The house had been interested in Minerva long before she hadbecome interested in it. Now it welcomed her: a crackling, almost electric shock spread down her spine as she stepped farther into the room. It was the sharp sting of a whip and her ears rang. She rubbed her head, remaining still until the sensation dissipated.
She aimed the beam of light above the doorway and noticed a carving there, on the wood of the doorframe. A witch mark, much like her own. She approached the window and ran her hand around its frame, brushing the dust away, until she felt the whorls of another witch mark beneath her fingertips. This time there was no electric shock, simply the texture of ancient wood.
Ginny had safeguarded the door and the window. Safeguarded herself and Beatrice. No evil entity could slip into that room. Although one must have breached the barrier, because Ginny had disappeared, had likely been taken from there. The witch marks had not been enough, or there had been a flaw in their design, even if they were still potent years after their making, so potent that Minerva had felt them even if they were not meant to harm her.
But like Nana Alba, Minerva had portents, and she was growing attuned to them. She no longer dismissed them as a simple migraine. Perhaps this was enough to trigger a response, however small, from the room.
She looked around and tried to picture the room as it might have been when students had lived in it, imagining the location of the beds, the desks, the chairs. She poked her head into the bathroom, which had an old-fashioned toilet with an overhead box and a pull chain and a claw-foot tub.
She peered into the mirror above the sink, found her tired face staring back at her.
Something brushed against her body, like the filaments of a spiderweb stretching against her skin. She turned around, the flashlight illuminating a bare wall. There was nothing there, but something was close to her. Something that could not be seen, but that she felt, inches out of reach.
Ginny’s ghost. She knew it, could sense it. It was a talent. Nana Alba could predict the arrival of a guest at their apartment longbefore they rang the bell, could chatter with a dead parrot. Minerva had thought her a tired, half-asleep old woman, whispering old stories under her breath, but Nana Alba had power.
Now Minerva focused and tried to look beyond the tiles of the room, the peeling paint, and glimpse something. She was unsure of how to proceed, how to coax the dead out from the shadows.
“Virginia Somerset,” she called out. “You were trying to speak to Tom. Won’t you speak to me?”
The ghost did not reveal itself, there was no milky-white apparition, no ectoplasmic manifestation, but she felt it again. Something out of reach.
It was nearby.
She stepped out of the bathroom, pulled the thermos from her backpack, and took a sip. Her throat was dry as dust. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and unzipped one of the backpack’s pockets, digging out an old black-and-white photograph. It showed Betty and Ginny together, smiling at the camera.
“I learned your story from Beatrice Tremblay, but not the ending,” she said, holding the photograph up. “I’d like to figure it out.”
There was no answer at first. The ghost was coy, did not know whether to trust her, or perhaps it was a frail, dim presence that could not manage much. The minutes slogged by.
She heard a faint scratching, which might have been simply a rodent rushing across the room. But she suspected not. She swung around and aimed the flashlight at a different spot in the room, and the noise seemed to move across the floor, so she moved her arm, the beam of light illuminating one ancient floorboard after another.
The noise ceased.
Minerva stuffed the photograph in her pocket, took a few steps, and bent down.
One of the floorboards had three circles scratched upon it. A small, crude design that people wouldn’t have bothered to look at and recognize as a witch mark, safeguarding whatever lay beneath from sorcerous hands.
Time and the elements had shrunk the edges of the floorboard,leaving a gap, and she slid the wide-bladed chisel into this gap with ease. Then it was a matter of using the hammer together with the chisel to pry up the board.
And there it was, a yellowed piece of paper that had been slipped in between the edges of the floorboards many years before. Ginny must have tucked other pieces of paper under the floor, drawings with concentric circles, charms to keep evil away. But this one board and this one piece of paper were special.
The floorboards creaked and groaned, and there was a bump against the wall, then another. The ghost in the room was restless, perhaps afraid.
She unfolded the paper. There, in Ginny’s beautiful handwriting, was the name of her murderers. The name that Beatrice Tremblay had longed to know and never suspected. It was a familiar name.
“Wingrave,” Minerva said, reading the piece of paper.
The old lightbulb above her head grew dimmer and flickered. The silken, spidery threads brushed against her arm again, tugging at her with such force that Minerva stumbled back and bumped against the old-fashioned radiator. The ghost dragged her farther into the room, pulling her as far as it could from the entrance.
The house seemed to shiver, unnerved.
She heard footsteps and the creak and crack of old wood as someone moved down the hallway and stopped.
Carolyn stood outside the doorway. She was wearing one of her expensive turbans and a long, dark blue coat with a huge fox-fur collar that completely hid her neck. The woman parted her crimson lips and gave her a smile. Her teeth seemed blindingly white, and dangerously sharp. It was the grin of a predator, of a creature of abyssal depths.
“What did you find?” she asked.
Minerva clutched the slip of paper between her hands. It almost felt warm to the touch, this paper, or else it was her fingertips that seemed to have caught on fire. A combustion beneath the skin, smoldering powder caught in her grip.
