It was useless to lie abed, Minerva knew: sleep would never come, at least this night, until she received explanations. She rose and dressed quickly, throwing an extra shawl around her shoulders against the chill. When she was ready, she reached for the unlit lantern on her nightstand. Her hand hesitated. Instead she plucked up Bitty’s amulet lying beside it, feeling its embossed arcs and circles in the thick leather under her thumb. In the dark it somehow seemed brighter than any lamp. Rather than tie it around her neck, she stuffed into the pocket of her jacket.
Any other time it would’ve been easy enough to creep downstairs and slip out the door without interference, but on this particular midnight, the front parlor was occupied by Mr. Isaac Rose. After conducting whatever unspoken business he’d had with Minerva’s father, Rose joined Bonaventure for their communal supper and then—after gamely helping the other men in the washing up—was given pillow and blanket and a place on the divan. Rose said he intended to depart Bonaventure the next morning, and none raised an eyebrow that an associate of the farm’s founder might be granted a free night’s room and board. Yet even so, something about tiptoeing past the parlor made Minerva uneasy; and for some ambiguous reason, she felt that Rose’s ears would prickle at the sound of her sneaking toward the kitchen door. Either instance, she was sure, would lead to inquiries and interrogation.
So instead, with great caution and stealth, she skulked to the open window at the end of the second-floor hall, climbed through and down the trellis, and stole across the yard.
The moon was half coming or going, Minerva didn’t know which, but the result was that under a clear sky she had little need of a lantern anyway. The road past the fields and cabins glowed beneath her lace-up boots, even after it trickled into two ruts between weeds. Soon the woods closed over her head, shielding her from the moonlight, and she slowed her pace, wondering if she might lose the path and stray off into the thickets. Strangely, the thought of another pit failed to frighten her. Then the black hulk of the stone house rose on her right, elevated slightly from the road, the windows blank and dark. Carefully she swung herself up the incline, using the skinny maples and birches like walking canes to prevent her from tripping.
For a long moment she stood on the step. In her bed Minerva hadn’t conceived how this moment should go. It was entirely possible Lyman was sound asleep and she might knock all night before he answered. And yet she asked herself if knocking was even proper. Tradition and niceties seemed superfluous in a world of moonlight and undefined space, like a landscape where the artist had run out of pigment before reaching the edges. Dupin wouldn’t knock, that she was sure of.
The door was unlatched, the bolt unshod. It slid open on silent oiled hinges.
The main room was barely furnished, though the floor was swept and the windows shut. Cautiously she stumbled through the room to the mantel. A pair of stubby candles waited there, hard wax pooled in the dishes of their holders, but when she knelt to poke the ashes in the grate, she couldn’t even find an ember to light them.
Perched on a corner of the stone was a piece of paper, dropped there as if the owner, having made reference to it, became distracted and laid it aside, forgotten. Immediately a vision of Sutton furiously jumping up from his afternoon coffee, letter in hand, lunged at her from the recesses. She seized the sheet and in less than four steps crossed to the window.
Yet peering close to it in the moonlight, Minerva apprehended it was not a letter at all.
Brothers and Sisters
evil
the Basement
to be
No one should go
picnic
lunch
yes/no
good Friend
hog, pig, swine
And thusly the list continued. The words and phrases were written in a neat and measured hand, arranged in columns of ten. Minerva quickly calculated over three-hundred seventy itemized.
“You haven’t—why not—too long—”
As if lifting off the page in her hand, words floated up through the floorboards to Minerva’s ears. They arrived as incomplete fragments, chopped and sawed, without meaning. Though distant and far away, yet Minerva recognized the voice unmistakably as Lyman’s. Yet whom he spoke to, if anyone, Minerva could not distinguish.
She dropped the list back onto the mantel, the paper again forgotten, and breathed deeply. Carefully she stepped across the floorboards, allowing only the leather of her sole and never the heel to touch wood. The basement door stood wide open, a black portal gaping in deep shadow; and Minerva regretted being unable to light the candles from the mantel. Yet she told herself whatever advantage of sight it provided would negate stealth; and so, very carefully, with hands on the rail, she dipped her toe over the edge of the landing, seeking the step below; and when that was found, lowered herself by slow inches onto it before reaching out for the next.
“I cannot—you demand—”
By careful descent Minerva found herself in the basement, wrapped in thick blackness. She turned and saw, from beneath the stairs, a soft glow coloring the mouth of a low tunnel. The earthen floor made movement easier, muffling her steps, even if she fumbled in darkness as complete as a tomb’s. Her hands trailed like those of a blind man’s along the wood of the staircase, refusing to leave it behind, a single line of string leading her from the labyrinth. When she realized she could go no farther without releasing it, she held her breath and lunged at the tunnel entrance, only releasing the air from her lungs once the damp, cobwebby stone pressed against her palms.
Very little was clear to her: the short tunnel and, at the other end, a globe of lamplight illuminating a stage bereft of Lyman or any other player. As her perspective of the room was incomplete, Minerva