PART 3: The Voice Inside the Music Box
I carried Biscuit back through the rain, wrapped in my cardigan, and brought him straight up to the nursery. Wren was waiting by the balcony doors in her nightgown, rigid as a statue. When I held him out, she snatched him and pressed him to her face and shook so hard that the whole room seemed to tremble with her.
I let her cry. I sat beside her on the rug, close enough to be there but not so close that she felt trapped, and when her breathing eased, I signed with great care, “Someone opened Biscuit. Did you know?”
She nodded, wiping her nose on the rabbit’s damaged ear. Her fingers moved slowly now. “Grandmother found Mama’s card inside. She took it. But Mama made two.”
“Two?”
“Mama said one is for Grandmother to find,” Wren signed. Her hands steadied as she went on, and I realized she was repeating something she had memorized word for word. “One is for the people who love me.”
I stared at her. Whatever Claire Ashby had been afraid of, she had known she would not have the time to say it all out loud, and she had built a trap with a child’s toy and a six-year-old’s silence as the lock.
“Where is the second card?” I signed.
Wren slid off the rug and went to the shelf where the china dolls sat in their silent row. Behind them, half hidden in the shadow, was a small wooden music box painted with faded violets. She wound it with trembling fingers, and a thin, tinkling lullaby began to play.
She lifted the lid. The tray inside was lined with velvet, and under the velvet, when she pressed at the corner, a thin panel lifted up. Beneath it lay a tiny memory card wrapped in a folded square of paper.
My heart pounded. “Wren, you are very brave,” I signed. “Do you want to see it with your father?”
She hesitated, her eyes on the door, and I understood what she was weighing. She had been taught that her grandmother’s ears were everywhere. Then she took the card in her fist and signed, “Not here. Not her house.”
“Whose house?”
“The cold room,” she signed, and pointed down at the floor. “The place with the big clock.”
I found Daniel in the study, standing over his mother’s torn-open handbag, which she had left on a chair when she went out to the village. He saw my face and his expression changed at once.
“What is it?”
“Close the door,” I said. “Please.”
We went down to the old conservatory at the back of the house, a glass-roofed room with a grandfather clock that had not been wound in years and a single dusty sofa that no one had sat on since the funeral. Mrs. Dobbs followed us without being asked and locked the door from the inside, and no one questioned her. Daniel had a laptop under his arm. His hand shook as he slid the card into the slot.
The screen flickered, and a woman appeared. She was sitting in the nursery in a white blouse with her light brown hair tied back, and she looked tired, but she was smiling.
“Hello, my loves,” she said, and her hands moved with her voice, signing as she spoke. “Daniel, if you are watching this, then I did not get to say it to your face, and I am so sorry. Wren, baby, you are so brave.”
Daniel made a sound I had never heard a grown man make. He sat down on the sofa without seeming to realize it, and Wren climbed up beside him and put the rabbit in his lap.
“I need to tell you what I found,” Claire went on. Her voice was steady, but her fingers trembled slightly. “For three years, the Ashby Children’s Foundation has been sending money to accounts that do not belong to any hospital. I found the statements in your mother’s desk. I asked her about it, and she told me I was confused, that grief and illness had made me forgetful. But I am not confused, Daniel.”
The room was so quiet that I could hear rain ticking against the glass.
“I have gone to Mr. Fenwick, our attorney, with copies of everything. I changed the trust so that Wren’s inheritance and the foundation cannot be touched without his signature. But your mother has been reading my mail, and I think she has learned I am ill, and I am afraid she is going to try to make Wren forget everything I have ever said to her.”
On the screen, Claire glanced over her shoulder, and her smile faltered. “I told Wren to keep this secret and to keep signing, because your mother does not believe a silent child can ever tell. But Daniel, there is one more thing, and it is the most important. Your mother knows that the first card—”
The video froze. The image shuddered, stretched into long gray lines, and went black.
Daniel stabbed at the keys. “No, no, no, play it again. What did she say about the first card?”
“It is corrupted,” Mrs. Dobbs said softly. “Look at the end of the file.”
Wren tugged at my sleeve. She was staring at the laptop, and her hands were rising on their own. She signed slowly, and her face was calm with the terrible calm of a child who has carried a secret for a year.
“Mama said Grandmother is not going to stop. Mama said she will do one more thing.”
“What thing?” I signed back.
But before Wren could finish, a key turned in the lock of the conservatory door. We all looked up. The handle shook, then stilled, and the door swung open.
Cordelia Ashby stood on the threshold with rain on her ivory coat and a thin smile on her mouth. In her hand she held a ring of keys, and behind her, filling the hall, stood two men in dark jackets that I had never seen before.
