Chapter 56: The Woman Who Sang

 

Gabriel's words seemed to empty the room of air.

Elara heard the hospital trolley rattling beyond the door, the distant chime of a lift. Ordinary noises. Nothing in them belonged beside her mother's name.

“Rhys was at the atelier?” she asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “Vale said he remembered it. I don't know whether he was there.”

“Those aren't the same thing,” Brandt said.

“No.” Gabriel rubbed his palms against his trousers. “I was eight. I wrote down what the adults said because I thought someone would make me forget.”

“Where's the notebook?” Rhys asked.

“In my bag. I didn't bring it through security.”

Brandt rose. “I'll have an officer collect it with you. We'll document the handover.”

Gabriel stood, then faltered. “My mother doesn't know what's in it.”

“She can decide whether she wants to hear it,” Elara said.

He looked at her with startled gratitude.

 

The notebook was smaller than Elara expected.

Its cover showed a cartoon sailboat, faded almost white. Gabriel laid it on the consultation table while Brandt photographed the pages, including the child's crooked spelling and the dark ring left by a spilled drink.

Rhys stood behind his chair.

“Read what you wrote,” he said.

Gabriel found a page marked with a strip of blue ribbon.

“Vale said the tea was for your headaches,” he began. “Then Father said, ‘You promised he wouldn't remember the atelier.’ Vale said, ‘He remembers pieces. The medicine keeps them from fitting together.’”

Elara felt Rhys move behind her.

Gabriel continued. “‘He saw the door,’ Father said. ‘He knows why Lucille couldn't get out.’”

“Stop,” Rhys said.

Gabriel closed the notebook.

Rhys walked to the window. His reflection stared back at him, gray-eyed and pale.

“Do you want us to stop?” Elara asked.

He did not turn around. “For a minute.”

Nobody spoke.

Elara wanted to press Gabriel for the next sentence. Instead, she folded her hands tightly together. She knew what it meant to have strangers demand the worst story of your life before you were ready to tell it.

At last Rhys said, “I remember a door.”

Elara looked up.

“An iron handle. It was hot. I couldn't reach it without standing on something.”

“Where?” Brandt asked.

“I don't know.”

“That's enough,” Elara said before anyone could ask more.

Rhys turned toward her. His face was stricken.

“What if I could have opened it?”

“You were a child.”

“What if someone was still inside?”

She crossed the room. “Not remembering isn't the same as leaving someone there.”

He looked down at her, breathing unevenly.

“Will you still believe that when we know?”

“I'll believe we need to know what happened before deciding what it means.”

He caught her hand and held it against his chest, where his heart beat much too fast.

 

Brandt asked Gabriel to leave the notebook with the police. Gabriel hesitated, then turned to the final written page.

“There's something else. I didn't write it at Saint-Claire. I wrote it after Father's funeral.”

“What is it?” Elara asked.

“Rhys came to see me once. Just once. Marguerite brought him. He had stopped smelling things. He kept rubbing his fingers together because they hurt.”

Rhys looked at his hands.

“I remember blisters.”

“You told me you could still feel heat,” Gabriel said. “And you made me promise not to tell Grandfather about the woman.”

Elara's breath caught.

“Which woman?”

Gabriel swallowed. “You didn't say her name. You said she kept singing so you would follow her voice.”

Rhys shut his eyes.

A woman singing.

The memory he had described when Elara first examined the tea.

For the first time, it was attached to something besides pain.

“Did she get you out?” Elara asked gently.

Rhys pressed his fingertips to his forehead.

“I can hear her,” he whispered. “But I can't see her face.”

Gabriel opened the final page.

“I drew what you described. You said you didn't want to forget it again.”

He turned the notebook toward them.

A child's drawing showed a narrow door, a staircase, and a woman reaching backward with one hand. Above the door was a sign, copied carefully in block letters.

Elara knew the sign.

She had seen those words engraved on the brass plaque salvaged from her mother's ruined workshop.

MAISON CALLOWAY-QUINN.

She gripped the table.

Below the drawing Gabriel had written one more sentence, in uneven blue ink.

Rhys leaned closer and read it aloud.

“‘The woman got me out. Then she went back for the baby.’”

Elara's hand flew to her mouth.

Because in the margin, beside the words, Gabriel had written the baby's name.

“Elara.”