Don't Tell a Soul

by Kirsten Miller

  The snow on the ground was already deep and growing deeper. Fresh powder clung to my coat and piled on my shoulders. Within minutes, I was completely covered. Then the wind changed direction and snow blew into my face. The storm wanted me to stay. As I stumbled blindly through the forest, it became painfully clear that I would never make it to the Bellingers. I was going to die the way April Hughes had.

  * * *

  —

  Right before you freeze to death, you see wonderful things. When I spotted the flickering light in the distance, I was certain I’d arrived at death’s door. I’d lost sensation in my face and legs. My mind was wandering through childhood memories. I felt my father take my hand and guide me toward the little stone building in the middle of the woods.

  Dahlia’s mausoleum almost seemed lived in. The pool in front had frozen over, but a fire was burning inside. I pulled open the door, and a wave of warmth washed over me. I stumbled inside and collapsed onto one of the benches. I watched a puddle of meltwater form beneath me as I slowly returned to my senses.

  Then the door opened, and my uncle appeared in the entrance with a kitchen knife in his hand. He pulled a phone from his pocket and put it up to his ear.

  “She’s in the mausoleum,” he told the person on the other end. “We’ll wait for you here.”

  James took a seat on the bench across from me, but he couldn’t stay still. I wondered how many pills he’d swallowed. As much as I wanted to, I was too exhausted to attack.

  “Is Gavin Turner going to kill me?” I didn’t see any point in mincing words.

  “I wanted to help you. I really did. But you just wouldn’t let me. Your mother always said you were impossible to deal with. I should have listened.”

  “So all of this is my fault?” I asked.

  James shrugged helplessly. “I tried my best,” he said. “But Jane was right. You are a very troubled child.”

  “Because you murdered my father.”

  “Your father was having an affair with my wife,” James said.

  “That’s not true!” I screamed. “My dad went to see Sarah because I told him she was scared of you. When I found their bodies, they were both fully clothed. You were at the house that morning, weren’t you? After I was gone, you made it look like they were having an affair. Then you edited the security tapes so the police wouldn’t know you and I had been there.”

  “None of that proves that Sarah and your father were innocent,” he insisted.

  “James, you were high on amphetamines. You were paranoid.”

  “That doesn’t mean I was wrong to suspect them.”

  I sat back, exhausted. There was no point in arguing. “My mother doesn’t know what you did, does she?” Before I died, I needed to know for sure.

  “I never told her. But then again, she never asked many questions. I think Jane was pleased with the way things worked out. As we both know, she was never well suited for family life.”

  “You seem to have some trouble with it yourself. You keep murdering wives.”

  “No, not Dahlia.” James looked offended that I’d even suggest such a thing. “Her death was an accident. I loved her. If I’d known Dahlia was going to run into the north wing, I would have stopped her. The fire was out of control.”

  “You mean the fire you set because you’d thrown her daughter off a balcony and you needed to make it look like Lark had no choice but to jump?”

  I saw the surprise on his face. I’d guessed right.

  “Here’s what I think,” I continued. “I think Lark broke into the manor to find the photo of the New Year’s Eve party. As usual, you were probably too high to sleep. I bet you caught her with the picture and figured out what she’d found.”

  “I was about to lose the manor,” James said. “I’d sunk every dime into the restorations, and your mother refused to help me financially. The moment Lark showed me that New Year’s photo, I saw a way out. I’d approached Gavin about investing in the inn, and he’d turned me down. The picture was leverage. He would save the manor—and do it on my terms. But Lark insisted on taking the picture to the police. She was bent on ruining me.”

  “Or maybe it had nothing to do with you,” I said. “Maybe Lark just wanted justice for the girl Gavin Turner murdered.”

  James sighed. “That was decades ago. Everyone’s moved on. No one even remembers what happened anymore. The girl’s just a campfire story.”

  I felt my fists clench. I would have punched him if I could. “April Hughes was a human being, and Gavin Turner killed her.”

  “He didn’t kill her.” James made it sound like I was an idiot for suggesting such a thing. “He let her die. There’s a difference.”

  “How do you know what happened?”

  “He told me,” James said. “They were at a party. She left to go to bed. He had a key to her room. But when he got inside, she was gone and the balcony doors were wide open. He thought she might have jumped, and he went to have a look. When he got outside, he spotted her running for the trees. He found her alive, but he’d lost interest at that point. So he left her out there in the woods.”

  The legend was nowhere as horrifying as the truth. “He killed April,” I said. “What he did was no different from stabbing or strangling her.”

  “Yes, well, I have the whole conversation recorded, and I’ve made it clear what will happen if Gavin crosses the line again,” James said. “Right now there’s no need to involve the authorities. These sorts of problems have often been solved with gentlemen’s agreements.”

  “Gentlemen’s agreements?” I scoffed. “That’s what you call making a deal with the devil?”

