The Ainsworth townhouse on Louisburg Square wore its silence badly. Eleanor had been inside it perhaps a dozen times over the years — for committee meetings, for the occasional strained tea Margaret hosted out of obligation rather than pleasure — and she had never once seen it like this: doors standing open that should have been closed, the front hall cold because no one had thought to bank the fire, a maid sitting on the bottom stair with her apron twisted in both hands as though she meant to wring an answer out of it.
"Mrs. Ainsworth's brother has been sent for," the maid said, before Eleanor had asked her anything at all. She had wound the corner of her apron so tightly around one finger that the fingertip had gone faintly white, and released it, and immediately began again. "He'll be here by noon. I don't know what to do until then. I don't know what I'm meant to be doing. She always left a list, Sunday nights, for the week's marketing — I looked for it this morning, out of habit more than sense, and there wasn't one. First Sunday in a year she's forgotten it."
"You could start," Eleanor said, gently, "by telling us what you found this morning."
The maid — Sarah, Eleanor remembered, a girl of perhaps twenty who had been with Margaret only since the spring — looked between Eleanor and Clara as though weighing whether this was a question she was permitted to answer. Whatever she decided, it took her only a moment.
"Her bed weren't slept in. I told the others that already. But it's the study, miss. I went in to open the curtains, same as always, and it was—" She stopped, started again. "It weren't right. I didn't touch anything. I know better than that."
Clara was already moving toward the study before Sarah had finished the sentence, and Eleanor followed close behind her — closer, perhaps, than the errand strictly required. She did not examine why a missing woman's study should draw her so quickly to Clara's side. There would be time for that later.
The study told its own story before either of them said a word.
Margaret's desk — a heavy mahogany rolltop that Eleanor remembered as perpetually, almost defiantly tidy, the one corner of Margaret's life that seemed to have escaped her general talent for disorder — had been forced. Not broken, exactly; whoever had done it had taken some care, working the lock with something narrow and patient rather than simply splintering the wood, but the brass fitting hung askew all the same, and the roll top itself had been pushed back and left open, papers disturbed in a way that no orderly woman would have left them. A drawer on the lower right stood pulled fully out, empty, resting crooked on the rug where it had been set down and not replaced.
"She wouldn't leave it like this," Clara said. Her voice had gone thin. "Whatever else was wrong with her last night, she would never leave her desk like this. You remember how she was about that desk."
Eleanor did remember — Margaret rapping some hapless committee secretary's knuckles, half in jest and half not, for setting a teacup down on its surface without a saucer beneath it. A woman who guarded her desk that closely did not leave it gutted and gaping unless she had no choice in the matter, or unless someone else had made the choice for her. Eleanor reached, without quite deciding to, for Clara's hand — a brief, steadying press, gone again before Sarah or anyone else might have noticed it, but enough, she hoped, to say what there wasn't time to say aloud.
"Don't touch the drawer," Eleanor said, though Clara had made no move to. She heard the words land as much for herself as for Clara — her own hands had begun, without her quite noticing, to want very badly to open every remaining drawer in the room and see what else had been left behind.
She crouched instead beside the desk itself, careful of the crooked drawer, and it was there, caught between the leg of the desk and the edge of the rug, that she found the scrap of paper — torn, not cut, along one ragged edge, as though it had been part of a larger sheet that someone had ripped away in haste or anger and not troubled to collect every piece of. It was small enough to have been missed by whoever had searched the room, or perhaps simply overlooked in the dark, or perhaps — Eleanor allowed herself the thought and did not like where it led — left deliberately, though for whom and to what purpose she could not begin to say.
The handwriting on it was Margaret's; Eleanor had seen it often enough on committee minutes and pointed marginal notes to know it at a glance, small and slanted and impatient, the hand of someone who wrote faster than she thought and thought faster than most people spoke. What remained of the sentence read only:
—cannot keep paying for what L. did in '94. I have tried for years to
The rest was gone, torn away with the missing portion of the page.
"Ninety-four," Clara said, reading over Eleanor's shoulder, close enough that Eleanor could feel her breath against her ear, could feel, even in the cold study with its wrongness pressing in on both of them, the small comfort of Clara's shoulder against her own. "Eleanor, that's — that's two years ago. What could Lavinia Blackstone have done two years ago that Margaret's been paying for since?"
"We don't know it's Lavinia. It might be any name that begins with L. Half the guests at that party could claim the letter."
"Half the guests at that party weren't quarreling with her twelve hours before she vanished."
"No," Eleanor admitted. "They weren't." She turned the scrap over once more, as though the blank reverse side might yet yield something the front had withheld. It didn't. "I only mean we shouldn't let the one name we already suspect crowd out whatever else this might turn out to say. A torn sentence is a poor thing to build a certainty on."
