Holmes was nowhere to be seen, but I heard a movement from further overhead: the attic. I stood in the door of my parents' room, looking in warily, not certain if I was ready for the intimacy of a married couple's bedroom. However, the room did not feel particularly private, not with the afternoon sun streaming in through the south window where Holmes had drawn back the curtains. The dust of his passing still hung in the sunlight, muffling the rainbows cast by the prismed glass of the window onto the white cloths covering the dressing-table. He had also left a trail of footprints on the boards, coming and going and, by the looks of it, circling into various corners as he searched for anything out of the ordinary. Two white-painted wicker chairs sat in the bay window to my left, arranged on either side of a small, high table just large enough for a cup-laden tray. I had a vivid picture of the two occupants sitting in the morning sunlight, sharing their coffee at the start of the day; again, was it memory, or imagination?
I moved across to the lumpy dressing-table, cautiously raising its protective cloth to reveal hair-brush, powder, manicure implements, crystal scent bottle. My hand hovered above the delicate glass stopper of this last, pulled by the powerful memory stimulus the aroma might hold, held back by the fear that it might be more than I could endure. Either that, or nothing at all, which would be even more unbearable. Instead, my hand came down on the long red lacquer-ware box beside it, tipping open the top to reveal a collection of hair- and hat-pins and the single carved ivory chop-stick that she had used to tease loose portions of hair. It was a lovely thing, and I ran my thumb across the worn carvings before I closed the top of the box and withdrew my hand.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I would envelop myself in my mother's scent. Or the next day.
Instead of the bottle, my hand reached out for a picture, one of half a dozen tarnished silver frames lying face-down on the table's linen cloth. The one I lifted first was the largest, and showed my brother and me when Levi was on the cusp of walking—perhaps a year old, which would have made me six. But instead of the usual studio setting of curly-headed children before a painted rose bower or atop a bored Shetland pony, we were dressed in elaborately formal Chinese costumes, high-necked, glossy as only silk could be, the frogs of the front fastenings intricately worked. My brother and I stood before some kind of shelved cabinet, ornately carved although out of focus, and although he looked merely bewildered, my expression indicated that I appreciated the joke; I could see why my mother had chosen the photograph for her dressing-table.
I ran my thumb over the blackened frame, thinking it looked familiar. Slowly, it came to me: I had this one's twin at home, in Sussex, lying (also face-down) in a drawer under some meaningless papers; rarely glimpsed, never forgotten. My own photograph showed the entire family, not just its younger generation, but as I studied the arrangement of pictures on my mother's dressing-table, I began to suspect that mine had once balanced the other frame on this surface. I could even see where it had once stood, in the large empty space on the right-hand side of the table. Whoever had packed the trunk of clothing and effects that accompanied me on the boat to England in 1915 had come in here and removed the portrait from my mother's collection, that I might take something of them with me.
I placed the picture back upright on the cloth, and one by one, set the others upright as well. My father appeared, stretched out on a travelling-rug laid across a very English-looking stretch of pebbly beach, eyes closed behind his spectacles, the blonde infant tucked under his arm similarly asleep; my dark-haired brother as a small baby was next, his face surrounded by a cloud of lace in our mother's arms, a peculiarly enigmatic expression on her features; me by a lake, shovel in one hand, mud to my waist, a look of great stubbornness on my face. Then a surprise: a pair of strangers who could not possibly be related to me.
I knew who they were, though: Their shades had just visited me downstairs, in the kitchen and just outside its door. Mah and Micah, siblings or, I thought, studying their broad, foreign faces more carefully, a married couple. And if their employment here had struck me as unlikely, how much more so their presence in my mother's collection of intimate family portraits?
I sat down on the padded bench before the dressing-table with the small photograph of two middle-aged Chinese people in one hand, looking between it and the larger one of my brother and myself in Oriental costume. The edge of the carved cabinet could be seen in both photographs; they had been taken in the same room.
After a minute I reached out to prop up the remaining pictures. The first showed a curly-headed blonde girl of about five, bony knees drawn up into a large wooden chair, a book spread out in her lap, squinting in concentration at the pages. Portrait of a young scholar: Miss Mary Russell at her books. And finally, like a familiar face in a crowd, the picture of my house in Sussex. It had been a vacation cottage during the periods we lived in England, and I had insisted on going back there when I was orphaned, to the place where happiness had once lived.
Not that I had found happiness still in residence when I returned: Instead, I got my aunt. But I had held to myself the sensation of refuge, and restored the house to it when I came of age and turned that so-called guardian out. Clearly, my mother, too, had treasured the summer weeks there on the Downs.
My reverie was broken by motion. I looked up, and nearly dropped the pictures before my mind interpreted the ghost it was seeing as Holmes' reflection in the filthy looking-glass.
“Holmes! You startled me. Did you find anything?”
“Dried scraps of soap in the bath-room dishes, beds still made up, two half-packed trunks here and one in the child's room, and in the attic entire townships of mice. What have you there?”
I handed him the picture of Mah and Micah for his examination, watching his reflected face, seeing his eyes flick from the Chinese faces to the ornately wrought frame, then to the identical frames that graced the family pictures.
“Provocative,” he said after a minute, and gave it back to me.
“Why were you so interested in my father's dressing-table?” I asked.
“That was not I.”
Startled, I looked into his dim reflection, then swivelled around on the bench to stare at the swirl of footprints I had taken to be his. This time, I saw: At least two other people had walked through this room, one with feet slightly smaller than Holmes', the other's considerably smaller. I slid the photo into my pocket and went to see what had interested the intruders.
The other dressing-table, which had neither seat nor mirror, stood just outside the door to the bath-room. That it belonged to a man was clear even under cover, since the shapes were those of a man's hair-brushes and a clothes brush, and little else. Kneeling in front of it, I could see that the dust on the top had been recently disturbed; I duplicated the disturbance now, folding the cloth back to reveal a small drawer. It did not take a magnifying glass to see the marks on its brass lock.
“Looks pretty amateurish,” I remarked.
“They might as well have set a chisel to it,” he agreed.
By habit, I hooked my finger-nails under the edge of the drawer in case of finger-prints, and tugged. It slid open freely, releasing a faint odour of cedar and revealing a handful of small coins, a set of black shoe-laces, some pen nibs, and an assortment of collar-studs, the normal debris of the male animal. If there had been anything of import in the drawer, it was not there now.
I swivelled on my heels to study the prints. The people who made them had spent some time gathered around my father's steamer trunk, then one of them—the smaller feet—had investigated his bed-side table. Not, however, my mother's, which was decidedly odd. Unless, of course, they were not simply sneak-thieves, and had already found what they were after.
“When do you suppose those footprints were made?” I asked.
“Within the past month, or two months at the most.”
“Did you find where they got in?”
“Judging by the traces of soil there and here, I should say they came in through the kitchen door.”
I twisted to look up at him. “I saw no fresh soil there.”
“You were . . . distracted.”
“I did see the soil, but I'd have said it was old. And I'm certain the kitchen door showed no signs of tampering.” That I definitely would have noticed.
“No,” he agreed.
I slid the drawer shut, let the cloth fall over it, and got to my feet. “Which means that either their locksmith's talents deteriorated, or they had the one key and not the other. I shall have to ask Mr Norbert just how many sets of keys there were.”
The rest of the house held neither ghosts nor clues. Even my bedroom might have belonged to a stranger, its fittings and knick-knacks curiously apt rather than familiar. I picked from a shelf a tiny porcelain baby-doll, all unruly
