A Slow Ruin Read online

  I should have known better than to pause outside Vera’s room. The detours taken throughout the day to search her things for clues I blamed on my obsessive-compulsive brain. To smell her on the sheets. To sit in her space. Even now, six months gone, I knew there was something I hadn’t found. A secret I hadn’t unearthed. Secrets. I had them too.

  My scattered thoughts weren’t anything new. Every morning I misplaced my half-drunk coffee cup, or forgot to finish my half-eaten breakfast. And this year I had neglected to buy Halloween costumes for the kids. With trick-or-treat quickly approaching, even Amazon two-day shipping couldn’t save me. So I handed the kids a bin full of costume oddments and told them to take their pick. This was probably why Sydney was dressed from the waist down as Snow White and the waist up as a ninja. Eliot always chose Iron Man. Vera would have posed with the little ones for a selfie and called them drippy, which was a compliment in Vera-speak. To me it sounded like an STD.

  My stomach rumbled, my brain seized. What was I supposed to be doing?

  Oh yes, the Band-Aid, then eat something. Had I even eaten yet today?

  The forgetfulness predated Vera’s disappearance, first becoming noticeable when Vera was a baby. Back then it was new-mom sleep deprivation. But lately it had gotten worse, because I didn’t want to drink my coffee or eat my breakfast. The perpetual grip on my stomach made all food intolerable, as if my body wanted to die along with Vera’s.

  No. Nix the word die.

  I didn’t believe that Vera was dead, no matter what the Pittsburgh Police Special Victims Unit or Detective Courtney Montgomery said.

  Idling in the doorway, I noted how Vera’s bedroom looked exactly like it had the day she disappeared, minus a few items after the police had rifled through it with tornado intensity, looking for clues. With the expectation that Vera would come home and accuse her siblings of destroying her bedroom, I had straightened her London-themed comforter splashed with turquoise and gray images of Big Ben and the London Bridge, closed dresser drawers, tidied the closet. Things I’d done for the past fifteen years of her life. Inspired by her love of all things British, we had planned a trip to the United Kingdom as her graduation gift. I even baked two dozen scones—cranberry and chocolate chip, her favorites, using Brit gourmand Mary Berry’s recipes—and stored them in the freezer, waiting for her return. Back then I had expected. Now I wondered. Would we ever see Big Ben or the bridge together? I could only cling to pale hope these days.

  I stepped inside. The bedroom suffocated me with its emptiness. No dirty laundry overflowing from her basket. No stained Vans scattered across the floor. No scent of beachy coconut lotion. Outside her window hung clouds pregnant with rain, reminders of the gray, eerie April day she had disappeared. Any minute now the sky would crack open and weep with me.

  I felt a strange sensation, like something under the bed trying to grab my ankle, and stepping backwards I gave a little cry. Looking down, I saw Meowzebub’s orange and white paw clawing at the carpet, and then she poked her pumpkin head out triumphantly as if to say gotcha! The long-haired calico cat had been Vera’s boon companion ever since the spring night she showed up on our doorstep after a torrential downpour, drenched and shivering. Usually I was the softie that couldn’t resist a stray critter, no matter how woebegone, but this time it was Vera who pleaded with Oliver to let her keep the kitty. Oliver was putty in her hands.

  Under Vera’s care Meowzebub—so christened because of her bone-chilling yowl, akin to some netherworld denizen—was restored to robust health, and became a member of the family. Meowzebub possessed in spades the calico’s infamously temperamental nature. Vera preferred to say that Meowzebub simply had cattitude, which she regarded as a virtue. The mischievous cat was likely to turn up anywhere in the house, at any time, and loved to ambush unsuspecting victims. Oliver tolerated her, the dogs were terrified of her, the kids loved her, as did I; she was a living link to Vera.

  Suddenly Meowzebub gave her trademark yowl from hell and darted out from under the bed, careening down the stairs at breakneck speed. The crazy cat often got the zoomies in the middle of the night, racing around the house until she was exhausted, but not before waking the entire family. Syd and Eliot found these antics hilarious. Oliver wanted to turn Meowzebub into an outdoor cat. Over my dead body!

