by Tamara Berry
Her eyes, I note, are fixed on my throat, where the marks of my near-strangulation linger. Thanks to Vivian’s salve, they glisten, too. I can hardly blame the girl for being unable to look away.
I pat the bed where I’ve laid myself out, reposing in rapt contemplation of the ceiling as I try to figure out what my next steps are. In the short time it’s taken Rachel to head my way, the only real plan I’ve come up with is to join Inspector Piper’s vigil outside as soon as possible. He’d been correct in thinking the dead man’s name would get a reaction out of someone: my neck can attest to that. Instead of going after the existing dead body, however, they tried making a new one.
“I’m fine, sweetie,” I promise and pat again until she crosses the room to join me. “I always forget how drained I get after a séance. A good night’s sleep, and I’ll be back to my cheerful ghost-hunting self.”
She lowers herself to the bed and sinks into the mattress next to me, but her pose isn’t one of rest. She sits tense and rigid, her legs dangling and her hands twisted in her lap.
My heart wrings for the poor girl. Granted, she does own this castle, and if Nicholas holds it in trust for her, I’m assuming there will be funds enough to maintain it in perpetuity, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s spent most of her life hidden away where the world can’t see—or age—her.
“Just like Sleeping Beauty,” I murmur, running my hand through her hair.
“What’s that?” she asks, turning her violet eyes toward me. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Ellie, I need to confess something. Something terrible.”
I sit up in the bed, heedless of how the quick movement sets my senses reeling again. “What do you mean? It’s been a difficult evening, I know, and I’m sorry if the séance was too much for you, but nothing that happened was your fault.”
She shakes her head, her eyes brimming with tears. Dashing a quick hand across her face, she holds them in abeyance. “It wasn’t too much for me, but you can’t go through that again. I won’t let you. Not when—”
“Not when what?” I prod.
She forces a deep breath, steeling herself as if for war. “I did it. It was me. I’m Xavier.”
My response is automatic. “Don’t be silly. Of course you’re not.”
She doesn’t say anything right away, her silence stiff and unyielding.
“Rachel? What are you talking about? How can you be Xavier? He’s—” I halt, trying to think of the best way to finish that sentence. Dangerous? Evil? Intent on finishing what he started?
I finally settle on “—a ghost.”
“Not always.”
The certainty in her voice is alarming, but not nearly as much as my reaction to it. Part of me buoys up in triumph at her confession, since I’ve always felt as though Xavier bore the hallmarks of a cooped-up, angry teenage girl. Another part—the part that should balk in fear—feels only relief.
Well, relief and the absolute certainty that whatever this girl did, whoever she hurt, I can’t let her uncle know.
It will break Nicholas’s heart.
I take her icy hands in mine and give them a reassuring squeeze. “It’s alright, Rachel. I promise. We can make this okay. You just have to tell me what you did.”
She sniffles loudly, but she doesn’t pull away. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and I didn’t know things would go this far. It was only meant to be a prank.”
“Of course it was,” I say soothingly.
“It’s so boring—being stuck in this village, going nowhere, seeing no one.” She blinks rapidly, causing a lone tear to loosen and fall down her cheek. She leaves it there, a testament to her penitence. “Uncle Nicholas already talked to Mum about Italy, and I think he might even convince her to let me go, but I can’t. Not now. Not with what I’ve done.”
“What exactly have you done?” I ask, starting to feel really alarmed now. Flitting through my head is a vision of everyone nestled in their beds while Rachel single-handedly drags a dead man into a hiding place known only to her. Even with an imagination like mine, I’m having a hard time making it fit.
“So many things,” she says and hangs her head. “The torn dresses, the lie about the tray flying through the air and almost hitting me, whispering to Grandmother sometimes in an empty corridor.”
I wait, assuming her careful pause is a precursor for more. I’m not disappointed.
“And those noises and lights in your room the first night.” She glances up, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “I’m sorry about that, Ellie. I didn’t mean to scare you. I was afraid that if Xavier didn’t do anything, you might not find any evidence of a ghost and leave.”
