The Only One Left by Riley Sager

TWENTY-FOUR

For the second day in a row, I skip Lenora’s exercises and take her straight to the typewriter. Even though I know it’s bordering on dereliction of duty, I’m too impatient.

On a normal night—not that any night at Hope’s End can be described as normal—I would have shaken Lenora awake after leaving Carter’s cottage, carried the typewriter to the bed, and demanded the truth about the baby. But the night before was particularly abnormal.

After the partial collapse of the cliff outside the cottage, Carter wisely decided to move into the main house until the damage could be assessed. Not that it’s any safer in here. While helping Carter carry some of his belongings to an empty bedroom on the third floor, I spotted a new crack at the service stairs and a broken tile on the kitchen floor. Bad omens all.

Jessie sidled up to me while I examined the stairwell walls and whispered, “What were you and Carter up to?”

“Just talking,” I said.

She winked. “Sure. Right. Totally.”

“We were.”

“Did you find out anything else about Mary?”

I stopped on the landing and studied her. Dressed in a pink sleepshirt and missing her makeup and jewelry, she looked like a complete stranger. Which she technically was.

“No,” I said before continuing on.

I wanted to trust Jessie. I really did. Of everyone at Hope’s End, she seemed the least likely to have a reason for wanting Mary dead and the most likely to be an ally to me. But since I’d already ruled out Carter as a suspect, I couldn’t risk doing it for anyone else. Even Jessie. While I’m not usually a suspicious person, in this case I needed to be. I doubted Mary was suspicious, either, and look at what happened to her.

Carter must have been thinking the same thing when he came to my door while on his way to his temporary room on the third floor. “Are you going to be okay?” he said in a half whisper.

“Yeah,” I replied, even though I knew what he was really asking. Barring the possible but unlikely scenario that someone from town had snuck through the open gate and killed Mary, someone under this roof was a murderer. “I’ll be fine.”

I wasn’t fine.

I ended up spending most of the night wide awake, thinking about Lenora and Carter and the idea that Mary was dead because she knew too much about them both. That led to wondering if I now knew too much. The answer I came up with—a resounding yes—prompted more questions. How much danger was I in? Should I just up and leave in the middle of night like everyone thought Mary had?

With ideas like that clanging through my skull, the fact I managed to fall asleep at all is a minor miracle. When I woke to sunrise piercing my eyes and the mattress slid lower on the bed frame, I realized that I hadn’t heard any mysterious noises coming from Lenora’s room. Either I slept right through them or whoever—whatever?—is causing them decided to take the night off.

Now I stifle a yawn while getting Lenora into typing position. When she’s ready, I kneel beside her and say, “Lenora, I think we should talk about the baby.”

She pretends not to be surprised I know.

But she is.

Her face, as expressive as a silent film star’s, can’t hide such shock. This is especially true of her eyes, which widen at the same time they go slightly dim. An unspoken answer to the biggest question I had: Could Carter have been wrong about Lenora’s pregnancy? Yes, that photograph of her in 1929 is very persuasive, but it doesn’t confirm anything.

“I know you were pregnant,” I say. “And Mary knew, too, didn’t she?”

Lenora’s left hand rises and falls twice against the typewriter. That’s a yes.

“What happened to the baby?”

Lenora lets out a long, sad sigh. Then she types a single word—gone—before letting her hand slide off the typewriter.

“Gone?”

It’s strange how a word so short can contain so many possibilities. Lenora could have had a miscarriage. Or the baby was stillborn. Or left this world shortly after entering it. Or was bundled up and left on the front steps of a church on Christmas morning. That single word—gone—could also mean something happier. The child was born, grew up, left Hope’s End, and now has a family of their own. Although, going by Lenora’s reaction, I don’t think that’s what happened.

“Did the baby die?” I say.

Lenora makes no indication she wants to type more. Her hands sit in her lap, the useful left one atop the useless right, and she stares at them as if she didn’t hear me.

“Who was the father?” I say, pressing. “Was it Ricky?”

Still nothing from Lenora. No acknowledging the question. No acknowledging me. Without saying a word, she’s made her message clear—she doesn’t want to talk about it.

I can’t blame her. She was pregnant. The baby’s now gone. She probably thinks there’s nothing else to be said.

Only there is.

And Lenora told it to at least one other person—Mary.

Considering what happened to her, I should be grateful Lenora now refuses to tell me. Maybe that’s another reason for her silence. She doesn’t want to put me in more danger than I might already be.

Once again, I think about leaving. It would take only minutes to pack my suitcase and box, grab my medical bag, and walk away from Hope’s End without looking back. But I can’t bring myself to do it. Even though I haven’t been told everything, what I do know is enough to keep me here. I need to learn the rest.

