We drive back to Spring Brook and get right down to business. I grab all the drawings that I found in my cottage, plus the three pictures I took from Teddy’s bedroom. Adrian has the one drawing left on his desk, plus all his photographs of the Maxwells’ den. He’s already output the images on an inkjet printer so we can add them to the sequence. There are less than forty-eight hours before Russell comes to pick me up—and before that happens, I’m determined to convince the Maxwells we’re telling the truth. We arrange all the pictures on the pool patio, using stones or pinches of loose gravel to hold them in place. Then we spend half an hour moving them around, trying to arrange them in order, looking for some kind of narrative
that makes sense.
After much trial and error, we arrive at this:
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“The first picture is the hot-air balloon,” I begin. “We’re in some kind of park or field. An area with a lot of wide-open space. Big skies.”
“So definitely not Spring Brook,” Adrian says. “There’s too much air traffic out of Philly.”
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“We see a woman painting a picture of the hot-air balloon. Let’s assume for now this is Anya. Judging from her
sleeveless dress, I’m guessing it’s summer, or maybe we’re in a warmer climate.”
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“There’s a girl nearby, playing with toys. Possibly Anya’s daughter. Teddy mentioned Anya has a daughter. It doesn’t seem like Anya is watching her closely.”
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“Then along comes a white rabbit.”
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“The little girl is intrigued. She’s playing with a stuffed rabbit, but here comes a real one.”
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“So she follows the rabbit down into a valley…”
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“… but Anya doesn’t notice the girl walking away. She’s too absorbed in her work. But you can see the little girl off on the horizon. Leaving her toys behind. Does that all make sense so far?”
“I think so,” Adrian says.
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“Good, because here’s where it gets confusing. Something goes wrong. The rabbit is gone, the girl looks lost. She might be hurt. She might even be dead. Because in the next picture…”
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“She’s approached by an angel.”
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“And the angel leads the little girl toward the light.”
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“But someone’s trying to stop them. Someone’s chasing after them.”
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“It’s Anya,” Adrian says. “It’s the same white dress.” “Exactly. She’s running to save her little girl, to stop her
from being taken away.”
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“But Anya’s too late. The angel won’t give her back.” “Or can’t give her back,” Adrian says.
“Exactly. Now here comes a gap.”
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“The angel and the child are gone. We don’t see them anymore. And now someone is strangling Anya. This is the one piece of the puzzle we’re still missing.”
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“Time passes. It’s nighttime. Anya’s easel is abandoned.”
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“A man arrives in the forest, carrying tools. They look like a pick and a shovel.”
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“The man drags Anya’s body through the forest…”
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“He uses his shovel to dig a hole…”
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“And then he buries the body.”
“So the man strangled Anya,” Adrian says.
“Not necessarily.”
“He moves her body. He buries her.”
“But the story starts in the daytime. The man doesn’t show up until later, until dark.”
Adrian starts moving the pictures around again— arranging them in a different sequence—but I’ve tried every possible order, and this is the only one that comes close to making sense.
Except something’s still missing. It’s like the feeling of working through a jigsaw puzzle, putting the whole scene together, only to discover the box has three or four missing pieces, and they’re all right in the middle.
Adrian throws up his hands. “Why doesn’t she just spell it out for us? Skip the stupid pictures and use words? ‘My name is Rumpelstiltskin. I was murdered by the archduke.’ Or whoever. Why is she being so cryptic?”
He’s just venting, but I realize I’ve never stopped to ask myself this question: Why is Anya being so cryptic?
Instead of using Teddy to draw pictures, why not use words? Why not write a letter? Unless—
I think back to all the one-sided conversations I overheard in Teddy’s bedroom—all the guessing games he would play during Quiet Time. “Teddy says Anya talks funny. He says she’s hard to understand. What if she doesn’t speak English?”
Adrian seems ready to dismiss the idea, but then he reaches for the library book—The Collected Works of Anne
C. Barrett. “All right, let’s think this through for a minute. We know Annie came from Europe after World War II. Maybe she doesn’t speak English. Maybe Barrett isn’t even her real name. Maybe it’s a westernized version of something like Baryshnikov, one of those long impossible-to-pronounce Eastern European names. And the family changed it, just to blend in.”
“Exactly,” I tell him, warming to the theory. “George writes like he’s been in the United States for a long time.
He’s already assimilated. He’s a deacon at the church, he’s an alderman on the town council. But suddenly his Bohemian cousin shows up in Spring Brook. She’s a reminder of where he’s from, and he’s ashamed of her. His letter in the book is so condescending, all his talk about her slight achievements and her foolishness.”
Adrian snaps his fingers. “And this explains the spirit board! You said her answers were gibberish! You called them alphabet soup. But what if she was spelling in a different language?”
I think back to the gathering—to the feeling of being entombed inside the cottage, with the planchette trembling beneath my fingertips.
I knew we weren’t alone.
I knew someone was moving my hand and choosing each letter very deliberately.
“Mitzi wrote everything down,” I tell him.
