Chapter 12 A Dozen Doors #2
Instead of going to get my things, I start up after the woman. I don’t remember her from my time in Faulkner, and when she reaches the door at the top and turns to give me the sourest look I’ve ever gotten in my life, I know she must be Preston’s hire.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” she says in a shrill voice that snaps with a British accent. “You’re not allowed up here.”
She looks and sounds like the villain in an old British movie about an orphanage where the headmistress devises unique tortures for the orphans.
I can’t think of anyone further from the type of girl Grampa Darling used to hire—mostly hot high school girls who left town in a hurry or disappeared quietly back to Faulkner High without another word.
By the time I was in high school, I’d learned not to bother getting to know them, since they’d be gone within a year.
“Oh, just let me get the door for you,” I say, smiling at the woman and reaching for the door. I grab the handle, but it’s locked fast when I pull on it.
The woman gives me a dour look and shifts her towels onto one arm while she fishes the key from the pocket of her oversized apron.
“I assure you, I am perfectly capable of opening a door,” she says, giving me an imperious look as she pushes the old-fashioned key in and turns.
“Well, with your arms as full as they are, a little help never hurt,” I say, pulling the door open and sliding the key from the lock.
She huffs but steps through. I step through after her.
This side of the house doesn’t open into a room with windows, but a wide, dark hallway with barely any light filtering in.
Each side is lined with six widely spaced doors, meaning the rooms behind them are spacious and hopefully brighter than the gloomy hall.
At the far end is a staircase leading up to the third floor, which is accessible from the east wing as well. I’ve been up there plenty.
When I was a kid, it was a favorite spot for the moms when it was too hot for us to play outside.
They’d sit at one of the tables with their cocktails, gossiping and watching us race around what seemed like the world’s biggest attic space, with sloped ceilings and skylights and even a princess bedroom set at one end that Grampa Darling had custom made for his favorite granddaughter, Mabel Darling.
But I’ve never been in this wing of the house. Even though I’m an adult now, it feels even more off-limits than the east wing did when we were kids. My heart is pounding in my chest just from setting foot into the forbidden hall.
“Go on, get out,” cries the maid when she sees that I followed her in.
Before I can answer, a loud pounding interrupts us from the third room on the right.
It’s a sound that, now that I’m up here, is unmistakable.
It’s not footsteps. It’s someone pounding on the inside of the door.
My skin goes cold, and I stare at the maid for a second while she stares back at me with an expression that can only be described as wide-eyed ‘oh, shit.’ In that moment, I feel the key still resting in my palm, long and heavy, and I remember what Preston said about the other key, the one he gave me.
The one that opens all the doors in the east wing.
I dart for the door, shoving the key into the lock.
“Don’t open that,” the maid cries, a cascade of sheets and towels toppling from her arms as she leaps for me. “It’s for your safety, Miss!”
I turn the knob and yank open the door. Grampa Darling comes rushing out, nearly toppling over when the door swings from under his hammering fists. He’s breathing hard, and his face is slightly flushed, but he doesn’t look the slightest bit feeble or incapacitated, as Preston led me to believe.
“Dolly Beckett?” he asks, staring at me. “What are you doing here?”
“The real question is, what are you doing locked up in a room in your own house?” I ask.
“You need to get out of here,” he says urgently, his gaze jerking to the door behind me. “We both do.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you leave, Mr. Darling,” the maid says.
“Try and stop me,” he thunders, every bit the imposing, powerful man I remember.
In fact, I’m beginning to think everything I’ve been told is a lie.
The real villain here, the one with the unsound mind, isn’t Grampa Darling.
It’s the man who locked him up and took over his estate, the one who locked me up and wouldn’t let me leave.
The one who steps into the doorway to the hall just as we start toward it, the man in the mask, with his cold, steely blue eyes and jaw set in a hard, angry line.
As I stare back at him, my heart thumping hard in my chest, I realize I don’t know this man at all.
Just as I’ve changed in the past three years, he’s no longer the man I knew, the friend who held me when I cried, the man who would never hurt me.
That man is long gone. This is the man who stayed, the one who remains.
He’s a stranger, scarred by life, who’s let tragedy and bitterness turn him into a dangerous beast. I don’t know what he’ll do next, and for the first time in my life, I’m truly scared to find out.