# The Photograph on the Velvet Bench

On the 14th of September 1996, Peg Ostrander drove eleven miles north of Renfield, Ohio, to the estate sale of a woman named Iris Bondorf. Mrs. Bondorf had been ninety-one years old, had lived alone at the end of a gravel lane in a white frame house with green shutters, and for nearly forty years before that she had kept house for another old woman in Renfield, a widow named Clara Witcom. Remember that name.

The sale was poorly attended. It had rained in the night, and the lawn was soft. The auctioneer moved quickly through a dining set, a treadle sewing machine, two iron bedsteads, a box of canning jars. Near noon, a young man carried out a cardboard carton that had once held a case of laundry soap.

Inside it was a jumble of small things from a dresser drawer—spools of thread, a tin of buttons, a pair of reading spectacles with one arm missing, and a stack of perhaps twenty old photographs held together with a perished rubber band that broke the moment Peg touched it. She bid one dollar. Nobody bid against her. Peg had worked thirty-one years in the county recorder’s office in Renfield, a narrow river town on a bend of the Salow River, and in those years she had handled more deeds, plats, marriage licenses, and death certificates than anyone else alive in that part of the state.

She had retired in the spring of 1994. Her husband had died two winters before. She had no children. A life spent around old paper does not stop simply because the paycheck stops, so Peg went to estate auctions, the kind held on a Saturday morning on the lawn of a house where an old person had died and the relatives lived too far away to want the furniture.

She went for the boxes nobody else bid on. She would pay a dollar or two, carry the box home to her kitchen table, and spend a week putting names back on faces where she could. She called it returning things to the record. Her friends called it a hobby.

Peg would have told you it was closer to a duty. She did not look closely at the photographs that afternoon. She put the carton on the backseat of her car, drove home, set it on the kitchen table, and made herself supper. It was only afterward, with the dishes washed and the radio playing low, that she spread the photographs out across the oilcloth and began to sort them.

Most were what you would expect—a few tintypes, dark and scratched; several postcards from the 1910s showing a church picnic, a school group, a man standing beside a new automobile with his thumbs hooked in his vest. And among them, a little worn at one corner, a cabinet card. If you have never held a cabinet card, picture a stiff piece of cardboard about the size of a modern paperback book, perhaps four and a quarter inches wide and six and a half inches tall, with a photographic print mounted on its face. These were the ordinary family portraits of the 1870s, ’80s, and ’90s.

The cardboard was often printed along the bottom with the studio’s name in gold or black lettering, and on the back there would be an advertisement, sometimes very ornate, with the photographer’s name and address and a line promising that copies could be made from the negative at any future time. This one was printed along the bottom in faded gold: *Ambrose, Front Street, Renfield, Ohio. *

Peg knew the name. Josiah Ambrose had been the town’s portrait photographer for almost thirty years.

She had seen hundreds of Ambrose cards. She very nearly put this one in the pile with the others and moved on. What stopped her was that there were three of them. Three small girls, perhaps five or six years old, seated side by side on a long, low bench upholstered in some dark material that, even in the brown tones of the old print, gave the impression of velvet.

Behind them hung a painted backdrop—a vague garden scene with a balustrade and the soft suggestion of trees. At the girls’ feet, a corner of patterned carpet. The girls wore matching dresses, pale, with high collars and a narrow band of lace, long sleeves gathered at the wrist. Each had her hair parted in the center and drawn back with a broad ribbon tied at the crown in a large flat bow.

Each wore dark stockings and dark buttoned boots. Their hands were folded in their laps, the right hand over the left in the same small careful way, as if somebody had arranged each pair of hands in turn and told them not to move. And their faces were the same face. Peg had seen twins in old photographs many times.

Twins are always a little different, even identical twins. One sits taller, one has a fuller lip, one cannot stop smiling while the other looks frightened. But these three were alike in a way that made her lean closer to the lamp. The same round brow, the same small straight nose, the same slight heaviness to the lower lip, as if each was about to ask a question and had been told to wait.

The same pale eyes under the same faint brows. If you had cut the print into thirds and shuffled them, you could not have put them back in order. She turned the card over. The back was printed with the usual advertisement—a border of curling leaves, the words *Ambrose, Portraitist*, and beneath them *Front Street, over Pel and Sons’ Hardware, Renfield, O.

* Then the promise: *Duplicates from this negative may be had at any time. *

And there was writing. Two lines, in ink, in two different hands. The first was in a neat, rounded, careful hand, the hand of a woman who had been taught penmanship at a country school and was proud of it.

It read: *Our three, October the 9th, 1898. *

The second line was below it, smaller, in a slanting, cramped script with a heavy downstroke, the hand of somebody who wrote a great deal and quickly. It was written in a darker ink, and it had been pressed so hard into the card that Peg could feel the letters with the tip of her finger from the front of the print. *Do not let them sit together again.

*

Peg sat for a long time at the kitchen table with that card in her hand. She told this part of the story many times in later years, and she always repeated the same thing about that first evening. She insisted she was not frightened. Not yet.

What she felt was the ordinary itch of a records clerk who has found a document that does not quite add up. Who were these girls? Why did the second hand write that line? And why, of all the ways to describe three daughters, had their mother chosen the words *our three,* as if it were important to say how many there were.

She did the sensible thing first. She made a list. The studio was Ambrose. The date was written plainly.

The girls looked to be about six, which meant they had been born somewhere around 1892. Triplets were rare in any year. In a county as small as Harrow in the 1890s, a set of triplets would have been talked about in every kitchen. It would have been in the newspaper, in the church register, in the doctor’s ledger or the midwife’s.

Somebody somewhere would have written it down. And Peg Ostrander had spent thirty-one years in the room where Harrow County kept the things it wrote down. That night she did not sleep well. She woke several times, and each time the first thing she saw in the gray light from the window was the small pale rectangle of the card on the dresser, the three small shapes on it.

Toward four in the morning, she got up, crossed the room, and turned the card to face the wall. She told nobody about that for almost two years. When she finally did, she admitted she had turned it because the girls’ eyes seemed to follow her when she moved in the bed. Then she corrected herself, as a careful person does.

No, that was not quite right. Two pairs of eyes seemed to follow her. That was ordinary—every portrait does that. The eyes in a photograph look at the lens, and so they look at whoever stands in front of it, wherever that person stands.

It was the third pair that troubled her, because the third pair did not seem to follow her at all. The third pair seemed to have already been looking at the place where she was going to move, a moment before she moved there. She laughed at herself in the morning. She was sixty-four years old, and she was not a woman who believed a cabinet card could look ahead of her across a bedroom.

She turned the card face out again, put it in an envelope, and took it with her when she drove into Renfield that morning to begin. To understand what Peg found next, it helps to understand the town she drove into that morning and the town it had been a century before. Renfield sits where the Salow River makes a slow loop to the east before straightening out again toward the Ohio. In 1898, it was a town of a little under three thousand people.

It had two churches of brick and one of frame, a grain mill on the river, a tannery downstream where the smell would not trouble anyone who mattered, a cooperage that made barrels for the mill and the distillery, a bank, a hotel, an opera house that showed mostly traveling lecturers and temperance plays, and a single paved street, Front Street, that ran along the high bank above the water. Everything else was dirt in summer, mud in the spring, and frozen ruts in the winter. Front Street was where the town kept its pride. The bank was there, and the hotel, and the better shops.

And on the second floor of a long brick building above a hardware store owned by a family named Pel was the portrait studio of Josiah Ambrose. You reached it by a flight of outside stairs at the side of the building. At the top was a door with a frosted glass panel, and on the glass in gold leaf the word *Ambrose*, and a painted hand pointing upward, though there was nowhere further up to go. People in Renfield used to joke that the hand pointed toward heaven, because sooner or later everybody climbed those stairs, and many of them came back down in a picture frame on somebody’s mantel.

Inside there was a small reception room with a horsehair settee and a glass case of sample cards, and beyond it, through a curtain doorway, the operating room. That was the word photographers used then for the room where the camera stood. The operating room was long and high, and its most important feature was the roof. The north side had been cut away and replaced with a great slanting window of ground glass and clear glass panes, perhaps twelve feet across, so that the cool, steady light of the northern sky fell down into the room all day without the harsh shadows of direct sun.

Under the skylight stood the camera—a large wooden box on a heavy stand with iron casters, its bellows of dark leather, its brass lens as wide as a man’s palm. Behind it hung the dark cloth. In front of it, at the far end of the room, were the backdrops, painted canvases on rollers—a garden, a library, a seaside, a plain gray. There were other things in that room that we no longer think about when we look at old portraits.

There was a posing chair with an adjustable back, small tables and plaster columns to lean an elbow on, and the headrests. By the 1890s, with the newer dry plates, an exposure in a good studio might be a second or two on a bright day. But on a dull October afternoon, with the sky clouded over, it could still be eight or ten or twelve seconds—long enough for a child to fidget, long enough for a blur where a face should be. So photographers used stands of iron with a little padded clamp at the top that came up behind the sitter’s head and held it gently in place.

Children hated them. Most studios had a set in several sizes, and most photographers of that time kept a daybook—a working ledger in which every sitting was entered on the day it was made: the name of the client, the address, the number in the party, the number of plates exposed, sometimes the time of day and the weather, the order placed, the price, whether it was paid. Some photographers wrote nothing more than that. A few wrote a good deal more.

Josiah Ambrose, as Peg was about to learn, was one of the few. The Harrow County Historical Society occupied the ground floor of an old Italianate house on Chestnut Street, three blocks back from the river. It was open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and it was run almost single-handedly by a retired schoolteacher named Walter Grub, then eighty-one, who wore a cardigan in every season and knew Peg well. It was a Tuesday.

He let her in himself. She showed him the card. He looked at it for a long time without speaking, holding it by the edges in the way people do who have been taught how to hold old things. Then he turned it over and read the two lines on the back, and Peg recalled afterward that she saw his mouth tighten very slightly at the second one.

“Ambrose’s daybooks came to us in 1952,” he told her. “His granddaughter gave them. Nine volumes, 1871 to 1900. October of ’98 will be in the eighth.

”

He went into the back room. He was gone for some time. When he came back he was carrying a tall narrow ledger bound in green cloth, its spine mended with library tape, and he set it on the reading table and opened it carefully about two-thirds of the way through. The pages were ruled in faint blue.

The handwriting was the slanting, cramped script with a heavy downstroke. Peg did not need to compare it with the back of the card. She knew it at once. Most of the entries were brief and practical.

*Mrs. Ruth Hoverstock and infant, one plate, half-dozen cabinets, paid. Mr. and Mrs.

Edwin Cole, wedding, two plates, one dozen, owing. Odd Fellows’ Lodge, group of 14, by arrangement, two plates, large mount. Weather: overcast. * Then, under October the 9th, 1898, a Sunday, in the same hand:

*Sale, Thomas Sale, Cooper, Mill Street.

The three daughters. One sitting at a quarter past 3. Three plates, a poor light, overcast. Screens all drawn back.

12 seconds. One dozen cabinets ordered, paid in full. *

Peg read it twice. Sale.

She had never seen the name in any record she could recall. But the entry fit. The date fit. The three daughters fit.

It was what came after it that made her look up at Walter Grub. Below the business of the entry, Ambrose had written three more lines in a smaller hand, as though he had come back to the book later that evening and added them. *The first plate good. The second good.

The third plate broken in the bath. * And then, below that, a line that had been written and then struck through with a single firm stroke of ink blacker than the ink of the words, but the words could still be read beneath it. *The middle child does not take the light. *

Peg asked Walter what that meant—*take the light.

* Was it a phrase photographers used? Walter answered that he had read all nine of those daybooks, some of them twice, and in all of them he had never seen Josiah Ambrose use those words about any other sitter. Ambrose had a habit of noting difficulties—a child who would not keep still, an old man with a palsy, a bride whose white dress would come out as a blank shape if the exposure ran long. Those notes were always plain.

*The child moved. The dress burned out. Take another. * They read like the notes of a craftsman.

This one did not. Walter turned a few pages forward, and Peg remarked later that he seemed to know exactly what he was looking for, and that he went to it as a man goes to a step in his own house in the dark. There was nothing more about the Sales in the rest of October. But on the inside of the back cover of that eighth volume, in the corner, very small, there was a final note, undated:

*Have made up my mind.

No more children in threes, nor in a row before the glass. *

Peg asked him what it meant. Walter Grub closed the ledger and sat back in his chair and looked at her for a while. Then he told her something that was not strictly speaking in the record.

He told her that there was a ninth volume, 1899 to 1900, the last two years Ambrose kept the studio before he sold it. It had come to the society in 1952 along with the others, and the granddaughter who gave it had asked one thing when she handed it over: that it be kept closed for the rest of her life. The granddaughter had died in 1988. Walter admitted that he had opened the ninth volume exactly once, in the winter of 1989, and that he had read it through in a single afternoon, and that he did not intend to take it down again for anyone who had not first done her homework.

“Find out who the Sales were,” he said. “Find out how many daughters they had. Then come back, and I will show you what Josiah wrote in the spring. ”

She tried to argue.

She told him she had spent thirty-one years in the recorder’s office and could have the Sale family laid out on paper by the end of the week. “Then you will be back by the end of the week,” Walter replied. He walked her to the door. On the porch he stopped her with one hand on her arm and told her one more thing, and she remembered it word for word because of how quietly he said it and because of what it turned out to mean.

“And Peg, when you look at that card at home, do not look at the middle one for very long at a time. ”

She asked him why. “Because I did in ’89. I had a copy of the same print from another family’s album, and I looked at the middle one too long, and I have not slept with the lamp off since.

”

Then he went back inside and shut the door, and she heard him turn the lock, though it was not yet noon on a Tuesday and the society was supposed to be open until four. Peg drove the three blocks to the county courthouse. She knew where everything was. She went first to the birth records, and there, in the very first place she looked, the story started to come apart in her hands.

Ohio had required counties to keep a register of births since 1867, but in practice the register depended on doctors and midwives and parents remembering to report. Renfield was the county seat, though—a birth in the town itself, in a family with a house on Mill Street and a trade at the cooperage, would almost certainly have been reported. The register for 1892 was a heavy book bound in brown leather with a red label on the spine. Peg turned to March, because a child of six in October of 1898 would have been born in late 1891 or in 1892, and she had a feeling, which she could not have explained, that the spring was right.

She found it on the second page of March. *Sale. Born March 4th, 1892. Renfield.

Father: Thomas Sale, Cooper, age 29. Mother: Hester Sale, formerly Gerity, age 24. Sex: female. Number of this birth: twin.

Names: Clara Jane and Edith May. Attending: O. Lusk, midwife. Living: two.

*

Peg read the line several times. *Number of this birth: twin. Living: two. * Twins, not triplets.

Two girls born on the 4th of March, reported to the county as two girls, by a midwife whose initial and surname were written in the same column as every other birth she had attended in that book. Peg ran her finger down the page and found O. Lusk again and again—she had been busy that spring—but she had written the word *twin* and she had written *living two. *

A register is only as good as the person who fills it in, and Peg was a careful person.

She did not leap. A third child might have been born later that night, after the midwife had already sent her report. A third child might have been weak, not expected to live, left off for that reason. There were a dozen ordinary explanations, and Peg went through all of them, standing at the desk under the bulb.

So she went to the next record. The federal census of 1900 had been taken in June of that year, a year and eight months after the photograph. The courthouse had a set of microfilm reels for Harrow County, and Peg had spent many slow afternoons cranking through them on the old reader in the corner of the vault. She threaded the reel for Renfield and wound forward to Mill Street.

There was Thomas Sale, head of household, Cooper, born in Ohio, age 37. There was Hester, wife, age 32. And there were the daughters. Clara J.

, daughter, born March 1892, age 8, at school. Edith M. , daughter, born March 1892, age 8, at school. Two daughters.

But the column that asked the mother how many children she had borne recorded the number three. The column that asked how many of those were living recorded the number two. Three born, two living. That at least was a kind of answer.

It meant there had been a third child. It meant the third had died. And it meant that Hester Sale, sitting in her kitchen on Mill Street in June of 1900 with a census taker at her table, had counted three. But the census was a year and eight months too late, and the photograph showed three living girls sitting on a bench in the autumn of 1898.