  James’s phone rang, and I saw that Gavin Turner’s name was on the caller ID. “What’s taking so long?” James demanded. I could hear it was a woman’s voice on the other end. James’s face went sheet white and he instantly ended the call.

  “Get up,” he ordered.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Was that the sheriff?”

  “Get up.” He dragged me off the bench and pulled me out of the mausoleum. “Walk.” He pushed me forward.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. We weren’t headed home. I was the only person who knew that James had murdered my father—and attempted to murder Lark. He had to get rid of me.

  “Just keep going straight,” he ordered.

  Straight meant across the frozen pool in front of the mausoleum. I stepped forward without even thinking. And fell.

  The cold burned for an instant, and then every part of me went numb. When I surfaced and grabbed hold of the side of the pool, I couldn’t feel very much at all.

  “I salted the ice earlier,” James explained. “But you couldn’t have known that. It’s going to look like a terrible tragedy. Still, I suspect that won’t stop the locals from gossiping.”

  I gripped the ledge as hard as I could, but my muscles had seized up and I was powerless to pull myself up.

  “Help me,” I begged. I could hardly force the words out.

  James squatted down at the side of the pool. “I’m so sorry it had to end this way, Bram. But I promise you, this is for the best.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but I could no longer move. When the warmth began spreading inside me, I realized I was dying. And I realized how the scene would look to whoever found my body. They’d assume I’d fallen into the water and frozen to death. There would be no sign of foul play. James would never pay for what he’d done.

  My body was lost to me, and I could feel consciousness slipping away. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. A ghostly figure had appeared at the edge of the woods, her face hidden behind a veil. She moved slowly and silently behind James until she loomed over him. Then she pulled off the veil and let it fall to the snow. I watched her raise a finger to her black lips, warning me not to make a sound. The ghost’s
other arm hung by her side, a thick stick clutched in its fist like a club. She raised the wood and brought it down in one swift movement onto the base of James’s skull.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  I was lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling, and the voice had come from the right. When I let my head flop in that direction, I could see I was tucked into a bed with blue sheets. A girl had pulled a chair up to my bedside. She was small and pale, with dark brown hair and big black eyes.

  “Who are you?” I croaked. My mouth was parched and my throat hoarse.

  “My name is Lark,” she said, handing me a glass of water.

  I stared at her over the edge of the glass while I gulped water down and tried to place the name.

  “Your uncle married my mother. Do you remember what happened?”

  I thought for a moment. “I remember James getting hit on the head by a ghost.”

  “That wasn’t a ghost. It was me,” she said. “James fell into the pool after I hit him. His heart was damaged from amphetamine abuse, and the shock of the cold water sent him into cardiac arrest. I’m sorry to tell you he died.”

  “He tried to kill me.” It was all coming back.

  “Yes.” Lark picked up my hand and held it. “You’ve been unconscious for three days.”

  “You saved my life?”

  “I wasn’t the only one,” Lark said. “Sam got worried when you suddenly stopped answering texts, and he called the sheriff. If he hadn’t, Gavin Turner could have murdered us both.”

  I struggled to sit, and Lark jumped up to adjust the bed for me.

  “Sam called the sheriff?”

  “Yep, and since then, he’s probably spent more time in this room with you than anyone else. The mums are from him. They were grown in his parents’ greenhouse.”

  On the other side of the room stood a table with two vases overflowing with expensive flowers. Between them was a mason jar full of handpicked white chrysanthemums.

  “The other bouquets are from Maisie and Nolan. They were both here this morning.”

  “Together?” I marveled. “At the same time?”

  “Yeah. It’s hard to believe that, until a few days ago, Nolan had no idea they were related—and Maisie was convinced that Nolan had murdered Ella Bristol.”

  “Did he?”

  “No,” Lark said. “Ella is in Manhattan. I was the one who asked Nolan to help her. He could have easily cleared his name at any time, but Ella didn’t want her family to find her. Now that she’s eighteen, she doesn’t need to worry about being dragged back to Louth. Apparently, she and Nolan have been a thing for a while now.”

  “How does Maisie feel about that?”

  “She’s still wrapping her head around it.” Lark laughed. “So she tried to convince you that Nolan was just like his father?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t convinced, but I would have looked into her claims.”

  “Sounds like you have good instincts. They tell me you never believed I started the fire, either.”

  “It didn’t make sense,” I told her. “It was like Grace’s story. It just felt wrong.”

  Lark nodded. “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’d heard about Grace Louth my whole life. But the moment I saw her face on the mural, I knew the legend couldn’t be true. When I started hearing noises at night, people kept saying it had to be a ghost. I wasn’t convinced, so I decided to find out what really happened to Grace.”

  Lark’s mother had told her about a box of unusual items that had been uncovered during the renovations. The construction crew working on the building had discovered the artifacts tucked under floorboards or hidden behind walls. Among the items were a box of old photos that seemed to have belonged to the Louth family itself—and a small, leather-bound three-ring binder.

