"Nancy?"
The young detective glanced up to see Celia standing hesitantly in the doorway. "Who was on the phone?"
"Dad," Nancy lied, shuffling the papers in her lap.
"How is he?"
"Good," she replied. "What're you up to?"
"Reading," Celia said idly, running the back of her thumb along the door trim. "What was Isabel so upset about earlier?" she asked, trying and failing to sound nonchalant.
"She's taking Ethan's death hard," Nancy said slowly. "Celia, I want you to see something." She pulled out the sheet of paper with Ethan's description of Isabel and silently handed it over. Celia read it, her hand shaking, then looked up at Nancy.
"I don't…I don't…"
"I know it's hard for you to accept Isabel," Nancy said, laying a hand on Celia's arm. "Believe me, I understand. But it sounds like she made the last months of your brother's life a lot easier, whether she knew it or not."
Celia was silent a moment, than slid down the wall to sit on the floor, knees tucked up under her chin. Nancy sat beside her, still holding the manuscript.
"I miss him," Celia said.
"I know," Nancy replied, watching the sun slant through the glass panes in the front door.
"I mean"—Celia choked a little, then regained her composure—"even when he was a little…preoccupied, he was always here. I never had to worry about where our next meal was coming from or whether the house would fall in around us, because Ethan took care of all that. When I was in school and the other girls would make fun of me—remember?—I'd cry by myself in the bathroom and hide at recess, but I really didn't care because I knew I could go home and it'd just be Ethan and me. We never had to hide who we really were. I know you don't understand, but…"
"No," said Nancy quickly. "I understand, Celia. More than you think."
But Celia appeared barely to have heard. "…in town, people stared at us all the time. 'There go those Laramie kids, their parents were crazy and then they drowned.' People used to gossip and say horrible things about us, that Ethan had killed our parents or that my mom's family was full of lunatics. But here we were just—us. We did silly things, we had this bizarre set of in-jokes that no one else could have ever understood. He always took care of me. He was all I had."
Nancy felt persistent tears pricking at her eyelids. "Celia, listen. A few months ago, when my dad…Hannah came and got me and drove me to the hospital, told me that there'd been an accident, that he'd been thrown from the car and no one knew what he'd be like when—if—he woke up. Whether he'd know who we were or he was. But none of it meant anything until I saw him lying there."
"Nancy," Celia began, but Nancy went on.
"He looked so weak and frail and grey and even when he woke up, he seemed dazed and unfocused. He seemed completely helpless, and he'd always been funny and strong. When he was around, people just felt—better, somehow. He'd always been the one to bail me out of trouble. There was nothing he couldn't fix. And I couldn't fix him."
A single, hot tear trickled down Nancy's cheek. "So I guess I realized the hard way that the people who love you can't always protect you. Sometimes you just have to be strong for yourself."
Celia gave a strangled cry and buried her face in Nancy's shoulder. The two girls sat in silence for a time, Celia sobbing onto Nancy's shirt sleeve, Nancy staring into the blinding noon sunlight as silent tears slid down her face.
Finally Celia spoke, her voice ragged with tears.
"We had an argument the night he died."
Nancy said nothing.
"I mean, we bickered a lot. We were brother and sister, after all, but this was different. This was the first time we'd really fought about anything," Celia went on.
Had Isabel heard Celia and Ethan fighting that night? Nancy wondered, but merely whispered, "What did you fight about?"
Celia wiped her nose with the back of her hand and leaned back against the wall, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The golden fall sunlight illuminated the tears caught in her long eyelashes and gently lit the damp streaks on her face.
"He wanted me to apply for college," she said. "He'd sent off for all these brochures for me to look at. I told him I wasn't going to go. I said that if it was the money he was worried about, wasn't it better for me to get a job instead of spending so much on school?"
She wrapped the slender silver chain of her locket around her fingers as she spoke and tapped the fingers of the other hand on the hardwood floor in a nervous staccato. "He said the money didn't matter, that we'd find a way. I told him I wasn't leaving Selkirk End. I tore up the brochures and threw them in the fireplace. Then—"
"Then what?" Nancy asked gently. "Was it you who broke the mirror?"
"No!" Celia said, glancing at her in surprise. "No! I don't know what happened to the mirror. I didn't lie to you, Nancy. I just didn't tell you quite everything."
"I didn't mean that," Nancy apologized. "Please, go on."
"Then," Celia said slowly, bowing her head so that a curtain of dark hair concealed her face, "then he said something that—I mean, you have to understand, he never said anything bitter about what he'd had to give up for me. He wasn't like that."
"What did he say?" Nancy prompted, though she thought she already knew.