Not an infant. Not a grave. Three girls of the same size and the same age, with their hands folded the same way. Peg rewound the reel and went to the shelf where the courthouse kept the odds and ends of township and school records that had found their way there over the years.

She found a long row of school registers from the Renfield Union School, 1880 to 1920, which the school board had sent over to the courthouse for safekeeping in the 1950s when the old school building was torn down. The register for the school year 1898 to 1899 was thin and dog-eared and smelled of mice. The first grade had been taught that year by a Miss Florence Abbott. Her register listed her pupils alphabetically, with their ages, the names of their parents, and a column of small, neat marks for attendance through the autumn and winter.

Near the bottom of the page, in Miss Abbott’s handwriting, Peg found the Sales. *Sale, Clara, age 6, parent Thos. Sale. *
*Sale, Edith, age 6, parent Thos.

Sale. *
*Sale, Nell, age 6, parent Thos. Sale. *

Three.

Three girls of six, entered in the first grade in September of 1898. Three rows of attendance marks running across the page into the autumn. *Present, present, present. *

Peg insisted later that she remembered exactly what she did when she saw that third name.

She took off her glasses, cleaned them on the hem of her blouse, and put them back on, as if the name might be a smudge. It was not a smudge. Nell Sale had been enrolled in the first grade of the Renfield Union School in the autumn of 1898, and by Miss Abbott’s reckoning she had come to school every single day through September and October and November. Peg ran her finger along Nell’s row, and she noticed what you might have noticed too, if you had been looking as closely as a records clerk looks.

Clara’s row had absences—a day in late September, two days in November. Edith’s row had absences—a day in October, and a run of four days in early December, with a small note in the margin: *Children are absent. Children get sick. *

Nell’s row had none.

Not one. Present every day from the first day of the term. And then, in the last week of February of 1899, Nell’s row simply stopped. There was no mark of absence, no note of withdrawal, no line saying the family had moved, nothing in the margin at all.

The little row of *present* marks ran up to the 20th of February, and then the squares were empty for the rest of the year, as if Miss Abbott had come to that name each morning and could not decide what to write beside it. Clara’s row also had something odd about it from the same week. On the 20th and 21st of February, Clara was marked absent with the note *ill. * On the 22nd, she was marked present again—and from that day until the end of the school year in May, Clara Sale was never absent again.

Peg copied all of it into the small notebook she carried. Then she closed the register and sat for some time in the vault with her hands in her lap. She had three records now. A birth register that showed two.

A census that counted three born and two living. A school register that listed three living, until the third simply stopped. There was one more place to look, and it was not in the courthouse. Riverside Cemetery lies on a low rise south of Renfield, above the tannery, with a view of the river where it bends.

It is an old cemetery, laid out in the 1840s, with iron gates and a gravel drive and a great many small marble stones gone gray and soft with weather. Peg knew that the families from Mill Street and the cooperage tended to be buried in the eastern sections nearest the road, where the lots had been cheapest. It took her the better part of an hour to find it. At last, in a row near the fence, where a line of old cedars threw a dark shade over the grass, she found a gray granite marker larger than its neighbors, with the name SALE cut deep across it.

*Thomas Sale, 1863–1931. *
*Hester Gerity Sale, his wife, 1868–1907. *

And to the left of it, almost lost in the long grass at the foot of the cedars, a much smaller stone—white marble, the size of a loaf of bread, its top rounded, its face carved with a small lamb that the weather had worn almost smooth. Peg knelt in the grass and pulled the stems away from it with her hands.

The inscription was short, and in places very faint. She traced it with her fingers before she could read it with her eyes. *Lenore. Born and taken, the 4th of March, 1892.

*

And beneath it, in letters smaller still, a line Peg had never seen on any infant stone in that county, and she had seen hundreds:

*The third of three. *

So there it was. A third girl, born the same night as Clara and Edith, who did not live, who was buried here under a little lamb at the foot of her parents’ grave, who had been given a name. Lenore.

Peg stayed kneeling in the grass for a while, and she recalled later that two thoughts came to her, one after the other. The first was that the puzzle was solved. The Sales had triplets. One was stillborn.

The family called the two survivors and the memory of the third “the three,” as grieving families sometimes do. Perhaps the third girl in the photograph was a cousin, dressed to match, to make the picture whole for a mother who could not stop counting to three. It was sad, and it was strange, and it was not impossible. The second thought came while she was looking at the name *Lenore,* and she remembered as a records clerk remembers that in the 1890s a girl named Lenore would almost always have been called by a shorter name at home.

Nora. Sometimes Lena. Or, most commonly of all in that part of Ohio, Nell. The girl buried under the lamb in March of 1892 had been named Lenore.

The girl who came to the first grade every single day through the autumn of 1898 without one absence, and then stopped coming in the last week of February, had been called Nell. Peg Ostrander got up from her knees in Riverside Cemetery with grass stains on her skirt. She drove home. She took the card out of its envelope and laid it face up on the kitchen table under the lamp, and she went to the drawer by the sink and found the magnifying glass she used for reading the fine print on old deeds.

Walter Grub had told her not to look at the middle one for very long. She told herself that she would only look for a minute. There is a small thing about eyes that most of us know without ever having thought about it. The black circle at the center of your eye—the pupil—is not a thing at all.

It is an opening, a hole in the colored ring of the iris, through which light passes to the back of the eye. Its size is governed by a small ring of muscle that tightens and loosens by itself, according to how much light is falling on you. In a bright room, the pupils shrink to small points. In a dim room, they open wide.

You cannot make your pupils open in a bright room by wishing it, any more than you can make your heart slow down by asking. The second small thing is the catch light. Look at any portrait taken by daylight, and look closely at the eyes, and you will usually see a tiny bright spot in each one. That spot is a reflection.

The surface of the eye is wet and curved, a small round mirror, and it reflects whatever is brightest in front of it. In a studio of the 1890s, that was the skylight—a little pale square or a little pale arch sitting on the dark of the pupil or on the edge of the iris. In a properly lit portrait, every person in the frame will have catch lights in the same place, because they are all looking toward the same bright window. And every person in the frame will have pupils of roughly the same size, because they are all sitting in the same light.

Peg Ostrander knew none of this as a matter of science. What she knew that evening was what she saw. She held the magnifying glass a few inches above the card and began on the left. The girl on the left sat very slightly turned toward her sisters.

Her face was perfectly still, perfectly sharp. Through the glass, Peg could see the fine lace at her collar, the small stray hairs at her temple that had escaped the ribbon, the faint crease at the corner of her mouth where she was pressing her lips together. And her eyes. Pale irises, light gray perhaps, or a light blue that the old emulsion had rendered gray.

At the center of each, a small black pupil no larger than the point of a pencil. And on each pupil, toward the upper left, a tiny bright square. The skylight. Peg moved the glass to the right, to the girl on the right side of the bench.

The same. The face a mirror of her sister’s, turned very slightly inward toward the middle. The same pale irises, the same small, tight, pencil-point pupils closed down against the light of the north sky, the same bright little square toward the upper left of each. That was right.

The two girls were sitting in the same light, looking toward the same window, and their eyes agreed. She moved the glass to the middle girl. She said many years later, recording an interview for the County Historical Society, that she did not immediately understand what she was seeing. Her first thought was that the print was damaged—a spot of mold, perhaps, or a place where the emulsion had worn away.

Because the middle girl’s eyes were dark. Not the irises—the irises were the same pale gray as her sisters’. But the pupils were wide open. So wide that only a thin ring of gray showed around the black, the way your own eyes look when you have just come in from a dark night and stand blinking in a doorway.

They were the pupils of a child sitting in a room lit by a single candle. Sitting in a dark room. Sitting at night. And they had no catch light.

Peg moved the glass back and forth along the bench several times. Left girl: small pupils, bright square. Right girl: small pupils, bright square. Middle girl: wide black pupils, and no reflection of the skylight at all.

Nothing in them shone. They were the flat, dull dark of the bottom of a well. She put the glass down and sat back. From a distance, of course, you could see nothing of the kind—three small girls with pale eyes, three solemn faces.

It was only through the glass that the difference appeared, which meant, Peg realized, that the card could sit on a mantel for a hundred years and be handed down and be put in an album, and nobody would ever know. Unless somebody took it into her head to compare the eyes. She picked up the glass again. This time she made herself look at everything else about the middle girl, slowly, from one corner to the other.

The middle girl was the same size as her sisters. She sat the same way, back straight, not touching the back of the bench. Her dress was the same, with the same lace at the collar and the same gathered sleeves. Her hands were folded in her lap the same way, right over left.

Peg moved the glass down, past the hands, past the hem of the dress, to the boots. All three girls wore the same short boots of dark leather, buttoned up the side—the kind every child wore to church in the 1890s. Boots like that buttoned on the outside of the ankle, the row of small round buttons running up the outer side of each boot, away from the other foot, so that a child bending to do them up with a button hook could reach them easily. On the girl on the left, the buttons ran up the outside of each ankle.

On the girl on the right, the same. On the middle girl, the buttons ran up the inside. Peg looked at that for a very long time. Two small rows of black dots on the inner sides of two small boots, facing each other, where no cobbler in Ohio would have put them.

It was such a small thing. A detail that no one would ever notice. A mother dressing three daughters in a hurry on a Sunday afternoon would never think about it. And it was exactly backwards, as if the middle girl’s boots had been made from a picture of her sister’s boots, held up to a looking glass.

Peg put the magnifying glass in the drawer. She put the card back in its envelope, and she put the envelope in the drawer, and she closed the drawer. She maintained she did not feel afraid. What she felt, she explained, was closer to the feeling you have when you are reading a familiar page and come to a word you know you know and cannot for the life of you remember what it means.

She went to bed. She did not put the card on the dresser that night, or on any night after. She did, however, wake a little after three. She woke because she thought she had heard the kitchen drawer open.

The drawer by the sink stuck in damp weather and came free with a little wooden squeak and a rattle of whatever was inside. She lay in the dark and listened. She heard nothing more. She got up after a while and went down the hall to the kitchen and switched on the light.

The drawer was closed. She opened it. The magnifying glass was there. The envelope was there.

She took the card out of the envelope, and she confessed that she did this without thinking about it, and that she should not have. The card was as she had left it. Three girls on a bench. She did not need the glass to see that nothing had changed—except that she had left it face up in the envelope, with the faces toward the open end.

And the faces were now toward the closed end. The card had turned itself around inside the envelope, so that whoever opened the drawer would have to slide it out back first, with the writing showing: *Our three. Do not let them sit together again. *

She told herself she had put it in that way.

She told herself she had been tired and had not been paying attention. She was a woman of sixty-four who had lived alone for two years, and she was used to telling herself sensible things in the middle of the night. She put the card back in the envelope, face toward the open end, and closed the drawer firmly, and took a dish towel from the rail by the stove and wrapped it once around the handle of the drawer and tied it in a knot. In the morning, the knot was still tied.

She untied it and took out the envelope, and the card was facing the way she had left it. That should have been reassuring. It was not. She remembered that she stood at the sink in the gray morning light with the envelope in her hand, and that what came into her mind was a picture of a small girl standing at the drawer in the night, with her hands folded right over left, waiting for somebody to come and untie it.

She drove back to the historical society that Thursday, the first day it was open. She had the birth register, the census, the school register, and the little stone all written down in her notebook. She had done her homework. Walter Grub read through her notes standing up at the front desk without inviting her to sit.

When he reached the line about the school register—Nell, age six, present every day—he closed his eyes for a moment. Then he murmured, “You found the stone. ”

She told him she had. He asked, “Did you read the bottom line?

”

“The third of three? ”

Walter nodded. “Then you are ready for Orpha Lusk. ” And he took her into the back room.

The back room of the Harrow County Historical Society had been the dining room of the old house on Chestnut Street. It still had the plaster medallion in the ceiling where a chandelier once hung, and a bay window that had been covered over with plywood to keep the sun off the shelves. Walter took down a box from the second shelf on the left. He did it without searching, and Peg understood, watching him, that he had taken it down before, and more than once.

Inside, wrapped in a sheet of yellow tissue, was a small book, perhaps the size of a man’s hand, bound in limp black leather gone brown at the edges, tied shut with a faded ribbon. A tag of card had been tied to the ribbon, and written on it in pencil were the words: *Lusk, O. , midwife. Ledger.

Donated by her grand-nephew, 1938. *

Walter set it on the table and untied the ribbon and stepped back. Peg understood that he wanted her to read it for herself. Orpha Lusk had been born in 1824 in a cabin in the hills east of the Salow, and had delivered, by her own count written on the inside of the front cover, 1,116 children in Harrow County between 1848 and 1898.

She never married. She lived the last thirty years of her life in a two-room house on Water Street near the mill, with a goat, a great many cats, and a reputation among the women of the county as the one you sent for when the doctor said there was nothing more he could do. Men in Renfield were a little afraid of her. Women were not.

Women loved her the way you love a person who has seen you at the worst hour of your life and has not looked away. Her ledger was nothing like Ambrose’s. Ambrose wrote for business. Orpha wrote for herself.

Her entries were short, and her spelling was her own, and she had a habit of writing in the margins, small and slanting, things she wanted to remember that had nothing to do with fees or dates. A woman who had eaten clay in her pregnancy. A baby born with a caul, which she had dried and given back to the mother to keep. A house where the husband drank, and she had left a knife under the mattress before she went home.

Walter had marked a page with a slip of paper. *March the 3rd, 1892. * Orpha had written: *Sent for to Mill Street, the cooper’s wife, Hester Sale, her first pains since noon. A large belly.

I think twins. *

And then, below it, written on the fourth: *Three. Two girls living and one girl dead. The first at 20 past 1 in the morning, a fair strong child.

The second at a quarter to 2, small but she cried well. The third not till near 4, and she came feet first and blue, and I could not bring breath into her though I tried a long while. The mother bled hard after. Dr.

Finn sent for and came at six. The mother will live. Fee $1. 50, paid by the cooper in coin.

*

That was the business of the entry. But down the right-hand margin of that page, continuing along the bottom and up the left side, so that Peg had to turn the little book in her hands to follow it, there was more. It was written in pencil, very small, and it looked to Peg as though it had been written some days afterward, in a hand that was not as steady as the one above it. *I will put down what happened because it should be put down somewhere, and I do not think I will tell it.

The cooper’s wife lay in the front bedroom upstairs, which looks out to the street. In that room there is a tall looking glass on a stand in a frame of dark wood that came to her from her mother. When I come into a lying-in room, I cover every glass. My grandmother did, and her mother before her, and I have never once not done it.

I asked the cooper for a cloth, and he gave me a shawl of his wife’s blue wool, and I put it over the glass myself, and tucked it at the top of the frame. *

*The first girl came, and the second girl came. I washed them, and wrapped them, and gave them to the cooper, and he took them down to the kitchen where his sister had a fire going. Then I knew there was a third.

When she came, she was the color of a plum, and she did not breathe. I worked at her. I worked at her a long while on the dresser top with my mouth on her mouth and my hand on her chest. Then the mother began to bleed, and I had to leave her and go to the mother.

I laid the little one on the dresser on a clean towel. *

*I was at the mother perhaps half an hour. When I could leave her, I turned around. The shawl was on the floor.

I did not hear it fall. The glass was bare. The child was on the dresser where I put her. Her eyes were shut, as they had been.

In the glass, which stood beside the dresser and a little behind it, I could see the dresser and the towel and the child upon it, as you would expect. The child in the glass had her eyes open. She was looking at me. It was not a newborn’s look.

A new child cannot see you. It looks at the light. This one looked at me, at my face. Then she looked past me at the bed where her mother lay.

Then she looked at the door to the stair, where the cooper had gone down with her sisters. *

*I picked up the shawl and I put it back over the glass. I did not look into it while I did it. I wrapped the dead child in the towel.

When the cooper came up, I told him she was gone, and he wept, and I let him hold her, and I did not tell him about the glass. The mother asked her name. I told her it was not my place. She chose Lenore after her own mother, and I said nothing.

I should have said no. I did not have it in me that night to say no to a woman who had bled as she had bled. They buried her in the riverside ground on the sixth. I did not go.

*

Peg read it through three times. Walter did not interrupt her. When she finally looked up, he had sat down on a folding chair by the plywood window, turning his reading glasses over and over in his hands. She asked him how long he had known.

