Page 107 of The Manor of Dreams

“I don’t know what Madeline is seeing,” Rennie said. “But I seeheragain. Ada.”

Lucille backed away. Her stark expression told Rennie everything.

Rennie said, “You’ve been seeing her too, haven’t you?”

Lucille shut her eyes tightly.

Rennie walked toward her. “When was the first time?”

Tears slid from her sister’s closed eyes. “Winter break. Senior year.”

Rennie had been a freshman at Lawrence then. She remembered sitting together in the waiting room of the counselor’s office before they each went in alone; she remembered standing in the hallway outside Lucille’s room. How Lucille had told her that she was seeing things, that she was going to become an addict, that she was going to end up just like Dad.God, how Rennie held on to that accusation for years, decades, dragging herself in and out of rehab, hurting herself, hating herself for being high, thinking she was damaged and rotten to the core. She remembered the Thanksgiving, years later, when she overheard Lucille telling her then-husband, Daniel, offhandedly, that Rennie seemed a borderline alcoholic and unstable.

She wanted to scream now:How could you have left me alone all this time?

But just then the floor tipped underneath them. Lucille staggered.Rennie threw her arms out against the bed to steady herself. The lights in the room flickered.

The floor jolted again, and Rennie looked at Lucille with terror.

A final tremor shuddered through the room and then everything was still.

Madeline burst in. “Did you feel that?”

Rennie looked at Lucille and pleaded, “We need to go.”

“Okay.” Her sister was back to pacing, but she wouldn’t meet Rennie’s eyes. “It’s late. I need to gather some last files. We can leave first thing in the morning.”

LUCILLEshoved everything in her bag: papers, files, all the things she could look at in more detail later. She tried to fit as much as possible, but she was running out of time. Once they left this house in the morning there was a chance they could never come back.

She blinked hard to stay awake. The sleepless nights were catching up to her. It would be so easy to take a quick nap in the armchair, but she switched on the computer and went to email herself all the security camera footage. She watched it again. There was Elaine’s car on the twentieth of July; she arrived in the early afternoon and left an hour later. Then the camera lens got progressively darker, until it was completely obscured by that evening by the leaves.

Could Elaine have donethat? This was why she hadn’t seen Rennie’s car in the footage, but what could have made it happen?

The files were massive and took forever to send; the Wi-Fi kept going in and out. Lucille paced. She yanked her thumbnail between teeth until she felt a sharp slice of pain and drew blood. Finally, the files appeared in her phone’s email inbox. She scrolled to make sure the videos were all there and then was about to click out when she saw the old email. The preliminary autopsy.

She’d read it already, days ago. Several times. But she clicked on the report again.

This time she fixed on the last line.

Her mother’s time of death was estimated to be between July 20 and July 21.

Lucille scrambled to read the line again. Rennie said she visited Ma on July 22. It didn’t make sense.

Lucille sank into the armchair. Either the medical examiner was wrong, or— Or Rennie had recounted the wrong dates.

Could Rennie have misremembered? She did seem pretty out of it these days. Could she be on something? Lucille caught herself—she didn’t want to accuse Rennie of anything else. She’d already done enough. She couldn’t stop thinking about Rennie’s broken expression when she admitted that she, too, had seen Ada’s ghost. She knew she had exacted cruelty time and time again toward her sister. She wanted it to be different between them.

Lucille wanted so badly to be a soft and understanding person and not human shrapnel. But she had been doing what she thought was necessary. And this was a critical detail. If Renniehadmisremembered the dates and went to see Ma earlier in the week, then that meant the case was still viable. It was still possible for Elaine to have been involved in Ma’s death. It would all fit perfectly, terribly, in this timeline.

Lucille felt that familiar kinetic rush of figuring out the key to a case. She spun the dates and the facts around in her head. She resolved to ask Rennie in the morning, after they left, and sat back in the chair with a sense of relief. Her eyelids started to droop like she was a little kid again, in the spot of afternoon sun, with the library and the whole world in front of her. She was asleep long before the light of the green lamp finally gave out.

Lucille found herself lying in the soft grass. Stars stretched out above her. It was a summer night and the air had long cooled. She breathed in deeply, taking in the scent of jasmine and lavender.

“Jie Jie.”

Lucille turned her head. Ada lay on the grass next to her. Her eyes were closed. Her bangs had grown out and swept over the side of her cheeks. She was wearing the Sky High shirt she loved.

Her sister was exactly how Lucille remembered her that summer, 1990.

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