"He stood up and faced the window for a minute. It was just getting dark, and it was that time of evening when the shadows are just starting to fall, so softly that you barely notice. He turned to face me, and he looked almost savage, Nancy. Then he said, very quietly, 'Celia, if you knew what I've sacrificed for you...I've buried myself alive so that you could have some semblance of a normal childhood. I've watched every dream I ever had suffocate and die in this town, in this house…and you'd throw all that away?'
"His face was twisted, almost unrecognizable…I started to back toward the door, but he yelled after me: 'I secluded you here, God knows why, and now—now you're standing there telling me that I've martyred myself for nothing, that you're too afraid to leave this house, too afraid to do what I'd give anything—anything to do.'"
She paused a moment, and there was no sound but the even ticking of the clock in the study across the hall.
"'Then why don't you leave?" I yelled back. 'You go to school, then. I'll stay here. I'm not stopping you.'
"'You don't understand, do you?' he spat, sitting down in the desk chair and facing me. 'You really don't understand at all. Night after night after night, sitting here waiting for him. It's only a matter of time, Celia.' And that's when he asked to see my locket. I was lying, before, Nancy…I wouldn't give it to him. He wasn't in his right mind. I thought he'd destroy it. So he walked over to me and yanked it from my neck. I started sobbing and threw myself against the wall and huddled there, covering my eyes with my hands. I didn't see what he did with the locket—hid the key in it, I suppose—and then I heard it hit the floor at my feet. I stooped to pick it up, not looking at him, and I heard him say, "And when he comes, Celia, I want you to do something for me.'"
"Read the manuscript," Nancy murmured, glancing over at the place where it sat, in a beam of sunlight from the front door.
"I didn't tell you because I thought he had lost his mind and I didn't want you to think badly of him. And because I was ashamed. Because he was right. I'm a coward, Nancy, and now he's dead and I'm alone. You're so lucky…you can't imagine what it's like to be like me. You're so confident and brave. I can't be strong for myself. I've never had to. And now—now I haven't got anyone to depend on…"
There was a rustling in the hall, and Nancy looked up to see Isabel standing by the study door. Wordlessly, she sank to the floor in front of the two girls and took Celia's thin white fingers in her own square, weathered hands.
"You've got me," she said simply, and Celia looked up at her through a veil of tears, surprise written on her blotchy face. Nancy held her breath, waiting, as the girls sat motionless, a tableau of grief. Finally, Celia spoke.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"No," Isabel insisted, biting her chapped lower lip. Her face was curtained by her dishwater-blonde hair, and Nancy couldn't read her expression, but her voice cracked slightly as she went on.
"No, Celia, I'm sorry for intrudin' on you like this, and I'm sorry for yellin' at you all earlier. But it doesn't do any good for us to go on fightin'. Ethan woulda hated that."
Celia made a sound somewhere between a sniffle and a laugh and tilted her head back, the sunlight casting flecks of garnet in her chestnut hair. "Oh, would he ever. When we'd argue about things—stupid things, looking back—he'd lock himself in the study and sulk for hours."
Isabel let go of Celia's hands and scooted back against the wall next to Nancy. "I imagine," she said. "He sure liked his peace and quiet. I think if I'da come in every night and made a bunch of noise he'd've thought twice about letting me stick around."
"Once," said Celia, an impish smile blooming across her thin face, "biking home from town, he rode four miles out of his way to avoid having to talk to our neighbor Mr. Baker, who was walking down the road in front of his house."
"Oooh, I would too," Isabel said, grinning. "One time that cranky old man cornered me at church and talked about homemade mole repellants for forty-five minutes. I don't blame Ethan at all."
The clock beside them struck noon, and all three girls jumped. "Lunchtime, I think," Celia said, awkwardly stumbling to her feet. "Ooof. Sat there too long. My knees are stiff. You coming, Nancy?" she added as Isabel stood.
Nancy rubbed her swollen eyes, brushing aside the sun-warmed, sticky tears still lingering on her cheeks. "No thanks, Celia," she said, her voice ragged. "I'm not that hungry. You two go on."
They hesitated a moment, then disappeared down the hall. Stiffly, Nancy reached for Ethan's manuscript and slowly walked down the hall toward the grand curving stairway, passing the glittering debris of the mirror and the open study door.
Suddenly, a curious notion skimmed across the surface of her mind. Stopping at the foot of the stairs, she turned back to face the hallway and the front door at the far end. Someone coming from the back of the house, as Isabel so often did, could easily have been seen in the tilted mirror by someone in the study.
I knew that, she reminded herself. But there was something else, something that she felt she should understand, but whatever it was had flitted away into the recesses of her brain, leaving only spreading ripples behind.
Sighing, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto the bed (the broken-down old mattress emitted a shriek of protest) and began to read.