He told her he had first read the Lusk ledger in 1974, the year he retired from teaching and began volunteering at the society. He had read it as a curiosity, and the marginal note about the glass had seemed to him a piece of country superstition, nothing more. He had thought no more about it for fifteen years. Then, in the winter of 1989, a woman from Zanesville had sent the society a box of photographs from her late aunt’s album, and among them was an Ambrose cabinet card of three little girls on a velvet bench.

On the back, nothing. Just the studio’s printing. Walter had looked at it with a magnifying glass, as he looked at every card that came in, and he had seen the eyes. He did not tell Peg what he had felt.

He told her what he had done. He had gone to Ambrose’s daybooks and searched them for every sitting of three children between 1890 and 1900, and there was only one. Sale. And then he had remembered the name from the Lusk ledger.

And then he had opened the ninth volume, which he had promised a dead woman would stay closed, and he had read it in an afternoon, and he had put it back. Peg asked where the Zanesville card was now. Walter said, “I burned it. ”

She stared at him.

He went on. “I know. I am a historian. I have never burned a document in my life before or since.

I burned that one in the stove in this room in February of ’89, and I stood and watched it go, and I would do it again. ”

She asked him why. “Because after a week of having it in the building, I came in on a Saturday morning and found it on the front desk. And I had left it locked in the cabinet.

And there was nobody else with a key. And it was face up. And the middle one was looking at the door. ”

He put his glasses on.

“Turn the page, Peg. Orpha wrote more. ”

She turned the page. The next entries were ordinary—births in April, a breech in Taylor Township, a girl of fifteen whose child Orpha had placed with a family in Coshocton, weather and fees.

Then a year, 1893, with nothing about the Sales. Then 1894. Nothing. Peg began to think that was the end of it.

Then on a page in the spring of 1895, there was a single line in the body of the ledger where the births were written: *April the 10th. Not a lying-in. Called to Mill Street by the cooper. No fee.

* And beside it, in the margin, the pencil again:

*He met me in the street and asked me to come and look at his girls. He would not say why. When I came in at the kitchen door, his wife was at the stove and she did not turn round. There were three little girls at the table eating bread and milk.

Three little girls of three years old, in three blue pinafores, with three cups. His wife called out, “Good morning, Mrs. Lusk. The girls have been asking after you.

” I asked Hester, “Which of them is which? ” She answered, “There is Clara, and there is Edith, and there in the middle is our Nell. “*

*The cooper took me out into the yard. He was shaking.

He told me he did not know when it began. One morning that week he had come down and his wife had laid three places at the table, and he had thought she had made a mistake, as a woman who has lost a child sometimes does. And then the girls had come down the stair, and there were three of them, and the third was holding the other two by the hand, and his wife had kissed all three and sat them down and said nothing at all, as if it were the most ordinary morning of their lives. *

*I asked him, “Had any of the neighbors said anything?

” He looked at me like a man drowning. He answered, “That is the worst of it, Mrs. Lusk. Mrs.

Aldrich next door brought round a cake on Tuesday, and she told me, ‘Here is a piece for each of the triplets. ‘ Triplets. She said it plain, as if she had always known it, as if it had always been so. The grocer said it.

My own sister said it. Everybody on this street has been saying it all week, and I am the only one who knows I buried a child in the riverside ground three years ago. ” Then he looked at me and asked, “You know it too, do you not? You were there.

” I told him I was there. *

*I went back into the kitchen. The mother was still at the stove. The three of them were still at the table.

I went close and I looked at the one in the middle. She had her sister’s face. She had it exactly. But a child of three does not sit so still.

A child of three swings its feet and spills its milk. This one sat with her hands folded on the table, the right hand over the left, and she was not eating. She watched her sisters eat. She watched how they held their spoons.

And when I bent down near her, she turned her head and looked at me. I knew the look. I saw it once before in a glass. *

Walter Grub had been watching Peg’s face while she read.

When she lifted her head from the page, he urged very gently, “Go on. There is one more. ”

At the bottom of that page, set apart from the rest by a line Orpha had drawn across it, there were three short sentences, written in ink, not pencil, written firmly, the way you write a thing you mean to be obeyed. *Keep every glass in that house covered while the children sleep.

*

*Do not call her by the buried name. *

*Never set the three of them in a row before a glass. For a glass is a door, and three in a row is two children, and one who is waiting for a place. *

And beneath the three rules, in pencil again, very small, as though it had been added years later, one more line:

*The mother would not hear me.

She has called her Nell from the first. *

Peg sat in the back room of the historical society until the light behind the plywood had gone from white to gold to gray, and she read every page of the Lusk ledger from the spring of 1895 to the end. Walter brought her a cup of coffee at some point, and later a second one, and he did not tell her that the society had closed at four. Orpha did not write about the Sales often.

A busy midwife in a county of twenty thousand people had a great many other houses to think about. But she came back to Mill Street every few months, without fee, and each time she came back, she left a note in the margin. Taken together, those notes make a kind of diary of the next three and a half years. *August 1895.

To the Coopers’. The three girls playing in the yard. The two run and fall down and get up again as children do. The third runs a little behind them and falls when they fall, at the same moment, in the same way, as if she had been told to.

The mother sat on the step shelling peas and laughed to watch them. She called to me, “Look how they love each other, Mrs. Lusk. They cannot do a thing apart.

” I said nothing. *

*November 1895. The cooper tells me the third child does not sleep. He has gone up in the night with a candle and found the two in their beds asleep, and the third standing at the foot of the beds with her hands folded, looking at them.

He asked her what she was doing, and she answered, “Watching how. ” He asked her, “How what? ” She did not answer him. In the morning the mother told him he must have dreamed it.

I asked him, “Were the glasses covered? ” He told me his wife would not allow it. She claimed covering the glasses was for a house of mourning, and theirs was not a house of mourning any longer. He has tried twice, and twice found the cloths folded on the floor in the morning.

*

*March 1896. The girls are four. I went at their birthday with a little cake. The mother had made a cake too, and there were four candles on it.

She told me, “One candle for each year. ” I asked her had she made a wish for all three. She looked at me a long while and answered, “There have always been three, Mrs. Lusk.

You of all people should remember. You were there. ” And she smiled at me. I have known Hester Gerity since she was born.

I delivered her. It was not her smile. *

*July 1896. I took the eldest, Clara, on my knee in the yard while the others were in the house.

I asked her who her sister Nell was. She did not understand me. She told me, “Nell is Nell. ” I asked her where Nell came from.

She answered, “From upstairs. ” I asked her, “Where upstairs? ” She whispered, “From the big glass in Mama’s room. But you must not tell, because Nell does not like it to be told.

” Then she got down and ran inside. *

Peg stopped there for a long time. Walter, by the window, did not ask her what she had read. She thought he probably knew it by heart.

The notes went on. *January 1897. I came in by the front door, which I never do, because the kitchen door was barred. In the hall of that house there is a long glass on the wall by the coat pegs.

The three children came down the stair to see who was at the door. They stood in a row in front of the glass and looked at me, and I looked past them into the glass. There were three in the glass. I will say that first, so no one thinks I am a foolish old woman.

There were three children in the glass, as there were three in the hall. But when the two moved, the third in the glass did not move with them. When Edith put up her hand to rub her eye, and Clara turned her head to look up at her mother on the stair, the third child in the glass waited. It was only the smallest part of a moment, as you might wait to watch how a thing is done before you do it yourself.

And then she did it. She put up her hand to her eye. She turned her head toward the stair a little after. And the child in the hall, the third one, standing beside her sisters, did not do either thing.

She stood quite still and looked at me. *

Peg read that note aloud to Walter. She did not mean to. She explained afterward that she had needed to hear it in a human voice in that room, to be sure it was there.

Walter said, “Yes. ” That was all he said. *May 1897. Clara has been poorly this spring.

A little fever that comes and goes. She does not eat well. Doctor Finn has seen her and thinks it is nothing and will pass with the warm weather. The mother does not seem troubled.

Edith is well. Nell has never been sick a day. Nell sits by Clara’s bed when she is poorly and holds her hand. And the mother calls it a sweet thing to see, and I tell her to take Nell out of that room.

She will not. *

*September 1897. Clara is better. When the third child is away from her, at the other end of the house, or out in the yard with Edith, she is better.

When the third child sits with her, she is worse. I have told the cooper. He has tried to keep them apart. The children will not be kept apart.

If he locks Nell in the back room, in the morning she is in Clara’s bed, with her arms around her, and the door still locked. *

*February 1898. I am 73 this year, and the stairs at Mill Street are hard on me. I went anyway.

I brought cloths of my own, black muslin, and while the mother was at market, I covered every glass in that house myself, and I nailed the cloths to the frames with tacks. The cooper helped me. There are seven glasses in that house. I did not know a cooper’s house could hold so many.

The cooper told me most of them came with his wife from her mother’s people. The big one in the front bedroom is the worst. I made him turn it to the wall before I covered it. When the mother came home, she said nothing about it.

She put away her parcels and made the supper. In the night, the cooper woke to a sound and went down and found her in the hall in her nightgown, with a pair of pliers, taking out the tacks one by one, very quietly, so as not to wake anyone. He told me she was humming. The third child, he told me, was sitting on the stair above her, with her hands folded, watching.

*

That was the second-to-last entry about the Sales. The last one was on a page near the very end of the ledger, after a long gap. Orpha’s hand had grown shaky by then; some of the letters had been gone over twice. *The cooper came to my door tonight, the 9th of October.

He told me his wife has had a portrait made of the three girls at the studio on Front Street this afternoon, and that he could not stop her, and he wanted me to know. A portrait. A lens is a glass. I told him so.

He asked, “What will it do? ” I told him I did not know. I told him that I had heard my grandmother say that a glass is a door, but that I had never in my life heard anybody say, “What happens when you put three in a row before a door, and then close it on them, and keep the picture? ” I told him, “A portrait keeps what it sees.

” I told him, “God help the eldest. ” He went home. I have not slept. *

Below it there was nothing more.

The remaining pages of the ledger were blank. And on the inside of the back cover, in a different hand, a man’s hand, someone had written:

*Orpha Lusk died at her house on Water Street, the 14th of March, 1899, aged 74 years. Found in her chair by the stove. The looking glass in her front room was found broken.

Nobody heard it. *

Peg closed the little book. She asked Walter if there was anything else—anything from the family, from Hester Sale herself. Walter answered that in all his years at the society, he had never found a single document written by any member of the Sale family.

No letters, no diary, no family Bible. When Thomas Sale died in 1931, his house on Mill Street had been cleared by the town, and nothing from it had come to the society. But he pointed out that the 1900 census gave Hester’s maiden name as Gerity, and he admitted he had always wondered, in the years since ’89, whether Hester might have had people somewhere else—brothers, sisters, somebody she would have written to, somebody who might have kept the letters. He shook his head.

“I never went looking. I am an old man, and I was afraid of what I would find. You are younger than I am, Peg, and you have the card now. It has already found you.

I do not think it will make much difference to you one way or the other whether you go on. ”

She went home that night and did not open the kitchen drawer. She slept with the hall light on. In the morning, she began to look for the Geritys.

It took her three weeks. She was very good at it. She found Hester’s parents in the 1880 census in Taylor Township, east of Renfield—a farmer named Daniel Gerity and his wife Lenore, with five children. Hester was the youngest.

The oldest was a daughter named Winifred. Peg traced Winifred to a marriage license in 1884 to a man named August Maul, a glass worker, and from there to Wheeling, West Virginia, across the Ohio River, where the Mauls appeared in every census from 1890 to 1940. August Maul worked his whole life at one of the Wheeling glass factories, blowing lamp chimneys. Peg noted that and moved on, and only later did it come back to her as a thing worth noticing.

Winifred and August had four children. The youngest, a girl named Rose, married a man named Kempton in 1920. Rose Kempton had a daughter named Doris, born in 1926. And Doris Kempton, a widow of seventy, was alive in October of 1996, living in the same brick house in the Woodsdale neighborhood of Wheeling that her grandmother Winifred had bought in 1906.

Peg wrote to her. The answer came back in eight days. It was on lined notepaper in a firm, large hand. *Dear Mrs.

Ostrander, Yes, there is a tin box of them in the attic. My grandmother kept every letter Aunt Hester ever wrote her. My mother kept them after her, and I have kept them after my mother. Though none of us has opened that box since 1941.

You will understand why when you read them. You are welcome to come and look. Please do not ask me to read them with you. Come on a weekday in the morning.

Do not stay past dark. *

And then at the bottom, a postscript:

*You did not say in your letter whether you have the photograph. If you have it, please do not bring it into this house. *

Peg drove to Wheeling on a Tuesday in early November.

She left the card at home, in its envelope, in the kitchen drawer, and she tied the dish towel around the handle in a double knot, and she felt foolish doing it and did it anyway. Doris Kempton was waiting for her on the porch in a wool coat, though she was standing at her own front door. She shook Peg’s hand and looked past her at the car and asked, before she said anything else, whether Peg had brought the photograph. Peg told her she had not.

Doris nodded once and let her in. The tin box was already waiting on the dining room table. It had been a biscuit tin once, a large square one, with a faded picture of a Scottish castle on the lid. Beside it, Doris had put a pot of coffee, a plate of shortbread, a magnifying glass, and a box of tissues.

She explained, “The tissues are not for crying. My mother said you should never touch them with bare hands. ” She claimed it was a matter of preservation. “I always thought it was a matter of something else.

” Then she announced she would be in the kitchen, and that Peg was to call if she needed anything, and that she would come back in at a quarter to four, and that by four o’clock Peg was to be in her car. She went out and closed the door. There were 112 letters in the box. Peg counted them.

They were tied in bundles by year with string, 1886 through 1901, and they were all in the neat, rounded, careful hand that Peg had first seen on the back of the cabinet card. The early ones were the letters of a young woman writing to an older sister she loved and missed. Hester had married Thomas Sale in the spring of 1890 and moved from the farm in Taylor Township to the little house on Mill Street. Her letters were full of the small business of a new household—the price of coffee, a recipe for vinegar pie, Thomas’s work at the cooperage, the long hours, the burn on his hand from a hot hoop, the house which was too big for two, and which she was filling slowly with furniture from her mother’s people.

She wrote at length about a tall looking glass in a dark frame that she had hung in the front bedroom. She was proud of that glass. She wrote that it made the room look twice as large and twice as bright. In the summer of 1891, she wrote that she was expecting.

Her letters through that autumn and winter were happy ones. She was large, she wrote, larger than any woman she knew, and Mrs. Lusk had felt her belly and guessed there might be two. Hester wrote that she hoped it was two.

She wrote that she would like a houseful. She wrote that Winifred must come in the spring. The letter of March the 11th, 1892 was short. The handwriting was weak and uneven, and in places it slanted downward off the line.

*Dearest Win, I have two girls living and one in the ground. I named her Lenore, for mother. The two are Clara and Edith, and they are well, and so am I, or Mrs. Lusk and the doctor say I will be.

I cannot write more. Thomas will write. I lie here and look at the glass in this room and think of her. Mrs.

Lusk had it covered while I labored, and Thomas wants it covered still, but I will not have it. I want to see the room as it was. I want to see the place where she lay. Your sister, H.

*

The letters of 1892 and 1893 were the letters of a woman in deep grief. They were not long. They were full of the two babies, their feedings, their first teeth. But in nearly every one, at the end, there was a line or two about the third.

*I dreamed of her again. * Hester wrote. *I dreamed she was standing in the glass. * Or, *I counted three cradles in my sleep last night, and woke and counted two, and could not stop weeping.

* Or, *Thomas tells me I must stop talking of her. He does not understand that she is not gone. She is only on the other side of something. *

Peg noted that line and underlined it in her notebook.

And then, in the bundle for 1895, the letters changed. The first letter of that year was dated the 20th of January, and it was cheerful, almost giddy. Hester wrote that the girls were nearly three, and growing like weeds, that they were all three such a handful, that Winifred would not believe how alike they were, that even she herself could hardly tell them apart some mornings. All three.

Peg read that letter four times. It was written in January of 1895. Orpha Lusk’s ledger put the morning Thomas Sale found three girls at his breakfast table in the second week of April. But here, in January, three months before that, Hester was already writing about all three.

