This Must Be the Place: A Novel by Kate Racculia Page B

even remember—meant she liked him. She would talk to him again and she would tell him things about Amy and about the contents of the shoebox. Which stirred his unease, since he had to make sure
he
didn’t tell her too much in return. He couldn’t let Mona see the postcard that bequeathed the best parts of Amy to the one who would know where to look. It would be difficult, but necessary, to get at the truth that Amy wanted
him
—and only him—to discover, and if that meant keeping a culinary genius in the dark, so be it.
    Harry was lying beside Arthur in bed, practically spooning him.
    “Morning,” Arthur said. Harry sighed.
    Arthur smelled sunblock and oranges and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
    Maybe he was still dreaming.
    He stood. He heard a thump as Harry leaped down and Arthur filled his lungs and took a step and then another step. This really did feel like dreaming: his head was light and very far away.
    Mona was singing in the kitchen. Arthur heard her as soon as he opened his door, and for a moment it jarred him. But he refused to wake up.
    The old hall boards creaked under his bare feet. He wasn’t surewhere he was going, only trusted that he would know when he arrived. The hall was more like a balcony or a parapet: a landing that wrapped around the hollow core of the house on all four stories, connected from floor to floor by short staircases that curled like fruit peels. Arthur had never been in a house like this; it was an optical illusion or an impossible illustration, and it made him feel unsteady and wary and watched.
    He passed a large framed black-and-white photograph at the top of the main stairs, of two young men in old-fashioned suits with tight collars and matching silver watch fobs, facing each other in fanatically straight high-backed chairs. Behind one chair stood a woman with a grim expression and dark curly hair.
    He looked at the two men. He looked at their faces. The man on the left had thick black hair, a long nose in a pale young face, and a smile that revealed itself only after Arthur had been staring at him for a long time. The man on the right, with the woman standing behind him, had short light hair and a spectacular brush of mustache, and a small notch, like a bite, out of one ear. A fighter, Arthur thought. But he didn’t look unkind; his eyes were tipped at the corners, lifted. The men in the photograph were smiling. The woman looked like someone had just drop-kicked her kitten.
    They wore their secrets like their buttons and their chains and their cuff links—too small to see but essential, giving everything its shape and place.
    Their cuff links?
    Arthur screamed.
    The men in the photograph— MR. DANIEL DARBY and MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM FITCHBURG JONES , as the brass plate screwed into the over-bearing gilt frame proclaimed—wore matching, perfectly round, silver-edged cuff links that Arthur had seen, that Arthur had held in his hands, that Arthur had unwrapped from a piece of yellow tissue paper inside a plastic egg. He would bet every dollar he had ever owned or would ever make that they were ruby-red and heavy and beautiful, and this—this was more than a clue, this meant—he didn’t know what it meant other than that it was something he was meant to see.
    “
Mona
!” he shouted. He pulled the picture off its nail and held it at arm’s length and laughed.
    “Hey!” Mona’s shout startled him, and he clutched the frame to his chest.
    She was standing in the foyer, wiping her hands on a blue and pink towel. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was barefoot, and she wasn’t smiling her usual smile. She was angry and afraid.
    A tiny part of Arthur woke up and was horrified to know none of this was a dream. It never had been. He was freezing cold. He saw what he looked like to Mona: he tried to remember if he had taken a shower that morning (he hadn’t), or shaved (he hadn’t, in days), or put on a shirt, even (he hadn’t—nor