Chapter Three #2
She runs her hand along the wallpaper, her anger momentarily displaced by curiosity.
Not just curiosity. Research. After all, what better way to get insight into the late Arthur Fletch?
As for Rufus Beaumont, well, he isn’t going anywhere.
Sienna glances around—the floor seems empty—then traces her hand back and forth, studying the patterned wall until she sees it. The slightest offset in the paper. The faint outline of a door.
It’s flush, but she can feel the wood beneath, the slight give as she presses down. There’s no handle, of course, and the paper is ornate, an overlapping pattern of flowers, so it takes her a moment to find the keyhole, tucked like a shadow in the center of a bloom.
Sienna glances around again, then plucks the ballpoint pen from her notebook and kneels, popping off the cap and unscrewing the casing, tipping out the thin ink-filled chamber and sliding it into the keyhole, along with the clip on the cap.
She thinks about the time she first performed this party trick, at a writers’ symposium outside Chicago, the night she met Malcolm, when a fellow conference-goer got locked out of their room.
She didn’t admit, then, of course, that it only works with this pen, or that it wasn’t a talent she’d just picked up, in the throes of research.
Sienna had learned it as a way to impress the other writers.
And it did.
“Voilà,” she whispers now, even though there’s no one around when the lock clicks. She stands and presses on the door, and this time it bounces back, hinges open, revealing a steep coil of stairs that go up and out of sight.
Sienna slips inside, pulling the door shut behind her. For a moment, she’s plunged into darkness, but as she climbs the stairs, one hand on each wall for balance, the darkness thins, and when she reaches the top, the light spilling through the window is more than enough to see by.
She steps carefully, reverently, the floorboards groaning softly beneath her feet as she takes in the narrow bedroom, with its peaked ceiling.
It looks like a larger version of the room in the model, and yet, in person, it feels smaller.
The bed is narrower than the others in the house, and while there are no papers spread across the duvet, it hasn’t been made; the sheets are flung to the side as if Fletch just got up.
Kenzo mentioned that Arthur wrote in bed, but there’s no sign of a laptop, or a notebook.
Only a polished black typewriter on a simple wooden desk beneath the window, a rickety old chair half tucked beneath, turned at an angle as if recently abandoned.
Sienna has been to three crime scenes in her life, all of them for research, and while there’s no blood here, no body beneath a sheet, the room has the same eerie pall.
There is a stillness to the room, which holds the faint smell of unaired spaces, dust just beginning to settle.
She realizes she’s holding her breath, as if a single exhale might upset the balance of this space.
But when she finally lets the air slip out, nothing changes.
She drifts around the room, hoping to soak up something, anything. To be inspired. A blue-and-yellow robe, soft but well-worn, sags on a hook beside the wardrobe, and Sienna shrugs it on, closing her eyes as the fabric settles.
“I am Arthur Fletch,” she whispers, taking in the scent of sandalwood aftershave and sea-salt air. She opens her eyes. “What am I thinking?” she asks, crossing to the desk, running her hand along the wood as if it were a Ouija board.
There’s no hum of energy, no answering spirit.
Sienna grits her teeth as she considers the typewriter.
“What were you thinking?” she asks again, touching the keys. Her hand stops, gaze dipping to the desk’s two drawers. She didn’t break into Arthur Fletch’s room looking for clues about the book, but now that she’s here . . .
She hooks her finger into the handle of the right desk drawer and tugs it open, hoping to discover—what?
The ending of the book, finished and waiting to be found?
—but there’s nothing but a stack of blank paper.
Her heart sinks until she checks the left drawer, which holds a small leather notebook.
She snatches it up, fingers shaking slightly as she flicks the pages, searching for answers.
Fletch’s handwriting is even worse than hers.
On one page, she’s able to make out Julia—Petrarch’s first name—but the two lines after are crossed out so viciously they can’t be salvaged. There are scribbles about places and times, references to earlier sections of the book, but none of the notes go past the pages she’s already read.
Sienna lets out a strangled sound as she puts the notebook back, and shuts the drawer, a little too hard. She shoves her hands into the pockets of the robe, startling as one hand brushes crumpled paper. Pulling it out, she smooths the page against the desk.
It’s a typewritten letter. Well, part of one, abandoned mid-sentence, but unlike Fletch’s illegible penmanship, this is readable.
Eleanor—
Forgive the delay. I know you’re impatient. God knows, everyone is. But the harder I try to find the end of our dear Julia, the more she pulls away. I feel like I’m chasing shadows, and I’m beginning to fear that I can’t
Sienna stares down at the half-finished letter.
Was Arthur making excuses? Or had the master of mystery, the titan of twists, written himself into a corner even he couldn’t escape?
Even without the slash and press of pen, there is a quiet desperation to the printed words, to the fact that they were abandoned, torn off the typewriter roll and crumpled, shoved into the pocket of his robe.
How long ago did he write this? A month before his death? A week? A day?
Sienna’s gaze flicks to the window over the desk, the unbroken view of the sea, whitecaps churning with the waves, and for the first time, she wonders if it was indeed an accident. Or if there’s more to the story.
She swallows, feeling suddenly like a trespasser. She’s about to fold the paper and slip it back into the pocket when she notices something.
The capital G in God knows is out of line, its bottom curve sitting just below the other letters. Her attention flicks back to the typewriter. She grabs a sheet of blank paper from the drawer and feeds it onto the roller, then types the two words in all capitals—
GET OUT
To prove what she already knows.
Whoever wrote the note to scare Millie, they used this typewriter to do it.
Which means that either Arthur Fletch’s ghost really is fucking with them, or someone else broke into this room before she did.
