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“Mrs. Cordial …” His hands fell away.
She took a deep breath and yelled, “Bloody murder!” Then she dropped to the floor. Mr. Mallery rushed off.
From the carpet in the dining room, she heard the screams and laughs, the pounding footfalls and shouts of warning. When the sounds died out, she stood and moved carefully through the dining room, knowing that Mr. Mallery had left minutes ago but feeling that he was still there, watching her. It was not a comfortable sensation, not as it had been when he’d held her.
All the players had returned to the drawing room and were recounting their various hiding spots and moments of terror with breathless excitement.
“There is our murderer!” said Colonel Andrews, smiling at Charlotte.
“What? I’m the only one he touched?” she said.
“I missed them all,” Mr. Mallery said. “I was clumsy.”
Miss Charming giggled. “Right-o! The bloke nearly broke the stairs with his head.”
Colonel Andrews was smiling at Charlotte, though in the traitorous shadowing of candlelight, the smile seemed full of malice. “Very well then, Mrs. Cordial. You have till the count of fifty.”
“But—”
“One, two, three …” Miss Gardenside began.
Chanting numbers prodded Charlotte from the room, and before she could lose her nerve, she ran into the dark.
She’d meant to hide somewhere close to the drawing room and get it over with, but as soon as she was alone, she just kept running, passing up dozens of hiding places: the dining room with its voluminous drapes and vast under-table territory; the morning room with its concealing chairs and settees, its windows curtained from the occasional buzz of lightning; the ballroom, large as the moon and echoey as a seashell.
Up the stairs she went, counting along in her head—thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three—past the gallery and its creepy staring portraits. Charlotte didn’t know she had a plan until she was on the spiral staircase leading to the servants’ rooms, which she found in the dark by memory. The second floor.
The far window was like a glint of gray water at the bottom of a well. Charlotte could hear distant thumping, feet running. The count was over. They were on the hunt. She pressed her back to the wall and walked along it, her hands running over the wood paneling, her eyes alert to the shifts in the dark, shapes that could be a person, watching.
Her breath got louder in her own ears. She hated this. She wanted to be wrapped in velvet drapes like Mr. Mallery, not standing naked as a skeleton in the middle of a hall. Hide, hide, hide …
There was a creak to her right. Her breath startled out of her. She pressed her back harder to the wall, kept moving, her hands sliding over the wainscoting.
She felt a notch. Her fingers investigated it. And suddenly the wall at her back wasn’t there anymore. She gasped and fell backward, landing on her rear. Something clicked shut.
Charlotte scrambled to her feet, and her shoulders hit a wall. Where was she? Had she entered one of the upstairs rooms? But she hadn’t turned a doorknob.
There was a bare window, and the room was filled with murky gray light, thick as oatmeal. This was definitely not the hallway. She pressed her hands to her pounding chest and looked around. There must be a door. Of course there had to be a door. How else did she get in?
She could not walk without bumping into things. This chamber was filled with objects—a storage room perhaps? She put her hands out, feeling her way around, trying to work toward the window and its pale invitation of light. From there she could find the other walls and search for a door.
Her fingers drifted over dusty wood, crates, cardboard boxes, glass vases, fringed pillows. Then something cool and fleshy. She paused.
That is not what it felt like, she told herself.
Of course not. What a ridiculous notion! She’d just take a closer look then laugh at herself and her prickly imagination. She moved aside what appeared to be a heavy velvet curtain from atop a sofa and peered in the half-light at what lay underneath.
Lightning filled the window, piercing the room with an X-ray flash. And she saw. It seemed to be … it couldn’t be but it sure looked like … a hand. A cold, dead hand. And in her experience, hands tend to be attached to bodies.
She saw for just a splinter of a second. The room went postlightning dark, but still Charlotte stared. She stared for the count of three, waiting for her mind to come up with an alternate possibility.
It didn’t.
Charlotte screamed. She screamed as if her voice could shatter windows. She screamed as she threw herself back the way she thought she’d come, fingers scrambling at the wall, searching for a way out, an escape. Something clicked, a piece of the wall lurched open as if on springs. She was knocked back. She crawled out the opening and kept screaming.
The scream lasted as she went down the spiral stairs, down the main staircase, and zipped into the drawing room, though by then it was breathy and restless, a scream that wouldn’t stay pu
t in her throat but kept slipping down into her middle or floating out harmlessly on an exhale.
