Free The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

that everything was different now, that without her father’s laugh dismissing the rest of the world, there were appearances to be maintained.
    —
    On her way out of the building she ran into Cole, who held the door open. Those eyebrows: long white hairs among the darkshort ones. Someone had planted them in the wrong garden. “Smile!” he shouted, and because her every interaction with the man was a charade anyway, she did just that. He didn’t let her past, though. He poked a bony finger into her sternum, right above her blouse. “Do you know why I like it when you smile?”
    “I do not,” she said, still grinning, though her ears were hot now, and her neck.
    “You resemble someone I used to know. It’s uncanny. The ears and chin.”
    “Why, thank you,” Zee said, and leaned back so she could get around his finger without it grazing her breast.
    “A man, mind you!” he called after her. “It was a man!”

22
    D oug had been much more confident about the soccer chapters in the previous book—he’d played varsity in high school, three lifetimes ago—than about the theater business here. He was flummoxed by the parts of Frieda’s outline where the Populars and the Friends shared a dressing room. In the back of an old notebook, he’d begun listing things he needed to research:
Would have bra?
Purse? Backpack?
Stage makeup?
Undress in front of each other or hide in stalls?
Chairs backstage? Benches?
    They read like a pedophilic stalker’s notes, and he wanted them scratched out as soon as possible. He could maybe use the Internet for the theater parts, but he shuddered to think where an AltaVista search for “twelve-year-old, brassiere” would lead.
    He started down to look for Miriam, but she was on the landing of the stairs, cross-legged, sorting through an ice cube tray of colored beads. She said “Oh!” and some of the glassy blue ones splashed out and rolled down the steps. Doug bounded down, picked them up with the sweat of his fingertips, then shook them into Miriam’s outstretched palm.
    “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” she said, as Doug sat on the step above her. He regretted his choice of seat immediately. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could see too far down her green tank top. He leaned back and looked instead at the ceiling. Miriam said, “I wasn’t sleeping well, so I thought I’d spend time in the ghostliest part of the coach house. Just to dare something to happen. If it does, I’ll know. And if it doesn’t, I’ll sleep better.”
    “Why is this the ghostliest part?” He hoped she didn’t have a good answer.
    “Oh, you know. Doorways, staircases, attics, windows. You never see a ghost in the middle of the room.”
    “I’ve never seen a ghost at all.”
    “Well, yes. That.”
    “But Doug,” she said. “I found out. How she died.”
    “What, Violet?” He sat back up despite himself.
    “I went to the library and they got me set with microfiche. There was an obituary with no information at all—But did you know she was born in England? I love it! English ghosts are scarier, right?—so I was about to give up. But then there was this weird article a few days later that was like, ‘Husbands, pray for your wives!’ You know, very 1906. And then it talks about ‘to perish by starvation, in this land of plenty.’ And it was clearly about her. Starvation .”
    “Seriously. Wow. Wait, I thought she killed herself.”
    “Exactly. Something doesn’t add up.”
    “Was anorexia a thing back then?”
    Miriam tilted her head. “That’s the boring version. I think Augustus killed her. I think he starved her.”
    Doug let out a low, slow whistle and laughed. “So I need your help on something less serious,” he said. “Since you’re already in on my secret.” He decided not to ask the bra question, in light of current circumstances. “Do twelve-year-olds carry purses?”
    She put the bead tray down. “Oh, fun! Well, the Popularswould have chic purses. The