Peg went back to the last letter of 1894. It was dated the 22nd of December—about the Christmas preparations, the weather, the price of a goose. At the end, Hester wrote: *Clara and Edith send kisses to their aunt Win, and our Nell sends her love too, from the glass. *

From the glass.

Peg put that letter down very carefully on the tissue paper. She went back further. 1894. A letter from September.

*Edith has a cough. Clara has learned to say “kitty. “* And at the end: *I have started to call her our Nell, Win. I know it is foolish.

Thomas does not know I talk to her. I go up in the afternoon while the girls nap, and I sit in front of Mother’s glass and talk to her. I tell her about her sisters. I tell her how they eat and how they walk and the little things they say.

I think she likes to hear it. I think she is learning. *

A letter from June of 1894. *Something strange today.

When I was sitting at the glass, I lifted my hand to my hair, and I would swear the girl in the glass lifted hers a moment after. Not me in the glass. I mean a little girl standing just behind my chair in the glass, where no little girl was standing in the room. She was the size of the twins.

She had their face. I turned round, and nobody was there. And when I turned back, she was gone. I have not told Thomas.

I do not think I am going mad. I think it was her. * And at the bottom of the same page: *If it was her, she was not wearing anything, and she looked cold. I have begun to make a little dress.

*

Peg sat back in the dining room chair in Doris Kempton’s quiet house, and she found that her hands were cold, though the radiators were ticking and the room was warm. She went on reading. The letters of 1895, after the change, were cheerful in a way that Peg found harder and harder to read. Hester wrote about the three girls constantly.

Their games. Their dresses, which she sewed in sets of three, always the same. Their cleverness. How Nell could do anything her sisters could do, the moment after she had seen them do it.

How Nell never cried. How Nell never needed to be told twice. How Nell never seemed to tire, and sat up at night watching over the other two while they slept, like a little guardian. Hester did not seem to see anything wrong in this.

She wrote it as a mother writes about a remarkable child. *Thomas does not like it,* she wrote in May. *He thinks three is too many. He tells me so in the night when he thinks the girls cannot hear.

He whispers, “I buried a child, Hester. I carried her in a box to the riverside ground. ” And I say to him, “Then who is this, Thomas, sitting at your table? ” And he cannot say.

He cannot say. Nobody can say. Everybody on the street knows our three. Everybody calls them the Sale triplets.

Only Thomas, and that old woman Lusk, who never did like me. *

Peg underlined that too. Because it was true. Peg had seen it in the school register.

Miss Florence Abbott, the first-grade teacher, had written *Sale, Nell, age 6* without hesitation in the autumn of 1898. She had marked her present every day. Mrs. Aldrich next door had brought a piece of cake for each of the triplets.

Everybody on Mill Street had accepted, at some point in the early spring of 1895, that there were three Sale girls, and that there had always been three. Everybody except the father, who had carried a box to the cemetery, and the midwife who had seen the eyes in the glass. And Ambrose, Peg thought. In 1898, Ambrose, who had looked at all three of them through his own glass, had written: *The middle child does not take the light.

*

She reached for the bundle of letters for 1898. It was the thickest of all of them. She untied the string. The first letter on top was dated the 10th of October, the day after the sitting.

She did not open it right away. She recalled years later that she sat with her hand on that letter for a long time, and that she could not have said why, except that the room had grown very quiet. The radio in the back of the house had stopped. She had not heard Doris switch it off.

It was only a little after one in the afternoon, and the November sun was coming in at a long slant, lying across the dining table and across the tin box and across her hands. She remembered that she looked up then, at the wall across the table. There was a mirror hanging there—a small oval one in a gilt frame, of the kind people used to hang in dining rooms to throw back the light from the window. She had not noticed it when she sat down.

It was covered with a linen napkin, tucked at the top of the frame. She had not noticed that either. The letter of October the 10th, 1898, ran to six pages, written on both sides—the longest Hester Sale ever sent her sister. The handwriting was the same rounded schoolroom hand, but it was faster than usual, and in places the pen had caught and spattered, as though she had been writing in a hurry, or in some distress, and had not stopped to blot.

*Dearest Win, I have done it. I have had their likeness made. Thomas is not speaking to me, and I do not care. I wanted it done before winter, before the light goes.

I wanted something that would show him, once and for all, and show anyone else who doubts it, that there are three. A likeness cannot lie. That is what I told him. A likeness only shows what is there.

*

She described the afternoon in detail. She had dressed the girls herself after church, in the white lawn dresses she had sewn for Easter, three alike, with lace at the collar that she had bought from a peddler in the summer and saved. She had tied their hair with new blue ribbons. She had blacked and buttoned their boots.

Clara had fussed and complained that her collar scratched. Edith had wanted to bring her doll. Nell had stood quite still while she was dressed, and had watched her sisters being dressed. And when Hester knelt to button Nell’s boots, she found that Nell had already done them up herself.

Peg stopped there, and thought about the buttons running up the insides of the ankles, facing each other. Hester had not noticed. Or if she had noticed, she had not thought it worth writing down. They walked to Front Street together, the four of them.

Thomas would not come. They climbed the outside stair at the side of Pel’s Hardware, Hester holding Clara and Edith by the hand, and Nell following a step behind. It had begun to cloud over, and she was afraid it would rain before they were done. *Mr.

Ambrose received us himself. He is a tall, stooped old man with white whiskers and very clean hands. His daughter, Miss Lavinia, was there to help him. He was kind to the girls at first.

He gave them each a peppermint from a dish. Then he looked at the three of them standing in a row in his front room, and he stopped smiling, and he asked me, “Are they all three yours? ” I told him, “Of course they are. ” He asked me, “Were they born together?

” I told him they had been, on the 4th of March, 1892, and he could ask anybody on Mill Street. He told me he would take my word for it. *

*He took them into the big room under the window where the camera is. He had a long bench brought out, with dark blue velvet on it, and a garden painted on a cloth behind.

He sat Clara on the left and Edith on the right. When he went to put Nell in the middle, he did not touch her. He had touched the other two, to turn their shoulders a little and fold their hands. He did not touch Nell.

He only pointed, and she went and sat where he pointed, and folded her own hands, right over left, the way he had folded her sisters. *

*Then he brought out the iron rests that go behind the head to keep them still. He put one behind Clara and one behind Edith, and they did not like it, and Edith cried a little, and I had to hush her. He brought one for Nell, and stood holding it, and then he put it down on the floor without using it.

He told me, “This one will not need it. ” I asked him how he knew. He did not answer me. *

*He went and put his head under the black cloth.

He was under the cloth a long time, Win, longer than I have ever seen a photographer. The girls began to fidget—the two of them. Nell did not. I asked Miss Lavinia was something the matter.

She answered that her father was particular. Then Mr. Ambrose came out from under the cloth, and his face was gray as dishwater, and he went to the window and stood with his back to us for a while. Then he asked Miss Lavinia to look.

She went under the cloth. She came out very quick. She did not look at me after that. *

*He asked me would I consider having the girls taken one at a time, three separate likenesses.

He promised he would charge me for one. I said no. I told him I wanted them together. That was the whole of the reason.

He asked me again. He pleaded. “Mrs. Sale, I would take it as a kindness if you would let me take them one at a time.

” And I said, “No, Mr. Ambrose. Our three together, or I will take them to the man in Coshocton. ” He answered, “Very well.

“*

*He took three plates. He explained it was a dull light and he needed a long time for each, 12 seconds, and he counted them out loud. He told the girls not to blink. On the first plate, Clara blinked, and he told us it did not matter.

On the second plate, Edith blinked. On the third plate, Win—while he was counting, Clara cried out. Not loud. A little cry, like a child who has been pinched.

She did not move her head, because the iron rest held it, but she cried out. And afterward, when he let her down, she was cold all over, her hands like ice. She told me that Nell had been looking at her the whole time. I told her that could not be.

Nell was looking at the camera. I saw her myself. Clara said, “No, Mama. Nell was looking at the camera with her face.

But she was looking at me with the other part. ” I do not know what she meant by that. I asked her, and she would not say. On the stair going down, Clara fainted, only for a moment.

Miss Lavinia caught her. *

*Mr. Ambrose came out to the top of the stair and looked down at us. He called down, “Mrs.

Sale, I will bring the cards to your house myself when they are ready. Do not come back for them. ” I thought it was a kindness. And then afterward I was not sure.

*

There was a second letter in the bundle, dated the 24th of October. It was shorter. *Mr. Ambrose brought the cards today, Win.

A dozen. They are very fine. The girls look like angels. I have put one on the mantel.

I will send one to you, and one to Thomas’s sister, and one to my cousins in Zanesville. I am keeping one for myself, to keep by me always. Mr. Ambrose would not come in.

He stood at the front door with the parcel. Before he gave it to me, he asked for the one I meant to keep. I gave it to him, not knowing why. He took a pen out of his coat, and he wrote on the back of it, below where I had written “Our three” and the date.

He leaned on the door frame to do it, and he pressed very hard. He wrote, “Do not let them sit together again. ” Then he gave it back to me, and he told me, “Mrs. Sale, if you love the eldest, you will burn the glass plates I have kept.

I will send them to you. You must break them and bury the pieces. ” I told him I would not. He answered, “Then I will keep them, God help me.

And I will keep them locked. ” And he went down the steps. *

*He told me one thing more. There had been a third plate, he explained, and it had broken in the bath when he went to develop it.

He swore it had cracked right down the middle, from the top of the plate to the bottom, all on its own, through the middle child. And when he took the two halves out of the bath, the image on them had already gone dark, as if the plate were thirty years old. He told me he had never seen a plate do that. *

Peg held that letter for a while, and thought about the card in her kitchen drawer at home, with the second line on the back pressed so deeply into the cardboard that she could feel it from the front.

The rest of the letters for 1898 were about Clara. *November the 6th. Clara is poorly again. She has no fever, Doctor Finn tells me, and nothing he can find.

She is only tired. She sleeps very late and is pale. Nell sits with her. *

*November the 20th.

Clara will not eat. Nell eats for her. I think Nell has never eaten much, but she has begun to eat now at table the way Clara used to eat, holding her spoon the same way and blowing on the milk the same way. It is like seeing Clara well again, watching Nell.

*

*December the 2nd. Something has happened that I do not know how to say. Clara asked me today which one she was. She was lying in bed, and Nell was sitting by her, and I came in with the broth.

And Clara looked up at me and asked, “Mama, which one of us is me? ” And I laughed. I thought it was a game. And I told her, “You are Clara, you silly goose.

” And she asked, “Are you sure? ” And I looked at the two of them—Clara in the bed, and Nell on the chair. And I was not sure, Win. For a moment, I was not sure.

*

*December the 14th. Thomas has turned the big glass in our room to the wall, and covered it with a quilt, and nailed the quilt down. I have not taken it off. I find I do not want to.

*

*December the 26th. Christmas was quiet. Clara came downstairs for dinner and sat at table and was very good. Nell sat beside her.

They held hands under the table the whole meal. Thomas did not eat. After dinner, he took me into the kitchen and said, “Hester, look at them. Look at them properly.

” I answered, “I am looking. ” He asked, “Which of them is sitting where Clara always sits? ” And I looked, and it was Nell. And I said, “Well, Thomas, what does it matter where they sit?

” And he answered, “It matters, because the one in Nell’s chair is the one who cannot lift her fork. “*

*January the 8th, 1899. I am frightened, Win. There.

I have written it. I am frightened of my own child, and I do not even know which child it is I am frightened of. I go up at night and stand in the door of their room with the lamp, and they are all three in their beds, and all three asleep. And then I come back in an hour, and two are asleep, and one is standing at the foot of the beds with her hands folded.

And when she turns her head to me in the lamplight, her eyes do not shrink from it. They stay wide and black, like the eyes of something that has come out of a cellar. Like the eyes of something that does not know what light is for. *

*I asked Mrs.

Lusk. She is old now, and very ill. She answered, “Hester, I told you three things six years ago, and you did not listen to one of them, and now it is too late for two of them. But you may still do the third.

Keep them from sitting in a row before a glass again. Any glass. A window at night is a glass. A pond is a glass.

A spoon is a glass. ” I asked Mrs. Lusk, “What happens if they do? ” She answered, “Then the one who is waiting will take the place she has been learning.

“*

That was the last letter in the bundle for 1898, though it had been written in the new year. The bundle for 1899 was very thin. It held only three envelopes. And when Peg took the first of them out of the box and turned it over, she saw that the address on the front was not in Hester’s hand at all.

She heard the dining room door open behind her. It was Doris. Peg looked at her watch. It was a quarter to four.

Doris came and stood beside her and looked down at the three thin envelopes on the tissue paper. She did not touch them. She said, “You have read up to January. ”

Peg answered that she had.

Doris nodded. “Then you should go home now, and come back another morning for the rest. My mother read them all in one afternoon in 1941, when I was fifteen. She read them to the end at this table.

That night I got up for a glass of water and went past the mirror on the landing, and there was a little girl standing in it behind me, in a white dress with a blue ribbon, with her hands folded. And when I turned round, there was nobody on the landing. And when I turned back, she was still in the glass. Only now she was standing a step closer.

”

Doris went on. “We covered every glass in this house that night. They have been covered ever since. Fifty-five years.

And my mother put the letters in the attic, and made me swear never to bring the photograph into the house, and I never have. Hester sent one here, you know, to my grandmother, in 1898. Nobody knows what became of it. My grandmother would not say.

All she would ever say was that she had sent it back. I have always wondered where. ”

Then she walked Peg to the door, and stood on the porch in her wool coat until Peg’s car had turned the corner. Peg did not go straight home from Wheeling.

She drove to Chestnut Street and parked in front of the historical society, though it was a Tuesday evening and the windows were dark. After a little while, a light came on in the back of the house, and Walter Grub opened the side door in his cardigan and stood in it, waiting for her as if he had known she would come. She told him what was in the letters. He listened without interrupting.

When she was finished, he went into the back room and came out with the ninth volume of the Ambrose daybooks under his arm. It was bound in the same green cloth as the others, but thinner, and the cloth had faded unevenly, darker at one edge, as though it had been kept for many years propped against something that shaded half of it from the light. Walter set it on the reading table and pulled up a second chair, and this time he sat down beside her. “The business entries in the front are ordinary,” he explained.

“He was a careful man. He kept the accounts until the day he sold the studio. But he kept something else in the back of this one. He started from the last page and wrote toward the middle, upside down, so that anyone who opened it at the front would only find the accounts.

I think that was the point. ”

He turned the book over and opened it from the back. The private entries of Josiah Ambrose began on the last page with a date: the 9th of October, 1898, the same day as the sitting. But it was clear from the ink and the hand that he had written them later, perhaps over several evenings, going back to set down that afternoon in full, as a man sometimes writes out a thing he cannot stop thinking about, in the hope that writing it will let him put it down.

*I will set down what I saw under the cloth. I am 61 years old, and have been a photographer since 1868, and I have never been afraid of my own camera until this day. Those who do not follow my trade may not know that the image on the ground glass is upside down. The lens turns the world over.

I have looked at the world that way for 30 years and think nothing of it. One learns to compose upside down as easily as one learns to read. *

*I sat the three Sale children on the long bench. I had a peculiar feeling about the middle child from the moment the mother brought them in, and I did not touch her.

I went under the cloth to focus. On the glass, the eldest and the youngest hung upside down, as all sitters do. The middle child sat upright. I pulled my head out from under the cloth and looked at the bench.

Three little girls, all sitting the right way up, all looking at me. I went back under. On the glass, the two outside children were upside down, their hair hanging toward the bottom of the glass, their boots toward the top. And between them, the middle child sat the right way up, her head at the top of the glass and her boots at the bottom, her hands folded in her lap.

The light of the window was on her sisters. It was not on her. She was dark, as though she sat in a separate room with the lamp turned down, and only the shape of her face was clear. She was looking at me.

Not at the lens, as sitters look. At me, through the glass, from the other side. *

*I came out from under the cloth and went to the window and stood there until I could command myself. Then I asked my daughter to look.

She went under. She came out at once. She did not say a word to me until we were home that evening, and then she whispered only, “Father. ” “She was right side up,” I answered.

And we have not spoken of it since. *

*I asked the mother to let me take them singly. She would not. I asked again.

