Again her fingers found it: a thick coating of algae—slimy feathers of it—and not only around the stopper, either. As fast as she could feel for it, it seemed to spread, until it coated the bottom of the tub, until she was sitting on it, her naked skin pressed against its awfulness. And now, even as she watched, it climbed like a shadow up the sides of the tub’s enameled walls.

  It could not be, but it was: algae spreading like a heap of skittering spiders, its black legs reaching and racing.

  She screamed for Alex, but the buzzing was on again and now so loud—so much louder than before—and Alex a floor below and several rooms between. Libbie knew she wouldn’t be heard. She needed to stand. She needed to get herself out of this mad bathtub.

  She tried to grip its rolled rim, but the algae was already there, thick and noisome but with a distinct note of former sweetness gone bad. It was the scent of lilacs left too long in a vase, the water growing rank—a miasma of rot and perfume both, like the fountain from her nightmare. She pulled her hands back and turned them over, saw black algae on her palms and fingers. She dunked them back into the tub, but as she tried to scrub them clean, the buzzing grew louder still, until she could place it exactly. Yellow jackets.

  The sound was the horrible buzzing of a swarm of yellow jackets.

  Libbie again attempted to grip the rim of the tub and plant her feet hard against its bottom in order to pull and push herself up. But the algae was too slippery, so thick with slime, she couldn’t gain purchase. Her thrashing movements spilled great arcs of water onto the marble floor. It smacked hard there.

  And then Libbie Brookhants watched—squinting to be sure, trembling when she was—as the antennae and black, mirrored eyes of a yellow jacket emerged from the dripping end of the bathtub faucet. Its head twitched as it felt the air.

  Soon after came the rest of its pointed body and cellophane wings—its yellow stripes somehow incorrectly bright, almost as if glowing there in the dark. Now it used its sticky, jointed legs to spring from the faucet and fly in a line just over the top of her left ear. She swatted her hand at the awful buzz of it, the hideous flick of it through the air, as another yellow jacket emerged from the faucet. And then another. Until there came a stream of them.

  Now, Readers, Libbie Brookhants screamed and screamed, and not only for Alex, but for anyone who might hear her, who might come. The wretchedness of the rot-sweet scent was stronger too, and the buzzing, the buzzing was everywhere, joined by the sounds of the faucet-sprung yellow jackets now careening between the bathroom’s walls.

  And now, oh God, she sensed some dark presence in the dressing room, a scuttle, a shift of shadows, there beyond the gap—the door not quite closed. There was only a line of space through which to see, but just as in the memory she’d used to pleasure herself, Libbie was certain that someone now stood in the dressing room, watching her.

  “Let me help you, Mrs. Brookhants,” Adelaide said, opening wide the door.

  Maybe Libbie, at first, felt a brief ripple of relief, but if so, it ended in cold dread as Adelaide Eckhart took her first steps into the room—strange, stilted steps. This was because, Libbie strained to see, to be certain: Adelaide was wearing her massive snowshoes. They were like dinner platters strapped to her feet. It should have been a comic thing, Adelaide indoors in her snowshoes, being blithe and merry and making Libbie like her even more. But in these moments the effect was only additionally unsettling, especially as she neared the tub and Libbie saw her in full.

  She looked very little like herself, at least not like any version of herself that Libbie had ever encountered, nor any version of any person Libbie had ever encountered. She wore one of Max’s dark wool work coats; it was still flaked with fresh snow and hung open garishly, revealing that her too-thin nightgown was all she had on underneath. Her hair was up, pinned at random, as if she’d done it in the dark, sections of it stuck to her scalp and matted with sweat.

  “Let me help you, Mrs. Brookhants,” Adelaide said, opening wide the door.

  Adelaide’s face, though, was the most wrong. Even in this half dark, Libbie could see that it was discolored and swollen, but only in patches, as if someone had inflated one eyelid, part of her bottom lip, the soft skin beneath her chin, and then had painted those flesh balloons in reds and purples.

