Page 30 of A Lullaby for Witches

They lapsed into silence. The car began picking up speed, and Augusta shifted uncomfortably in her seat. They were in the fast lane, the scenery whizzing past them. Reaching for the safety handle, Augusta took a peek at the speedometer and nearly did a double take. They were going almost 85 mph.

“Do you, um, always drive so fast?” she asked, her knuckles tightening around the handle.

“Hmm?” Leo glanced at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Oh, sorry. I like opening up on the highway and sometimes I get carried away.” He slowed down and Augusta’s heart rate likewise slowed back to normal.

The rest of the trip was spent listening to Stevie Nicks belt out the classics. Gradually, houses and neighborhoods replaced the trees, and then the suburbs transitioned to the dense city blocks of Boston. They pulled up behind a stately brick building in the heart of the city across from the Public Garden.

“You said you’ve never been to the Harlowe mansion before, right?” Leo asked as they pulled into the small side lot.

Augusta shook her head. “I never even knew it existed until I was hired.”

He grinned. “Well, you’re in for a treat. I’ll give you a quick tour before getting you set up in the archives.”

Augusta was itching to get her hands on those documents, but she couldn’t turn down a private tour from Leo. They went in through the front where a ticket counter was set up in the front hall. “Hey, Monica,” Leo said, waving to a young woman with long brown hair in a white button-down behind the desk. “Have you met Augusta yet? She’s our new collections manager at Harlowe.”

Augusta shook her hand, then stood by awkwardly while Leo and Monica caught up on some small talk. “We’re going to zip through the house real fast before heading up to the archives—is that all right?” Leo asked.

“They’re between tours right now, so just be quick and you’ll be fine.”

“Great.” Leo motioned for Augusta to follow him out of the front vestibule and past the counter.

If she had thought that Harlowe House was elegant, the Boston mansion was a picture of Victorian refinement at its best. Leo led her through a formal dining room that made the dining room at Harlowe House look quaint by comparison. The table was set with crystal stemware that twinkled in the sunlight let in from the floor-length windows. “How often was the family here?” she asked him. It was nowhere near as homey and welcoming as the house in Tynemouth.

“The history of the family isn’t my strong point, but I’m pretty sure Harlowe House was their main residence until the 1870s or so. I think after that one of the brothers lived here and the place in Tynemouth was more of a summer retreat.”

The 1870s. So, right when Margaret was supposedly living. Would she have come here to visit her brother? Had she dined in this very room, surrounded by the elegant, powder blue molding and gilded mirrors?

They headed up a gracious marble staircase just as a tour was starting downstairs. Leo swiped his card at the door at the top. “I just have to grab my charger from my office,” he told her over his shoulder as he led her down the hall.

Augusta stood in the doorway while he rifled through his desk drawers. There were a couple of framed photos on the desk facing away from her, and a neat row of Matchbox cars. File folders sat in piles, and there was a shelf of binders with labels like “Summer Programming 2016” and “Tynemouth Artist CO-OP Directory.” A shriveled fern sat next to the only window. “So, this is the wellspring of public engagement, huh?”

He flashed her a grin before returning to his search. “Oh, yeah. All the magic happens here. Don’t blame me for the plant, though—I think it was dead when I got it. Aha, there it is.” He waved the charger triumphantly and then led her down the hall to the archives.

Augusta had pictured a grand hall lined with books and old-fashioned green library lamps, but in reality, it was a modest room with two reading stations and a modern shelving system.

A middle-aged woman with light skin and a silver pixie cut sat behind the desk. “Hey, Lori, this is Augusta.”

Augusta shook her hand. “I think we’ve emailed a couple of times.”

“Of course! So nice to meet you in person. So, Leo says you’re doing some research on the Harlowe women around the 1860s through the 1880s?”

Augusta had decided that she would have the best chance of finding information about Margaret if she kept the parameters of her research vague. She nodded. “That’s right.”

“I got out some reels for you to start with on the microfiche, mostly of transcribed journals and ledgers from that period. When you’re done with those, I can pull out specific correspondences.”

When Lori had gone back to her desk, Leo made sure that Augusta had everything she needed. “I’ll be down the hall in my office. Just come and find me when you’re ready. Or, actually...” He paused, glancing at his watch. “Why don’t we grab some lunch across the street at one? You’ll probably be about ready to give your eyes a break by then.”

Augusta instinctively prepared herself to turn down the invitation, especially since it involved food. But why shouldn’t they grab lunch? She didn’t have to worry about Chris grilling her later about who she’d been with, and she knew she had to eat to something. There couldn’t be any more fainting spells or hallucinations at work. “Lunch sounds perfect,” she told him.

Jill had been right: there wasn’t even so much as a mention of Margaret Harlowe. Dizzy from whirring through the microfiche, Augusta let her mind wander as she stared sightlessly out the window. Why wouldn’t a wealthy, notable family want any trace of their daughter to survive? Had she committed some sort of unforgivable transgression? The Victorians were notoriously prudish when it came to scandals and love affairs, and Augusta had come across more than one case when a zealous descendant had decided to take things into their own hands and censor the historical record. But this was different. There wasn’t even so much as a scratched-out name in a family Bible, or a veiled reference to a disappointing daughter.

She was going to have to get creative. Scrolling through the rest of the journals, she skipped to the ledger entries. Correspondence and diaries could tell a story, but numbers didn’t lie. There had to be a record of expenses that showed that Margaret Harlowe had existed.

The portrait in the Harlowe dining room suggested that the sitter had been in her teens or early twenties in the 1870s, so Augusta raced through the reels from about twenty-five years earlier. If Margaret had been born sometime in the 1850s, then there should besomethingfrom that period that suggested a birth had occurred. Perhaps there had been an expense for a doctor to come and deliver the baby, or maybe her mother had needed a new wardrobe of maternity clothes. She checked her notes to see when the three brothers were born so she could rule them out, and then she began carefully scanning the cramped rows of numbers and shorthand.

It was mind-numbing work, so she almost missed the innocuous entry in the ledger. She paused the microfiche and then rolled it back another page. There. She squinted at the entry, double-checking that it really said what she thought it said.

She was hurriedly scribbling notes when her phone buzzed with a message from Leo asking if she was ready. Two hours had flown by, and she found that she almost wished she didn’t have to pause her work to meet up with him.

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