She would not. I am a tradesman, and I took her money, and I made the exposures. God forgive me. Three plates, 12 seconds each, counting aloud.

During the third exposure, at the count of nine, the eldest child cried out. I have taken a great many children, and I know the sounds they make when they are cross or frightened or bored. This was none of those. It was the sound a child makes when something is taken from her.

I did not see what was taken. *

The entries that followed were briefer, dated through October and November and into the winter. *Developed the first and second plates. Both good, very sharp.

The light was poor, but the exposure was right. The third plate cracked in the bath while I watched it, from the top edge to the bottom, through the middle child, with a sound like a small bone breaking. The two halves had gone black by the time I lifted them out. *

*Made a dozen prints from the first plate.

Printed them myself. Did not let Lavinia do it. *

*Looked at the first print under the lens. The eyes of the eldest and the youngest are as they should be—the pupils small, the window bright on them.

The middle child has the eyes of a cat in a coal cellar. There is no window in them. There is nothing in them at all. * Then, a little later, in the same entry: *I am not certain of that last.

I looked again, by lamplight. There is something in them. It is very small. It is not my window.

I cannot make it out with the lens I have, and I do not wish to buy a stronger one. *

Peg read that line aloud. “It is not my window. ”

Walter nodded.

“Keep going. This is the part that matters. ”

*November the 20th. Mrs.

Lusk came to the studio today. I have known her 40 years, and she has never climbed my stairs. She is very old, and it took her a long while. She asked to see the plates.

I told her they were locked in the cabinet in my darkroom. She asked me to show her the second plate only, the one from which I had made no prints. I took it out and held it to the window for her, so she could see the negative. On a negative, what is dark is light, and what is light is dark.

On the second plate, the eldest and the youngest have dark eyes, which in the print would be pale, and two small dark points at their centers, which in the print would be the bright window. The middle child, on the negative, has eyes that are white—perfectly white, from rim to rim, as if two lamps had been lit inside her head. *

*Mrs. Lusk looked at it a long time.

Then she said, “Josiah, turn it round. ” I asked her what she meant. She answered, “Turn the plate so the glass side is toward you, and look at her through the back of it, as you would look into a looking glass. ” I turned it.

I held it to the window with the emulsion side toward me, so that the image was reversed, left for right, as it would be in a mirror. The eldest and the youngest looked as they had looked—reversed, but the same. The middle child, reversed, looked like her sisters. Her eyes were dark on the negative, with two small points of window, as theirs were.

As if she had been made the wrong way round, and turning her round had made her right. *

*Mrs. Lusk answered, “There. Now you see what she is.

She is the glass side. She is the other side of a looking glass, come through. The two of them are on our side, and she is on hers. And every day she watches the eldest.

She learns a little more of how to be her, from our side. ” I asked her what could be done. She told me, “Break the plates. ” I told her I could not.

They were my work, and the mother’s property. She answered, “Then keep them where no one will set them in a row. ” I asked her, “What would happen if someone did? ” She answered, “I am too old to find out.

” She went down my stairs. I watched her from the top. It took her a long time. That was the last I saw of her.

*

The next entry was dated the 21st of February, 1899. Peg looked up at Walter. He was watching her. She spoke slowly.

“The 20th of February. That is the day the school register stops. ”

He only answered, “Read it. ”

*February the 21st.

I did not sleep last night. At a little after 2 in the morning, I heard a sound from the darkroom. We live behind the studio now, Lavinia and I, since her mother died, and the darkroom is at the end of the hall. It was the sound of glass plates touching in a rack.

I took the lamp and went down the hall and unlocked the darkroom door. The cabinet was locked as I had left it. Inside, the plates were in their slotted rack, standing on edge, each in its own slot, as I store all my negatives. The two Sale plates were in the bottom rack, in slots nine and ten, with an empty slot between them, where the third would have gone if it had not broken.

The empty slot was not empty. There was a plate in it. I did not put it there. It was black—entirely black, from edge to edge, as if it had been exposed to the full light of day and developed.

I took it out and held it to the lamp and could see nothing in it. Then I turned it round, glass side toward me. There was an image. Very faint.

It was the long bench and the painted garden, the same as the others. The bench was empty except for two children. They sat at the two ends, where the eldest and the youngest had sat. The middle of the bench was empty.

But the child on the left was not the eldest anymore. She had the eldest’s dress and the eldest’s ribbon and the eldest’s boots, and she sat in the eldest’s place, with her hands folded right over left. And she had the cat eyes. She had the white lamp eyes.

She was looking out of the plate at me, at the lamp, at the darkroom, with those eyes. *

*I put the plate back in the slot. I locked the cabinet and went back to bed. I did not sleep.

At first light, I went back and unlocked it again. There were two plates in the bottom rack, slots nine and ten. The slot between them was empty, as it had always been. *

Peg sat back from the table.

She felt Walter put his hand on her arm. She admitted later that she was grateful for it, and that she had not realized until that moment that she was shaking. There was one more entry. It was written very large, in a hand that had begun to wander, and it filled the last page of the private section of the daybook, where the two halves of the book met in the middle.

*February the 28th. Word came today that the cooper’s eldest girl was very ill last week, and has recovered. Mrs. Pel downstairs told me.

She told me the doctor had given her up on the 20th, and on the 22nd she was up and about and eating like a horse. Mrs. Pel called it a miracle. According to her, the family has sent the youngest to stay with relations in West Virginia, for her health, as she was the delicate one.

Mrs. Pel said, “The youngest? ” I asked her, “Which was the youngest? ” She thought about it.

She answered, “Why, the little one. The one they called Nell. ” Then she looked at me as if she did not know why she had said the name. She asked, “Was there a Nell, Mr.

Ambrose? ” I could have sworn there were only ever the two. *

*I am selling the studio. I have written to a man in Columbus who wants it.

I will take the plates with me. God help whoever opens the cabinet when I am gone. *

That was the end of what Josiah Ambrose wrote. Walter closed the ledger.

He told her he sold the studio in the spring of 1900 and moved to Dayton with his daughter. He died there in 1931. Lavinia never married. She kept her father’s things until she died in 1940.

And her niece, the granddaughter who gave them the daybooks, kept them after her. The daybooks came to the society in ’52. The plates did not. The granddaughter reported they had been sold years before, to a collector.

She did not know his name. She remembered that her aunt Lavinia had sold them in 1939, the year before she died, and had wept when she did it, and had said only that she could not bear to have them in the house through one more winter. Peg asked him what he thought had happened to the plates. Walter answered, “I think they are out there.

In a basement, in an attic, in a crate in somebody’s barn, with a hundred other glass negatives nobody has looked at in fifty years. I think one of them shows three little girls on a velvet bench. And I think that somebody, one day, is going to hold it up to the light. ”

He was right.

But neither Walter Grub nor Peg Ostrander would live to see it. Peg went back to Wheeling on the second Tuesday in December. It had snowed overnight along the river, and the hills were white, and the roads were slow, and she did not reach Doris Kempton’s porch until nearly eleven. Doris let her in without a word about the time.

The tin box was on the dining room table as before. The oval mirror on the wall was still covered with its napkin. There were three envelopes in the bundle for 1899. Peg had seen the first of them in November and noticed that the address was not in Hester’s hand.

She opened it now. It was from Thomas Sale. It was the only letter in the box that he had written, and it was written in the heavy, square, effortful hand of a man who worked with his arms all day and did not often hold a pen. It was dated the 23rd of February, 1899.

*Mrs. Maul, I am writing to you because Hester will not, and somebody must. Clara was very bad on the 20th. Doctor Finn told us she would not see the morning.

In the morning she was alive. Since then she is well. She eats and walks and talks. She is well.

Nell is gone. *

*Hester is telling people that Nell has gone to you in Wheeling, for her health. I ask you, as a Christian woman, to say that it is so, if anybody asks. It is not so.

Nell has not gone to Wheeling. I do not know where Nell has gone. I know that on the morning of the 21st there were two beds slept in, and the third was cold, and made up tight, and that Edith would not stop crying, and that Hester went from room to room all that day, uncovering the glasses I had covered, and talking to them. *

*I do not know what to tell you about Clara.

She is my daughter. She has Clara’s face, and she answers to Clara’s name. But she ate her breakfast this morning with her left hand. And Clara has always used her right.

And when I came into the kitchen, she was standing by the window looking out at the yard. And she turned round to me and smiled. And Mrs. Maul, I have seen my girl smile 10,000 times, and I have never seen her smile like that.

I do not know which of my daughters came down to breakfast this morning. *

*Please burn the likeness Hester sent you. Please do not let it be near any glass. *

*Your brother, Thomas Sale.

*

Peg folded the letter and laid it on the tissue paper. Doris had not left the room this time. She was standing by the window with her arms folded, looking out at the snow in the yard, and when Peg looked up at her, she said without turning round, “Read the next one. ”

The second envelope was addressed in Hester’s hand to Mrs.

August Maul, at the old address in Wheeling. The postmark was Renfield, April the 1st, 1899. The letter inside was a single sheet, and Peg could not read it. She could see that it was Hester’s hand—the same round schoolroom letters, the same slope, the same habit of making the capital H with a little loop at the crossbar.

But every word on the page was written backward. The letters faced the wrong way. The lines ran from the right edge of the paper to the left. It was perfect mirror writing, from the salutation to the signature, without one mistake or one hesitation, as if the woman who wrote it had never in her life written any other way.

Peg asked Doris whether she had a hand mirror. Doris turned round from the window. She looked at Peg for a long moment. Then she said, “No.

”

Peg explained that she only needed it for a minute, to read the letter. Doris answered, “There is a hand mirror in the top drawer of my dressing table upstairs, and it has been wrapped in a pillowcase since 1941, and I am not going to unwrap it in this house with that letter on the table. My mother tried it. My mother held that letter up to the landing glass the night she read them all, to read what was written.

That was the night I saw the little girl behind me. You may take the letter with you. Take it home, and read it there. ”

So Peg did, and so must we, for now wait with her until she was home.

The third envelope was the strangest of all. It was addressed in a different hand again—a strong, upright, rather old-fashioned hand—to Mrs. Thomas Sale, Mill Street, Renfield, Ohio. It had been stamped and posted in Wheeling in March of 1899.

And across the front, in purple ink, somebody at the Renfield post office had stamped the words: *Refused by addressee. Returned to sender. *

The envelope had come back to Wheeling. It had never been opened.

Doris explained, “That is my grandmother’s hand. She wrote to Aunt Hester in March of ’99, and Aunt Hester sent it back without opening it. My grandmother kept it. My mother never opened it.

I never opened it. It has been sealed for ninety-seven years. ”

Peg asked her whether she wanted it opened. Doris was quiet for a while.

At last she answered, “I want it out of my house. Whether it is opened or not. If you open it, you open it, and then you take it with you. ”

Peg told her she would open it.

She took a letter knife from her bag and slit the top edge of the envelope very carefully, as she had slit open a thousand old envelopes in her working life, and drew out what was inside. There was a letter, a single sheet folded in three, and folded inside the letter there was something stiff and small—a strip of card, perhaps an inch and a half wide and four inches tall, cut very straight on both long edges with a pair of good scissors. Peg unfolded the letter first. She did not look at the strip.

She insisted later that she knew what it was before she saw it, and she did not want to see it before she read what Winifred had written. *Hester,*

*I have your letter saying your Nell has been sent to me. No child has come to this house. No child has come to Wheeling.

I have asked at the depot and at the boat landing, and nobody has seen a little girl traveling alone. I do not know what you have done, or what has been done, and I do not want to know. *

*I am sending back the likeness of your girls that you sent me in October. Part of it.

I put it on my dresser when it came, as you asked me to. On the first night, I woke at 3, and it was face down. I set it up again. On the next night, it was face up, and I had laid it face down myself before I went to bed.

August told me I was imagining things. On the third night, August woke and swore there was a child at the foot of our bed. When I lit the lamp, there was nobody there. The card was standing up on the dresser, facing the bed.

*

*I have cut her out. I have cut the middle one out of the picture with my sewing scissors. And I have burned the two sides in my stove—Clara and Edith. God forgive me, because I could not bear to have the one without the others.

And I could not bear to have the others without the one, either. And I did not know what else to do. I am sending you the middle. I will not keep her.

I will not burn her. I am afraid of what would come out of the stove. She is yours, Hester. You called her.

You keep her. *

*I will pray for Clara. If there is still a Clara to pray for. *

*Your sister, Winifred*

When Peg laid the letter down, she picked up the strip of card and turned it over.

It was the middle third of a cabinet card. The same velvet bench, the same painted garden behind, the same patterned carpet at the bottom edge. The cut on either side ran straight down through the bench, so close to the figure in the middle that it had taken a sliver of the white sleeve on each side. And there, in the center of the strip, sat the middle girl alone—her hands folded right over left, her boots buttoned up the insides, her pale face, her dark, wide, empty eyes.

Without her sisters on either side of her, Peg recalled, she looked smaller. And she looked, for the first time, as though she were waiting for somebody. Doris asked from across the room, “Is that what I think it is? ”

Peg nodded.

Doris whispered, “It has been in my attic for fifty-five years. It has been in this family for ninety-seven years. My grandmother told my mother she had sent it back. She did send it back, and it came back to her.

”

Peg asked her whether she had ever, in all those years, seen anything else in the house—anything apart from the night in 1941. Doris answered, “Every so often, my whole life, I have woken in the night and been certain someone was standing at the foot of my bed, watching how I sleep. I always thought it was the house. Old houses creak.

I always thought it was nerves. ” She looked at the strip in Peg’s hand. “It was not nerves. Please take it.

Please take it now. ”

Peg wrapped the strip of card in a clean sheet of tissue paper and slid it inside an envelope of its own, and she put that envelope into the inside pocket of her coat. She packed up Hester’s mirror-written letter and Winifred’s letter and Thomas’s letter in a folder. Doris walked her to the door.

On the porch, Doris did something Peg did not expect. She took Peg’s hand in both of hers and held it for a moment, as you would hold the hand of somebody going on a long journey. “Mrs. Ostrander, you have the card at home, the one with the writing on the back.

Is that right? ”

Peg told her it was. Doris went on. “Then you have two of them now.

The three and the one. Do you understand what I am telling you? ”

Peg admitted she did not. Doris said, “Do not let them sit together again.

”

Peg drove home through the snow with the strip in her inside pocket over her heart. She remembered it as the longest drive of her life, though it was less than two hours, and that the strip of card in her pocket seemed to grow colder the farther she drove from Wheeling, and the nearer she came to Renfield, and to her own kitchen, where the card with the two sisters, on either side of an empty-looking, waiting middle girl, lay in a drawer tied shut with a dish towel. She admitted to having a thought on that drive that she could not get rid of. The thought was this: that her own card had three girls on it, and the strip in her pocket had one, and that if a person were to set the strip down on the table beside the card, there would be four girls on that table.

And one of them would be counted twice. She did not take the strip into her house. She drove past her own lane and on into Renfield, and she parked on Chestnut Street, and she rang the bell of the historical society, though it was dark and snowing and long after closing. Walter Grub answered the door.

He saw her face, and he saw her hand pressed flat against the pocket of her coat, and he did not ask her anything. He brought her in. He took the envelope from her, with the strip of card inside it, and carried it into the back room and locked it in a steel cabinet that the society used for its most fragile documents. And he gave her the key.

“You keep the key, Peg,” he told her. “I will keep the cabinet, and you will keep the card at your house, and they will sit in two different buildings for as long as either of us is alive. ”

She asked, “And after that? ”

Walter said, “After that, we will have to trust somebody.

”

Then she drove home, went into her kitchen, and turned on every light. She did not open the drawer. She went into her bathroom, closed the door, and took Hester Sale’s letter of April 1899 out of the folder and held it up in front of the mirror over the sink. And there, at last, the backward words turned round and became words in the round school hand.

Peg read them in the mirror. It took her a long time, because her hands were not steady and the letter shook in the glass. *Win, I have my Clara back. She is well and strong, and she eats and laughs, and she is the best girl in the world.

I do not know why I am writing to you backward. I sat down to write the right way round, and my hand would not do it. It has not done it since the 20th. *

*I think that when a door opens, it opens both ways, and a little of whoever is standing nearest goes through.