  Ambling to Vera’s desk, my gaze settled on a framed 1910 tintype of her great-great-grandmother Alvera Fields. We had found this photo when digging into the family archives for Vera’s school project on the women’s suffrage movement, in which Alvera had been a prominent and outspoken figure. In the yellowed photo, Alvera and her millionaire husband Robert were resplendent examples of Edwardian-era haute couture. Alvera looked smart in a dark twill suit with a hip-length jacket, lace gloves, and a whimsical hat bedecked with white roses and ostrich plumes, her arms wrapped around her newborn daughter, precious in a white lace gown and bonnet.

  Robert was dapper in a cutaway morning coat with paisley vest and puff tie, walking cane in one hand, the other holding his top hat in the crook of his arm. Following the fashion of the day, the couple wore dour expressions, which had prompted Vera to joke that they looked like they had a hellacious case of hemorrhoids. But that was just teenage irreverence talking. Vera had in fact been named in honor of the pioneering suffragette, and the school project had sparked in Vera an obsession with her ancestor’s life…and eventual disappearance.

  Alvera had vanished one fateful day without a trace, a baffling event chronicled in newspapers from coast to coast, and sparking countless theories from professionals and detectives alike as clues came to light. As a cause cèlebré, and to some a controversial and polarizing figure, it was widely believed Alvera died in service to the cause of establishing women’s right to vote, but no one knew the truth. Now, a hundred and eleven years later, my Vera had followed in the footsteps of the woman she revered—in the most tragically distressing way imaginable. A terrible coincidence, a family curse.

  I traced my finger across the antique desk, smiling at her scribbles that marred the wood. A DIY project she had worked on with Oliver back when she was ten...back when she still craved her father’s attention. We had found the writing desk on a visit to the Fields Estate, a forlorn ancestral mansion whose designation by the state of Pennsylvania as an historical landmark had saved it from demolition. The home had belonged to Oliver’s great-grandfather Robert Fields, a silk importer tycoon, and Alvera, his wife. The couple’s only daughter, Olivia, had inherited the home, and while she had maintained its magnificence for many decades, in recent years it had fallen into disrepair after her death. Oliver and his brother Cody were hopeful of restoring the structure to its Edwardian era splendor—a mammoth physical and financial undertaking—and had secured an Historic Preservation Tax Credit for that purpose to honor Alvera Fields’ legacy.

  The desk had been covered in dust, yet the bones solid. An intriguing piece, Vera had discovered a secret hollow leg that contained old letters, a fun find when they were restoring it. Together Vera and Oliver sanded and painted it in a rich white chalk paint. The project kindled a creative spark in her. Since then she’d collected and restored a four-poster bedframe, a dresser to match, and a stool that fit snugly under her desk. That winter I watched Vera and her father sweat and work their fingers raw in the freezing cold detached garage, warmed only by a single space heater while they created this bedroom, bonding over paint swatches and knob hardware. Vera had seemed so happy back then. What changed in my daughter that made her run away?

  I cried this question daily.

  I could never hear an answer through the sobs.

  Up to 2.8 million teens in the United States run away from home each year. Ninety-nine percent of them return home safely. The stats were supposed to comfort me as Detective Montgomery delivered them by rote the first time we met on April 16, the blackest black-letter date of my life. Where was my 99 percent assuredness of my daughter’s safe return home? Because it had been six mo
nths and still no Vera.

  We had scoured every inch of the Steel City, from the projects where crumbling brick townhomes decayed along with the desolate steel mills, to the money-soaked upper-middle-class neighborhoods like ours. But in a city of three hundred thousand faces, I couldn’t find my daughter’s.

  I admit the staggering number of missing children shocked me, but not as much as the possibility that Vera would willingly choose to leave her beautiful home, her parents who loved her, her siblings who adored her. She had everything. But believing Vera had chosen to leave was better than the alternative: that she’d been kidnapped or murdered, which the police told me was unlikely.

  No body had been found. No evidence of an abduction.

