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The words brought me back to the moment, and I nodded, plastering a fake smile on my face instinctively. I knew from experience that they wouldn’t be able to see through it.
“I’m great. I just got a little lightheaded for a second. I probably haven’t drunk enough water today.” I set down my fork and took a gulp from my glass. “Do you mind if I excuse myself for a moment and go use the restroom?”
A worried expression crossed my mother’s face. “All this talk about legacy and crime would be enough to overwhelm anyone. I’m sorry. You go take care of yourself, and let us know if you need anything.”
I dipped my head graciously and hurried out of the room. As soon as I’d passed out of view into the hall, I tapped a quick message into my phone—the message the men were waiting for. They were going to buy me more time than a simple bathroom excuse could manage.
I strode toward the bathroom and slipped inside, my ears pricked. It only took a matter of seconds. Then a bizarre squawking sound pierced through the walls, like there was a flock of rapid chickens congregating right outside the house.
What the heck had the guys orchestrated? As my relatives’ voices faltered and then their footsteps hustled over to the back door to see what was going on outside, I had to resist the urge to join them. The crew could tell me all about it later. I could just imagine how much Garrison would enjoy conveying the story.
Instead, I darted out of the bathroom and over to the spot opposite the family room doorway where I’d seen Margaret emerge seemingly through the bare wall. My fingers slid over the striped wallpaper, testing it with years of honed experience. I couldn’t expect the crew to keep my family distracted forever. If I took too long, my relatives might return and catch me in my stealthy investigation.
My fingertips caught on the faintest of grooves and traced it up and down, confirming that it was straight and tall enough to mark the edge of a door. My pulse kicked up a notch. There.
But there was no knob, no obvious way of opening it. How had Margaret done it? I hadn’t seen her go in.
There were a few basic mechanisms to concealed doors, so I just had to figure out which one this operated by. Trying not to let the voices filtering in from outside distract me, I gave the door a general shove with my shoulder. Nothing. Then I ran my fingers along the edge of the seam again, pressing every couple of inches.
At hip height, the surface depressed just a fraction. Something in the wall gave a small click, and the door swung open.
My breath caught in my throat. I peeked through the doorway and found a plain flight of stairs leading down into the darkness of a basement room.
Without hesitation, I slipped inside and found a handle that let me pull the door shut. At least no one would be able to figure out where I’d gone, even if they noticed I’d been gone for a while.
I pawed at the walls on either side of the stairwell until my palm hit a light switch. When I flicked it upward, brilliant light spilled into the space at the bottom of the stairs. All I could see was polished wood flooring and the edge of a maroon rug that looked as thick as the ones in the main rooms upstairs.
As I eased down the stairs, a crisp scent—smoky and herbal—tickled my nose. It reminded me of the incense in churches and temples I’d occasionally had to carry out missions in or around. I couldn’t place the exact scent—it might not have been quite the same as any I’d encountered before.
There was no sign of its source when I reached the bottom of the stairs. I came to a halt and stared at the room that opened up beyond the steps.
It looked like a large den. Bookshelves lined two of the walls, stuffed full with thick volumes and antique-looking decorations. In the center of the room, on top of the rug I’d seen the corner of, squatted a large desk piled high with more books and various other documents. A large leather office chair sat behind it, with a few more traditional wingchairs scattered through the rest of the space.
Damien already had a home office space upstairs. Did my mother work down here? I hadn’t gotten the impression that her job would require anything so elaborate. And why would she have kept it hidden?
I slunk closer to the bookshelves and scanned the spines. Most of them appeared to be volumes on law, politics, and criminology. I found one row with stranger titles, things like Channeling the Inner Spirit and The Energy of the Great Beyond. No one in the family had mentioned any kind of spiritual interests, but I guessed they could have those books more out of an academic interest rather than because they believed in the contents.
I snapped pictures of all of the shelves and then studied the items placed here and there in front of the books more closely. Some of them were antiques as I’d thought, a fancy old candlestick here, an intricately carved trinket box there. Others I had a lot more trouble making sense of.
Knitting my brow, I paused over a small shoe that must have belonged to a child. It was a dress shoe, but not particularly fancy or pretty, just a glossy black shell that looked like it was made out of plastic and a narrow strap with a tiny flower over the snap. The toes were lightly scuffed.
Normally when people kept mementos from their children, they bronzed them, didn’t they? And I didn’t see how this could have belonged to me or Carter. It was too large to have belonged to the toddler I’d been when I was kidnapped, and too girly for me to imagine a five- or six-year-old Carter donning it. But the style was fairly modern, so I couldn’t picture it belonging to my parents’ generation either.
Maybe it’d been Margaret’s? But then why would it be here in my parents’ house and not at Aunt Mabel and Uncle Henry’s?
The shoe wasn’t the only oddity. There was a little figure with a face roughly carved into the wood and a scrap of fabric as clothing. What appeared to be a hair clip in cheap metal shaped like a butterfly. A thin, folded cloth that might have been a napkin or a handkerchief.
Why would my parents have used things like that as part of the décor? It didn’t match the rest of the room at all.
By the time I turned to take in the far wall, my skin was already creeping. What I found myself staring at didn’t exactly comfort me. It held a few more framed parchments like the one I’d found in Damien’s office, but these looked progressively newer and less worn, which fit with the numbers I was now more convinced were years. They continued on in a steady progression until they reached the 2000s, at which point they started to double up, two of the same before going on to the next.
The rest of the notations next to them looked like the same unfamiliar code as on the matching document upstairs. As far as I knew, Blaze had never managed to crack it.
Maybe he’d be able to with more examples to work with. I took pictures of those parchments too, holding my hands as steady as I could.
I’d seen a lot of horrible things in my time. I hadn’t actually uncovered anything specifically horrible here. But the whole vibe of the secret room—and the fact that it was secret at all—was making my skin crawl in a way I’d never experienced before. I couldn’t shake the sense that something was very, very wrong.
At the end of the row of parchments, there was one more framed picture. This one was a faded photograph of a house with a broad front porch and vines crawling up one side. It sat on a wide, open property with no near neighbors, like it was out in the countryside. I didn’t recognize anything about it either, and my parents hadn’t mentioned owning a country home. Blaze hadn’t found a deed or other record for it in all his searching.
