The Dark Glamour (666 Park Avenue 2)
fingers were still the same walnut-brown, and her hair was still in its longish, smooth bob. Her fingers fluttered over her cheekbones, nose, and lips, but they all seemed to still be firmly Ella’s. Her disguise hadn’t suddenly disappeared . . . Charles just didn’t see it.
‘Charles,’ she said levelly. ‘You remember me?’
He jumped heavily off of the couch, and she reached behind her to make sure the door was still open in case she needed an escape route. But he shuffled away in the opposite direction instead, and after a moment of counting all the things that could go wrong, Jane clenched her hands into fists and followed him. Charles was both unpredictable and not fond of bathing, so she kept her distance, but he seemed entirely focused on his self-appointed mission.
When they reached what had to be his bedroom – all the toys that money could buy, but shabby with madness and neglect – Charles became a little more agitated, rooting around in the top drawer of a sturdy white dresser and sending a few pairs of socks flying. With a triumphant-sounding gurgle, he pulled out the object of his search, and Jane blushed furiously: he was holding the lacy red thong he had accepted as a bribe for helping her escape from the attic the last time she had been up here. ‘Jane,’ he repeated fondly, stroking the scrap of lace like a cat.
‘I told you I would come back,’ she improvised, although she couldn’t remember if she had ever actually said that. Charles was watching her intently, and she had no idea what those empty-looking eyes might see.
‘Charles,’ she began again, sending a probing finger of her mind towards his, ‘I need your help again. You helped me so much last time, I know you can do it again.’
‘Friends help,’ he mumbled, ambling over to sit on his single bed. But he wouldn’t look at her, and Jane, filtering through the top layer of his mind, realized that Lynne had been furious with him after Jane’s escape. She clearly hadn’t suspected that Charles could have helped Jane intentionally, which had probably saved him some real pain, but she was still his mother, and her rage had been painful enough for him on its own.
‘It won’t be like last time,’ she assured him, hoping fervently it was the truth. No matter how badly Charles had frightened her in the past, she didn’t want him to suffer. ‘I just wanted to know about your older sister. Can you tell me about Annette?’
‘I have a brother,’ Charles told her uncertainly, sliding one hand into his pocket. Jane remembered that he liked to carry around the old Yale key chain Malcolm had given him, and sincerely hoped that this was what he was fumbling around with in there. ‘He had a sister.’
They never even met,
Jane reminded herself; no wonder he didn’t really understand that they were related. There would be no point in trying to find pictures of Annette in Charles’s head; Charles had only been conceived in the first place because Annette had died.
Or so they thought.
‘Did he tell you about her?’
Charles shook his head no and began rocking gently back and forth on his bed. Jane raced through his mind, pausing whenever a young version of Malcolm came into view, but she wasn’t even entirely sure what moment she was looking for. She knew how Annette had looked at the age when she had supposedly drowned, but if Charles had ever seen a photograph of her, he had buried the memory deeply.
Of course, there’s nothing remotely organized about his mind, anyway,
she thought testily. There were no connections between his thoughts that she could understand or follow, and his memories tumbled at her mind like plaster raining from the roof in an earthquake.
Suddenly, Charles jumped up off the bed, and Jane jumped back. But he just shuffled towards the room’s other door, gesturing vaguely for her to come with him. She knew that she should be getting back to the party; she had already probably spent too long on this wild-goose chase. But she couldn’t help herself. Now that she had come face-to-face with the sad, broken boy she had once thought of as a real-life boogeyman, she felt an overpowering need to see whatever he could show her. She stepped carefully around what looked like a pillow fort and followed him.
Two rooms later, they seemed to have left the part of the attic that was meant for Charles.
The room I was tied up in must be around here somewhere,
Jane realized with a chill. They had taken the
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