I am not sorry. I want you to know that I am not sorry. I wanted my third girl, and I called her, and she came, and she is here now. She is inside Clara, and Clara is better for it, and that is all I wanted.

All three of them under one roof. *

*But at night I hear a little girl crying in the big glass in our room. Thomas has turned it to the wall and nailed a quilt over it, and still I hear her. She calls me Mama.

She cries, “Mama, it is cold. ” She begs, “Mama, let me in. ” And I lie awake, and I do not know which of my girls it is. I do not know which one I let out, and which one I shut in.

*

*Do not cover your glasses for my sake. If you cover them, she cannot see out. And she is so lonely. *

When she had read it through, she folded it up very small and went out of the bathroom and stood in her hallway for a while, with her back against the wall.

Then she went and found a towel, and hung it over the bathroom mirror, and she did not take it down again for the rest of her life. There was one more person in that house on Mill Street in the winter of 1899 who had kept a written record. Peg found him in January of 1997, in a reading room in Columbus. Dr.

Lucius Finn had practiced medicine in Renfield from 1879 until his death in 1916. He was the doctor Orpha Lusk had sent for on the night of the birth, and the doctor Hester mentioned in her letters. He had kept casebooks, as most country doctors did—small notebooks in which he wrote down every visit, every complaint, every remedy, and every fee. After his death, his widow had given them to the library of the state medical association, where they sat on a high shelf for eighty years.

Peg drove to Columbus on a Wednesday. The librarian brought her the casebooks for 1898 and 1899 on a little wheeled cart and left her alone with them at a long oak table under a green-shaded lamp. Dr. Finn’s handwriting was small and precise and full of abbreviations.

He was not a man who wrote about his feelings, but he was a good observer. And a good observer who writes down what he sees plainly, without deciding in advance what it means, can be more frightening than any diary. *December the 3rd, 1898. Sale, Mill Street.

Eldest girl, Clara, 6 years. Lethargy, pallor. Poor appetite, some weeks. No fever.

Lungs clear. Pulse regular but feeble. Glands not swollen. Throat clean.

No sign of diphtheria or consumption. Prescribed iron tonic and beef tea. Mother asked me to examine the other children. Youngest girl, Edith, healthy.

Third girl, Nell, very healthy in appearance. *

Then below it, a second entry on the same day, in the same small hand, but written, Peg thought, a little more slowly. *Note. Could not find a pulse in the third girl at the wrist.

Tried both wrists. At the neck, there is a motion under the skin, but it is not the beat of a heart. It is irregular and fluttering. Hands of the child at the temperature of the room.

Not cold, not warm. The temperature of the room. Exactly, as the bedpost is. Mother insists she has never been ill.

I believe it. *

*Held the lamp close to examine the eyes. The pupils of the third girl did not contract. They remained fully dilated, with the lamp an inch from them.

Child did not blink or turn away. I have seen this in patients with injuries to the brain, and in the dead. The child is not injured. The child is not dead.

*

*She looked at me throughout the examination, and when I had finished, she said, “Thank you, doctor,” in her sister Clara’s voice. *

Peg turned the page. *December the 19th. Sale.

Clara worse. Weight loss. Sleeps 14 hours. The third girl sits by her and holds her hand, and the mother will not have her moved.

I held my small looking glass to Clara’s lips to judge her breath, which was faint. The glass clouded properly. Then the mother asked me to do the same for the third girl, so that she would not feel left out. I did so.

The glass did not cloud. I held it to her lips for half a minute. It stayed clear. I looked into it to see whether I had the angle wrong.

The child’s mouth was shut in the glass. Her mouth was open. I put the glass in my bag, and have not used it since. *

*January the 26th, 1899.

Sale. Clara very ill. Heartwise, and wasting from the bed. I do not know what ails her.

It is as though she were being drawn out of herself by slow degrees, as you draw water from a well with a long cord. I have advised the father to send the third child away to relations. He tells me he has tried, and that she comes back. *

*February the 20th.

Called to Sale at 9 in the evening. Clara sinking. Pulse very weak and very fast, then very slow. Extremities cold.

Eyes half open, not responding. I told the father to prepare himself. Gave a little brandy and digitalis. Stayed until near midnight.

When I left, the mother was asleep in the chair, and the father was sitting on the stair with his head in his hands. Edith was asleep in the small bed by the wall. The third girl was standing at the foot of Clara’s bed, with her hands folded, watching her. She had not moved from that spot in three hours.

I asked her to go to bed. She answered that she would go to bed when Clara was finished. I did not understand her, and I did not ask. *

Peg read that line twice.

*When Clara was finished. *

The entry for the next day was very short. *February the 21st. Sent for at 7 in the morning.

Found Clara sitting up in bed, eating porridge. Pulse full and strong. Color good. No fever.

She smiled at me. I examined her and found her well. I do not understand it. The third child was not in the house.

The mother tells me she has gone to relations. *

And then, on the 22nd, an entry that Dr. Finn had clearly come back to, because the ink of the last lines was a different shade from the ink of the first. *February the 22nd.

Sale. Clara entirely recovered. Up and dressed. Ate a large breakfast.

Father very quiet. Mother very cheerful. I listened to the child’s chest. Lungs clear.

Heart strong and regular. *

*Heart on the right side. *

*I listened again. I listened for a long time.

The heart of Clara Sale beats on the right side of her chest, where the left is in other people. The great vessels seem to lie the wrong way also, as far as I can judge. *

*I have listened to this child’s chest more times than I can count. I listened to it the night she was born.

I listened to it on the 3rd of December, and on the 19th of December, and on the 20th of February at 9 in the evening, when she was dying. On every one of those occasions, her heart was on the left. *

*There is a condition, very rare, in which all the organs of the body are reversed, as in a looking glass. It is present from birth.

It does not happen in a night. *

*Below that,* in the different ink, written later: *She has begun to use her left hand. Mother claims she was always left-handed. She was not.

I delivered this child’s mother. I have known this family for 20 years. I will not visit them again. *

That was all.

The casebooks went on for another seventeen years, through the deaths and births and broken bones of Harrow County, and the name Sale appeared in them only once more—in the spring of 1907, beside the death of Hester Sale, aged 39. And there, in the margin, in the same small precise hand, Dr. Finn had written only: *Found in the front bedroom, with a quilt torn from the glass. Cause: heart.

*

Peg drove home from Columbus in the dark. She noticed that night that she could not stop looking at the windows of the houses she passed. Every lit window was a small bright square in the dark, and in each one, for a moment, as the car went by, she thought she saw the shape of somebody standing just inside the glass, looking out at the road. She told herself it was only people—farm wives at the sink, old men at the kitchen table.

But she noticed, too, that in every window the shape she thought she saw was small, and standing very straight, and that it never moved, even when the car went by, the way a person at a sink would turn her head at the sound of a passing engine. She did not look at the windows after that. She kept her eyes on the road, and she did not look at the rearview mirror either, though she knew she ought to, all the rest of the way home. Peg went home that evening and laid out everything she had gathered on her kitchen table—every note and photocopy in order, from the birth register to the casebooks.

Everything except the card in the drawer. She sat and looked at it all for a long time. She had a mother’s letters and a father’s single letter and a midwife’s ledger and a photographer’s private notes and a doctor’s casebooks. She had the records of the town, the census, and the school register, and the stone.

She had a sister’s letter, and a strip of card in a steel cabinet. Every one of those sources had been written by somebody standing outside the room where it happened, looking in. What she did not have was a voice from inside the room. There had been three girls in that house on the night of February the 20th, 1899.

One was Nell, and whatever Nell was, she had not left any account of herself. One was Clara—or the one who woke up as Clara. And one was Edith, the youngest—the one Dr. Finn had seen asleep in the small bed by the wall, the one Thomas said would not stop crying the next morning.

The 1900 census put Edith at eight years old. If Edith had lived an ordinary length of life, she might have lived into the 1960s or the 1970s. Peg had already looked for her under *Sale* in the county death index and found nothing. That was only to be expected; a girl named Sale in 1900 would most likely have married and died under another name.

So Peg went back to the marriage registers, and she found it in an afternoon. *Edith May Sale, 21, of Mill Street, to Robert Morrow, 24, a railway telegrapher, June of 1913. * And in the county death index, she found *Edith Sale Morrow, died at Renfield, the 9th of August, 1974, aged 82. *

1974.

Peg had been forty-two that year. She had been working in the recorder’s office. She had very possibly passed the old woman in the street. She drove to the historical society the next Saturday and told Walter what she had found.

Walter looked at her for a long time over his reading glasses and said, “Morrow. Edith Morrow. Good Lord. ”

He went to a filing cabinet in the corner of the front room, an old wooden card index that held the catalog of the society’s collections, and pulled open a drawer, and went through the cards, and took one out, and laid it on the desk in front of her.

It was a typed index card, yellowed at the edges. *Oral history collection. Morrow, Edith S. , born 1892, Renfield.

Interviewed at her home, Locust Street, by Mrs. Gail Tennant, the 14th of October, 1971. One reel, 7-inch, about 90 minutes. Subjects: Childhood on Mill Street; the Cooperage; the Flood of 1913; railway life.

RESTRICTED at the request of the speaker: not to be played until after her death. *

And beneath that, in pencil, in a different hand, a note that Walter believed had been written by the society’s old secretary, long since dead:

*Mrs. Tennant asked that this reel be stored apart from the photograph collection. She did not say why.

*

Walter admitted, “I catalogued that reel myself in ’74, the year I started here. I never listened to it. We had dozens of them—old folks talking about the flood and the trolley line. I had no idea who she was.

I had no idea she had been a Sale. ” He shook his head. “Sixty years of old ladies on Locust Street, Peg, and one of them was the youngest of the three. ”

The reel was in a gray cardboard box in the back room, on a shelf by itself, far from the photograph cabinets, just as Mrs.

Tennant had asked. The society still had the old reel-to-reel machine. Walter carried it out to the reading table and plugged it in and threaded the brown tape through the heads with fingers that had done it a hundred times. The machine hummed as it warmed up.

He asked, “Do you want me to stay? ”

Peg asked him to stay. He pressed the key. The reels began to turn.

For a little while there was nothing but the hiss of old tape and the faint sound of a clock ticking somewhere in a room on Locust Street, twenty-five years before. Then a woman’s voice—young, pleasant, a little nervous—gave the date and her own name, and explained that she was speaking with Mrs. Edith Morrow at her home. And then another voice.

Very old, a little cracked, but clear. A voice that took its time. “I will tell you about the trolley and the flood, my dear, because that is what you came for, and because I want there to be something on this tape that anybody could listen to,” the voice began. “And then I am going to tell you about my sisters.

Both of them. And after that, I would like you to turn off the machine, and go home, and not come back. ”

The first part of the tape is exactly what the index card promised. For about forty minutes, Edith Morrow talked about the trolley line that ran from Renfield to Coshocton until 1926, and the great flood of March 1913 when the Salow came up over Front Street and Pel’s Hardware had four feet of brown water in it, and her husband’s work at the railway depot, and the price of things, and the names of the shops.

Her voice was steady and dry and often funny. Gail Tennant laughed a good deal on the tape. You can hear that she liked the old woman. Then there is a pause.

You can hear a cup being set down on a saucer. And Edith says, “Now then. What follows is the only account we have of what happened in that house, from someone who lived in it as a child. ”

Peg transcribed it in full over many evenings, with the society’s machine and a pair of headphones.

Her transcript is still in the society’s files. What follows is drawn from it, in Edith’s own words wherever her words can be used, and set down as nearly as possible as she spoke them, slowly, with long pauses, in the voice of a woman of seventy-nine looking back across the better part of a century. “I do not remember a time before Nell,” Edith said. “You must understand that first.

People think, when I tell them this, that I must remember the day she came. I do not. My earliest memory is of the three of us in the kitchen on Mill Street, sitting on the floor by the stove, and my mother singing, and Nell sitting between Clara and me. She was always between us, in every memory I have of being small.

She is in the middle. “And I knew she was different. Children know. I knew it the way you know which stair creaks.

She never cried. She never fell down unless we fell down first. She never laughed unless we laughed. And when she laughed, it was a little after, as if she had to hear how it was done.

When Clara learned to whistle, Nell could whistle the next morning—the same tune, with the same mistake in the middle that Clara always made. “She did not sleep. I would wake in the night, and the lamp in the hall would be turned low, and Nell would be standing at the foot of our beds, with her hands folded, just standing, looking at us. Mostly at Clara.

Once I asked her what she was doing, and she told me, ‘Watching how. ‘ I asked her, ‘How what? ‘ And she answered, ‘How to be asleep. How to be Clara.

How to be inside. ‘ I did not know what she meant. I was four. I went back to sleep.

“The strange thing, my dear, is that I loved her. I want that on the tape. I loved her the way you love your sister. She was gentle with us.

She never pinched or pulled hair. She would sit with Clara when Clara was poorly, and hold her hand for hours. She was the most patient child I ever knew. It was only that her patience was the patience of a cat at a mouse hole.

I did not understand that until much later. ”

Gail Tennant asked her on the tape what she remembered about the mirrors. Edith was quiet for a while. “There were a great many in that house,” she said.

“Most of them had come from my grandmother Gerity’s people, and Mother loved them. The big one in the front bedroom most of all. When we were small, Mother would take us in there in the afternoons, and sit us in front of it, the three of us in a row, on the rag rug, and brush our hair, and talk to the glass. Not to us.

To the glass. She would say, ‘Look, here are your sisters. See how pretty they are? See how Clara holds her head?

See how Edith smiles? ‘ As if there were somebody in the glass who needed to be taught. “And sometimes there was. I remember seeing four of us in that glass.

Clara and me and Nell, sitting on the rug, and a fourth little girl standing behind us in the glass, only, with her hands folded. When I turned round, there was nobody behind us. When I turned back to the glass, the fourth girl was gone, and Nell was sitting very still, and she was smiling at me in the glass. Not in the room.

In the room, she was looking straight ahead. Only in the glass was she smiling at me. “Papa covered them all, later, and Mother uncovered them. That went on for years.

Old Mrs. Lusk came and nailed black cloth over everyone, and Mother pulled the tacks out in the night. I used to lie awake and listen to her doing it—tap, tap, with the pliers—humming, and Nell would be sitting on the stair watching her. ”

Gail asked her about the photograph.

Edith laughed—a short, dry laugh. “Ah. The likeness. You know about that?

Of course you do. Everybody in this town has a copy in a drawer somewhere, and none of them knows it. “I remember it very well. It was a Sunday after church, in October.

Mother had made us new white dresses, all alike. Papa would not come. He stood at the gate when we went, and he called to Mother, ‘Hester, if you do this, do not bring all three of them home. ‘ She did not answer him.

I did not understand what he meant. “We climbed the stair to the studio. Mr. Ambrose was an old man with white whiskers.

He gave us peppermints. He sat us on a long blue bench, with Clara on one end and me on the other end, and Nell in the middle. He put iron things behind our heads to hold us still, and they hurt. He did not put one behind Nell.

“Then he went under his black cloth, and we sat. And I was not supposed to move, but I moved my eyes. I looked at the camera. It had a great round brass eye, with a glass in it.

And in the glass, very small, I could see the three of us on the bench, the way you see yourself in the back of a spoon. And in the glass, Nell was not looking at the camera. In the glass, Nell had turned her head, and was looking at Clara. Right at her.

Close, close enough to touch noses. And on the bench, Nell was sitting quite straight, looking straight ahead at the camera, just as she had been told. “I felt Clara go cold beside me. Not beside me—she was at the other end—but I felt it, as if a door had been opened in winter.

And on the third time Mr. Ambrose counted, Clara cried out. And I saw in the brass eye that Nell, in the glass, had put her mouth to Clara’s mouth, the way you would if you were trying to breathe into somebody who had stopped breathing. Only the other way about.

She was not breathing in. She was drawing out. ”

There is a long silence on the tape there. You can hear the clock ticking.

Then Gail Tennant’s voice, very small, asking if Mrs. Morrow would like to stop. Edith answered, “No. I have waited seventy-three years to tell somebody this.

I am not going to stop now. ”

“Clara was never well after that day. You know that, I think. She grew thinner and paler and quieter.

