Chapter Twenty-Seven
The wind gusted even harder now; Willow’s sweatshirt was far from sufficient to keep the cold at bay, and she was shivering within minutes.
She didn’t need her flashlight, after all; the gentle lightening of the eastern sky provided enough illumination to find her way.
Willow and Finn cut quietly across the Cameron House lawn and around to the back door, where Willow had seen the intruder enter.
It was open—not wide but propped ajar, with a junk mail postcard covering the latch, in the usual method of a someone who wants to keep a door from locking behind them.
In this instance, were they waiting for another intruder to come in after them?
Or ensuring they would be able to get out?
The door gave a little creak as she and Finn slipped inside, sounding gunshot-loud to her ears. Willow froze, Finn motionless and alert by her side; God, she was horrible at this, she thought. Would they be caught before they even got inside?
But nothing happened.
After a few minutes of stillness, Willow’s eyes became accustomed to the dark of the big old kitchen, and she was able to make out the shapes of the hulking appliances around the walls and the heavy island in the center.
Keep calm, she told herself. Take it slowly.
She carefully made her way through the kitchen, then cautiously stepped through the doorway into the gaping darkness of the entry hall.
After a moment, she realized she could see better here; a dim glow shone down from the second floor. Someone was in one of the rooms upstairs.
After a hair’s breadth of hesitation, Willow grasped the banister and put her foot gently onto the first step, and the second, miraculously avoiding noisy creaks or groans from the wood.
What are you doing? she asked herself. You’ve seen this movie; you’ve scoffed at the nitwit heroine who dives headfirst into situations she is completely ill prepared for.
You’ve always said, “That would never be me”—and yet, here you are …
With agonizing slowness, she carefully ascended, a reluctant Finn one step behind.
The faint light emanated from a partially closed door to the left of the staircase; by the time she was nearly to the top, Willow could hear movement on the other side of the door, footsteps on the floor and drawers opening and closing.
She was at the top step; she was on the landing, the soft rubber soles of her shoes soundless as she quietly moved closer to the door, hoping to catch a glimpse inside. She took two more steps, about to peek through the two-inch crack in the doorway; one more, and …
With her last step, her foot landed sharply on exactly the wrong floorboard, emitting a sharp creak the person in the room could not have missed.
She froze; so did the unknown intruder in the room, now still and silent except for quiet breathing.
How many seconds did Willow have before she was caught?
Two, maybe three? It was the middle of the night, no one knew she was here, and her odds of making it out of the house unharmed or possibly even alive were in a rapid nosedive.
She whipped her head around in desperation, quickly calculating her options.
Down the stairs and out? Even if she could make it to the first floor without being caught, she had already encountered the sticky front door bolt.
The back door through which she’d entered?
She cursed inwardly when she realized she’d forgotten to replace the postcard in the door latch; maybe it would open, but she wasn’t about to bet her life on it.
Upstairs was out of the question; she’d never make it to the next floor unseen, or even down the hallway.
One second gone …
Run down the hall or upstairs, try to hide, and risk being trapped? Or dash downstairs, relying on speed and praying the doors would open to let her out before she was captured?
Finn, his eyes not leaving hers, was inching backward down the stairs. What are you waiting for? he seemed to be asking. Let’s move! Okay, she concluded. Slightly better terrible odds than the alternatives. Two seconds …
Her heart nearly stopped when she saw the shadowy figure—had it been there all along, or had it just appeared?
—standing in the hallway on the other side of the bedchamber door, not four feet from Willow, exhaling an icy chill across the space between them.
One dark hand, a wraithlike grasp of negative space, reached out to the section of wall and pressed one of the wainscoted squares; a small section of wall shifted, opening inward to reveal a narrow passageway, a pitch-black opening, offering no clue what might be beyond it. Then the figure was gone.
Three seconds … She’d waited too long; now it was a choice between certain capture, or a featureless black tunnel to God knew where?
Not much of a choice, she thought. But what are the alternatives?
Willow ducked quickly across the doorway into the black hole of the secret passage; she bit back a scream when the same icy hand reached over her shoulder from behind, so cold she could feel the chill emanating off it, to press a spot on the wall to the right of the door.
The panel began its silent slide shut.
Three and a half seconds …
In a burst of panic, Willow realized Finn had not followed her—but it was too late to do anything to get to him.
As the intruder flung the bedroom door open and burst into the hallway, Finn uttered a single sharp bark and ran down the stairs for the door.
With a muttered curse, the black-clad figure followed, just as the wall panel slid shut with a soft click.
Finn! Willow thought in panic, listening to the blend of canine and human footsteps descending the stairway; then she remembered to pause. Keep still, she told herself again. Breathe. Breathe until your mind starts working again.
The corgi knew more about this house than any human, and Diana had mentioned his escape-artist tendencies before; Finn would be fine. She hoped. Please, Finn, be as smart as I hope you are, she begged silently.
Willow turned on her flashlight. She was alone again, at least as far as she could tell; in Cameron House, one could never be sure.
Another passageway lay before her, narrow and low, warm wood and plastered walls, the flashlight creating more shadows than it dispelled.
She haltingly started forward, then paused when she heard the pad of a shoeless footstep behind her, felt a burst of icy air on the back of her neck.
Not alone, after all; Willow might have left the living intruder behind, but someone or something else was in this passageway with her.
Her heart thudded violently in her chest; she moved as quickly as she could along the twisting passage, as though by doing so she could escape the unseen presence behind her.
Gradually, light seeped into the little corridor from up ahead; the pitch-black dark softened to shadows until Willow found she no longer needed the flashlight. A final turn, a short staircase …
She stood inside a bedroom, the smallest she had yet found in the grand old house.
Its shape was irregular, tucked into the higher levels of the mansion; it stood neither on the third floor nor in the attic proper, as though someone had decided one day to carve a piece out of the roof of Cameron House and drop this cozy chamber into the space left behind.
And it was cozy—the chill had left the air, and whatever terrifying presence had prickled the hair on Willow’s neck and made her heart beat faster seemed to have left her for now.
A small dormer with a lace-curtained window faced southeast; another, at a ninety-degree angle from the first, faced up the roof to the widow’s walk.
Together, the two windows formed a nook with a bench-like window seat.
Willow walked across to it and saw Sue’s cabin framed in the wavy glass.
She had found it at last, the room with the glowing gas lamp and the indistinct face behind the curtain.
A secret room; a hidden room. A room whose owner had shown Willow the way in and saved her from almost certain catastrophe.
Willow gently drew back the lacy draperies and fastened them on the hooks to either side of the window.
She let herself sink onto the window seat, the exhaustion and tension of the past hour—could it have been so short a time?
—finally catching up to her. Willow watched as the first brilliant rays of sunrise shot up from forest and sea and the soft quilt of clouds on the horizon.
She took a proper look around the little room, now illuminated by the morning sun.
The asymmetrical slant of the ceiling made one feel like a poet in a garret, though perhaps a finer one than the average Victorian starving artist might have managed; the furniture, though spare, was of the same high quality found in the more formal bedrooms on the lower floors.
An ornately carved wardrobe stood in one corner; a pair of chairs and a secretary desk, the kind whose writing surface could be folded up and latched to conceal what lay behind it, sat across from one of the dormer windows.
The walls, though faded by sunlight and time, had once been painted a soft coral; an antique colonial spool bed was tucked neatly into the larger west gable, covered in a bright patchwork counterpane made of dozens of little circles of cloth sewn together.