  She was a straight-A student. Book nerd. No drugs. No shady friends. No deviant behavior—that I knew of. Private school. Affluent town with a keen neighborhood watch. No one saw a thing. Kidnapping didn’t fit the profile. I wanted to be glad for that…but my daughter was still missing. It had been too long. A mother can’t help but slip into worst-case scenarios as the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months tick by.

  It didn’t make sense for a girl from a loving home to just up and leave. But it often happened, Detective Montgomery gently reminded me. So here we were, 184 days post-disappearance, with no clues as to where she had gone, or with whom, or why. The detective had searched every angle, interviewed every close friend, but sometimes there simply was no explanation for why an ambitious honor roll student from a good family decides to disappear. But as the detective told me again and again as the months dragged on, everyone is hiding something. Even my perfect fifteen-year-old daughter.

  Pulling open the desk drawer, I didn’t expect to find anything new. The police had been through it at least once, and me a dozen times. With eight bedrooms and over 9,000 square feet in our home—dubbed the Execution Estate, after the horror that marred this house forever—endless hiding places and secrets lurked behind these walls and haunted every room. But every day I hoped, prayed that maybe, just maybe, we had missed something that would lead me to Vera. Something I hadn’t noticed before. Something with hidden meaning.

  Beneath pages of scribbled notes, Vera’s women’s suffrage report remained unfinished. I picked up the same art notebook I had leafed through countless times. The pages were jammed front and back with original drawings displaying real talent and growing artistic maturity. Mostly manga-inspired cartoons, elves, with the occasional self-portrait or sketch of our imposing Victorian home, which always seemed to be just one coat of paint away from being declared Oakmont’s unofficial haunted house.

  In one hilarious cartoon representing Vera at her irreverent best, she depicted the house as a popular retreat for a motley crew of horror icons. Psycho’s Norman Bates, in drag as his dead mother, sat in a rocking chair in an upstairs window. Edward Scissorhands was busy sculpting a topiary shaped like Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed dog that guarded Hades—and their heads looked suspiciously like our own three dogs. Demented author Jack Torrance from The Shining was busting down the front door with an axe. Vera had sprinkled our family into the drawing too, as the Addams Family. Eliot and Sydney as Pugsley and Wednesday were setting dynamite charges under the mansion’s foundation. Oliver, rakish in a pencil mustache and double-breasted striped suit, was Gomez, canoodling the arm of pasty-faced Morticia—representing none other than me—in a sprayed-on mourning dress with octopus tentacle hem. And in the foreground stood Vera clapping her hands to her ears like the spectral figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, with a word balloon over her head saying It’s a madhouse! A maaaaadhouse! Luckily the detectives read no deeper meanings into the macabre masterpiece.

  Flipping through the pages, I paused on a sketch of some sort of symbol. Celtic, maybe? I traced the image with my eyes, searching for something. But what?

  A crash split the silence somewhere in the house, followed by Eliot’s screams, but I couldn’t shift my attention. There was something significant about this drawing. A moment later the dogs erupted in a cacophony of barking; a loud wail echoed.

  “Mommy, help!” Yelling reached my ears, but my focus was hooked on the image.

  Yes, I knew this image. It was important; I could feel it in my bones.

  While the noise intensified, the questions in my head shouted over it. Where had I seen it? On my phone, perhaps? Had Vera sent me a picture of this before? It felt urgently meaningful.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my back pocket—it was always on me in case Vera called or, more likely, texted. I scrolled through my ancient texts from her, the most recent one six months ago. April 16. The cursed day. She had texted me shortly before she vanished. I should have seen the warning behind the green bubble of letters and abbreviated words. But I saw the hidden message now, tucked in between the text slang and the emojis:

  Mom pls don’t be mad at me when u get home. but i need 2 clean up the mess.

  Heat radiated up my neck, cooked my forehead. Her text hadn’t been about the dirty dishes cluttering the counter that she was supposed to put in the dishwasher. Or the toys scattered across the area rug that she was supposed to put in the toy box. The mess was our family. Vera had found out something she shouldn’t have. And if I didn’t find her soon, it could get her killed.

