Cutler 02 - Secrets of the Morning

had simply been swallowed up one day, for the vanity table was still covered with brushes and combs and jars of skin creams. Some jars had been left opened, the contents dried and evaporated. Clothing still hung in the closets and there were pairs of shoes beside the bed, a man's pair on one side, a woman's on the other. I had the chilling feeling I had invaded the sanctuary of a pair of ghosts.
    I backed out of the room I felt sure had once been Father and Mother Booth's room and continued down the corridor. When I realized that the door to the next room on the right was open, I turned the kerosene lamp down again and approached as quietly as I could. There was some very dim light coming from this room. I hesitated and then peered around the door jamb and gazed within.
    There, asleep on a long, narrow bed with a plain square head and foot board was Miss Emily. She looked laid out like a corpse, for she wore a shroudlike nightgown and the light of her small kerosene lamp made her face appear bone white. So she slept with a light on, I thought. How interesting that she permitted herself to be wasteful. Despite her iron face and steel cold eyes, she lived with fears that made her afraid of the darkness.
    I moved across her open doorway quickly and hurried down the long corridor, for the next doorway was some distance away. That door, too, was open, and when I looked in, I found Charlotte asleep in her bed, her body folded into the fetal position, her fingers near her mouth. Her long pigtails had been unraveled and her hair lie about her head in a clump of gray that made her childlike face look strangely out of place.
    Except for their parents' room kept like some museum chamber, what was here that would make Miss Emily want to forbid me from entering the west wing? I wondered. I lifted the lamp and directed the light ahead of me and saw that there was another room on Charlotte's side, the doorway much smaller than the others. I listened to be sure Miss Emily hadn't heard my footsteps and then I walked on. The door to this room was closed. I tried the knob, but the door didn't budge. Was it just like the first door, simply stuck? I pushed harder and it opened as if someone had been standing behind it and had suddenly decided not to resist. I practically flew into the room, carried in by my own efforts.
    This time when I lifted the lamp to gaze about, I shuddered. It was a nursery. Charlotte hadn't been fantasizing about that. The walls were covered with her needlework in frames, all of it beautiful work, pictures of animals and the plantation, as well as simple scenes in nature—meadows, trees, flowers. There were dressers and closets in the room, but the centerpiece was a crib and it looked like there was a baby in it.
    My heart began to pound as I drew closer and closer. There was a baby. All this time . . . but I never heard it cry and why keep it a secret? Whose baby could it be?
    I stepped up to the crib and lifted the light slowly over it. Then I reached in and carefully drew the soft, pink blanket back from the baby's face and realized . . . it was a doll!
    "How dare you come in here?" I heard Miss Emily scream and I nearly dropped my lamp. I spun around quickly to see her standing in the nursery doorway. She was only in her nightgown, her hair loose around her shoulders, making her even more witchlike. She held her own lamp up so the light fell on me. "How dare you come into this wing when I forbid it!"
    "I wanted to see why Charlotte kept telling me about her baby. I wanted . . ."
    "You had no right," she roared, coming forward. "This is not your business," she hissed, only a few feet from me now. Her eyes were filled with hot anger, her neck strained, making her collarbone look like it would rip out 'of her skin. Death itself couldn't have appeared more horrid looking than she did with the light over her venomous face, her skin the same shade as her teeth and her eyes red. I could barely breathe, barely move. My throat closed up; my heart felt as if it had stopped and a cold chill rushed up from my feet and traveled with electric speed over my spine to the back of my head.
    "I . . . didn't want to bother you by asking, but . . ."
    "But you were curious," she said, nodding, "as curious as Eve about the Tree of Knowledge, even though she, like you, were forbidden to taste of it. Nothing's changed you all the time you have been here, not the work, not the Sundays in the chapel, not my lectures, nothing; you are