9781250816214

But nothing is locked in Arcadia Gardens. It’s not that kind of
neighborhood. They don’t lock their front door at night. No one does. It’s so
unnecessary. They don’t even have a key to this place—the real estate agent
didn’t mention one and after a while they just never bothered to have any
made. They are safe here. That’s the whole point. Nothing can touch them
here.
Sophia picks up her silver brush and jimmies the thin handle into the
crack between the countertop and the drawer.
It doesn’t take much. Token resistance. The sound of the lock popping
free is as satisfying as her shimmying, stretching foot finding purchase on
the first step of the staircase.
Sophia blinks slowly and stares into the drawer.
It is not empty.
There’s a hairbrush in there. A hairbrush she has never seen before. And
beside it, a lock of hair.
The brush is enormous. The back is made of antler or bone, the bristles
no soft spring rabbit, but hard, sharp, wild boar. She picks it up and turns it
over and over in her hands. The size of the thing makes her feel like a child
juggling some forbidden adult prize she can barely hold on to. Someone has
burned runes and designs and symbols Sophia cannot understand, except to
think they are beautiful in a brutal sort of way, all over the handle and body
of the thing: dark, angular, slashing. Maybe they’re letters. Maybe they’re
stallions’ heads. Maybe they’re something very, very else.
But it is the lock of hair that troubles her more.
It is not her hair.
Sophia’s hair is soft and fine and curly and the color of good, sweet
roasting pecans. The hair in the drawer is straight, coarse, and black as a
secret. Each strand is so thick you could almost write with it. No one they
know has hair like that. Not Mrs. Crabbe or Mrs. Lam or Mrs. Lyon or even
beautiful Mrs. Palfrey two blocks over on Olive Street.
Like a horse’s mane.
Perhaps it is a horse’s mane.
But why would anyone tie the hair of a horse so lovingly, with a white
ribbon just the same as the one Sophia uses to pull her hair away from her
graceful collarbones every morning?
She puts it to her nose and smells the hair. The stench of it floods her
brain and makes her gag: spices and rotting flesh and sour, private sweat