“Not having much luck today,” Edwina said and nudged the rusted hinge deeper into the mud with the toe of her boot.
Mary, perhaps sensing she trod on tender ground, changed her tune. “Well, I’ve already found some things you overlooked,” she said, holding up a silver-plated hip flask and a small folding pocketknife, the sort men sometimes used to clean their fingernails and teeth. Both had a glaze of mud on them, but neither appeared particularly water or weather beaten. The brandy flask had scratches on it, but they were the sort easily accounted for by the effort of slipping the container in and out of one’s pocket. She doubted it had ever been pressed hard beneath the weight of water for even a day of its life.
“Might have been flung off the bridge,” Mary said, reading her doubt.
Edwina agreed the items would be nice additions for the shop. Ones that would sell quickly. She tipped her face up to the bridge, trying to imagine the rattle of a train crossing over while some passenger tossed a perfectly good flask out the window after the last drop of brandy was gone. While she dwelled on the improbability, a familiar shape crossed into the halo of lamplight on the bridge. The boy. He stood at the end near the embankment, watching her and Mary through the dawn mist and fading moonlight. This lurking of his had become something more than curiosity. More than mere petulance too. She turned her attention back to the mud at her feet as if she hadn’t noticed him, then stole a glimpse at Mary. Her sister merely smiled, proud of her finds, as she rinsed the flask and knife off in a pool of backwater.
“I’m ready to call it a morning,” Edwina said, lifting the hem of her skirt to trudge over the mud and algae.
“So soon? There are fifty-three minutes yet until we open.”
“Your marvelous finds have more than made up for my bad luck this morning,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at Mary. “Coming?”
But no. Mary stood and pulled her shawl around her, saying she’d best go and fetch the milk fresh from the udder for their tea. She handed off the flask and pocketknife so Edwina could take them back to the shop and clean them up for sale. Together they ascended the moss-slick stairs to the top of the embankment, where they parted ways. By then the boy was nowhere to be seen, though Edwina suspected he wouldn’t be far from wherever Mary went.
Back at their aerie top-floor bedroom, Edwina tossed off her muddy knockabouts. As she laced up her ankle boots for shop work, the rarity of her sister not sitting on the bed opposite to show off her finds plucked a melancholy chord inside her. Alone, she picked up the flask and turned it over in her hands under the light. Not a speck of mud inside, and the whiff of alcohol still wafted out with the cap removed. The knife, too, though still wet with river slime, showed no sign of rust. Edwina’s chest fluttered with doubt as her intuition pushed up against her ribs.
She walked to the dresser and opened the jewelry box on top. It was the same as before, with Mary’s baubles taking up the majority of the space, though a few now seemed to be missing. She moved them around with her finger, wondering how something as morbid as her sister’s talent came to be in the world. There were creatures like moth larvae and carrion beetles whose unpleasant work did the task of breaking down skin and hair and bone in a perpetual cycle, but what purpose in the natural order of life unto death was served by stripping memories from cold flesh? The person’s thoughts weren’t preserved in any measurable way. The memories, sitting as idle orbs in a secondhand jewelry box, died as surely as if they’d stayed with the body. And yet the compulsion ruled her sister’s life. And hers, too, in ways too painful to recount some days.
Edwina shut the lid to the jewelry box but hadn’t quite quelled the nagging caution flapping about inside her. Kneeling at the foot of her bed, she opened the lid on the cedar hope chest she and Mary shared to search for anything new she didn’t recognize. Instead she found her lavender blouse with the pearl buttons buried near the bottom wrapped in butcher’s paper. The shirt, with its straight front bodice and mutton-leg puff at the shoulder, along with a matching skirt, had been put away for a special day, one she knew all too well might never come.
She lifted the blouse out of its burial place and held it up to her face. As she stood before the looking glass, the color made her pale cheeks pinken so that she almost looked like the carefree girl she used to be, running beside the stream in the snowy hills and collecting leeks to be cooked with cream and thyme. In her odd mood she considered wearing the blouse, but she found the memory of a childhood home she could no longer revisit had drained the blush from her skin again, so she wrapped the blouse in its paper and smothered it again deep in the chest beside her sister’s similarly stored outfit of midnight blue.