Page 41 of A Study in Drowning

“Did you see Ianto leave?” Preston asked.

“No, he was already gone.” Effy thought about the animal carcass in the road. It had been too small to be a deer but too large to be a rabbit, large enough that Ianto would have seen it through the windshield, and kept his foot pressed down on the gas pedal anyway.

The image of the Fairy King sitting there in the driver’s seat blinked across her vision. Effy had to dig her fingernails into her palm to make it vanish again.

“We should hurry,” Preston said. “I think Llyrian services only last an hour, but you would know better than me.”

As they began walking toward the door, Effy said, “So my suspicions were correct—Argantians are heathens.”

“Not all Argantians,” he said, nonplussed, almost cheerful. “Just me.”

“I’m sure your Llyrian mother is very pleased with you.”

“She does her best to make me feel guilty about it.” They started down the hall.

“But she can’t really be that sanctimonious,” Effy said as they rounded the corner to the bedchamber, “or else she wouldn’t have married an Argantian.”

“You’d be surprised how much cognitive dissonance people are capable of.”

“Do you ever get weary of being so snootily unsentimental?”

Preston huffed a laugh. “No, it comes very naturally to me.”

“You know, you could have said that love transcends petty theological squabbles.”

“Love conquers all?” Preston arched a brow. “I suppose I could say that, if I were a romantic.”

Effy snorted, but for some reason her heart thumped unevenly. She told herself it was nervousness about their assuredly ill-fated plan, and—as Preston reached for the door—the memory of the ghost surged forward in her mind. Her white hair lashing like a cut sail, her skin so pale it was almost translucent.

A similar coldness prickled Effy’s skin, and she almost said, Wait, stop. But it would be useless to mention the encounter to Preston. She knew without asking that he was not the type to believe in ghosts.

Mrs. Myrddin, on the other hand, was perhaps worth bringing up. “Be quiet,” she said tersely. “The widow must be in here.”

“I know,” Preston whispered back. “I’m being as quiet as I can.”

Effy held her breath as Preston turned the knob and pushed open the door to the private chambers. What spooled out in front of them was a narrow hallway, dust-choked and dark. The wooden floor was pocked with termite holes and the walls were bare, save for a small, rust-speckled mirror.

Effy was surprised to see it. Yet when she examined the mirror more closely, she realized the glass had been oxidized so thoroughly that there was no way to see a reflection in it. An odd disappointment settled in her belly.

She and Preston paused in the hallway and listened, but no sound echoed from either of the doors ahead. And just as it had the night before, even the thrashing of water against the rocks had gone silent. If Mrs. Myrddin was in her chambers, she must have been sleeping.

Or, a small voice nagged at Effy, she might not exist at all. It was not a thought she had any proof of, but when she thought of the ghost, her heartbeat quickened.

Keeping her voice low, she said, “Ianto’s room is on the left.”

“I hope he hasn’t locked it.”

There was something wrong with this section of the house. It seemed to exist in another world, cold and silent and strange, like a shipwreck on the ocean floor. The rest of Hiraeth creaked and groaned and swayed, protesting its slow destruction. The air here was stiff and heavy, and Effy moved through it almost in slow motion, as if she were wearing sopping wet clothes. In truth, it was as though this wing of the house had already been drowned.

Ianto’s door opened without so much as a shudder.

Effy didn’t know what she had expected to see on the other side. A beached mermaid on the bed, a heap of selkie skins? The ghost herself? The bedroom was disappointingly ordinary, at least as far as Hiraeth was concerned. There was an enormous canopy bed, not unlike the one Effy slept in herself, with moth-eaten gossamer curtains and dark blue satin sheets that made the mattress appear waterlogged. As far as she could tell, there was no mirror.

There was a wardrobe, its doors firmly shut, between which the sleeve of a black sweater was caught like a badger in a trap. A badger, Effy thought suddenly. Perhaps that had been the animal in the road.

There were piles of yellowed newspapers, but none of them pertained to Emrys Myrddin. The headlines were very arbitrary: An article about an art installation in Laleston. One about a series of burglaries in Corth, a town not far east of Saltney. Another was about a pony that had become a hero for bravely facing down a mountain cat; in the end, the pony had succumbed to its injuries and died.

Effy let the newspaper drift back down to the floor. “Nothing.”