Read The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel for Free Online Page B

can remember.
    Them windows been long painted shut, and Seddie minds all the door locks last thing at night, careful as a mama gator on a nest. Sleeps with the ring of keys tied on her neck. If Juneau Jane’s found a way in, somebody from the house helped her. Question is, who and when and for why? And how’d they get away with it?
    When I peek round the opening, she’s sneaking in the window, so it must’ve took her a while to pry it up. One little slipper touches down on the wood folding chair Old Mister likes to take out to the gardens to sit and read to the plants and the statues.
    I back myself into the shadows and watch-wait to see what this girl’s about. Climbing off the chair, she stops, looks over to my hiding spot, but I don’t move. I tell myself I’m a piece of the house. You ever been a slave at Goswood, you learn how to turn yourself into wood and wallpaper.
    Easy to see this girl knows nothing of that. She moves through the room like the place is hers, barely reasonable quiet while helping herself to her daddy’s big desk. Latches click as she opens parts of that desk I didn’t even know there was. Must be her papa showed her how, or told her.
    She ain’t happy with what she finds, and gives that desk a cussing in French before moving on to the tall hallway doors like she plans to push them closed. The hinges complain, low and soft. She stops. Listens. Looks into the hall.
    I back my way tighter to the wall and closer to the outside door. If Seddie comes from her bed, I’ll hide behind the curtain, then climb out that window during the ruckus and get myself away from here.
    The girl shuts the hall doors, all right, and I think to myself, Oh Lord! Ain’t no way Seddie didn’t hear that.
    Every hair on my body stands up, but no one comes, and little Juneau Jane moves on with her business. This girl is either smart or the biggest fool I ever came upon, because next she takes her papa’s little pocket lantern from the desk, opens the tin case, strikes up a Lucifer, and lights the candle.
    I can see her face clear then, lit up in that circle of yellow light. She ain’t a child anymore, but she ain’t a woman, either, someplace in-between. A strange creature with long, dark curls that circle her like angel hair and hang far down her back. That hair moves with life of its own. She’s still got that light skin, straight brows like Old Mister’s, and wide eyes that slant up at the corners, same’s my mama’s, same’s mine. But this girl’s are silvery bright. Unnatural. Witchy.
    She sets the lantern ’neath the desk, just enough to give some light, and she commences to fetching out ledger books from the drawer, turning pages by the light, her thin, pointed finger tracing a line here and there. She can read, reckon. Them sons and daughters born in plaçage live high, boys sent to France to get educated, and the girls to convent schools.
    She checks over every ledger book and slip of paper she can find, shakes her head, hisses through her teeth, not happy one bit. She lifts up boxes of powdered ink, pens, pencils, tobacco, pipes, holds them to the light and looks underneath.
    Be a sure miracle if this girl don’t get caught. Child’s getting noisier and braver by the minute.
    Or else just more desperate.
    Holding up the candle lamp, she goes to the shelves that rise floor to ceiling against the walls, higher than three men could reach if they stood on shoulders. For a minute, she’s got the flame so close, I think it’s in her mind to burn the books and the Grand House to the ground.
    There’s hired women and girls asleep at the attic. I can’t let Juneau Jane set that flame, if she tries to. I shift from behind the curtain, creep three steps ’cross the room, almost to the moonlight squares on the cherry wood floors.
    But she don’t do it. She’s trying to make out what the books are. Lifts onto her toes and holds the lantern high as she can. The candle tin tips, wax funneling over onto