LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      I pricked my finger on the stickpin. A fat, dark droplet of blood fell on the yellowed ivory vellum. It smudged one corner of the signature on the handwritten invitation. I could imagine an austere woman scratching those few wavering lines with an antique fountain pen. And now the n on her Victoria Allen was drowned in my blood.

      Drowned.

      The sharp pain in my finger was a sudden contrast to the numb I experienced everywhere else. My parents had died in a sailing accident off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard a month ago. I looked at the carnation and the bloody pin through its stem that had bitten me. Every year for twenty-one years, I’d received a pink carnation in October on my birthday. Even as a child, when I would have preferred a fashion doll, the flowers had fascinated me. I kept them all—gone dry to brittle petals in an antique jewelry box.

      And now, this year, something different arrived at the same time, an invitation to return to my mother’s childhood home.

      Allen House.

      A month too late for her to go with me. We’d never been close, but I ached over the injustice. The estrangement had never been discussed. It was like the wind or the sea—ever present. Unconsciously, I lifted my injured finger to my lips, but I wasn’t soothed, because just then my old jewelry box began to play. I jumped, startled, as a tiny ballerina that had been frozen in place for years jerked to life, seemingly spurred awake by the tinny notes of Brahms’s “Lullaby.”

      I suddenly remembered with perfect clarity the day my mother had broken it. The music box had been a gift from my grandmother, too, or so we assumed. Neither it nor the carnations had ever arrived with a card. That year, the box arrived with the carnation, but it hadn’t been new. The sides had already been worn from use. With the passionate obsession of a young seven-year-old girl, I’d played and played the tune. Winding and winding and winding the aged mechanism to see the miniature porcelain doll pirouette. I’d recently become a dancer myself, with weekly lessons and closets stuffed with sparkling tutus. I remembered imagining that my grandmother knew this…and cared.

      After what must have been the millionth turn of the little brass key my mother had snapped. She’d already pleaded a headache. I had selfishly continued to play the box. But I remember my shock when my normally quiet parent had stepped into my room to wrench the little ballerina in the opposite direction until a loud crack ended her dance forever.

      Or so I’d thought.

      I don’t know why my heart lurched painfully in my chest. I don’t know why I looked guiltily around my empty room as if the ballerina might offend my mother even weeks after her death. Maybe I looked for clues as to how the broken, unwound mechanism had suddenly found a second life?

      The day was gloomy and dark. The room was unlit save for a single dim lamp in the corner. I had been sleepless and plagued by nightmares for weeks. I blamed the pregnant silence of shadows in every corner for that aching lethargy.

      It was then that I noticed the dark smear of my blood on the ballerina’s crumpled gown. More than her sudden resurrection, more than the gloom, the blood on the tiny doll’s dress seemed a horror out of proportion to its reality. Her little body locked on pointe for eternity jerked as it moved. I shivered as the damaged mechanism persistently ground out the tortured tune, one laboring plink after another, until I couldn’t bear the tormented dance any longer.

      I put the fresh carnation in the music box with its twenty predecessors and quickly shut the lid…only to have my heart lurch again when the song continued for several more impossible notes.

      The broken music box had always haunted me. It had been a constant reminder of the potential for angry reaction that hid beneath my mother’s placid exterior. There was a raw

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