The Hope family murders. Lenora’s pregnancy. Mary’s death. They’re all tied together in a complex knot of secrets, lies, and misdeeds both past and present. I’m certain that if I can unravel it, the truth will be revealed. About Carter and Mary, yes, but most of all about Lenora. She’s the person I need to understand the most.

So I stay, letting the morning pass slowly and silently. With any other patient, I would have busied myself with light housework or cooking lunch or even just watching TV with them. None of those options are available to me at Hope’s End. So I pass the time reading a Danielle Steel novel on the divan while Lenora sits in her wheelchair and stares out the window.

It reminds me of my mother’s final days, when she was too fragile and pain-wracked to be moved to the couch in the living room. Stuck in a room without a television and its comforting background noise, the silence became so thick it was almost unbearable.

Today isn’t quite that bad, but it’s enough to make me appreciate the few moments of sound and activity. Fetching lunch. Feeding Lenora. Even assisting her in the bathroom because it’s something to do besides sitting here and thinking. While I tackle the tasks with endless chatter, Lenora does nothing in response.

No taps.

Certainly no typing.

She’s become the person I thought she was when I first arrived. Silent, still, almost a nonentity. It makes me wonder if this is what she was like with all the nurses before Mary breezed in with a typewriter. If so, does Lenora regret indulging her? Does she feel the same about me and has decided this will be the way things are now?

And it is her decision. An afternoon at the typewriter could end all this. Yet we spend this long, dreary day in more insufferable silence. I finish my book. Lenora stares out the window. The day fades into dusk, which darkens into night.

Eventually Archie arrives, carrying dinner on a tray. Salmon and sweet potatoes that are roasted for me, mashed for Lenora. On the side are piping-hot rolls for me and a chocolate milkshake for Lenora.

“I thought Miss Hope could use a pick-me-up,” Archie explains. “She loved them when she was a girl.”

The gesture is so thoughtful it takes me a second to remember that he could have killed Mary. It doesn’t matter that Archie looks about as threatening as a teddy bear. He was here when Lenora’s family was murdered in 1929, and he was here when Mary plummeted off the cliff.

Yet that also makes him a perfect source of information about both of those nights. The challenge is figuring out if Archie’s a friend or a foe, a suspect or a potentially trusted resource. For now, I decide it’s best to treat him as all of the above.

“You didn’t need to go to all the trouble,” I say, taking the food from his hands. Because I haven’t yet attached Lenora’s meal tray to her wheelchair, I set it on the sideboard next to her snow globe and the cassette Jessie gave me yesterday.

“It’s no trouble,” Archie says. “Besides, I wanted to see how Miss Hope is doing.”

I glance at Lenora, who acts like neither of us is in the room with her. “Not too well.”

“I think that goes for all of us,” Archie says. “Poor Mary. Had I known she was hurting so much, I would have tried to help her somehow. And then the cliff giving way like that. These are not happy times at Hope’s End.”

I wonder if there’s ever been a time here that was happy. From what Lenora has written, I’ve gathered the place was doomed from the start.

“The other day, you told me that you and Lenora used to be close.”

“I did,” Archie says. “And we were.”

“How close?”

“Best friends, I guess. Although that was more from proximity than anything else. We were roughly the same age in a place where that wasn’t common.”

“What about Virginia? Were the two of you also close?”

“No. Can’t say we were.”

His answer, refreshing in its swift honesty, makes me decide to continue the conversation. It might be risky—and I might eventually come to regret it—but if Archie’s currently in a talkative mood, I’m not going to stop him.

And Lenora, I know, is listening, even though she pretends she isn’t. I retrieve the Walkman, pop in the latest book-on-cassette from Jessie, and put the headphones over Lenora’s ears. I lodge the Walkman itself between her motionless right hand and the side of the wheelchair so it won’t slide off.

“A new book from Jessie,” I explain to Lenora. “Would you like to listen to it while I talk to Archie? After that we’ll have dinner.”

Knowing she’s not going to respond, I press play and turn back to Archie, who says, “What else do we need to talk about?”

I hesitate, trying to think of the best way to phrase my question. After concluding that there’s no good way to pose it, I blurt out, “Did Lenora have a baby?”

“A baby?” Archie stares at me, perplexed, like I’ve just asked if she had two heads or a pet rhinoceros. “Where’d you get that idea?”

“Lenora made a passing reference,” I say, nodding toward the typewriter on the desk. I figure it’s fine to give Archie an indication that Lenora can use it. He might already know.

“What have the two of you been doing on that thing?”

“Just getting to know each other better,” I say, presenting the truth in its simplest form. “I like to learn about the people I’m caring for.”

Archie eyes me with skepticism. “And she told you she had a baby?”

“She hinted at it.”

“You must have misunderstood her.”

“So Lenora was never pregnant?” I say.

“Never.”

Apparently done talking, Archie turns to leave. I pose one last question to his retreating form, hoping to get if not an honest answer, then at least an unconscious reaction.