  “It’s called a Filofax,” Lark explained. “They were super popular in the eighties and nineties. That’s how people organized their lives before smartphones. Filofaxes had sections for addresses and appointments. There were also calendar pages you could use as a diary.”

  “Oh my God!” I gasped. “That little leather notebook that was packed in the same box with the photos. It belonged to April Hughes, didn’t it?”

  “Yep,” Lark said. “But I didn’t figure that out right away. When I started the scrapbook, I was way more interested in the photos of Grace Louth and the manor. By the way—how long did it take you to notice the trellis in the old pictures of the house?”

  I was embarrassed to say. “Too long,” I told her.

  “Took me a few days, too. Grace used the trellis to escape from the manor the night she jumped in the river. But she came back to the house after she was supposed to be dead. Grace was the ‘ghost’ people kept seeing in the days before her father’s heart attack in the rose room. The trellis allowed her to enter and leave the manor without being seen. She stayed in Louth long enough to have her revenge. As soon as I figured all of that out, I knew for sure there had never been a curse or a ghost. And once I’d eliminated those two things…”

  “You knew there had to be a logical explanation for the noises you kept hearing in the manor at night.”

  “Exactly,” Lark said. “And there was.”

  “It was James, roaming the halls while he was high on amphetamines.”

  “Which was scarier than a ghost. I told my mom what I’d discovered, and she asked me to move back in with my dad for safety. She stayed at the manor. I think she really thought she could see James through his problem.”

  “So did my aunt, Sarah,” I told her. “Two women died trying to help him.”

  “Yes, James and Gavin have left a trail of dead girls behind them.”

  We hadn’t even gotten to Gavin Turner yet. “How’d you figure out what Gavin Turner did to April?”

  “When I read April’s diary, I noticed that the last few entries kept mentioning someone she called G. It was somebody she was clearly afraid of, and I assumed it was Grace Louth. She also wrote that she didn’t want to make a huge deal out of it, since the museum was her mom’s big break.”

  “When did you realize she wasn’t talking about Grace?”

  “It must have been the night of the fire. I remember more now, thanks to the phone, but a lot of the evening is still pretty fuzzy.”

  “I think I know how you figured out who G was,” I told her.

  “You do?”

  “I think you were looking at an old issue of Condé Nast Traveler that had a profile of James and your mom. In the article, there was a picture of a photo from New Year’s Eve 1986. It was hanging on one of the walls while you lived at the manor. You must have remembered seeing it.”

  A smile broke out across Lark’s face. “That’s right!” she said. “I knew New Year’s Eve 1986 was the night April disappeared, and I remembered seeing a similar picture at Nolan’s house.”

  “Which is why you went to see Nolan that night. You took a picture of a photo that showed August and Gavin Turner together at the same New Year’s party.”

  “That must have been the moment I made the connection. Gavin Turner had been at the party with April. And G stood for ‘Gavin,’ not ‘Grace.’ ”

  “So you went up to the manor to get the original photo. James told me what happened next. He caught you on one of the balconies. You must have had the photo and the Filofax. You wanted to go to the police. He wanted to use the photo to blackmail Gavin into paying for the manor’s renovations. When you refused to give it to him, he pushed you off the balcony. Then he started the fire to make it look like you’d had no choice but to jump. He didn’t expect the fire to kill your mother—or burn half the manor down.”

  “So, James tried to murder me, too.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t expect you to survive the fall. But you did, and when the firefighters found you alive, you kept talking abo
ut April Hughes. James let everyone think that you’d lost your mind. But the truth was, you had seen April Hughes that night—in the picture you’d gone to the manor to find.”

  Lark sat back in her chair. I could see tears in her eyes. “I wish James was alive so I could kill him again.”

  “There’s no need. You did it perfectly the first time,” I said gently. “I will never forget the sight of you in that white wedding dress sneaking up behind him. When did you decide to start dressing up like the ghost of Grace Louth?”

  “As soon as I got home from Hastings,” Lark said. “I realized my phone was missing, and I knew I must have dropped it that night. I had to get inside the manor, but I needed a disguise in case anyone spotted me. So I did what Grace Louth had done to get her revenge on her father—I came back to the house dressed up like a ghost.”

  “Then I showed up.”

  “That’s right. I saw you coming that very first night—out there in the snowstorm using your phone as a flashlight. I figured you were way out of your depth. At first I just wanted to scare you away. I tried doing little things that would freak you out without tipping off your uncle. I’d leave your door open or move your candle. But then one night, I heard you screaming in your sleep, and I realized I should help you instead. It wasn’t until much later that I figured out you’d come to Louth to help me.”

  “I think somewhere deep inside, I always suspected that James had a hand in my father’s death. I’d blocked out the memories, but there was some part of me that couldn’t let him get away with murder again—or let you take the blame for what he’d done.”

  “So you came to Louth to clear my name.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why haven’t you tried to clear your own?”

  She knew about what had happened to me in New York. “It’s not possible. At the end of the day, it all comes down to ‘he said, she said’ and everyone believes Daniel.”