Her mind instantly returns to Kenzo. Kenzo, who’s been nothing but nice since the moment they met.
Kenzo, who didn’t have to tell her about finding the secret door.
He also told her he couldn’t get in, because it was locked—but he could have picked it, like she did.
Sienna rubs her eyes, trying to work through her suspicions, one by one, the way she would a tricky plot. He still doesn’t strike her as the type to pull a silly prank. But was it just a silly prank? Or a subtle way to rile up the competition? To put them all on edge?
There’s certainly enough at stake.
Writers are a neurotic lot, easily thrown off their game. It’s why they like rituals, routines. A special mug. A specific pen. A white noise app. Some call them crutches, others tools, but the fact is, a bad day’s focus or a bad night’s sleep could mean the difference between winning and losing.
Sienna chews her lip and looks around. Whoever was up here—and someone was—could have done more than type a message. They could have found something, taken it. But given the state of the room, it’s impossible to tell what’s been disturbed.
She pulls the sheet of paper free of the typewriter, unsure what to do with it. All this proves is that she’s not the only one who broke into Fletch’s room. A dry voice in her head points out that this is the kind of energy she should be putting into writing.
And the voice is probably right.
Sienna peels the robe off and hangs it back on the hook as a second voice chimes in: The book that Fletch couldn’t even finish?
She shakes her head, trying to banish that thought, but as she rounds the bed toward the steps, crossing a threadbare rug, the floorboards beneath it let out a different sound, more a squeak than a creak, the way a wall sounds different when you knock against it, depending on whether there’s empty space or a stud.
She toes back the rug to find a trapdoor. Her breath catches as she pulls it up, revealing a ladder running straight down into the dark.
How many secrets, she wonders, does Fletch’s house have?
She climbs down, pausing every few steps to listen, since she has no idea where the ladder leads.
When she reaches the bottom, she sees a door, light seeping beneath the cracks.
It’s small, little wider than she is, and she presses her ear to the wall until she’s sure that no one is there, then turns the little knob.
The narrow passage leads, not onto a stretch of hall, but into a bedroom.
Millie’s bedroom.
Sienna freezes, shallow horror lapping at her skin. Because it’s one thing to sneak into a room through the door. It’s another to climb out of the wall. While the person behind it is sleeping.
She shivers, foot hovering off the floor until she’s sure the room is empty.
Then she steps through and swings the hidden door shut.
It disappears, pattern flush with the wall.
She makes a mental note to revisit the dollhouse in the library and see if there are more passages burrowing through the house.
The thought of someone climbing through the yellow wall into her room makes her queasy.
Sienna’s about to leave Millie’s room—she really is—but something catches her eye.
A pile of pale-blue paper sits beside the typewriter, face down, the faint echo of ink showing through.
Sienna is not the kind of person to read someone else’s work, that’s what she tells herself, but her feet are already moving, her hand already lifting the top sheet.
I look up, surprised to find myself in the dungeon of my own castle, the ground rattling with the tremors of giant steps beyond, the beating of dragon wings as loud as my heart.
Sienna frowns. She has no idea what Millie’s writing about, but it’s clearly not the ending of Julia Petrarch. She puts the page back and starts for the door, hand halfway to the handle when Jaxon’s voice comes spilling down the hall.
“Come on, Mill, you know it wasn’t me.”
“I don’t, in fact.”
Sienna freezes. How bad will this look, standing in another writer’s room, holding a piece of paper that says “GET OUT,” as if she’s about to leave a second note?
Not that she left the first one—but who would believe her?
She backs away, folding the paper and putting it in her pocket as she retreats toward the hidden passage.
Jaxon’s voice dips lower. “I don’t sneak into girls’ rooms,” he says. “Not unless I’m invited. I’m like a vampire. You YA authors are super into those, right?”
Sienna scrambles to find the secret door, but her palm lands on solid wall.
Jaxon must have moved toward Millie, because she says, “Eww, you’re so sweaty.”
At last, she finds the hidden spring.
“I’m gonna hop in the shower before I start writing,” says Jaxon. “Plenty of room in there for two.”
Sienna presses down on the catch, willing the secret door not to groan as it opens. Even though that line deserves it.
She hovers, one foot in the hidden passage.
“Thanks,” says Millie. “But I better get back to work.”
Shit, shit, shit, thinks Sienna, willing the girl to go with him.
“That’s right. Miss Three Thousand Words a Day.”
“Rain or shine,” she says in a singsong voice.
“Fine, fine. But if you change your mind . . .” Jaxon’s voice trails off as he heads for his room. Sienna watches in horror as the doorknob starts to turn under Millie’s hand—
“Oh, shit,” she says to herself. “I forgot my tea.”
The knob springs back. “Silly Millie,” she murmurs, before her steps trail off down the hall, away from her room.
Sienna counts to ten, twenty, thirty, then steps back into the room, the hidden door closing behind her as she crosses the rug. Her heart races as she escapes into the hall.
She moves briskly toward the stairs, nearly tripping on the runner.
Reaching the landing, she steadies herself on the gong, then forces herself to take the rest of the stairs more slowly.
Despite the party trick with the pen, Sienna’s always been a stickler for following the rules, and the whole thing has left her head light and her hands shaking on the rail.
And yet.
There was a thrill to it, too, a humming energy, like the kind she feels when she’s got a good idea, and even though she doesn’t have one yet, she’s suddenly eager to get to work.
Alone.
Enough stalling.
Voices ripple through the house, but Sienna heads for the front door, past the foyer table, where Jaxon’s sweaty hoodie is hanging from one of the antlers, like it’s a coatrack.
Men are such slobs, she thinks, putting the house and its problems behind her as she escapes into the fresh air.