Starling House

Opal visits Charlotte, a local librarian, and asks her for information on the Starlings. Charlotte shows her an archive that had been donated by someone from the Gravely family. Opal goes through piles of papers and eventually stumbles across her dead mother’s phone number written on a receipt. She steals this document, then tells Charlotte about her position at Starling House and her encounter with Elizabeth. Charlotte has been doing research on Eden and recently met a woman named Calliope Boone, whose family knew the Starlings. Charlotte does not elaborate on how the Boones and the Starlings were associated. She only says that Calliope is a Black woman, and it is left to Opal to “consider exactly what kind of history a Black family might have with a rich family just south of the Mason-Dixon Line” (85). Charlotte plays a recording of her conversation with Calliope, in which Calliope tells the “true” story of Starling House.

The recording of Calliope reveals that the three Gravely brothers (the same brothers whom Eleanor is suspected to have killed) worked in the coal business. Because they started this business just before the end of legalized slavery in the United States, they purchased several enslaved men to work in their mines, including a man named Nathaniel Boone.