  “The girls told me to come to you, Mrs. Brookhants,” this false Adelaide now said through her strange, stretched mouth, her words also misshapen. “They said you’d tell me how wonderful I am to think of you.”

  “Addie, you’re not at all well,” Libbie said slowly. “You must be half frozen!” Adelaide’s uncanny approach, her obvious illness, the awful warp of her face—as if behind a papier-mâché mask—had shocked Libbie into momentarily disregarding the terror of the bathtub, the yellow jackets. “Why aren’t you in your bed?”

  “I like watching you, Mrs. Brookhants,” Adelaide said, now bending and reaching her arms toward Libbie as though to pull her to standing. “I think you like me watching you.”

  Adelaide’s arms were also marked with welts. Libbie shuddered to see the black muck deep beneath her fingernails. She couldn’t let them touch her. “I’ll need a towel, Adelaide! You know where they are,” she said sharply, the latter part only to buy herself time.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brookhants,” Addie said. “Of course I do. I know where everything is here.” She turned to the cabinet, began her cumbersome, slapping steps there, and Libbie used these moments to thrust herself up and out of the tub. She didn’t care how much of the horrible seawater—a wave of it, Readers—splashed out over the side. She did care that some of the black algae wedged up and under her own fingernails with her effort, but she wanted only to be out of the water, over the rim of the tub, and standing, though as soon as she set one foot on the puddled marble it slipped out from beneath her and she crashed down, hard, smacking her hip against the tub’s edge before smashing her naked body against the floor.

  “Oh, my dearest darling Mrs. Brookhants,” Adelaide said as she turned to see, towel in hand. “What have you done? Now you must let me help you.” She didn’t seem to notice the yellow jackets beginning to swarm her—five or six of them, surely in her field of vision—landing on her face, hopping from her hair to her shoulders to her chest and around and back.

  Addie didn’t notice them, but Libbie Brookhants certainly did.

  And the buzzing, the awful buzzing, it was everywhere: vibrating in the air and through the marble panels too, up and down the walls and along the floor, as if it was trying to force itself inside of her. Libbie watched the black algae spreading fast across the floor, like someone unrolling a carpet of it. Everywhere the bathwater had sloshed it now spread. And then there was Adelaide again standing over her and Libbie’s breath catching hard in her throat.

  “Addie, am I dreaming?” she asked.

  “Oh no, Mrs. Brookhants, no,” Adelaide said as she bent toward Libbie with a dirty towel stretched between her arms. “You’re dying.”

  The towel was some filthy, rancid thing stained with every awful substance that might bleed or leak or spray, and there would be no saving Libbie from this. Adelaide bent closer still, and now the towel would wrap her up, Addie would see that it did, that it covered her, that she couldn’t escape it, that it was pulled around her tight and—

  The overhead light turned on.

  It was as if its electric glow simultaneously snapped off the worst of what was wrong. The buzzing ceased at once. Libbie was still on the floor, still in pain, but the spilled water around her was now only water: there was no creeping black algae. And while Adelaide remained standing above Libbie in her strange costume, the towel she held was clean and white and fresh from the cupboard. Adelaide’s face was red and puffed with welts, but she was also recognizably Addie and not some stretched skin mask formed from her features.

  “Libbie?” Alex asked from the doorway, clearly trying to make sense of a scene that refused such an effort. She’d come to talk about Mary MacLane’s book—she still had it in her hand, in fact—and had heard the commotion from the hall, had opened the door and reached in to turn on the light. “What’s happened? Adelaide, why are you wearing your snowshoes in the house?”

  “I slipped getting out of the tub,” Libbie said, reaching to take the towel Adelaide was still holding above her. She quickly covered herself. “I’m fine, but Addie isn’t. You need to find Max or Hanna and bring them here.”

  “Let me help you,” Alex said, coming into the room, slipping a little as she did. The sloshed bathwater had spread across the length of the floor. Now inside the bathroom, closer and under the light, she took in Addie anew. “Oh! What’s happened to her face?”

  “Alex!” Libbie said. “Please find Hanna. Now.”

