The Message Behind the Thirteenth Bell

Margaret’s fingertips hovered over the envelopes before settling on them. They shook as though the paper carried an electrical current.

She traced Eleanor’s narrow, slanting script with one thumb. Tears gathered immediately, bright in the lantern glow.

“Her handwriting,” Margaret murmured. The words seemed to break something open inside her.

I drew the last object from Eleanor’s hidden cache. It was the photograph from the wooden chest, beside the ruined wedding dress.

“There was this too,” I said.

I placed it on the crate near the lamp. “It was locked away in the basement. I thought it showed you with me.”

The photograph caught the weak yellow light. A young woman stood beside a small girl.

Someone had ruined the child’s face with frantic strokes of blue ink. The pen marks had gouged over and over at the paper.

Margaret did not touch it.

The bunker held its breath with us. Kerosene whispered inside the lantern, and Martha’s thin breaths rasped from the cot.

No smile softened Margaret’s face. No recognition warmed her eyes.

Instead, she raised her head and stared across the crate at me. The grief I had seen there a moment earlier vanished beneath raw disbelief.

“That woman isn’t me,” she said.

“It has to be,” I replied. I wiped at my nose with my sleeve. “It’s you and Chloe, before Eleanor took me away.”

Margaret got to her feet.

She edged backward from me, her attention no longer on the damaged picture but on my face. The hair along my neck lifted.

“Margaret?” My pulse began thudding again. “What is wrong?”

“Your eyes,” she breathed.

A terrible little smile pulled at my mouth. “Arthur noticed them downstairs. He told me they were exactly like his—pale hazel, with that dark rim. Apparently I got the worst thing about him.”

Margaret’s expression did not change. She retreated until the cinderblock wall stopped her.

Her hands trembled so hard that she flattened them against the cold blocks.

“Arthur has blue eyes,” Margaret said.

Everything went still.

I could not make sense of what she had said. My mind shoved the words away before they could settle.

“What?”

“Ice-blue,” she insisted, panic sharpening her voice. “Arthur’s eyes are pale blue. Hazel eyes do not run anywhere in his family.”

“But he knew me.” I stood, dizzy. “He looked directly at me in that basement. He said I had his eyes. He called me Chloe.”

Margaret shook her head wildly. Then she pointed at the photograph.

“Look at her,” she demanded. Her voice cracked apart. “Look at the woman beside that child.”

I lowered my gaze to the picture.

The woman looked barely older than twenty. Dark hair framed her face, and her eyes were pale hazel, each iris circled by a deep dark edge.

They were my eyes.

“That is not me,” Margaret said, drawing ragged breaths. “That is Arthur’s mistress in Boston. The woman he paid to vanish thirty years ago.”

The blood seemed to leave my body at once. The bunker tilted around me.

“My Chloe’s eyes were brown,” Margaret sobbed, covering her mouth with dirty fingers. “Warm brown, like mine. She never had hazel eyes.”

My left hand closed tighter around the hospital bracelet. Baby Girl. Sarah Eleanor Vance.

“If Chloe had brown eyes,” I whispered, nausea climbing into my throat, “why would Eleanor destroy the child’s face in this photograph?”

“So no one could see the eyes,” Martha said.

I turned toward her. Martha had pushed herself upright on the cot, one hand near her injured lip.

Pity and horror filled her face. Tears ran through the lines in her cheeks.

“What do you mean, Martha?” I asked. My voice fractured.

“I told you outside,” she said softly. “Eleanor never abandoned her own baby. She took you back from the people who had taken you.”

“But not from Arthur,” I said. The realization tasted burned and bitter.

“No,” Martha cried. “Not from Arthur. Eleanor was the woman in that photograph. Eleanor was his mistress.”

The truth struck with crushing force.

Eleanor had not stolen Margaret’s daughter and raised her as her own. She had been Arthur’s mistress.

I was Arthur’s discarded illegitimate child. I was Eleanor’s daughter. I was Sarah Vance, not Chloe.

“Then where is Chloe?” Margaret screamed.

She lunged across the crate and seized the front of my sweater. “If you are Eleanor’s child, where is my daughter? Where is the baby Eleanor took that night?”

Air would not enter my lungs. I stared at the seventeen unopened letters, then at the girl whose face had been scratched from the photograph.

Then my mother’s message came back to me, written on the photo’s reverse side: Trust the clock.

I remembered the note from the vent as well—the warning to tell Arthur the clock gears were missing, and the threat to expose what lay beneath the library floor. The missing gears had to lead to whatever Eleanor had hidden there.