  Panic stole my breath as I found myself slipping back in time, back to the day Vera disappeared…

  Chapter 2

  Felicity

  APRIL

  “I think it’s time to tell the kids the truth.” The truth. What a subjective word. These days, truth was a fog I wandered through. Impossible to grasp and as fleeting as a thought.

  But the truth had been weighing on me a lot lately. Along with the half-truths that attached themselves to it.

  “What truth, Felicity? About Sydney?” Evening sunlight darted across Oliver’s face, brightening the blue of his eyes. Other than fine lines that raked the edges, he hadn’t changed much since college. While time hit pause for him, for me it marched cruelly on.

  “Yes, about Sydney. What else would I be talking about?” Lately Sydney’s diagnosis was all we talked about. We never spoke about the other thing.

  His lips tightened in a crooked slash. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? It will only upset them. It seems a bit premature to be discussing it with Vera before we talk to the doctors first.”

  I inhaled the moist air as seagulls squawked over the Allegheny River that flowed past the dock where we enjoyed dessert at one of our favorite taprooms in downtown Pittsburgh’s North Shore. Speedboats sped across the water, trailed by jets of spray and party music in a strange cacophony. The Allegheny River teemed with water lovers eager to let go of the long winter and embrace a warm spring. It had been a perfect night for outdoor riverside dining, a rare treat during April in Pennsylvania, but the scent of rain and a brooding sky portended a coming storm. The weather had held off long enough for us to get through dinner and half of my tiramisu, but now a chilly wind made me pull my sweater tight around my shoulders.

  I reread the text that Marin had sent me after our Sisters Day Out earlier that afternoon, encouraging me to be strong after I told her the secret Oliver and I had been keeping from the whole family for months:

  Thank you for entrusting me with your secret about Syd Squid. I know you’re scared, but I think you need to come clean to Vera. She’ll understand. I’m here for anything you need. You’re closer than blood to me, sis.

  Although we were family by marriage, Marin was the closest thing to a sister I had, and loyal to a fault. Her husband, my brother-in-law Cody, often jokingly—or not so jokingly—reminded me of this when Marin put me before him.

  Marin was my rock when motherhood tried to sink me. When Vera entered her tween rebellious stage, Marin stepped in to support me against Vera’s demand for an eyebrow piercing. When I needed extra help after opening Barkalicious Boutique, Marin groomed a dog or five when I was understaffed and overbooked. When Oliver’s
promotion at his marketing firm enslaved him at the office, Marin delivered meals to him for me. And when my green-grass world turned bleak and brown, Marin comforted me with the vow that Sydney would be okay and we’d get through her sickness together. Marin convinced me I wasn’t a monster for what I wanted to ask Vera to do. Marin reminded me I was doing the right thing.

  I trusted Marin. Oliver, on the other hand, I didn’t trust.

  I had noticed the shift between my husband and sister-from-another-mister, the way his gaze lingered a little too long on her. The way his attention zeroed in on her every word. I couldn’t blame her that my husband was a flirt. It came with the package when I married him—take the good with the bad—and it had helped him charm his way to the top of a billion-dollar company. I accepted it, but I didn’t have to like it.

  “Marin thinks Vera can handle the news,” I said. “She’s fifteen years old. Old enough to know what’s going on, Ollie.” A droplet spattered on the glass mosaic bistro table, another pelted my silk blouse.

  “It’s not the news about Sydney that I think will upset Vera. It’s what we’re asking her to do that’s the issue,” Oliver replied.

  “I have a feeling she might already know after all the bloodwork she’s gone through.”

  Our waitress, her curves shrink-wrapped in black Lycra, rushed by. Oliver’s gaze trailed behind her, then darted back to me when he realized I’d caught him.

  “Like what you see?” I asked.

  “She’s hideous compared to you, honey.” There was that charming grin again. Irresistible, even after twenty years.

  “She does kind of resemble a pug.” Her upturned nose, expressive face. Who was I kidding? Pugs were adorable.