Clara didn't answer that directly, and Eleanor understood, watching her, that the caution had landed somewhere true without quite dislodging what Clara had already begun, privately, to believe.
Eleanor folded the scrap carefully — corner to corner, the way she might have handled a specimen she meant to preserve rather than a piece of evidence, though she was aware even as she did it that these were not, at the moment, distinguishable categories — and tucked it into the pocket of her coat.
It was while Clara was crouched at the desk, running a careful hand along the underside of the rolltop in case anything further had been wedged there, that Eleanor let her eyes travel the rest of the room — the disturbed papers, the cold hearth, the chair pushed askew from the desk at an angle that suggested it had been shoved back in haste rather than pulled out in the ordinary course of sitting down. It was on that slow circuit of the room that her attention finally caught on the bookshelf against the far wall, and on the single framed photograph that had been knocked from its place and left leaning, face-out, against a row of bound minutes from some long-dissolved reform league.
She had seen the Ainsworth family portraits before — the ones that hung properly in the front hall, the ones meant to be seen, Margaret flanked by a husband four years dead and a brother who bore the particular groomed blandness of old Boston money worn comfortably across three generations. This was not that photograph.
It was smaller, cheaper — a studio portrait gone slightly brown with age, the kind taken in some provincial gallery rather than a fashionable Newbury Street establishment, and the two women in it wore clothes that belonged to no drawing room Eleanor had ever seen Margaret Ainsworth occupy: plain wool, no lace, hair pinned back with a severity that spoke of practicality rather than fashion. One of the women was unmistakably a younger Margaret — perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, thinner in the face and entirely without the guarded composure Eleanor had come to think of as inseparable from her. The other woman, older, stood with a hand set firm on young Margaret's shoulder, and the resemblance between them was plain enough to suggest a mother, or perhaps an aunt.
On the back, in handwriting older and rounder than the slanted scrawl on the torn scrap, someone had written a single line: Fall River, 1879.
Eleanor turned the photograph over twice, as though a second look might produce more information than the first, and did not find any. Margaret Ainsworth, so far as Eleanor had ever heard the story told — and it had been told, in the offhand way society tells such things, at enough teas and committee dinners to have acquired the polish of established fact — was Boston born, a Whitney before her marriage, raised in a Beacon Hill nursery not unlike the ones that had raised half the women at last night's reception. Nothing in that story accounted for a plain photograph, a plainer dress, and a mill town seventeen years and one entirely different life away.
"Clara."
Clara straightened at the sound of her name, and for a moment simply looked at the photograph in Eleanor's hand without speaking at all — a long moment, longer than the room's quiet strictly wanted, her expression caught somewhere between confusion and the slow work of a fact rearranging itself into place.
"That's not Margaret's mother," she said finally, slowly. "I've met Margaret's mother. Mrs. Whitney has never worn wool like that in her life."
"Fall River," Eleanor said. "Eighteen seventy-nine."
"That's not where the Whitneys are from."
"No," Eleanor agreed. "It isn't."
Downstairs, a door opened hard enough to strike the wall behind it, and a man's voice carried up the stairwell before Sarah had finished her first sentence of greeting: "—don't care what the constable said, I want the room exactly as it was found, is that understood, nothing moved—" Margaret's brother, no doubt, arrived ahead of noon after all, already giving orders to a house he hadn't yet properly entered. Eleanor slipped the photograph inside her coat beside the torn scrap of paper, not entirely sure, even as she did it, whether she was preserving evidence or simply unwilling to let it out of her hands before she understood what it meant.
"We should go down," Clara said.
"In a moment." Eleanor looked once more around the study — at the forced desk, the crooked drawer, the space on the shelf where the photograph had stood before someone, in searching or in leaving, had knocked it face-out for anyone to find. Then, before she could think better of it, she reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair back from Clara's face, the gesture entirely unnecessary to the moment and entirely necessary to Eleanor's own steadiness. "Clara. Whatever Margaret meant to tell us tomorrow — I don't think it was going to be about Lavinia Blackstone's guest list."
Clara's face, in the cold grey light from the study window, had lost the last of its earlier composure, though something in it softened, briefly, at Eleanor's touch. "Then what was it going to be about?"
"I think," Eleanor said, "it was going to be about whoever she was before she became Margaret Ainsworth at all."
Below them, the brother's voice carried up again, still giving orders no one downstairs seemed able to satisfy — something about the police, something about the papers on Margaret's desk needing to be inventoried by a proper hand and not a housemaid's. Neither Eleanor nor Clara moved to answer it. They stood a moment longer over the empty drawer and the space on the shelf where the photograph had waited, however many years, to be found.
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