  Alex did so unhappily, giving Libbie, as she left the room, a look that suggested they would certainly discuss all of this later, and the book in her hand, too—but in private.

  Libbie managed to stand, though her hip was throbbing. Adelaide had not moved. In fact, she held her empty arms stiffly before her, as if she were still holding the towel that was now wrapped around Libbie.

  “Come with me, Addie,” Libbie said, taking her by the elbow.

  Between the wet floor, and Libbie’s hurt hip, and Adelaide’s absurd shoes, they moved very slowly. Once they were finally through the dressing room and into the bedroom, Libbie sat Adelaide on the edge of her bed. She held her hand to Addie’s temple and found it flushed with fever as she’d expected, but when she went to pull her hand away, Adelaide clasped her own cold fingers overtop, holding them there while attempting to nuzzle her face against them. The towel, Libbie’s only cover, slipped down, and she had to sloppily maneuver it back around herself with her one free hand.

  “Stop this, Adelaide,” she said, firmly pulling away from her reach. “Let me help you, now.” Libbie’s hip throbbed as she bent to remove the snowshoes. She saw, then, that their woven netting was variously studded with leaves and brambles and even a single delicate harbinger of the spring season then still months away: a blue windflower.* It could not be, but it was. As Libbie began to unfasten the snowshoes’ topmost leather straps, she asked, choosing her words carefully, “Adelaide, where have you been walking? What path did you take to arrive here?”

  “Through the orchard, of course,” Addie said simply. “The girls told me it would be quickest, because of the snow.”

  The orchard was not along even the most indirect route between the Eckharts’ cottages and Spite Manor. In fact, it was in the direction of campus.

  Before Libbie could ask for an explanation, Adelaide said, rather cheerfully, “Did you love your dead husband, Mrs. Brookhants?”

  And where was Alex with Hanna or Max? Earlier the house had seemed so full.

  “Shhhhhhhhh,” Libbie said. “Be still now. You have a fever and you aren’t making sense. I’ll get these boots off and I’ll bring you a glass of water.” She now had one snowshoe removed. The other, the one with the flower twined up in it, awaited her efforts.

  “I don’t think I love mine,” Addie said simply. “Not that he’s dead yet.”

  “No, he certainly is not,” Libbie said.

  “My sisters tell me what a catch I’ve made in Max,” she said, performing some kind of a simpering imitation of their voices. “And his mother tells me—she tells me all the time. Oh, he’s just so terribly sweet and good. He is, isn’t he, Mrs. Brookhants?”

  “He does seem it,” Libbie said, still undoing straps.

  “But I don’t want him to be,” Addie said. “I don’t want his sweetness. It makes me almost sick to have him touch me. Sometimes I want to scream and scream at him.”

  Libbie had both of the snowshoes off now, and so she started on the laces of Adelaide’s boots. “Addie,” she said carefully, “is Max to blame for your face?”

  “Oh, my dearest, most delicious Library,” Adelaide said, “you know better than that.” She giggled, an awful giggle. And then she began to sing:

  What’s the racket, yel-low jacket?

  Far afield you roam!

  But you’ll never leave these grounds

  for Brookhants is your home.

  “Enough,” Libbie said. She shivered. She was still wet beneath her towel but that wasn’t the cause: it was Adelaide’s perfect knowledge of a song she should not know.

  Just one sting will make us smart.

  With two, we might be brave.

  “Quiet now!” Libbie said.

  Three will buzz inside our hearts.

  With more, we’re in the grave.

  “Adelaide, stop—” Libbie started, nearly in tears at how wrong this all was, but she was interrupted by commotion in the hallway and then—

  “What in heaven!”

  Hanna, her skirts rustling with her efforts, rushed into the room followed by Alex, who was still carrying the book, and who would have likely still been pouting over being sent away earlier, had she not just caught the final lines of Adelaide’s song.

  “Dear girl, why are you here?” Hanna asked as she reached the bed. She did not wait for an answer before adding, “Why did she come?” She looked at Libbie to explain.

