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By Root 2189 0

a striking, increasingly self-reliant girl—yet, in these antique mirrors, her reflection was wan, tremulous, fearful, like a reflection in rippling water. Was she, too, disappearing? Or was it, in fact, but the inadequacy of the mirrors? She’d noticed that Stephen, too, appeared vague and irresolute when glimpsed in certain mirrors, and the twins, Neale and Ellen, who hadn’t grown at all this summer but seemed, disturbingly, to have shrunk an inch or so, scarcely appeared at all except as wavering, watery images like poorly executed watercolors. Scrubbing the grime away from a mirror and polishing its glass did little good, for the lead backing was seeping through; as Mrs. Dulne had said, throwing up her hands in genial exasperation when once she and Rosalind were trying to restore a mirror, “Cross Hill is old.”

One night, very late, Rosalind and Stephen were whispering together in the darkened corridor outside their bedrooms, and Rosalind dared to ask Stephen if he was starting to forget their brother—almost, Rosalind had forgotten Graeme’s name!—quite deliberately pronouncing it, “Graeme.” Stephen’s reply was an immediate, perhaps too immediate, “No.” Rosalind then asked if Stephen sometimes heard their names so faintly and teasingly in distance, like the wind, and Stephen shivered and acknowledged, yes, he sometimes heard “something—I’m not sure what.” “But it sounds like Graeme, doesn’t it?” Rosalind persisted, and Stephen said, as if this were something he’d been brooding over himself, “If he wants us to join him, how the hell can we? We don’t know where he is.” They talked for a while, in lowered voices, of where Graeme might have gone. Back home?—to the city? But what would he do there? Live with a friend? Not very likely. As for relatives, Mother and Father seemed to have few; Father’s parents were long dead, and Mother’s widowed mother, remarried and living in a condominium in Sarasota, Florida, had never expressed much interest in her grandchildren. Rosalind said, frowning, “But do you think Graeme could take care of himself, support himself?” and Stephen said, “We could all take care of ourselves, if we had to. We could get jobs, we could be independent. We could go to school but live alone—why not?” Rosalind said in a thrilled, tremulous voice, “We—could? I’d be afraid, I think,” and Stephen said impatiently, “Our great-grandfather Moses Matheson came to this country by himself when he was only twelve years old,” and Rosalind said, “Did Father tell you that?” and Stephen said, “No. I read it in a book in the library in town,” and Rosalind said, “But people were different then! I don’t think I would be that strong or brave,” and Stephen said, moving away, a forefinger to his lips, “Yes, you could.”

II. “Immunity”

Stephen whispered aloud, “I can’t believe it.”

He was too upset to remain seated at the table in the Contracoeur Public Library and so heaved himself to his feet to continue to read stooped over the outspread newspapers, a pulse beating in his head, sweat running in rivulets like tears down his face. Even as he was thinking, sickened, I can’t believe it; I know it must be true.

These ugly, damning headlines. In forbidden newspapers dating back to the previous winter. Front-page photographs of Judge Roderick Matheson and a half dozen other men. Arrested on charges of bribery, corruption, conspiracy to interfere with police investigations. These were Albany papers forbidden to us, the children of Roderick Matheson. These documents Stephen had at last sought out in the Contracoeur library, in willful defiance of his father’s command.

He wiped tears of angry, hurt shame from his eyes. He hoped no one was watching! Wondering at his naïveté, his stupidity, in having taken so long to seek the evidence when he’d half known, all these months, what it might be.

Should I bring a knife, a weapon to protect myself?

Somehow, Stephen never did. Thinking only of a knife when it was too late, when he was already gone from the house and pedaling his bicycle energetically away.

Those languid summer nights he