I wait again, wondering how long it will take her to build up to the real crimes taking place under this roof, but she closes her mouth and watches me with an expectant air.
“Is there anything else?” I prod. “The birds? The bones? The pulled-up stair?” I can’t bring myself to mention the dead man or all my broken equipment, so I leave things there.
Rachel shakes her head. “No, of course not. I’d never hurt anyone or anything, I promise. I only wanted to get rid of Cal, so I made Xavier do things.”
At the mention of Cal, Rachel’s chin lifts in a mulish angle, all the personal agony of her confession flying out the window. She looks defiant and proud and so much like Nicholas, I almost laugh.
I don’t, though. Not even when she adds “He doesn’t even want to be here, you know. I heard them arguing once. Cal wants to leave, but Mum told him that she can’t go or Uncle Nicholas will take over the castle for good. It’s the primogeniture. I told you.”
On the contrary, what Rachel told me about the primogeniture is what caused so many problems in the first place. The girl obviously has no idea that it’s her mother and not Nicholas who is the eldest of the family. She also doesn’t know that the castle has already been signed over to her.
Given Fern’s fixation on youth and beauty, I can understand why. I don’t approve of it, but I understand it. She kept her age and the inheritance a secret from her daughter for all these years to avoid publicly admitting her age.
Everything is starting to make sense. She refused to send Rachel to school. She wouldn’t take Rachel with her on her regular trips to London. The girl really is like Sleeping Beauty. Any moment, she’s going to wake up and find that this entire kingdom is hers.
What I can’t understand, however, is why Nicholas would agree to go along with it. If he cares about Rachel—truly cares about her—then he should have done something to help her years ago.
Unless, of course, he has another motive in place.
Another realization strikes, then, this one much easier to put into words. “Hang on. If you’ve been whispering to your grandmother, does that mean you’re the one who told her to lock my room?”
“No, that wasn’t me.” Her chin comes down a fraction. “Not all of it is me. I only help sometimes, when it feels like Xavier hasn’t made an appearance in a while. Most of what he does is totally real.”
Most of what he does is a real pain in my neck, but I know better than to try to argue that point. “You screamed in my room in the middle of the night?” I ask.
Rachel nods.
“You used flash paper to try to blind me?”
Her mouth falls open. “You could tell that was flash paper?”
“Wait a minute—does that mean you know another way into that room?” I’m on my feet in a matter of seconds. “Rachel, if you have access to a secret passageway anywhere in this house, you have to tell me. Even if you’re not supposed to. Even if it means betraying someone you love.”
“But there isn’t a secret passageway,” she insists. “There isn’t a secret anything, Ellie, I swear. I came in through the door while you were asleep like a normal person.”
“Then how did you escape without running into your uncle? He was there within seconds. He would have seen you in the hallway.”
She seems confused. “Uncle Nic
holas wasn’t in the hallway.”
“What? That’s not possible.”
“I slammed a book against the floor a few times and made all those noises and then I ran,” she insists. “I knew it would only be a few minutes before the entire house came to investigate, so I hid on the top stair. It’s so deep that if I lie perfectly flat, no one can see me from the hallway. And, of course, no one thought to look for Xavier there. They were all too busy in your room. Once everyone was distracted, I slipped down to the kitchen and pretended to have a glass of milk, but no one came to look for me, so it didn’t matter.”
“You saw everyone heading into my room?”
She nods.
“And your uncle wasn’t one of them?”
She shakes her head.
“Tell me, Rachel. Tell me exactly who came and in what order.”
She seems puzzled by my command—and the urgent way in which I voice it—but she complies. “Grandmother came first, and she was so excited, she practically skipped the whole way. She’s going to be so disappointed if you manage to get rid of Xavier. She loves being the only one of her friends to have a ghost.”
At my look of impatience, Rachel quickly rattles off the rest.