  “I don’t know!” Libbie said, finally pulling free one of Adelaide’s boots. “She won’t tell me anything that makes any sense. She came in from the dressing room while I was taking a bath, still in her snowshoes.”

  “But you’re leaving out so much, Mrs. Brookhants,” Adelaide said, grinning.

  “It’s her fever,” Hanna said quickly as an apology. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

  “Yes, I do!” Adelaide said. And then, as if giving a formal recitation, she clasped her hands to her chest and spoke brightly: “There is the element of Badness in me. I long to cultivate my element of Badness. Badness compared to Nothingness is beautiful.”

  “You see, it’s pure nonsense,” Hanna said. “It’s her fever talking.”

  “It isn’t nonsense at all,” Alex said, her face gray. “It’s Mary MacLane.”

  And, Readers, it was. Addie had just offered a partial recitation from the final lines of Mary’s March 19 entry.

  “Oh Kind Devil,” Adelaide said, looking between them and giggling, “deliver me.”

  Interlude

  Side Talks with Girls

  A side talk with girls means a word here or there about things that are interesting—a little discussion of this or that which provokes a question.

  —RUTH ASHMORE, Side Talks with Girls*

  Side Talk #1

  Bo Dhillon Makes His Case

  If you’ll allow me to return you now, Readers—as I promised you I would—to Bo Dhillon’s office on the day of the chemistry read, with Audrey still sharing your confusion about this scene unfolding before her. The scene of which she was a crucial part, even if she seemed to be the only one in the room not to understand it. This scene:

  “I know you can give us a bang-up Clara,” Bo said from behind his big-dumb desk. He folded a stick of gum onto his pink tongue, whereupon it lay like a stiff piece of cardboard until he closed his mouth and spoke around his chews. “I’m not worried about that.”

  “How could you not be worried about that?” Audrey asked. She felt unsteady, and like she couldn’t quite catch her breath. “I mean I know how awful that was. I know.”

  “Nah,” Bo said as he waved his hand as if to wipe her concerns out of the air. “We’ll get you the best coach. Somebody who’s worked on other period stuff—I have people in mind. And you’ve still got time to get a handle on her.” He paused, smiling like he knew he was about to confuse her more and relished in it. “What I want to talk about is getting a good Audrey out of you.”

  “Audrey’s maybe had enough riddles for today, Bo,” Heather said. She’d slipped back into his office at some point, but Audrey hadn’t even noticed until now.

  “Why is that a riddle?” Audrey asked. Her face felt hot while simultaneously her flop sweat was cooling beneath her clothes, leaving her chilled.

  By then, almost everyone had left Bo’s house. But Audrey was still there with Gray and Caroline and Noel—and Heather—and Bo was still trying to explain his grand concept, which was improbable enough that she couldn’t quite believe it.

  The (admittedly confusing and potentially hokey) gist was this: the movie Bo Dhillon intended to make was both the scripted drama about cursed heroines at a Gilded Age boarding school that Audrey had always thought she was signing up for, and also the docudrama of the three contemporary heroines—Audrey Wells, Merritt Emmons, and Harper Harper—who were involved in making that movie. Something a little like putting all the making-of, behind-the-scenes extras into the movie itself, found-footage style. But better, ideally much, much better, because it would be done under Bo’s artful eye and arrangement, with his distinctive sense of mise-en-scéne and his penchant for films that slowly and deliberately curdled the beautiful into the terrifying, so you couldn’t quite see the seams in between.

  “I know we all tricked you and I get you being mad about that,” Bo said. “It was clearly a fucked-up thing to do.” He waited for her to respond.

  “Yeah,” she said to the windows behind him. She couldn’t meet his eye.

  “Yeah.” He paused again, this time as if searching for the words he wanted. “But I guess my explanation is that I needed to see if it was even interesting to have the three of you alone in a room together. If there was potential there. And if you’d known about this you would have been trying to be interesting, which is not the idea. It’s the opposite of the idea.”

  “So you were watching us today?” Audrey asked. “Like, the whole time we were in here?”