Silence for the Dead(70)

Then we opened trunks of clothes. Silk dresses, jackets and skirts, suits and ties. A woman’s sun hat. A string of pearls. A dyed, feathered handbag. Men’s shirts. And shoes—satiny women’s heels, men’s shoes polished to a flawless shine, lined up in the bottoms of the boxes as if waiting for their owners to return.

I backed away. The clothes repelled me. We shouldn’t be touching them. Here were the shoes of a younger man, not quite fully grown; and the shoes of an older man, conservative and well worn and polished. Something about how those shoes spoke of a living person sent my stomach sinking into a sickening drop.

“They never left,” I said. As I spoke it, I knew that a small part of me had held out hope, had wanted the story to be different. “Anna, Mikael. Their mother. Their father. They never left.”

Jack’s eyes were equally bleak. He ran a hand over his face. “No,” he said.

“I’ll have to tell Maisey,” I said. “No one leaves without their clothes.”

“Or their underwear.” Jack reached into another box and held up a set of silky women’s drawers, made for a teenage girl. He dropped them back on the pile as if he couldn’t bear to touch them.

We stood silent for a moment, looking at the belongings of four people who had vanished a year before. “What could it be?” I asked him. “Could they have gone under some kind of compulsion?”

“There’s been no demand for ransom,” he said. “That we know of, at least. And how can you subdue four grown, healthy people at once, including a grown man? Perhaps they had debts.”

“Then why not sell the piano, or the paintings? Why abandon thousands of pounds’ worth of belongings?” I looked at the shoes, paired up as if their owners had just left them. “I think they’re dead, Jack. I can’t help it. I do.”

“Who would murder an entire family, including the children? And why? It must have been an illness. It’s the only way.”

“Then someone buried them.” I motioned my hand around the room. “And someone did this.”

“We have to find their bodies, Kitty.” His voice was quiet. “You know that. We don’t have a choice anymore.”

I thought of the girl who had worn those underthings, a girl who was shy but devoted to her one best friend. A girl who had been excited, perhaps, to wear a string of pearls, made to look like her mother’s real ones, not knowing when she put them away that she’d never need them again. The thought of it pressed behind my eyes.

And I thought of Creeton, breaking a window and marching out to the isolation room with a piece of glass. It was all connected somehow, the Gersbachs and the madness. Everything that was wrong here, everything that was tainted, was connected to these trunks.

“I know,” I said to Jack. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we have to find their bodies.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


The next morning the heat was already heavy, promising a stifling day. The wind, smelling of damp and salt, blew hot from the mainland, rolling off into the marshes and tousling the trees. After a morning’s work, I slipped into my quiet spot outside the kitchen door and lit a cigarette, thinking about my expedition with Jack the night before. The men were taking their exercise at the other side of the house, out of sight. I had just taken my first puff when a voice came from behind me.

“I’d marry you for one of those.”

I whirled. Mr. West was sitting in his chair next to a clump of boxed bushes. He eyed my cigarette hungrily.

I looked around and saw no nurses. “Did they just leave you here?”

“I asked to be alone. You don’t think you’re the only one who knows about this spot, do you?” He nodded at my cigarette. “But I don’t mind the interruption, as long as you’ll give me one. The price of my silence, you know.”

I walked over and handed him a smoke. Despite his severe injuries, West was one of the easier patients to deal with; he was quiet and not prone to arguments with the others. He wasn’t bad looking by any means, and his arms and shoulders were layered with muscle from maneuvering the chair. As far as I could tell, his mental affliction consisted of quiet periods punctuated by bouts of depression so bad they completely debilitated him.

But he was in a good mood today, and as I held the match to his cigarette, he inhaled with real pleasure. “Ah,” he said, his eyes drifting half closed as he exhaled a stream of smoke. “I meant it, you know. I’ll marry you for this.”

I smiled and took a drag of my own. “Thanks, but no.”

“What is it? You don’t want a fellow without legs?” His tone was teasing, not touchy, and he gave me an appreciative once-over. “You don’t need legs for everything, you know. All of my other parts work just fine.”

“I’m happy for you. Go use them on some other girl.”

He laughed. “I would, but my fiancée jettisoned me as soon as I came home, and I don’t meet many women in this place.”

I swallowed. Not a week ago he’d had one of his bouts, pulled from the bed by Paulus like a sack of potatoes, tears streaming heedless down his face. I pushed the memory away. “Are you sure you told her about your parts working?” I said lightly.

“Ah, no.” He took another long drag and savored it. “She wasn’t the sort of girl you could say that kind of thing to.” He didn’t even notice my glare, he was so suddenly lost in thought. “Do you know—I don’t even think I liked her very much.”