The Window Seat

Chapter 1: I. The Loose Board

The house on Alder Lane had been on the market for eleven months before Nora Vance bought it, and the agent said that was the only reason she could afford it. "It's got bones," he told her, jingling the keys on the porch. "But it's got opinions, too." Nora laughed. She had just turned thirty-four, had just left a job she had stopped loving, and had just ended an engagement that had been ending for a long time before anyone said so. She wanted a house with opinions. She wanted something that would argue with her. It was a narrow white farmhouse at the edge of a small town in Maine, with a sagging porch, a stubborn pear tree, and a bay window in the front room with a cushioned seat beneath it, the paint worn to bare wood where generations of elbows had rested. The agent said the last owner had been a woman in her eighties who had gone into a care home. A nephew had cleared out the furniture and sold the place in a hurry. That was all anyone seemed to know. Nora moved in on the first cold weekend of October with a borrowed truck, six boxes of books, and a mattress. By Sunday night she had mopped every floor, cried a little for no reason she could name, and eaten cereal sitting on the floor of the front room with her back against the window seat. It was the window seat that gave her away. When she shifted, her heel caught the edge of the seat's front panel and it gave a hollow knock, the sound of a drum with something inside it. She turned around, pressed her palm to the panel, and felt it move. Behind it was a shallow cavity, dry and dark and smelling of cedar and old paper. Inside sat a biscuit tin with a faded painting of a Scottish lake on the lid. The rust had welded the hinge shut, and she had to work a butter knife around the rim for five minutes before it popped open. Letters. Dozens of them, bundled in loops of blue ribbon gone gray with age, the envelopes soft as cloth. The top one was addressed in a looping, confident hand: Miss Winifred Hale, Alder Lane, Harrow Falls, Maine. Nora sat very still. The house ticked and settled around her, the way old houses do, as if clearing its throat. She should not read them. She knew that. They were private, and the people who wrote them were probably dead. She slid the first page out anyway.