Free Charlotte’s Story by Laura Benedict

photograph. This was how Olivia might have looked as a pensive teenage girl, unaware that she would be the sole mistress of Bliss House for nearly her entire adult life. What would her thoughts have been?
    What had mine been, coming to Bliss House? I hadn’t imagined that Olivia would die before she was even sixty years old and that I would be in her morning room without her.
    I avoided the neat desk with its bulging letter holder. She’d suddenly taken to her bed in the days just before she died, refusing to let anyone be with her except Terrance and Marlene. Press had told me not to worry, that she very occasionally had spells when she retired completely to her room, but that it hadn’t happened in a long time. Jack confided that he thought she’d become too dependent on the chloral hydrate drops her elderly internist had prescribed for her occasional sleeplessness and might have begun to mix them with alcohol. But no one even whispered the word “suicide.” It had been a terrible accident, Jack and the internist assured us. To spare the family any public embarrassment, her death had been recorded as simple cardiac arrest. It was, the internist said, what had certainly killed her in the end.
    That it had been an accident was what I chose to believe. Olivia wasn’t a moody, unpredictable sort of person. And I could neverhave faced the knowledge that both my children’s grandmothers had been selfish enough to commit suicide.
    Beneath the watchful eyes of all those children, I opened the door to the room’s single enormous closet. I felt around for a light switch, but there was only a dangling beaded chain attached to an exposed bulb.
    The naked light was harsh, the closet as big as one of the bedrooms in the servants’ area at the back of the house. All three walls were lined with crowded but neatly ordered shelves. Close by was a row of china-faced dolls in old-fashioned dresses, and a toy monkey with movable limbs and wide, mischievous eyes. Curious, I touched its fur, but drew my hand back quickly. The fur was real. I shuddered. The dolls were less alarming; but, wary now, I did not touch their hair. Other shelves contained dishes and baskets, and stacks of framed embroidered samplers with traditional aphorisms and bible quotes. The stitching was careful but not practiced. I wondered if Olivia had done them herself as a girl. I knew no needle arts. Rachel’s mother had taught her to smock, and she was always at work on some project.
    I had to stand on tiptoe to get a better look at what was on the top shelf, and then wished I hadn’t.
    Even with the glare from the bulb, I could see what the dusty, glass-domed display cases arranged there held: lifelike arrangements of taxidermy birds—a juvenile owl, finches, bluebirds, a woodpecker, butterflies and moths, and the delicate skeleton of what had probably been a tiny monkey (it appeared to be eating a crab).
    I was both fascinated and disgusted. But there was nothing here that needed to be immediately gotten rid of. Had the taxidermy animals belonged to Olivia? Perhaps they had been here even before she arrived.
    Below the dolls on a lower shelf was a row of wooden boxes labeled with ranges of letters: A–F, G–L, M–R, S–V, W–Z. Sliding out the S–V from its place, I found that it contained rows of heavyglass slides. I had used slide projectors in college, but these slides were much larger and thicker. Holding one to the light, I saw an 18th-century sailing ship that tilted in the water as though it were sinking. There were several more of ships—some in color, some in black and white. But after the ships, I pulled out several more of snakes—a cobra in a pen, a black snake like an ebony “S” separating a plot of vibrant, painted green grass. I might have stayed there all day, holding the curious slides up to the light, examining one after the other. They were obviously quite old and were like tiny windows into the past. I had no projector on which