Page 8 of The Inheritance At Bourton

She stared at him.

"What?"

"He mentioned it once. I was maybe twelve. There are plenty of secrets around this place. Some true, some not.”

"And you never thought to mention this?”

"Leah, I said I’ve never seen it with my own two eyes. I don’t know if my father ever saw it. We didn't snoop. That was the whole of the job, in the end. The Ellsworths trusted us with everything because they knew we wouldn't touch anything that wasn't ours. I wasn't going to be the Harrington who broke that. I never looked. I never even asked."

She got up off the floor, unfolding slowly, her knees cracking. “Where?”

“I don’t know, Leah. Houses this age had them. Smugglers' hides, some of them, this close to—well. It doesn't matter what it was for. My father said there was a room."

She turned in a slow circle, looking at the library with entirely new eyes. She thought of the house and where a secret room could be hidden. She wasn’t an architect. She didn’t know how to spot a room that was smaller than it looked.

“Where?” she asked. “Where would it be?”

He sighed and got to his feet as well. “I don’t know.”

“Rowan.”

“If I had to guess, I would say it might be off the main entrance or possibly here.”

Leah glanced around. Shelves covered the walls, except for one with a single window. Nothing stood out, which made sense, she thought. Still, how was she supposed to find it?

She walked out of the library and stared at the entranceway—the front door. One side opened to a small sitting room. But the other was a long wall with pictures of her ancestors. She stepped forward and ran her hand along the wall.

Rowan joined her, knocking here and there.

“Solid,” he said with disappointment when they moved the full length.

“Then it has to be in the library.”

“Or it doesn’t exist,” he said softly.

She refused to believe that. Something told her there had to be more. She had to find it.

Chapter Four

She stood in the middle of the library wreckage and turned in a slow circle.

Books were everywhere. They lay in piles on the floor and desk and leaned against chair legs like tired soldiers. After nine hours of work, books were stacked everywhere except on the shelves. Somewhere behind one of these walls, there might be a room.

"In the movies, you pull a book and the whole shelf swings open," she said.

"Which book?"

"That's the problem. It's always the right book." She glanced at the shelves they hadn't touched yet—the last wall, with at least four hundred books.

Rowan was looking at the walls the same way she was.

“Window, so it’s not that one,” she said, more to herself than him.

"The wall we came in through leads to the hall. What's on the other side of those shelves?" She pointed at the far wall, lined with books from floor to ceiling, the last part they hadn’t searched. "What's back there?"

Rowan frowned at it. "The bathroom."

"The little one off the hall?"