Page 92 of Mad Girl

“I’ll tell the coach I have period cramps. Come on.”

With a sigh, you lifted my tennis racket and bag off the ground.

About fifteen minutes later, you stood behind me on the Harrises’ front stoop as I knocked on their door. When no one answered, I used my key to enter.

“What are you doing?” You paused in the doorway, eyes big. “Do you normally let yourself inside their house when no one’s home?”

“Funny how you’ve never once asked Michael that question, even though he does the same thing at my house all the time.”

“Yes, but Michael doesn’t have the same sort of…habits you do.”

I rolled my eyes. “Are you coming in or not?”

“Fuck’s sake,” you mumbled, entering with your head down. You softly closed the door.

Filled with nervous anticipation, I headed straight to John’s study. The wall-to-wall bookcases. The books.

Why had I never thought to check inside the books?

A daunting task, to be sure, but no more daunting than inspecting over a thousand volumes to check that each book in John’s collection was, in fact, a book, and not some hollow box masquerading as a book. This, I had done over the course of three nights once, back when my dad had gone to Europe for business and left me with the Harrises. I’d snuck downstairs while everyone slept, happily losing hours of sleep every night to search all 125 shelves, searching until I could barely hold my eyes open or stand.

For the record, I’d found three such imposters. One filled with cash, another with valuable heirloom jewels, and yet another with sentimental objects that had been stowed away for safekeeping. But nothing that had given me any clues about my mother.

“What’s the point of this excursion?” you grumbled.

“Answers,” I said breathlessly, throwing open the study doors. Like you, Casey—like those pictures Michael had found—the answers I craved most might be hidden in plain sight.

Like I always did when entering John’s study, I stopped to breathe in the wonderful scent of old books. Earthy and sweet. Like smoked vanilla. You halted, transfixed, your mouth agape. “Oh my God,” you said, slowly walking forward. “Wow.”

“I thought you’d been here before.”

“To the house,” you said, crossing the room, my backpack and tennis racket still hanging off your shoulder. “Upstairs to Michael’s bedroom. Never here.”

You stopped in front of the fireplace on the center back wall, your gaze riveted to the painting above the mantelpiece. It’s giant, overbearing, and undeniably the focal point of the room.

The profile of a Caucasian woman’s face. Her eyes are shut. Her nose is perfectly straight and handsome, her mouth pretty and full, in varying shades of red. She floats in a sea of heavy brushstrokes—haphazardly swept across the canvas. Blacks and browns. Maroons and cobalt blues. No rhyme or order to the colors, no order to her. A spark of yellow here, a bit of white where a shirt collar would be. Hair that’s maybe sandy blonde, maybe brown. Still, she’s majestic and beautiful, even among the chaos.

An interesting fact about John? He’s a collector.

Of happy memories, like the family pictures that adorn the hallways and shelves and tabletops of the Harris home, quite a few of which feature me and my dad.

Of art, like the hazy landscapes, abstract splatters, line drawings, and old portraits (some of them similar to Garland) that are propped above mantelpieces and on little gold easels, often layered alongside other pieces of art—the painting in the study an outlier, markedly different from the rest.

Of books, both old and new, like the hundreds which filled the green-gray shelves all about the room, many of them passed on from John’s dad after a renovation. Something of a history buff, he reads books on presidents and wars, empires and Ancient Rome. But he loves the classics, too, and the best writers are all there: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Maya Angelou, and his personal childhood favorite: J. R. R. Tolkien. Specifically: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Every edition ever made. Including an incredibly rare first-edition printing of all three, in mint condition, signed by Tolkien himself. A Christmas present from my dad a few years prior to your arrival. One John had quietly told Nic was “way too much” for him to accept, until my dad—in a voice that had sounded unexpectedly soft and fragile—told him, “I really want you to have them.”

Out of curiosity, I’d looked it up, and a collection that rare would’ve cost my dad hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is why, following that Christmas, I rang in the New Year extra surly and pissed at my dad. Pissed he would go out of his way to blow that kind of cash on John, when the gift I wanted required minimal effort and very little, if any, money at all: a dog from the animal shelter.

But John wouldn’t hide secret photos in the rare editions—he didn’t like those books to be tampered with in any way. Michael said he’d discovered the pictures of my mom among the law books. But which law book? Nearly an entire wall was devoted to them. Old Harvard Law Review volumes, some browned with age. Legal encyclopedias. Annotated copies of Massachusetts General Law, federal statutes, old court reporters, and casebooks.

While I scanned the shelves, trying to decide the best place to start, you moved away from the classics to the history section, where a few family photos sat on the cabinet below the shelves, including that one of my dad and baby Michael at the Harrises’ wedding—the very one in which they’d cropped out my mom.

You picked up a photo of Michael and John. “Charming,” you said with a sigh, then put it back.

“Come help me look through these books.”

“Look for what?”

“I don’t know.” I wrung my hands, feeling antsy. We needed to hurry. “Anything.”