She slept and slept. Nell sat with her all that winter. And the strange thing—the thing I noticed even as a little girl of six—was that as Clara went quieter, Nell got louder. Nell began to talk more.

To laugh on her own, not after us. She began to eat. She had never eaten much. And now she ate like Clara used to eat, with her elbows on the table, the way Mother always scolded Clara for.

She began to say the things Clara said. Clara used to say, ‘Oh, bother,’ when she dropped something. Nell began to say, ‘Oh, bother. ‘ And one day in January, I heard Mother call Clara from the kitchen, and it was Nell who answered, and she answered in Clara’s voice, and Mother did not notice.

And Clara in the bed did not answer at all. “Clara asked me once, that winter, when we were alone, whether I could still tell which one of us she was. I told her, ‘Of course I could. ‘ She answered, ‘Good.

Hold on to that, Edie. ‘ She called me Edie. Nell never did. Nell always called me Edith.

‘Hold on to that,’ Clara said, ‘because I think I am going to forget. ‘”

Then Edith told Gail Tennant about the night of February the 20th. “Dr. Finn had been and gone.

I heard him tell Papa on the stair that Clara would not last the night. Papa was sitting on the stair crying. I had never heard my father cry. Mother had fallen asleep in the chair by the stove downstairs.

I was in my little bed by the wall. There were three beds in that room. Mine by the wall, and Clara’s in the middle, and Nell’s by the window—though Nell never slept in hers. “I woke a long time after midnight.

The lamp in the hall had gone out. There was snow outside, and the moon was on the snow, and the light from it came in through the window, very white and cold, and lay across the floor and across the foot of Clara’s bed. Nell was standing in it. At the foot of Clara’s bed, with her hands folded.

And the window behind her was black, because it was night, and a window at night is a looking glass. Old Mrs. Lusk had told Mother that a window at night is a glass. “And in the black window, I could see the room.

I could see the three beds. I could see Clara in hers, very small, under the quilt. I could see myself in mine, sitting up. And I could see Nell’s back, standing at the foot of Clara’s bed.

“Only in the window, Nell was not standing at the foot of the bed. In the window, Nell was already in the bed, lying beside Clara, with her arms around her. “I looked at the room. Nell was standing at the foot of the bed.

I looked at the window. Nell was in the bed. I looked from one to the other, back and forth, I do not know how many times. And then the Nell in the room unfolded her hands, and walked to the side of Clara’s bed, and lifted the quilt, and got in.

Very quiet. Very careful, as if she did not want to wake her. And she put her arms around Clara, just as she was doing in the window. And she put her face against Clara’s face.

“And then, my dear, I looked at the window again. “There was one girl in Clara’s bed in the window. One, lying very still, with her eyes shut. And there was a girl standing at the foot of the bed in the window, where Nell had been standing—in the moonlight, with her hands folded in front of her.

She was wearing Clara’s nightgown. She had Clara’s hair, all tangled from the pillow. She was looking at me, out of the window, out of the glass, and she was crying, without making any sound at all. The way you cry when you have been told you must be quiet.

“It was Clara. It was my sister, standing on the other side. “I looked at the room. There was nobody at the foot of the bed in the room.

There was only one girl in Clara’s bed. And she opened her eyes, and turned her head on the pillow, and looked at me across the moonlight. And her eyes were wide and black, and the moon was right on them, and they did not get any smaller. She said, ‘Go to sleep, Edie.

‘

“She called me Edie. “I looked back at the window, and the girl standing in it put her hand flat against the inside of the glass, as if she wanted to come through. And then the moon went behind a cloud, and the window was only a window, and I could not see anything in it at all. ”

There is another long silence on the tape.

Then Edith’s voice again, steadier, as though she had decided to get to the end. “In the morning, Clara was sitting up and eating porridge. Dr. Finn came and called it a miracle.

Nell’s bed was cold, and made up tight, and Mother told everyone Nell had gone to Aunt Win in Wheeling. And after a few weeks, nobody remembered there had been a Nell. Not the neighbors. Not the teacher.

Mother did, and Papa did, and I did. Nobody else. It was as if the town had only been holding her name for her while she was here. And when she did not need it anymore, they let it go.

“I have spent my life with the woman who woke up in my sister’s bed. We grew up together. We went to school together. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding.

People said we were close. We were not close. I never once, in all those years, let her sit beside me in front of a glass. I never once let her stand behind me when I did my hair.

And she never asked. She knew why. “She writes with her left hand. She parts her hair on the other side.

When she laughs, she laughs a little after everybody else. And all my life, in every glass I have ever passed—in every shop window at night, and every puddle in the road, and every spoon on every table—I have looked for my sister. For the real one. The one standing on the other side, with her hand on the glass.

“And sometimes, my dear, I see her. ”

Gail Tennant asked her on the tape whether she ever saw her still. Edith answered, “Last week. In the bathroom mirror, when I was brushing my teeth, standing behind me.

She is still six years old. She is still in her nightgown. She still has her hand up. She has never stopped trying to come back through.

”

And then she said, “Turn off the machine now, dear, and go home. And when you go past the window in my hall, do not look into it. ”

There is a click. And then, though the recording should have ended there, the tape runs on for another eleven seconds.

Peg listened to those eleven seconds many times, and so did Walter, and neither of them could ever agree on what they heard. There is the hiss of the tape, and the ticking of the clock, and the sound of somebody moving in the room. And then, very faint, close to the microphone, a child’s voice saying one word. Walter thought the word was *Edie.

*

Peg thought it was *Clara. *

Hester Sale lived eight more years. The town remembered her, when it remembered her at all, as a quiet, pleasant woman who kept a tidy house and went to church and doted on her two daughters. Dr.

Finn’s casebook records that she died in the spring of 1907, in the front bedroom, with a quilt torn off the big glass. Thomas found her in the morning. She was sitting on the floor in front of it, in her nightgown, with one hand flat against the glass. Her eyes were open.

He told the minister who buried him many years later that the mark of her hand stayed on that glass for weeks, and that it would not wipe off, because it was on the other side. Thomas Sale broke the big glass the day after the funeral. He carried it out to the yard, broke it with a cooper’s mallet, and buried the pieces under the apple tree. He lived another twenty-four years in the house on Mill Street, and in all that time there was not a single looking glass in it.

He shaved by feel. When he died in 1931, the men from the town who cleared the house found every window covered on the inside with brown paper, so that nothing in the house could see itself after dark. The minister who buried him was a young man then—the Reverend Harland Dunn, newly come to the Methodist church on Elm Street. He had visited Thomas several times in the last month of his life, and he set down an account of those visits in a letter to his bishop, which survives in the church’s files.

Thomas, by then, was sixty-eight and nearly blind. He sat all day in a straight chair in the kitchen, with his back to the papered window. He would not let the young minister sit facing it either. On the last visit, Thomas asked him to read a psalm.

Afterward, he was quiet for a long time. Then he told the minister that he heard a tapping most nights, very soft, on the other side of the brown paper over the kitchen window. Not on the outside of the glass, he insisted. On the inside of it.

Between the glass and the paper. As if somebody small were standing in the pane itself, knocking to be let into the room. The minister asked him who he thought it was. Thomas answered that he had spent thirty-two years trying not to decide.

He had two daughters living, he told the minister, and he had buried one under a lamb in the riverside ground. And somewhere in all of that there was a fourth—or there had been—and he no longer knew which of them was knocking. He only knew that he would not open the paper to see, because whichever of his girls it was, he could not bear to look her in the face and be wrong. He died two nights later.

The woman who came in to cook for him found him in his chair in the morning. The brown paper over the kitchen window had been torn from the inside, in a single small rip, about the height of a child’s shoulder. The glass behind it was whole. And on the glass, very faint, there were the marks of five small fingers, pressed flat.

Edith married in 1913 and moved to Locust Street. She had two sons. She lived, as far as anybody in Renfield knew, an ordinary life. And Clara grew up.

Peg went back, in the spring of 1997, to the carton from the Bondorf sale, the one she had bid a dollar on. She had set aside the other photographs in it on the first night and had never looked at them again. Now she went through them one by one. Near the bottom of the pile, she found a wedding portrait—a larger mount, the kind of studio card that was fashionable in the early 1920s, gray, with a deckled edge.

A woman of about thirty, in a dropped-waist dress of pale silk and a long veil, standing beside a seated man in a dark suit with a high collar. On the back, in pencil: *Clara and Howard, June the 10th, 1922. * And a studio stamp from Coshocton, not Renfield. Clara Sale had gone twenty miles to have her wedding portrait made, by a photographer who had never seen her before.

The woman in the picture had the face—the same round brow, the same small straight nose, the same slightly heavy lower lip, grown up. She was not smiling. Her husband was smiling a little. She was looking straight at the camera.

Peg took out her magnifying glass. Howard Whitman’s eyes were ordinary. Small pupils, a bright little catch light in each, toward the upper right, where the studio window must have been. Clara’s pupils were wide and black.

And she had a catch light that was new, but it was on the wrong side. It sat toward the upper left of each eye, as if, standing beside her husband in the same room, a foot away from him, she was being lit from a window on the opposite wall. As if she were standing in the same room, but reversed. A mirror image of a room.

And on her left hand, holding a small bouquet against the silk of her dress, she wore her wedding ring. On her right hand, there was nothing. Peg stared at that ring for a long while. A woman in Ohio in 1922 wore her wedding ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, as women still do.

Clara’s ring was on her left hand. That was right. That was ordinary. But in the picture, Clara was holding the bouquet in her left hand.

And Peg knew, from Finn and from Edith and from Thomas’s letter, that Clara had been left-handed since the 21st of February, 1899. So, of course, she held the flowers in her left. It was the ring that Peg could not stop looking at. Because the ring was on the left hand—the correct hand.

And yet, looking at the whole of that photograph, with the light falling the wrong way on her face, and her part on the wrong side of her head, and her pupils wide open in the studio light, Peg understood that the ring was the only thing on Clara Whitman that was the right way round. As if she had learned it. As if it was the one thing she had made a particular effort to get correct. Clara and Howard Whitman lived on Elm Street in Renfield for eighteen years.

Howard worked at the bank on Front Street. They had no children. Howard died in 1940, of a stroke, at fifty-one. Clara lived on in the house on Elm Street, alone, for another twenty-four years.

For thirty-nine of those years, from 1925 until 1964, Iris Bondorf kept house for her. Iris had died at ninety-one, the year before Peg bought her carton, and so Peg could not ask her anything. But Iris had a niece—a retired nurse named Carol Bondorf Hayes, who lived in Coshocton, and who remembered her aunt’s stories about the old lady on Elm Street very well, and who was glad, she said, to finally tell somebody who would not laugh. Carol explained that the Whitman house had no mirrors.

None at all. Not one, in thirty-nine years. Iris had been told on her first day that she must never bring one in—not even a compact in her handbag. There was a bathroom with a sink, and above the sink, where a mirror would have been, there was a small framed sampler of the Lord’s Prayer.

Mrs. Whitman did her hair by feel, sitting on the edge of her bed, with her eyes closed. The spoons in that house were always laid face down. The windows had heavy drapes, and Mrs.

Whitman drew them herself at sunset, every evening, without fail, before she lit a single lamp. She never went out after dark. She would not walk past the bank’s big plate-glass windows on Front Street, at any hour. If it had rained, she would step around a puddle in the road, with a care that Iris thought was very strange in a grown woman, as if the puddle were a hole she might fall into.

According to Carol, there were only two things her aunt had ever been afraid of in that house, and she told them to Peg in order. The first was that on the few occasions when Iris stayed overnight to nurse Mrs. Whitman through a cold or a bad spell, she would sometimes wake in the small hours in the spare room, and find the old woman standing at the foot of her bed. Not doing anything.

Just standing there, in the dark, with her hands folded in front of her, right over left, looking at Iris while she slept. When Iris asked her, the first time, whether anything was wrong, Mrs. Whitman answered, “No, dear. I was only watching how.

”

The second was a thing that happened in the winter of 1964, a few weeks before the end. Mrs. Whitman had been failing all that winter. She was seventy-one.

One night in February, she asked Iris to sit with her. And while Iris was sitting by the bed, the old woman asked her to go to the bottom drawer of the dresser and bring her the small envelope that was in it. Inside the envelope there was a cabinet card. Three little girls on a velvet bench.

And on the back, two lines, in two hands: *Our three. * And *Do not let them sit together again. *

Iris had never seen it before. Mrs.

Whitman held it in her lap for a long time. Then she said, in a voice Iris had never heard her use—a small voice, like a child’s:

“I took her place. I did not mean to be cruel. I only wanted to be on this side.

It is so cold on the other side, Iris. You cannot imagine how cold. And I watched, and watched, and learned how. And when my mother called me, I came.

And when the door opened, I went in, and she went out. “I have been her for sixty-five years. I have been better at being her than she ever was. And every night of those sixty-five years, she has stood in the glass and watched me do it.

That is why there are no glasses in this house, Iris. Not because I am afraid of what is in them. Because I am ashamed. ”

Then she said, “When I am gone, keep the likeness.

Keep it face down. Never set it in a row with anything. And never, ever, let anyone put it beside the other pieces. Because if the three of us are ever set side by side before a glass again, the door will open again.

And she will come back through, for her place. And I do not know which of us would be on which side when it closed. ”

Clara Sale Whitman died on the 26th of February, 1964—sixty-five years and six days after the night in the moonlight on Mill Street. Iris was with her.

Iris told her niece that at the very end, the old woman opened her eyes and looked toward the drawn curtains of the window, and said, quite clearly, in a voice that was not the small voice: “Clara. There you are. ”

And then she was gone. Her will was short.

She left the house on Elm Street to the Methodist church, her savings to Iris Bondorf, and one instruction. She asked to be buried at Riverside—not beside her husband in the Whitman plot, but at the foot of her parents’ stone, beside the little marble lamb. Peg drove to Riverside the next morning and walked to the row near the fence where the cedars threw their shade. She had knelt there in September and pulled the grass away from the lamb.

She had never looked on the other side of it. There, sunk almost flush with the turf and grown over at the edges, was a small flat bronze marker. It read only: *Clara S. Whitman, 1892–1964.

*

And on the other side of the lamb, a little farther off, a second flat marker that Peg had also missed: *Edith S. Morrow, 1892–1974. *

Edith had asked for it, too. It turned out her sons had been puzzled.

She had told them she wanted to be where she could keep an eye on things. Three graves in a row, at the foot of the Sale stone. Clara on one side, Edith on the other. And in the middle, under the lamb, a child named Lenore, who was born and taken on the 4th of March, 1892.

The third of three. Peg stood there for a long time. She admitted afterward that she did not know which of them she was standing over. She could not tell whether the girl under the lamb was the one who had been born dead, or the one who had been pushed out, or nobody at all.

Nor did she know whether the old woman under the bronze plate marked *Clara* had been Clara, or Nell, or both, or neither. She said the only thing she knew for certain was that there in the cemetery grass, the three of them were sitting together again. Walter Grub had predicted that one day somebody would hold the plates up to the light. He was right.

And it happened in the spring of 2011, a long way from Chestnut Street. Walter did not see it. He died in his sleep in the winter of 1998, at eighty-three, in the house on Sycamore Street where he had lived alone for forty years. Peg found him.

She had come by with a pot of soup, because he had not answered the telephone. He was in his bed, with his reading glasses folded on the nightstand, and every lamp in the house lit. Peg did not see it either, but that is for later. In the autumn of 2009, a man named Raymond Hulse went to a farm auction near Xenia, west of Columbus, and bought three wooden crates of glass negatives for forty dollars.

Hulse was a retired machinist who collected early photography and had a small reputation among other collectors as a man who would buy anything made of glass with an image on it. The crates had come out of the loft of a barn. The farmer’s grandfather, it turned out, had been a collector too, of a more serious kind, and had bought up whole studio stocks in the 1930s and ’40s, when the old photographers died and their families did not know what to do with the plates. Most of what was in the crates was what you would expect: portraits of strangers, prize cattle, a church being built, a Fourth of July parade.

And in a slotted wooden box near the bottom of the third crate, two plates, with a paper label pasted to the end of the box in faded brown ink:

*Ambrose, Renfield. Sale, three daughters. October ’98. Do not set in a row.

