Chapter 10 #2
It’s a bit larger than my palm. Dark wood, almost black, polished smooth.
There’s no clasp on it, no hinge that I can see, only a thin seam around the middle that suggests it does come apart somewhere if I knew how.
The wood has carvings on the lid I can’t quite read in the low light.
Knotwork, maybe? Or letters that aren’t letters in any alphabet I know.
I pick it up.
It’s heavier than it looks.
I shake it gently. Something inside makes a dull, soft sound against the wood.
I sigh and flip it over again, unsure how to open it.
I set the box on the floor beside the bundle of letters and sit cross-legged on the cold floorboards with both of them in front of me, my hips screaming at the stretch, and look at them for a long time without touching either.
The bundle is the easier of the two.
I untie the twine and release the letters, maybe twenty in total. The top one is dated 3rd of March, 2024—a year before Effie’s death. The bottom one, when I work my way down, is dated 9th of November, 1949.
Seventy-five years.
I read the top one first.
It’s brief. The same handwriting on every letter, Effie’s hand, neat and slanting, the kind a person used to writing in field notebooks has after decades of doing it.
Eachann, it reads.
The bargain holds. I have not asked anything of you that you did not say you would give.
I have kept what I said I would keep. I do not know if I am writing because I want you to know it, or because I want me to know it.
Either way. The arrangement has been a kindness to both of us, though I would not have chosen the word at the time.
I will not send this. I never send them. But I write them. That is the part I cannot stop doing. Maybe in hopes that one day you’ll ask to see them.
—Eufemia
I sit back on my heels.
She didn’t send any of them? I suppose that’s why they’re all gathered here.
I read the next, dated 2014.
Eachann. I saw the woman from Inverness on the eastern shore this morning. I have not asked you and I will not ask you. I think that means something between us. I hope it does.
I read down.
The letters span the decades in the rhythm of a woman who knew a man for a long time and wrote to him often without ever sending them.
References I can’t trace—the spring storm that took the boat, the woman who came with the dog, the cold winter when the loch froze the full way across—and references I can.
Mainly names I recognize from the list of forty-seven.
Bridget. Pavlina. Mary. Catriona. The names appear in Effie’s letters one by one across the decades, never in accusation, never in explanation. Just named, documented.
A letter dated 11th of August, 1962, is folded in three; the paper is creased deep with handling.
I open it carefully.
Eachann.
They came to my door today. I told them what I could and what I could not. I know what you did and don’t need to ask but they are hungrier than I am.
For what it is worth, I don’t regret the bargain. I don’t regret you, even on the days it feels like I do.
—E.
I read it again, slowly this time. The date…there’s something about the date.
Then I remember what Sinclair said. She wrote to him on the day they came about Catriona Carmichael. Whatever arrangement they had, she chose not to tell on him, for lack of a better word.
She loved him. All of these letters are nothing more than love letters she was too afraid to send to a man named Eachann.
She refused to invite him in, for whatever reason, whether it was real or just superstition.
She wrote to him for decades and never sent the letters, never let him in, never let her wishes be anything other than dreams.
That is a story. That is a love story I can hold, albeit a tragic one.
What I cannot hold is the man across the bay who told me, in a firelit room three days ago, that he knew her. Well enough.
But that was Alasdair. This Eachann is someone else, some other man. A predecessor. A man much older than the one in the castle now. Alasdair’s father, maybe? After all, Caisteal Eachainn was the name of his castle. Spelled differently, but too big of a coincidence to not matter.
What happened to Eachann? Was he still out there, killing and disappearing women? God, he would have to be Effie’s age, in his nineties I imagine, at least. Can ninety-year-olds do that? How old was the oldest serial killer?
I gather the letters back into their bundle. The twine is fraying in one place, so I tie it loosely and put it next to the mystery box. Blue light slants in through the mudroom window.
The afternoon has gone.
I’m about to stand up when I hear it.
Thud.
A single soft thud from above me.
Not loud. One muffled sound from the floor over my head, a sound like a book dropping.
My heart lurches. Every muscle in my body freezes, including my lungs.
No, not again, I think as I look at the ceiling. I can’t deal with finding more bones, not now.
But the cottage is silent around me. I only hear the faint drip from the kitchen tap. I strain my ears even harder but there’s nothing but a gull crying in the distance and the rustle of the wind outside.
I slowly get to my feet.
I know I closed that door, I know I did. I haven’t been up there since earlier.
House settling? It’s always a house settling, right? It was one thump, it’s possible.
As silently as I can, I creep to the bottom of the stairs and listen again.
Nothing.
I climb, the creak of the stairs giving me away to anyone who might be up there. My stomach churns, making me feel a little empty and sick with fear.
The hallway upstairs is the same as earlier. The door to the guest bedroom is still closed. I turn the knob, the sound loud and ominous, and push open the door.
The room is empty.
The single bed is against the far wall, the pale quilt smoothed flat. The jawbone is where it last was, which is kind of a relief in itself, and kind of not.
I stand in the doorway in the dimming light and make myself look at the room as carefully as I can, even though every new spot my eyes land on scares me. The rafters above me. The small window onto the bay. The wardrobe on the left wall, doors closed. The closet in the corner.
I look at the closet again, which remains locked and without a key after I tried to open it the first night.
The door is at the back of the room, set into the wall under the slope of the eaves, painted the same white as the wall with a small brass keyhole. The wood of the door looks older than the room somehow, and the handle is dark with use.
There are marks on the floorboards in front of it. I don’t remember seeing them before. It’s enough that I slowly cross the room toward it, the floorboards creaking noisily as I go. Which is another relief, because if someone really had been walking around up here, I would have heard it.
Up closer, I can see two small curved scuffs in the wood, the shape a door makes when it has been opened against floorboards more than once over the years.
I carefully kneel and run my fingers along the scuffs.
The arcs are recent enough that they have not gathered the same fine grey dust as the rest of the floorboards.
The closet has been opened. But when? Days ago? Weeks? Months? Years?
I’m about to get up when I noticed a gleam. I peer closer. There’s salt on the floor at the base of the door.
Just a few grains of coarse sea salt, the kind sprinkled all over the house. They sit just outside the closet’s threshold, on the floorboards, as if they spilled inside and have not been swept up.
I touch one. It dissolves slightly on the pad of my finger. I lick the next one to be sure.
Yup. Salt.
Someone has been pouring salt inside the closet, and, at some point, opened the door, making salt come out the opening.
And that someone was not me.
I sit back on my heels with my finger still pressed to the grain of salt and I look at the brass keyhole of the closet door.
All this time I’ve been assuming it’s just a closet because that’s what the solicitor said—the spare bedroom upstairs has a large closet for storage—but now that I think about it, it takes up most of the room.
A narrow A-frame like the rest, judging by the shape and length of the house, but there’s got to be at least four or five feet in there.
It could be more of a small room than a closet.
I think about the wooden box downstairs.
I think about the carvings on its lid that look like letters from an alphabet I don’t know.
I think about Effie putting a key in a box and the box in the bottom of the trunk and the trunk under the stairs.
Did she leave me a map of some kind, like some sort of mystery to solve?
And if so, what’s the map for, and have I been reading it right?
The trunk was addressed to me, and her note was cryptic and disturbing as shit, but everything else in the trunk doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason other than she wanted me to discover them. She wanted me to learn something from them.
Only problem is, the more I discover, the more confused I get.
I think I have more questions for my new neighbor.