Chapter Eight
Chase
Finally, Mrs. W let out a long sigh. So quietly I could barely hear her through the thick door, she said, "I love you, too, Abel. I have for so long. I just… It's so much change."
"A good change, love. Not all change is bad. Look at the last year." Abel's words were so gentle I could barely imagine them coming from the gruff, taciturn man.
"I know. I'm not ready. I love you, but I'm not ready."
"Helen, we've been sneaking around for too long. If you're not ready, you need to get ready. This is ridiculous."
"I'm too old for this. Why do we have to make more of it?"
Another thump on the counter. Abel's frustration was palpable, even from another room.
"Because you're not too old for this, Helen.
Neither of us are. You act like you're ancient, but you're still young.
You have so much of your life left and I want you to spend it with me.
I'm tired of you treating me like a dirty secret.
If you're not prepared to take the next step, then we're not doing this at all. "
"Abel!"
Heavy footsteps. The door slammed. Barely audible, Mrs. W said to the empty room, "Abel, no."
I stayed there, frozen for a few minutes, listening to the murmur of voices from the dining room, the clink of silverware, the scrape of chairs being pushed back from the table.
When I thought enough time had passed, I pushed open the door to the kitchen to find Mrs. W washing dishes, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining with moisture.
"Hey, sorry to bother you—"
Mrs. W cleared her throat. "It's never a bother, Chase. What can I do for you?"
If I hadn't heard the argument, I would never have known anything was wrong. "I guess you know the search is on for another day?"
Mrs. W smiled fondly. "I supposed it would be. It's become something of a Saturday tradition around here."
"I asked, and they said no one has searched the library above the dining room."
Just as the family had earlier, Mrs. W's dark eyes went wide in surprise. "No. No, they haven't."
"Aiden said you didn't remember where any of the secret compartments are," I probed.
"I don't. It's not that I don't recall. It's that I was never told in the first place.
I only know they exist from things Olivia said.
And I've always been certain they were in the library.
She must have mentioned something about them being in the library at one point.
But now that you mention the library above the dining room… she never specified which library."
"Does anyone ever go up there?”
Mrs. W shook her head. "I do, only to dust. The books are antiques.
Delicate. If you're going to work in there, please be gentle.
There's nothing so old you can't handle it, but some of them are valuable.
It's a wonderful little space, but not very practical.
We tend to appreciate it from the dining room. Almost no one goes inside."
"May I have the key?"
"Certainly. Do you know how to get in?" A sly smile curled the sides of Mrs. W's mouth, and I shook my head.
"Here, I'll show you, let me dry my hands off."
I waited as she wiped her hands with a dish towel, neatly folding it and laying it beside the sink before disappearing into her office off the kitchen. She returned with a shiny brass skeleton key on a long, bottle-green ribbon.
I followed her down the hall, through the entry, and up the stairs to the second level. I'd only been up here once, the day we'd moved in. The second floor of Winters House held only two bedroom suites, the largest occupied by Aiden and the other, only slightly smaller, by Gage.
Just to the right of the top of the stairs, Mrs. W stopped. Reaching behind a small bronze statue of a dancer, she ran her fingertips down the wood paneling on the wall, feeling for something. Some change in texture, a bump, or a hole.
I couldn't tell, but I did see the flex of her arm as she pressed her thumb against something.
A moment later, a small square sank into the wall and slid to the side, revealing a keyhole.
I never would have seen it, the lines of the square disguised by the pattern of the paneling.
She used the key to turn the lock and the door swung open, appearing as if from nowhere.
"The wood panels do a perfect job of hiding the door," I said, marveling at the way the designer had lined up the pattern with the shape of the narrow doorway.
"I know. I polish it carefully to keep dust from settling into the cracks. The elder Mr. Winters, the children's grandfather, was apparently full of secrets. He liked his fun."
Mrs. W hung the key around her neck and nodded her head to the open doorway. "As I said, be gentle with the books. You can open the door easily from the inside, but if you take a break, prop it open because it will lock behind you."
"Thank you," I said.
For a moment I wished I could say something about the argument I'd overheard, but I didn't know Mrs. W well enough.
I did know she believed in keeping her personal life separate from her professional life.
She wouldn't appreciate my butting in. She definitely wouldn't appreciate my telling the rest of the family what I'd overheard. And I wouldn't. Probably.
"Good luck," she said. Her feet echoed down the hall, then the staircase, as I slipped through the open door into the secret library.
The view of the Winters family dining room from the second level was imposing. From above, the space was somehow even more grand, the wide stone fireplace majestic, the long shining table with almost throne-like chairs at either end fit for royalty.
It was hard to believe I'd been eating breakfast and dinner there every day for more than two weeks. Oddly, it was somehow not hard at all to imagine Violet sharing that table with Aiden.
