I suck in my breath and hold it there. A pain settles in my chest. My arms and legs go momentarily numb.

The same image is replicated on all three sheets of paper. There’s nothing different about them, nothing that I can see.

The drawings are Otto’s, I tell myself at first because Otto is the artist in the family. The only one of us who draws.

But this is far too primitive, far too rudimentary to be Otto’s. Otto can draw much better than this.

But Tate is a happy boy. An obedient boy. He wouldn’t have come into the attic if I told him not to. And besides, Tate doesn’t draw such violent, murderous images. He could never visualize such things, much less depict them on paper. Tate doesn’t know what murder is. He doesn’t know that people die.

I go back to Otto.

These drawings belong to Otto.

Unless, I think, drawing in a deep breath and holding it there, they belong to Imogen? Because Imogen is an angry girl. Imogen knows what murder is; she knows that people die. She’s seen it with her own eyes. But what would she be doing with Otto’s pencils and paper?

I close the window and turn my back to it. There’s a vintage dollhouse on the opposite wall. It catches my eye. I first found it the same day we arrived, thinking it might have belonged to Imogen when she was a child. It’s a charming green cottage with four rooms, an expansive attic, a slender staircase running up the center of it. The details of it are impeccable. Miniature window boxes and curtains, tiny lamps and chandeliers, bedding, a parlor table, even a green doghouse to match the home, complete with a miniature dog. That first day, I dusted the house out of respect for Alice, laid the family in their beds to sleep until there might be grandchildren to play with it. It wasn’t the type of thing Tate would use.

I go to it now, certain I’ll find the family fast asleep where I left them. Except that I don’t. Because someone has been up here in the attic, coloring pictures, opening windows, meddling with things. Because things in the dollhouse are not how I put them.

Inside the dollhouse, I see that the little girl has risen from bed. She no longer lies in the second-floor bedroom’s canopy bed but is on the floor of the room. The father is no longer in his bed either; he’s disappeared. I glance around, finding him nowhere. Only the mother is there, sleeping soundly in the sleigh bed on the first floor.

At the foot of the bed lies a miniature knife, no bigger than the pad of a thumb.

There’s a box beside the dollhouse, chock-full of accessories. The lid of it is closed, but the latch is unfastened. I open it up and have a look, searching inside the box for the father, but finding him nowhere. I give up my search.

I pull the string and the attic goes black.

As I travel down the steps with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, it dawns on me: the house is quiet. Imogen has turned her offensive music off. When I reach the second-story landing, I see her standing in her doorway, backlit by the bedroom light.

Her eyes are accusatory. She doesn’t ask, and yet I read it in her expression. She wants to know what I was doing in the attic. “There was a light on,” I explain, waiting a beat before I ask, “Was it you? Were you up there, Imogen?”

She snorts. “You’re an idiot if you think I’d ever go back up there,” she says.

I mull that over. She could be lying. Imogen strikes me as a masterful liar.

She leans against the door frame, crosses her arms.

“Do you know, Sadie,” she says, looking pleased with herself, and I realize that she’s never called me by name before, “what a person looks like when they die?”

Suffice to say, I do. I’ve seen plenty of fatalities in my life.

But the question, on Imogen’s tongue, leaves me at a loss for words.

Imogen doesn’t want an answer. It’s for shock value; she’s trying to intimidate me. She goes on to describe in disturbing detail the way Alice looked the day she found her, hanging in the attic from a rope. Imogen had been at school that day. She took the ferry home as usual, came into a quiet house to discover what Alice had done.

“There were claw marks on her neck,” she says, raking her own violet fingernails down her pale neckline. “Her fucking tongue was purple. It got stuck, hanging out of her mouth, clamped between her teeth like this,” she says as she sticks her own tongue out at me and bites down. Hard.

I’ve seen victims of strangulation before. I know how the capillaries on the face break, how the eyes become bloodshot from the accumulation of blood behind them. As an emergency medicine physician, I’ve been trained to look for this in victims of domestic violence, for signs of strangulation. But I imagine that, for a sixteen-year-old girl, seeing your mother in this state would be traumatizing.

“She nearly bit the fucking thing off,” Imogen says about Alice’s tongue. She begins to laugh then, this ill-timed, uncontrollable laugh that gets to me. Imogen stands three feet away, devoid of emotion other than this unseemly gleeful display. “Want to see?” she asks, though I don’t know what she means by this.

“See what?” I ask carefully, and she says, “What she did with her tongue.”

I don’t want to see. But she shows me anyway, a photograph of her dead mother. It’s there on her cell phone. She forces the phone into my hands. The color drains from my face.

Before the police arrived that dreadful day, Imogen had the audacity to take a picture on her phone.

Alice, dressed in a pale pink tunic sweater and leggings, hangs from a noose. Her head is tilted, the rope boring into her neck. Her body is limp, arms at her sides, legs unbending. Storage boxes surround her, ones that were once piled two or three high but now lie on their sides, contents falling out. A lamp is on the ground, colored glass scattered at random. A telescope—once used to stare at the sky out through the attic window, perhaps—is also on its side, everything, presumably, knocked violently over as Alice died. The step stool she used to climb up into the gallows stands four feet away, upright.