a wishbone, it had broken down the middle. She picked up the smaller piece, the size of her smallest finger bone, its bark smooth and cool to the touch, and it sent a shiver through her, because what the hell was it doing there? She shined her light all around but didn’t see any houseplants, let alone a tree from which it might have fallen.