My baby sister had grown up in more ordinary circumstances than the Winters family, but she'd always had the seeds of a queen inside of her.
An empty place in my heart, a hole, jagged and unfinished, had filled at the knowledge that Vivi was safe and happy with Aiden Winters.
Obviously, I didn't think about what it really meant that she was with Aiden. In my mind, they sat side-by-side and held hands, because my little sister was never going to do more than that with any man, even after she was married.
If I admitted there might be more between them I'd go back to wanting to punch Aiden in his perfect nose, and Vivi would kill me.
Hand holding and other things aside, I knew Aiden Winters would do anything to keep her happy. That was more than enough for me. And this—this family, this house, these people—were everything she deserved. Weird then, that I had more right to them than she did.
I still hadn't absorbed the fact that I was related by blood to half of them. That Anna Winters, their beloved dead mother, had given birth to me first. That I was, in fact, the oldest in the family. Not a Winters. Not by blood. Anna had been a Marlow.
Not that I wanted to be a Winters. They may have been rich as sin, but I didn't do too badly myself, and their kind of money came with attention I didn't want. Scandal, and pain, and loss. I'd had enough of my own. I didn't want theirs, too.
Somehow, Aiden must have convinced the rest of them to let me search alone because the dining room remained empty, the silence interrupted only by Mrs. W clearing the breakfast dishes.
I stood, leaning against the door, and studied the long wall of books.
The narrow walkway. The waist-high railing of wood and dark iron.
I didn't know what I was looking for.
Patterns.
It’s a side benefit of being a coder. My brain loves patterns.
If there was a secret compartment hidden here, there would be a pattern to show me where it was. I let my eyes skim the shelves, unfocused, looking for the bigger picture.
Something in the color or the shapes.
Something in the way the books were spaced.
Nothing jumped out on my first pass. Or my second. I narrowed my gaze and looked for details, taking in each shelf one by one, studying them first horizontally, then vertically.
Still, nothing jumped out at me. I walked to the center of the library and leaned against the railing. It was hard to get the full scope this close. At least twelve feet of shelves extended on either side.
My peripheral vision blurred as I tried to process the entirety of the library at once. I let my eyes relax and began to scan again. Right to left. Top to bottom. Left to right. Floor to ceiling.
A few times, I thought I saw something, but when I checked it was only a book that hadn't been pushed all the way on the shelf or had been put back in the wrong place. Unlikely either were on purpose.
If the younger generation of Winters had no idea where to find the secret compartments, that meant no one would have touched them since Hugh and Olivia Winters had been killed nearly fifteen years before. And while this library was rarely used, it hadn’t remained untouched since then.
At the least, Mrs. W came in to clean. Anything that was slightly out of place was unlikely to be a clue. Methodically, I walked to the far end of the library, leaned into the corner created by the rail and the side wall, and began to scan the shelves again, just as I had the first two times.
Once with my eyes taking in every detail, and a second time with my eyes unfocused, absorbing the whole rather than the parts.
That was when I saw it. From this angle, there was a pattern to the spines of the books.
Not color. Not shape. But the print on the spines.
While the bindings all matched—no hodgepodge of volumes here—some of the bindings had an embossed fleur-de-lis at the base.
It was small and subtle. From my other positions on the narrow walkway the pattern hadn't jumped out at me, but from where I stood in the corner I could see they formed a line pointing to the bottom shelf, dead center.
Crouching down, I carefully removed the books from that section, stacking them neatly to the side, maintaining the order so I could replace them exactly how they’d been.
Right there, waiting for me on the back of the shelf, was a small black iron latch. I hooked the latch and pulled. The back panel of the shelf rose smoothly to reveal a hole in the wall.
My heart thudding with anticipation, I pulled out my phone and flicked on the light. I thought about calling the others. They'd want to be here to see what was inside. I told myself to get up or call out.
I did neither.
Breath short, heart racing, all I could do was stare. The last hidden compartment had contained secrets about me. Letters my biological father had written to Anna Marlow after she’d left him. After he'd gotten her pregnant with me.
I hadn't seen those letters yet. I hadn't asked. I knew if I did they would give them to me, but, while I hadn't decided how I felt about Anna Winters, I knew exactly how I felt about William Davis.
He'd been psychotic. Evil. He'd brought pain and death to this family, and I hated the thought that even a drop of his blood ran in my veins. Whatever he'd had to say to Anna, I wasn't ready to see it.
Just because the last secret compartment had answers to the mystery of my origins didn't mean this one would.
But it might.
Leaning in further, I shone the bright white light from my phone into the dark space.
It illuminated a rectangular wooden box covered with a thin film of dust. Scanning the light over all four corners of the compartment, I made sure the box was the only thing inside before I set down my phone and reached for my prize.