“Then my mum, of course, and she slammed the door to her room so hard she woke up Cal. I don’t think he would’ve bothered coming otherwise—he’s a very heavy sleeper, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I say. “Although I’m not surprised you do.”
She has the decency to blush. “Yes, well. I tried once to scare him with a sheet hung at the end of the bed, but he wouldn’t wake up, even when I pinched his toes. He snores loud enough to wake the dead.”
“You hung a sheet at the end of the bed?” I ask, incredulous.
“It wasn’t a nice sheet or anything. It’s one of the ones Grandmother saves for guests, so it’s all worn through, and there’s this huge brown stain on one end. I hung it on a string and waggled it about.”
At that particular confession, I’m almost ready to forgive her for everything, but my brain is much too busy putting the final pieces together. And my brain, poor thing, is none too happy with the way the facts are aligning.
If Nicholas never entered my room through the door on that first night, it means he must have entered through the secret passageway—the secret passageway no one is willing to admit exists. And his motives for doing so can’t be good. Either he wanted to pretend to be Xavier himself, or his presence was somehow related to the note that was planted the next night.
The childhood rhyme. The childhood rhyme that somehow ties him and Thomas—those most loyal of bosom bows—together.
Nicholas is also rich and, if Liam is to be believed, terribly so. Money will buy a lot of things in this world, but I doubt it could get him this place. Not in name, anyway. Vivian and Fern already saw to that by signing it over to Rachel. All Nicholas gets is the responsibility of maintaining it—a money pit, in his own words, and the most important thing in his life.
Of course, there are ways around the Vivian and Fern issues. Vivian he’s already threatened to send to a home for believing in ghosts. Fern might be more difficult to dislodge—as her determination to stay put despite Cal’s wish to leave proves—but it’s not impossible. With Rachel sent off to art school and a bona fide psychic medium on his side, he can easily clear a path to ownership, especially if there are dead bodies turning up in abundance.
And the bodies. Oh, the bodies. I don’t know what that Walter guy was doing here or what he found in that bible to interest him, but there was only one person in this house who was unaccounted for when Walter was moved from the bottom of the stairs: Thomas.
Thomas, who didn’t really have a weekend off.
Thomas, who used to search for tunnels with Nicholas when they were kids.
Thomas, whose secretive actions compelled even Cal to offer me a warning and a way out of here.
“Rachel, I think you should come outside with me,” I say. I strive to keep the panic out of my voice, but the words come out thin.
“Outside?” she echoes. “Why?”
Because there are policemen down there, I think but don’t say. Out loud, I answer, “For air. It’s awfully stuffy in here.”
It’s not the least bit stuffy in here—in fact, it’s practically glacial—but Rachel takes one look at my white face and trembling hands and accedes. She must think I’m still rattled from the séance, which is true to an extent. I am rattled from the séance. I don’t know whether it was Thomas or Nicholas who tried to strangle me in the dark, but I do know one thing for certain: they’re not getting a second chance.
But . . . “It’s locked,” Rachel says as she rattles the handle.
“What? It can’t be.” I rush to the door and try for myself, but she wasn’t mistaken. No matter how hard I twist or shake, there’s no budging it. I kick and pound for a full minute, even adding a few shouts for good measure, but no one comes to our aid.
I wish I could say I’m surprised, but I’m not. Nicholas lured us up here on purpose. He wanted us out of the way, trapped where he could keep us until he was ready. And I, dazzled by his reverent kiss on my wrist, fell for it.
Idiot. Fool. Silly, silly Ellie.
“Was it . . . Xavier?” Rachel asks, her voice trembling. “Like what happened with the stairs?”
I don’t answer her. Mostly because the answer—a definite yes—will only cause her to panic. “Do you have your phone?” I ask instead. “We can call for help.”
She shakes her head. “You made us put them in the basket, remember?”