We walk across the backyard to Mitzi’s house. I rap my knuckles on the front door but there’s no answer. Then we walk around to the back of the house, to the rear entrance used by her clients. The back door is open and we can see through the screen door into the kitchen, to the Formica table where Mitzi served me coffee. I bang on the screen door and the Kit-Cat Klock stares back at me, its tail wagging. I can hear the TV playing inside the house, some infomercial for commemorative gold dollars: “These coins are highly prized by collectors, and guaranteed to hold their value.…”
I shout Mitzi’s name, but there’s no way she’ll hear me over the sales pitch.
Adrian tries the handle and the door is unlocked. “What do you think?”
“I think she’s paranoid and she owns a gun. If we sneak up on her, there’s a good chance she’ll blow our heads off.”
“There’s also a chance she’s hurt. Maybe she slipped in the shower. If an old person doesn’t come to their door,
you’re supposed to check on them.” I knock again but still no answer. “Let’s come back later.”
But Adrian insists on opening the door and calling to her: “Mitzi, are you okay?”
He steps inside, and what else can I do? It’s already past three o’clock and the day is passing too quickly. If Mitzi has information that can help us, we need it as soon as possible. I hold the door open and follow him into the house.
The kitchen stinks. It smells like the trash needs to be taken out, or maybe it’s all the dirty dishes piled up in the sink. There’s a frying pan on the stovetop filled with congealed bacon grease. There are tiny paw prints scattered across the surface, and I don’t want to think about all the vermin that might be living behind the walls.
I follow Adrian into the living room. The TV is tuned to Fox News and the hosts are arguing with a guest about the latest threats to American security. They’re shouting at each other—shouting over each other—so I grab the remote and mute the volume.
“Mitzi? It’s Mallory. Can you hear me?” Still no answer.
“Maybe she went out for a bit,” Adrian says.
And left the back door open? No way, not Mitzi. I move toward the back of the house and check the bathroom— nothing. At last I come to the door of Mitzi’s bedroom. I knock several times, calling her name, and then finally open it.
Inside the bedroom, the shades are drawn, the bed is unmade, and there are clothes all over the floor. The air is sour and stale and I’m afraid to touch anything. The door bangs against a wicker wastebasket, knocking the basin on its side, and crumpled wads of Kleenex tumble out.
“Anything?” Adrian asks.
I get down on my knees and look under the bed just to be sure. There’s more dirty laundry but no Mitzi.
“She’s not here.”
As I stand up, I notice the surface of Mitzi’s nightstand. Along with a lamp and a telephone I see a handful of cotton balls, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a length of latex tourniquet.
“What is it?” Adrian asks.
“I don’t know. Probably nothing. We should go.”
We walk back to the living room and Adrian finds the notepad on the sofa, tucked beneath the heavy wooden spirit board.
“That’s it,” I tell him.
I flip past shopping lists and to-do items before arriving at the last used page—her notes from the séance. I rip the page from the pad, then show it to Adrian.
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I took Spanish in high school and I had friends who took French and Mandarin, but these words don’t look like any language I’ve ever seen. “The name Anya sounds Russian,” Adrian says. “But I’m pretty sure this isn’t Russian.”
I take out my phone and google IGENXO just to be certain
—and it might be the first time I’ve googled a phrase that doesn’t return a single result.
“If Google doesn’t know it, it’s definitely not a word.” “Maybe it’s some kind of cryptogram,” Adrian says. “One
of those puzzles where every letter is substituted by a different letter.”
“We just decided she can’t speak English,” I tell him. “Do you really think she’s making up brainteasers?”
“They’re not complicated if you know all the tricks. Give me a minute.” He grabs a pencil and sits down on Mitzi’s sofa, determined to crack the code.
I start poking around the living room, trying to imagine why Mitzi left the house with her TV on and her back door open, when something crunches beneath my sneaker. It sounds like I’ve stepped on a beetle, some small insect with a hard brittle shell. I lift my foot and see that it’s actually a thin plastic tube, orange and cylindrical, about three inches long.
I lift it off the floor and Adrian looks up from his work. “What is that?”
“A cap for a hypodermic needle. I think she’s been injecting herself. Hopefully with insulin, but this is Mitzi we’re talking about so who knows.” As I move around the room, I discover three more needle caps—on a bookshelf, in a wastebasket, on a windowsill. When you factor in the rubber tourniquet, I’m pretty sure we can rule out diabetes.
“Are you finished yet?”
I look down at Adrian’s notepad and it doesn’t seem like he’s made any progress.
“This is a tough one,” he admits. “Normally you look for the most frequent letter and you replace it with E. In this
case, there are four Xs, but when I change them to Es, it doesn’t help any.”
I think he’s wasting his time. If I’m right about Anya’s language barrier—and I’m pretty sure I am—then communicating in English would be enough of a challenge. She wouldn’t try writing in code. She’d want to make things easier for us, not harder. She’d try to make her message clearer.
“Give me another minute,” he says.
And then there’s a knock at the back door. “Hello? Anybody home?”
It’s a man’s voice, unfamiliar.
Maybe one of Mitzi’s customers, visiting to have his energy read?
Adrian stuffs the sheet of notepaper into his pocket. And when we enter the kitchen, I see the man at the back door is wearing a police uniform.
“I’m gonna need you to step outside.”