“When you were close, did she ever mention the name Ricardo Mayhew?”

Archie’s formidable frame comes to a stop in the doorway. “No,” he says.

“He used to work here.”

“I know,” Archie says. “But Miss Hope never mentioned him. There’s your answer.”

He starts moving again, walking stiffly into the hall. Only then does he face me again, his hard stare a silent warning.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t spend too much time typing with Miss Hope,” he says. “The past is in the past. It does no one any good to start digging it up.”

“The baby just kicked.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“It did, I swear,” Archie said, his hand still pressed to my swollen belly.

I pushed it away. “I think I’d know.”

It was another Tuesday night with the rest of the household staff gone and my family scattered. Archie often spent those nights off in my room, where we’d laugh and talk and dream about the future. It was a ritual we had performed almost since he first started working at Hope’s End.

By that September, though, the ritual had become a rarity. In the past few months, Archie and I had spent little time together. He’d grown distant, and I worried it was all my doing rather than his. I’d neglected him terribly since meeting Ricky, so my decision to tell him of my pregnancy was an attempt to involve him once again in my life.

He was happy for me, but also concerned. As I told him my plans for the future, he pretended to be pleased, but worry lines kept rippling over his brow.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said. “With someone like him?”

“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

Archie leaned against me on the divan, our shoulders touching. “You know exactly why.”

“It’s a tricky situation,” I said. “But we have a plan.”

We didn’t yet, but I couldn’t tell that to Archie. I knew it would only make him more concerned. He had always seen himself as my protector. Even when we were younger and he was just a runaway given a job in the kitchen out of pity. I think that’s what drew us to each other. We were two lonely souls in need of someone to care for.

“I wish you had told me you were sweet on him,” Archie said.

“Why?”

“Because I would have tried to stop you.”

“Stop pretending like I’m the only one in a tricky situation,” I said. “I know what you’ve been up to.”

“It’s not the same,” Archie said, and indeed it wasn’t. The only situation more scandalous than mine was Archie’s.

“I knew what I was getting myself into when I met him,” I said, when in truth I had no idea how deeply I’d fall in love with Ricky and how quickly it would happen.

“That’s one thing. Having a baby is another.” Archie reached for the camera he’d just purchased. An extravagance I knew he couldn’t easily afford. Buying it required months of saving. “I know of someone who can help, if you decide you don’t want to have it. A doctor.”

“Who told you this?”

“One of the maids. She went to him when she got pregnant. She couldn’t keep it because the father--”

Archie stopped himself, too kind to speak aloud the truth we both knew.

“Was my father,” I said. “I know.”

I’d heard Berniece talking about it in the kitchen one morning when she thought none of the High and Mighty Hopes was around. That’s what she called us. The High and Mighty Hopes, always spoken with a derisive snort. She mentioned that one of the new maids had been ruined by my father, forced to get rid of the baby and then kicked out of Hope’s End.

That was the previous year, and based on the compromising position I’d caught him in on my birthday, my father hadn’t learned his lesson. Although no one said as much, I knew it was one of the reasons my mother kept to her own bed. She and my father barely spoke, let alone saw each other.

It made me sad to see them so miserable with each other. My sister, however, merely pretended nothing was wrong. I knew it was pretend because it was impossible to miss the tension strung like trip wire throughout the entire mansion.

“I won’t end up like my parents,” I said. “I’ll make sure of it. I love him, Arch. I really do.”

“Well, I wish you didn’t.”

I wasn’t hurt by Archie’s words. I knew he didn’t say them to be cruel. It was simply his way. He had a gentle soul and told things the way he saw them, unlike most everyone else at Hope’s End.

“If things were different, you know I’d have chosen you,” I said.

“I know,” he replied. “But they are different. With me and with him. People like us and people like you and your sister--we’re not meant to mingle. Society won’t allow it. The longer you let this thing go on, the worse it’ll be when it inevitably ends.”

I sat up, adamant. “It won’t end.”

Archie raised his hands in surrender. “I believe you. But whatever happens, good or bad, know that I’ll be with you the entire time.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He raised the camera, prompting a sigh from me. The last thing I wanted at that moment was to have my picture taken. Even though Ricky told me I was beautiful every time he saw me, I didn’t feel beautiful. Into the sixth month of my pregnancy, I felt bloated and restless. I couldn’t even muster a proper pose for Archie, although he didn’t seem to mind.

“Perfect,” he said as I cradled my swollen stomach.

The shutter clicked, and Archie joined me on the divan. I leaned my head against his shoulder, as I had done a hundred times in the past few years. He was so big, so solid. I knew he would always be there for me, no matter what.

“Just to make it clear,” Archie added out of the blue. “If he--or anyone--ever hurts you or makes you unhappy, I won’t hesitate to kill them.”