I do remember, and I could curse myself for being so shortsighted. An attempt to force open one of the lead-paned windows along the outer wall proves equally fruitless. They don’t appear to have been opened since the nineteenth century, if ever. Setting aside the fire hazards of such a setup, how the devil are we supposed to get out of here?
“Ellie, what’s going on?” Rachel asks. “Why did Xavier lock us in here?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m not going to sit around and wait to find out.”
Closing my eyes, I summon every bit of belief I’ve ever held in magic, miracles, and myself. It’s a long shot, I know, but it’s all I have. Just me and Winnie. Just that tenuous connection that no amount of life—or death—can sever.
“Winnie, my love, I need you. I know I say that a lot, but I mean it this time. Get off whatever unicorn you’re riding through the clouds and help me. Help us.”
“Ellie?”
I shush the girl without opening my eyes. “Just a second, Rachel. I’m almost there. Seriously, Winnie. It’s now or never. Otherwise, there’s a good chance I’m going to end up reaching the afterlife before you. How’s that for irony?”
“Um, Ellie?”
“Not now. She’s close. I can feel it.”
Rachel puts her hands on my shoulders and gives me a turn. “No, she’s not close. I think she’s already here.”
Winnie. My eyes fly open, my heart in my throat. Without quite knowing why, my gaze moves to the spilled rowan berry mixture on the floorboards. I fully expect to see my sister sitting there—in the flesh, her beaming smile reassuring me that everything will be okay again—but of course she’s not. That would defy everything I know to be true.
Fortunately, she’s sent an emissary instead.
“Beast!” I cry, falling to my knees in front of the cat, sleek and black and conjured as if out of thin air. “You little monster. How did you get here?”
When I twist to look up at Rachel, she’s watching me with an expression of rapt wonder, her finger pointing toward the head of her enormous Elizabethan bed. “He appeared from out of nowhere. One second, there was nothing but an empty bed. I looked away for four, maybe five, seconds. When I turned back, there he was, sitting on the pillow like it was no big deal. Ellie, is it—? Can it be—?”
I scoop up the cat, cradling her against my chest as she writhes and scratches and wrig
gles to be free.
“The secret passageway,” I say, releasing a sound that’s equal parts laughter and hysteria. “It’s about time someone found it.”
Chapter 25
The huge Elizabethan beds in both my and Rachel’s room aren’t, as I first suspected, pushed against the wall. They’re literally part of it—the giant wood-paneled headboards are inseparable from the plaster above and around them.
Making this discovery requires Rachel and me to use our full strength as we try to dislodge the headboard even a fraction of an inch.
“No wonder I could never get the bed to move,” I pant after our third failed attempt. Trying to jam any kind of tool behind the headboard is equally fruitless, since the seam between wall and wood is permanently affixed.
From there, the conclusion is a natural one—that the two beds share this wall and, with it, access to the passageway. I run my finger along the outer edge of the headboard, the ornate scrollwork bumpy under my touch. “It’s not just heavy. It’s built in. But how—?”
My answer comes as my finger snags on a particularly knobby piece of scrollwork. With one firm press, the furthest headboard panel unlatches at the outer edge. Because the headboard hangs over either side of the mattress by a good foot, it’s possible to slide the panel into a pocket door built into the wall—and to do it without disturbing anyone who happens to be in the bed at the time.
Including me.
“I don’t believe it,” I breathe, pushing the door in and out, watching the ease with which the portal comes and goes.
It helps that the track appears to have been oiled recently, much like the doors Nicholas asked Thomas to attend to when I first arrived. All it takes is one quick and effortless push, and I’ve created a hole big enough for anyone—cat or human—to slip through.
“Beast, you perfect genius!” I call. The cat has distanced herself from us to avoid another one of those affectionate scoops, so I have to content myself with blowing her a kiss. “She must have found the inside latch and slipped through when you weren’t paying attention. This explains everything.”
“I can’t believe this has been here my whole life and I never knew,” Rachel breathes, eyes rapt. “I wonder if anyone else knows about it?”
