Still, he longed to take some sort of action, some sort of stand, to grant himself a brief reprieve and somehow—and this was the thing he wanted most—somehow to make things right with his sister. He simply could not leave Holly behind.
That night, after his father had gone up to bed, Kit wandered into his father’s study, hoping to lose himself in a book, and found instead a way to free himself and Holly both.
He stared at the window behind his father’s spectacular desk for several minutes, scarcely moving, and then ran up to his room. To do this thing would force him to leave, at least for a while, perhaps a long while, but he was glad to feel that he had no other choice. So he collected his shaving kit, some clothes, spare shoes, scrounged a paper bag from under the kitchen sink, and carried everything back to his father’s study.
Dropping his gear by the door, he walked to the far side of the desk. He first opened the window and then examined the sill for a moment, took up his father’s sterling letter opener, and scraped the paint from two small hinges on the far edge of the sill. He loosened each hinge with a sharp rap—paused for a moment, listening for sounds from his father’s bedroom overhead, waiting to be sure his father had not heard, would not be storming down to face him—and then, with a bit of coaxing, tipped the sill back on its hinges to reveal a hollow space inside the wall. From this narrow compartment, Kit lifted a locked firebox.
The sight of it after a dozen years filled Kit with satisfaction and, despite himself, pride. “This is between us men, eh?” his father had told him with a conspiratorial wink. “For emergencies, understand? You are never”—and he had become stern for a moment—“never to open this unless you absolutely must. And never in front of anyone else. Don’t even go near the window unless you’re alone. I’m trusting you to keep this a secret.” And Kit had promised that he would.
“But why not have a real safe?” he had asked.
“If you want to make sure something escapes notice,” his father had intoned, “don’t put a lock on it.”
On the wall beside the window was a watercolor of several small and spotless sailboats tacking through a narrow, rocky channel. “Four skiffs tacking to starboard,” Kit murmured as he spun the dial on the firebox to the right and stopped at four. “Two prams tacking to port,” he continued, turning the dial left to the two. “Eight girls sailing the lot of them,” right to eight. “And one lighthouse on the shore.” Kit could not remember any nursery rhymes but this one.
As he opened the box, Kit once again marveled at a man who could look at a painting so full of color and light and see in it a way to grant a little boy access to a fortune.
Inside the box Kit found five bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills, three ten-ounce bars of gold bullion and half a dozen gleaming Krugerrands, a small velvet bag that held his mother’s rings, and a second bag he’d never seen before. When he turned it upside down, Kit was only mildly surprised at the spectrum of gems, cut but unset, that tumbled across the blotter on his father’s desk. He automatically admired their brilliance and calculated their worth but did not consider taking them. He had enough money of his own.
As he poured them back into their velvet pouch, however, he paused over a fiery opal the size of a robin’s egg and, without thinking twice, slipped it into his pocket.
Then he locked the gems in the firebox, put the currency, the gold, and his mother’s rings into the paper sack he’d brought with him, replaced the firebox in the wall, and closed the windowsill. He knew that his father would notice the intrusion when next in his study, for he liked to stand at the window, his hands resting on the paint-locked sill, and admire his rhododendron. Kit decided not to think about this until later.
Holly was still awake when Kit arrived at the carriage house. “I won’t stay long,” he promised when she invited him in.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You haven’t been up here in years. Have a seat.”
Kit sat down heavily. Holly looked at the paper bag in his lap. “You want something to drink?” she asked. “Are you hungry?”
“No, no, I’m fine.” He looked at his hands. Seemed not to know where to begin. But Holly was a patient person. He had waited for her that morning. She would wait for him now.
He began to speak several times, but each time he stopped after a word or two.
“It’s all right, Kit,” she finally said. “Believe me, I understand how hard it is to talk about it. You don’t have to get it perfect. Just say it.”
He looked at her and nodded. “I know,” he said. “It’s just that I feel so many things. One thing contradicts another. Maybe in a week or a month or a year I’ll know how I feel, but right now I’m absolutely flummoxed.” He cleared his throat, plunged ahead. “But I’ve spent the day thinking about everything you told me this morning, and I believe you. I believe all of it. All but one thing.
“You seem to think that Dad was being kind when he lied about how you were hurt … about how I hurt you. But I think you give him too much credit. He’s spent his entire life perfecting the art of escaping blame. Everything is always someone else’s fault, never his. And when he absolved me of my guilt—Christ, before I was even remotely qualified for any kind of absolution—he made me his conspirator. Twenty years ago, he lied so that I would not be