*

Hulse did not know the name Sale. He did not know anything about Renfield. But he knew Ambrose was an Ohio studio, and he liked the look of the two plates, which were unusually sharp, and the label made him curious. In the spring of 2011, he took both of them to a photographic conservator in Columbus to have them cleaned and scanned at high resolution.

The conservator’s name was Ellis Marchetti. He was forty-four, careful, unexcitable, with a small studio on the second floor of an old commercial building in the Short North, where he worked for museums and archives and private collectors on glass plates, tintypes, and early film. He had handled thousands of plates. He told a reporter for a Columbus newspaper a year later that he had never thought about any of them after they left his studio.

Until these two. He cleaned the first plate on a Tuesday. He scanned it on a Wednesday, on a large flatbed scanner made for exactly that kind of work, at a resolution so high that a single eye in the finished file was larger than his computer screen. Then he sat down at the screen to look at it, as he looked at every scan, inch by inch, for scratches and dust and flaws in the emulsion.

He started with the faces. Then, as a professional habit, he went to the eyes. He had never heard of Peg Ostrander or Walter Grub or the Sales. He did not know what anybody had seen through a magnifying glass in 1996.

He saw it for himself, just as they had, in order. The girl on the left and the girl on the right had small, closed-down pupils, and in each eye a small bright catch light from the skylight. The girl in the middle had wide black pupils, and no window in them. Marchetti noted it as a curiosity.

Then, because the scan was so large, he did what nobody before him could have done. He kept enlarging the middle girl’s eye, past the point where the iris filled the screen, past the point where the pupil filled the screen, until he was looking at the black of the pupil itself—at the grain of the old emulsion, the tiny clumps of silver that made up the picture. And in the black, there was an image. It was very small, and very faint.

On the original plate, it would have been smaller than the head of a pin. But it was there. And when he adjusted the contrast on his screen, it came up out of the dark the way a room comes up out of the dark when your eyes have had time to adjust. It was a reflection—the kind of reflection that sits on the curved surface of any eye.

But it was not the studio. There was no skylight in it, no camera, no painted garden. It was a small room, with a low sloping ceiling. A window on one side, its panes white with what looked like moonlight.

And in the room, three narrow beds in a row. Two of the beds had shapes in them—the small, humped shapes of sleeping children under quilts. The third bed, nearest the window, was empty and flat. And at the foot of the middle bed, a small figure was standing in the moonlight, too small to see a face.

But it was standing very straight, with its arms held in front of it, the hands together at the waist. Marchetti sat and looked at that for a long time. Then he went to the middle girl’s other eye. He had to make sure.

He explained later that it was not a flaw in one place on the plate. It was in both eyes. The same small room, the same three beds, the same moonlit window, the same small standing figure. He did not yet know what it was.

He did not know about Mill Street, or about the night of the 20th of February, 1899, four months and eleven days after that plate was exposed. He only knew that the middle child, sitting on a velvet bench in a studio in daylight, had been looking at a different room. A room at night. And that whoever was standing at the foot of that bed in her eyes, she had been watching them.

The second thing he found was in the irises. It was a habit of his to study the irises in very sharp plates, because the iris of a human eye is as individual as a fingerprint. The flecks, the rings, the little crypts and furrows in the colored part of the eye are laid down before birth and do not change. Even identical twins have different irises.

He had once used that fact to tell apart two portraits of brothers for a museum that had mixed up their labels. So he laid the girl on the left beside the girl in the middle on his screen, eye to eye. And they were different, as he expected. And then he did a thing that was, he said later, almost a joke—almost an idle thought at the end of a long day.

He flipped the middle girl’s eye on the screen, left to right, as in a mirror. And it matched. Fleck for fleck, ring for ring. Every small dark crypt and pale furrow in the iris of the girl on the left, sitting on the end of the bench, was present in the iris of the girl in the middle, reversed.

It was not a resemblance. It was the same eye, seen in a looking glass. Marchetti went home that night and did not sleep. On the Thursday, he went back to the studio and did the third thing.

He went to the eyes of the girl on the left and enlarged the catch light—the little bright square of the skylight sitting on her pupil—until it filled his screen. In the bright square of the skylight, there was a shape. A small dark silhouette against the white of the sky, as if someone were standing outside the skylight, on the roof, looking down through the glass. It was the silhouette of a child.

One arm was raised. The hand was spread flat against the pane. He told the Columbus reporter, a year afterward, that this was the moment he stopped working on the plates. He told her that he had wrapped them both in acid-free paper and put them back in their box, and called Raymond Hulse that afternoon, and asked him to come and collect them.

He recalled that Hulse had asked him what was wrong, and that he had said only, “Read the label on the box. ”

But that was not quite the whole of it. There was one more thing, and he did not tell the reporter. He told it to the curator of the Harrow County Historical Society, a woman named Janet Puitt, when he drove to Renfield in the summer of 2011 to find out what he had been looking at.

And she wrote it down and put it in the file with Peg’s papers, and it is there still. Marchetti told her that on the Thursday night, after he found the child in the skylight, he stayed late at the studio. He had made a decision. He explained that he was going to look properly once, and then stop.

He had found the society’s name on the internet, and found that it held, according to an old catalog posted online, an Ambrose cabinet card of the Sale girls, donated by a Mrs. M. Ostrander. There was even a small photograph of it in the online listing, of poor quality, taken by some volunteer.

And beside it, in the same listing, a photograph of a narrow strip of card—the middle third of another copy, cut out with scissors. Marchetti confessed that a little after one in the morning, he did a foolish thing. He was tired. He did not believe in any of it.

He told Janet Puitt, “Or I believed in it the way you believe in a story you are being told by a fire. ” He opened his own scan of the plate on the left side of his large screen. He opened the society’s picture of the cabinet card in the center. He opened the picture of the cutout strip on the right.

Three of them, in a row, before a glass. He recalled that for a moment nothing happened. He sat and looked at the three images side by side—the plate, and the card, and the strip—the same three faces, and the same one face again. And he admitted that he noticed, the way you notice a draft, that the studio had grown very cold.

Then the screen flickered, and went black. Not off. He could hear the computer running. The screen had simply gone black, as a screen does when the power to it fails.

And a black screen, at one in the morning, in a dark studio with one lamp on the far wall, is a looking glass. He saw himself in it. His own face, pale. His shoulders, the back of his chair.

The lamp behind him, a small point of yellow. The long, dim room. And standing behind his chair in the black glass, at about the height of his shoulder, there was a little girl, in a white nightgown. Her hair was tangled.

Her hands were not folded. One hand was up—the palm flat, pressed against the inside of the screen, as if it were a window, and she were standing on the other side of it, trying to get in. Marchetti told Janet Puitt that he did not turn round. Some part of him knew.

He told her that if he turned round, there would be nobody there. And that he could not have borne to look back at the screen afterward, and find that she was still in it. So he did not turn round. He sat very still, and he looked at the little girl in the black glass, and she looked at him.

And then he said, “Behind her, deeper in the glass, farther back in the reflected room, there was a second small figure, standing very straight, hands folded right over left, watching the first one. ”

He reached out, without looking, and pulled the plug of the screen out of the wall. When the lamp was the only light in the room, and the screen was a dead gray rectangle with nothing in it, he deleted all three files from his computer. One by one, in the dark, by feel.

He drove home, and sat in his kitchen with the lights on until the sun came up. In the morning, he called Raymond Hulse. Raymond Hulse did not keep the plates. He explained that he had read the label on the box.

He drove them to Renfield himself that August, and gave them to Janet Puitt, and he refused to take a receipt, and he would not stay to see where she put them. Janet Puitt had been warned. She had Peg Ostrander’s papers, and she had Peg’s last letter of instructions, which Peg had written in 2003, the year before she died, and which the society had been following ever since. So she knew exactly what to do with them.

Peg Ostrander lived with the card for eight more years. She never put it on the dresser again. She kept it where it had first spent the night—in the kitchen drawer by the sink, in its envelope, face down, with the dish towel tied around the handle. Every night before she went to bed, she checked the knot.

Every morning, before she made her coffee, she checked it again. Most mornings it was exactly as she had tied it. On a few mornings over the years—perhaps a dozen in all—it was not. The knot would be loosened.

Once, it was untied entirely, and the towel was folded neatly beside the sink, the way you would fold a towel you meant to give back to someone. On those mornings, the envelope was always still in the drawer. But the card inside it was always face up. She did not tell many people.

She told Walter while he lived. She told her minister once, who listened kindly and did not believe her, and was too polite to say so. And in the spring of 2002, when she was seventy, she sat down at the historical society with a young volunteer and a cassette recorder, and told the whole of it—from the estate sale to the bronze markers in the grass—over three long afternoons. That recording is in the society’s files, beside Edith Morrow’s reel.

It is not restricted. Anybody may listen to it. Very few people have. Near the end of the third afternoon, the volunteer asked Peg whether she was afraid of the card.

Peg thought about it for a while. You can hear her thinking on the tape. Then she said:

“No. Not of the card.

I was afraid of the middle one for a long time. I am not anymore. I have spent too long with her. I have read everything anybody ever wrote about her.

I think I understand her a little. She was cold, and she was alone, and she was on the wrong side of something, and she wanted to come in. That is not so very strange. Most of us want that, one way or another.

”

The volunteer, a college student home for the summer, wrote in her notes afterward that Peg smiled when she finished that sentence—a small, tired smile—and looked for a moment toward the window of the reading room. It was a bright June afternoon. There was nothing in the window but the leaves of the maple outside. And then Peg looked away from it, with care, and folded her hands in her lap, the left over the right, as she had always folded them.

The volunteer asked her what she was afraid of, then. Peg answered:

“The other one. The one on the far side of the glass, with her hand up. The real one.

Clara. She has been standing there for over a hundred years. She has watched her own face grow up, and marry, and grow old, and die without her. She has watched it being buried.

And she is still six years old, and she is still in her nightgown, and she has still got her hand up against the glass. I am afraid of what a hundred years of that would do to a child. I am afraid of how badly she must want her place back. And I am afraid that if the door ever opens again, she will not be particular about whose place she takes.

”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “That is why the line on the back of the card is the most important thing in this whole business. Josiah Ambrose understood it. ‘Do not let them sit together again.

‘ It was never a warning about three little girls on a bench. It was a warning about the door. ”

Peg wrote her letter of instructions to the society in the autumn of 2003. She had been ill that year, and she knew it.

The letter is two pages long, typed on her old electric typewriter, and signed in ink. Most of it is an orderly inventory of her research papers, with notes about which documents were originals and which were copies, and where each had come from. She had been a records clerk to the end. The last paragraph is different.

It reads like something she had been composing in her head for a long time. *The card, the strip, and the plates, if the plates are ever found, are to be kept in three separate buildings in the town of Renfield, and never brought under one roof. They are never to be photographed together, displayed together, scanned together, or set side by side in any form—on paper, or on glass, or on any screen. No copy of any one of them is to be hung where it can see itself in a window after dark.

Whoever keeps them after me is to be told why. And whoever keeps them after that person is to be told also. The record must not be lost. If it is lost, somebody will put them in a row out of simple curiosity—as I nearly did, as a careful man in Columbus, or anywhere else, might do one night when he is tired.

And then I do not know what will come through. Or what will be pushed out, to make room for it. *

Peg Ostrander died in the county hospital in Renfield on the 3rd of March, 2004, at the age of seventy-two. It was one day short of the anniversary of the night Orpha Lusk was called to Mill Street.

Peg had noticed the date. She mentioned it to the nurse. The nurse remembered, because Peg had also asked her, that last evening, to hang a towel over the dark window of her room. The things she gathered are where she asked for them to be.

The cabinet card—the one Peg bought for a dollar, with Hester’s line and Ambrose’s line on the back—is in the historical society on Chestnut Street, in a locked drawer in the back room, face down, in an envelope, with a dish towel tied around the handle. Janet Puitt sees no reason to change a system that has worked. She also admits that she checks the knot every morning when she comes in. She has never yet found it undone.

And she will not tell anyone whether she ever expects to. The strip of card—the middle girl, the one Winifred Maul cut out with her sewing scissors in 1899 and mailed to her sister—is in the vault of the county recorder’s office at the courthouse, in a steel box on the top shelf at the back. It is in the room where Peg worked for thirty-one years. The young woman who took over Peg’s desk, who is not so young anymore, keeps the key, and was told why, and has told the person who will come after her.

And the two glass plates from the bottom of Raymond Hulse’s third crate are in the little stone vestry of the Methodist church on Elm Street—the church that owns the house where Clara Whitman lived for forty-two years without a mirror, doing her hair with her eyes closed. They are wrapped in black muslin, in their slotted box, with the old brown label still pasted on the end: *Do not set in a row. * The pastor did not want them. He took them anyway, after Janet Puitt explained.

And he has said a prayer over the box, though he admits he is not sure for whom. Three buildings, a few streets apart, in a small river town on a bend of the Salow. The card on Chestnut Street. The strip on Courthouse Square.

The plates on Elm Street. Never in a row. Never under one roof. And the line that Josiah Ambrose pressed so hard into the back of a piece of cardboard on a doorstep on Mill Street in October of 1898, that you can still feel it with your fingertip from the front of the print, has been obeyed, as far as anyone knows, for every day of the hundred and more years since.

As far as anyone knows. There is one more thing Janet Puitt will tell you, if you ask her, and she does not like to tell it. In the summer of 2015, a family came into the society on a Saturday afternoon. A man and his wife and a girl of about ten, on their way back to Pennsylvania from a reunion in Coshocton.

They had brought an old album that had belonged to the man’s great-grandmother, who had lived on Mill Street as a girl, and they wanted help putting names to the faces. Janet sat with them at the reading table and turned the pages. Weddings. Babies.

A man with a team of mules. And in a window cut into the thick gray page near the back, an Ambrose cabinet card of three little girls on a velvet bench. Janet did not take it out of the album. She told the family that it was a portrait of the Sale girls, 1898, and that the society knew a good deal about them.

The girl of ten asked whether they could see the society’s copy, to compare the two side by side. Janet closed the album. She explained, as gently as she could, that the society’s copy was not available for viewing that day. She asked the family to keep their album closed when they got home, and to keep it away from any window.

And she gave them a copy of Peg’s letter of instructions, to take with them. The man laughed, a little uncertainly. His wife did not. The girl kept looking at the album in her father’s hands.

And Janet noticed, as they were leaving, that she was walking with her hands folded in front of her. Right over left. Janet did not take their name. She has wished ever since that she had.

Because that album went back across the Ohio River, to a house somewhere in Pennsylvania. And she does not know whether anybody in that house has ever taken a magnifying glass to the eyes. She does not know whether the album sits on a shelf beside a mirror. And she does not know whether the girl who wanted to set the two copies side by side has grown up yet, and whether she still wants to.

Because there were a dozen of those cards. Remember, the daybook records it: *One dozen cabinets ordered, paid in full. *

Hester kept one, and it came down through Clara’s drawer to Iris Bondorf’s carton, and to Peg’s kitchen. Hester sent one to Winifred, and Winifred burned two-thirds of it and sent back the middle.

She sent one to Thomas’s sister. She sent one to the cousins in Zanesville—and Walter Grub burned that one in the stove in 1989. That is four. One was on the mantel on Mill Street, and nobody knows what became of it after 1931, when the town cleared the house.

That is five. Seven more of them went somewhere. To neighbors, perhaps. To the minister.

To Mrs. Aldrich next door, who brought round a piece of cake for each of the triplets. To the teacher, Miss Abbott, who marked Nell present every day. To families who did not know there was anything strange about three little girls on a velvet bench.

Because by the spring of 1899, nobody in Renfield could quite remember that there had ever been three. Seven cards. Three little girls on each. Twenty-one small solemn faces, in albums and shoeboxes and the bottoms of dresser drawers, in attics in Ohio and West Virginia, and wherever else the grandchildren of Harrow County have carried their old things in a hundred and more years.

Some of them surely have been thrown away. Some of them have been burned, or lost in floods, or sold at estate sales for a dollar, to people who never looked closely. And some of them, perhaps, are sitting on a shelf in a house tonight, in a frame beside a window, in a row with other family photographs, facing a mirror across a hallway. Waiting.

The way the middle one always waited. Very patiently, for somebody to set three of them side by side, before a glass.