“Thirty-eight years,” the director said. “Means they must have gotten married in…”
“1912,” I finished for him. “In 1912 Warthrop would have been fifty-nine years old.”
“Warthrop?”
“If there ever was a Warthrop. If there was, then by 1912 he was dead.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Will writes that he was Warthrop’s constant companion till he died. I can’t imagine them getting married and moving Pellinore Warthrop in with them.”
“But do you relly think there ever was a Pellinore Warthrop?” I could detect a smile in his voice. Will Henry’s words popped into my head at the question.
“I’m beginning to think there’s some underlying allegory here,” I said carefully. “At the very beginning of the diary, Will Henry says Warthrop has been dead for forty years. If Warthrop ‘died’ around 1912, that means Will began the journals around the same time the house in Auburn burned down, right after he lost everything—not just his sole companion in life but everything he had. Maybe the journals are some weird way of dealing with all that.”
“So he invents a past populated by monsters to understand the monsters of his past?”
“Well, it’s just a theory. I’m no psychiatrist.”
“Maybe we need to get one involved.”
I lay awake in bed that night, thinking of fire—the first fire that had yanked his parents away from him and the second fire that had claimed everything else.
While I pondered that possibility, my heart began to race, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to simply turn away… to not finish the three remaining journals… to return all of them to the director and drop my investigation, or whatever you wanted to call it. A little voice warned me I was heading down a path where I did not want to go, where I
He had kept his promise.
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1At her request, the name has been changed to protect her identity.