“I assume one of you possesses a ring like that?” Rémy asked.
“Yes.” Alderose slipped the thick gold band onto her middle finger, faced the nearest wall within the office, and held her hand in the same position. She swayed back and forth, mimicking our mother’s movements. We held our breath, hoping for something concrete to appear.
“Keep trying,” Alabastair said. He wiggled the thumbtack holding an outdated calendar to the wall and set to work removing the few other notes curling away from the grime-streaked paint. He and Kostya lifted the desk and carried it out of the office, giving Alderose more room to move.
She lifted her arm, hovered her hand, and whispered, “Bingo.”
A door-sized section of the wall slid away. A narrow set of wood stairs led upward, and sconces set into the walls began to glow.
Kostya followed Alderose. Rémy stepped forward next, then Beryl, and me. Alabastair took up the rear. Ten steps up, we came to a switchback landing. Ten more steps brought us to the second floor, and the double doors to my parents’ apartment. I pressed my hand against the wall. Cold seeped from the horsehair plaster.
“Keep going,” said Rémy, “to the third floor.”
The paneled walls of the final landing were stained the color of tobacco juice. Centered on the only door was the tarnished brass plate we had seen earlier. It was easily twelve inches high and six inches wide with a hole in the center.
“The ring is the key.” Alabastair’s deep bass startled me off the step. He caught my shoulders, apologized, and added for everyone’s benefit, “Try putting the ring in the keyhole, Alderose.”
With four bodies ahead of me, I didn’t see what happened next, only felt the collective intake of breath as the door swung open into a cavernous room and the ceiling burst into light.
3
No one moved.
“What do you see?” Beryl asked the question on the tip of my tongue. Before Alderose could answer, the rest of us flowed through the doorway to see my mother’s real office for ourselves.
“This is it,” Rémy said. “The furniture, the lights, the tables, everything.”
Alderose gave a low whistle as she gazed upward and turned in a circle. “The ceiling in here must be eighteen, twenty feet high.”
It looked like we had entered a couturier’s workroom. Chandeliers illuminated the four quadrants of the loft-like space. Headless dressmaker’s dummies were scattered about. Two were unclothed and four were draped in garments in varying stages of completion. If I had the ability to animate the mannequins and get them to speak, I’d start with the one in the intricate, black lace bustier.
I took a few steps farther into the room and sniffed. Underneath the musty air were the scents of old wood, cloth, and the oil my mother used on her scissors and sewing machines. The walls were lined with shelving units packed with bolts of fabric and neatly ordered spools of thread.
A long, low table designated the hat-making area. Narrow shelves above the table held hat forms and dummy heads. On the opposite side of the room, shoe lasts were lined up along one of the larger shelves. Underneath, hanging from hooks, were slopers, pattern pieces cut from stiff paper, which I remembered from one of my mother’s impromptu clothing-design lessons.
I looked around again. If an outsider wanted to judge my mother by the retail space on the ground floor, they could have easily assumed she was a romance-reading dilettante who dabbled in an array of needlework techniques.
In this space, serious design and fabrication was taking place. Which only made me miss her and everything she could have taught me—us—even more. Seeing this workroom also begged important questions. Was our mother intending to bring us into the family business? Could she have been surreptitiously imparting her methods on her daughters from the time she first opened the door to Needles and Sins? If so, how we were going to separate her keep-the-girls-busy tasks from her teach-the-girls-to-become-matchmaker tasks?
Those questions were too much to contemplate within the isolation of my own head. Plus, the more immediate task ahead of us was to hear out Rémy Ruisseau. A quick glance showed he was as curious about the contents of the room as the rest of us. I decided a couple more minutes spent cataloguing my mother’s workroom was fine and would help keep my emotions on an even keel.
The general layout was the same as the ground floor. The wall facing the public parking lot in back had one window and the side walls had none, as the neighboring buildings were built right up against one another. The wall fronting the street had four windows. They were large and unadorned except for more grime.
A massive desk, set at an angle and facing into the room, anchored the front, right-hand corner. As everyone continued to migrate toward whatever caught their interest, I sniffed at the air again. Fresh petrichor filled my nostrils, followed quickly by the faintest scent of dried blood, bird shit, and—
“I smell death,” I said under my breath. Alabastair pivoted and was beside me in a flash.
“Where?” he asked, concern flattening his pale eyebrows. I flared my nostrils, half closed my eyes, and let my magic—my ability to connect to moments from other peoples’ pasts—guide me. Turning slowly, I stopped when I faced the rear wall. The door we’d entered through sat to the right of center. Brown-edged water stains marred the repetitive floral pattern of the Arts and Crafts wallpaper.
“Here,” I said, moving toward the shadowy, left-hand corner. I was drawn to the wall’s sole window. I swept my gaze upward and located the source of the rain-scented air. Much of the upper pane of
