The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

THE MINIATURIST
    by HEIDI JULAVITS
     
    For Lois Duncan
     
    AS THE TIRE CHAINS CONTINUED their maddening irregular clinking and the steeply pitched road disappeared for a third time beneath a snowdrift, Jennifer reminded herself: it was Helen's idea to spend the weekend in the creepy Cascades in mid-February, mere miles from the cabin where, just last year, a man had killed his entire family in a fit of winter melancholy.
    "What's the odometer say?" Maureen asked. She held Helen's handwritten directions to the window to catch what little light eked between the frantic white particles, zooming this way and chat like a flock of crazed, speck-sized pigeons.
    "We've gone four-point-five miles," Jennifer said.
    "I think we missed the Davis Creek turnoff," Maureen said. "It was supposed to be four miles after the general store."
    "We didn't miss the turnoff," Jennifer said. "There hasn't been a turnoff. There hasn't even been a house."
    Maureen shrugged. Clearly she thought Jennifer had missed the turnoff.
    Jennifer white-knuckled the steering wheel and seethed. This whole trip was idiotic-three sort-of sisters spending a "relaxing" weekend before the fire, pretending to be excited about Helen's upcoming wedding to Maureen's ex-boyfriend.
    Ever since Helen asked the two of them to be her only bridesmaids, Maureen had decided that Helen was actually not so bad when, in Jennifer's opinion, Helen was a manipulative and fake-cheerful pain in the ass. Jennifer and Maureen first met Helen in the lawyer's waiting room before the reading of their father's will, eight days after their father had drowned while fly-fishing on the Penatoqua River. A freak accident, that had yet to sink in-as had the fact that their father had a family before their family, and now they had a half sister named Helen who wore a straw hat with a daisy on it and was, as Jennifer later put it, effervescently flipping through a beauty magazine in the antechambers of Murray, Plumb and Murray. Helen the effervescent mourner, who left that afternoon quite a bit richer than either Maureen or Jennifer, had effervescently become their best friend in the past five years, getting drunk on blackberry schnapps and repetitively confiding in them how she'd also lost her mother when she was seven (she died in a fire), subjecting them to dull stories of - the "dear, dear woman"---Aunt Margaret, actually her mother's best friend-who had raised her in the suburbs of Louisville. But Aunt Margaret lived far away, and her friends from UCLA were well-meaning flakes. That explained why she was so immediately fond of her half sisters, with whom she shared nothing in common save a dead father. Dependable, she called them. Stalwart , which Jennifer took to mean she thought they were fat. My real family . The best thing Jennifer could say about Helen was that she was a passionate collector of dollhouses. This made Helen remarkably fun to mock, and mocking Helen helped Jennifer and Maureen continue to feel like members of the same family, now that they didn't have parents to bind them together with commonly shared annoyances.
    Recently, however, this dynamic had changed. Jennifer would start to complain about Helen's wedding invitation (hand-painted on an antique lace handkerchief) or her insistence that the father in her Victorian dollhouse "looks just like our dad!" and Maureen, typically an eager Helen-basher, would vacantly demur, She's actually not so bad.
    This did not prevent Jennifer from trying to enlist Maureen's dormant mean side.
    "Helen's directions suck," she said.
    "There's a blizzard," Maureen pointed out.
    "There's a blizzard, and Helen's directions suck," Jennifer said.
    Maureen didn't respond.
    Finally, a turnoff. Unmarked, as best Jennifer could tell.
    "Take this," Maureen said.
    Jennifer didn't ask why. Jennifer took the turnoff. She was happy to make it Maureen's fault if it turned out to be a stupid decision.
    "What next?" she asked.
    "Keep an eye our for the mailbox