The Music Box: Chapter Sixty-Six

Helping Emily remove her coat, Isabelle saw how soaked her daughter had become from their dash home through the rain.

“You can take those sweets up to your room for later Emily – I want you in some new clothes as quickly as you can, then back down here before the fire so you can dry out.”

Clutching her bag of lollies from Mr Pollock’s seemingly endless selection, Emily headed silently up the stairs towards her room. Isabelle took off her own coat and decided the rest of her clothes had been adequately protected from the rain, so headed into the kitchen to begin her preparations for the evening meal.

While the outing had fallen short of what she had hoped, Emily did at least seem a little happier than she had been. She had seemed less excited to have been in Mr Pollock’s store than Isabelle had expected, but had seemed quite grateful to have been allowed to choose a bigger bag of sweets than usual.

Stoking the still glowing embers of the earlier fire, Isabelle was again whisked back to that experience under the tree – the strange little man, the laughing wolf, the fear that ran through her veins like the freezing river that had tumbled her along. It had all felt so real, so much more vivid a part of her memory than any dream ever could.

She knew it must have something to do with Emily, the way she had been behaving. ‘She’s not been herself at all’, murmured Isabelle, and she was so shocked at what a voice in the back of her mind then said that she fell into the nearest seat, catching her breath in her chest.

“It’s not Emily,” the voice had offered.

That was it. No explanation, no introduction, gone as soon as it had come. But it was crystal clear and so simply put that Isabelle was struck to the very heart of her knowing.

“It’s not Emily.” But how could that be? Of course it was Emily. Yet, somehow, her heart of hearts knew it was not. Her senses were deceiving her, everything she knew had somehow been turned on its head, yet there was such a strong sense of, what was it, relief? As though this impossible thought, once uttered, suddenly made sense of everything – explained Emily’s strange behaviour, her own sense of unease, the strange encounter and its cryptic message.

Putting aside the grotesque impossibility of such a revelation, Isabelle tried to think how it could be so, and what it could mean. She concentrated on when her feelings of uneasiness had begun. Ever since Emily had been late home from her visit to her young friend’s, Tabitha Tibbits, Isabelle had been uneasy. It’s true that being quite so late was out of character for Emily, but it must have been something more than that. Since then, Isabelle realised, she had been entirely out of sorts. She hadn’t slept properly, her nerves were more delicate than she was used to, and Emily had simply not seemed herself.

It’s not Emily. It was so simple, so straightforward, so – she realised – obvious. It still didn’t make sense, but that wasn’t enough to bring any further doubt. Now that she had made up her mind, Isabelle felt an incredible weight drop away. This burden had been oppressing her for days and now sloughed off, a snake relieved to have shed its too small skin.

Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Isabelle considered the situation. Upstairs, in one room, was her husband, Percy Button, no doubt lost in his writing and oblivious to the entire situation. In another room, somebody who to all intents and purposes appeared to be her daughter, her beloved Emily, but was not.

And here, in the kitchen, the fire before her crackling in its newly awaken state, the orange shadows flickering against her closed eyelids, Isabelle sat, helpless in the face of her revelation.

“Are you okay?”

Isabelle jumped at the sound of Emily’s voice, her eyes flying open to find her barely three feet away.

“I, I was just a little tired from our outing,” Isabelle stammered. “I was just enjoying some of the warmth in here – it was so cold out there.”

Isabelle put on a smile, not wanting to show any signs of concern she would have to explain any further. Her mind was ticking over too quickly, but never settling on anything that pointed to what her next step should be.

“Why don’t you grab a book and spend some time in here Emily, keep your mother company while I do some chores?”

“Sounds lovely, I’ll just go grab something.”

Emily was soon back and Isabelle watched as she took a seat, opening the leather-bound book on her knees. The sound of the water with which she had filled a pot coming to a boil brought her attention back to her duties. She went about her ordinary business of the day, distracted by the Emily issue but also keen to avoid the impression that anything was amiss.

After a few minutes this way Isabelle’s ears – sharpened by the tenseness of her mind, heard a scraping sound. Her eyes darted over to Emily, but she hadn’t appeared to hear anything. The sound had come from the front room - ordinarily she would have gone in to check, to see if it was Percy wanting something or simply her imagination, but this time something was holding her back.

There it was again – the sound of wood scraping against wood. This time Emily looked up.

“It must be your father after a book,” Isabelle said. “We’ll leave him to it, when he’s this hard at work there’s no point distracting him, he’ll hardly take in anything we might even say!”

Emily smiled and returned to her book. Isabelle’s heart began to thump as she heard the creak she knew came from the floor of the front room when anybody walked near the window. Worried Emily might take any more interest, she made sure she made plenty of noise of her own, jumbling around cutlery and rattling a stack of plates.

As the stairs creaked, then stopped, creaked, then stopped, Isabelle’s pulse thumped in her ears. She felt a hot flush hit her neck and face and the sickening burst of adrenaline flood her tensed body.

If she had misjudged, she had made a terrible mistake.