As they walked down the passage, Ellie pressed her hand against her thigh to keep it from shaking. It was adrenaline, she knew that, coursing through her body. The adrenaline from taking care of young Mr. Caskie. It had been the right choice. She knew that. He couldn’t be allowed to get away from them. Not with what he said. Not with what he knew. She wished, though, that the adrenaline would hurry up and leave. It was the same way she reacted after a fight with David or after she smacked one of the children. This heat would linger inside her until she could go for a run or take a bubble bath or lock herself in the walk-in closet and scream until she ran out of breath.
Those options weren’t on the table as she followed Oliver and Maeve up the steps at the end of the dark passage. She would have to hold it all in, hope her hand would stop shaking on its own.
Oliver and Maeve paused at the top of the short flight of steps. Lorna, unaware, bumped into the back of Ellie, mumbled something that might have been an apology. Ellie’s glower went unacknowledged.
Oliver pushed the door open.
Peeling paint that might’ve been green but took on a bluish hue in the light from their phones covered the walls, except for places where door-frames had been bricked up long ago, the mortar chipped and gray. The windows at the front had been boarded up, like Maeve said, and those boards were covered—plastered—in photographs. Photos from their Caldwell Street days. Ones from earlier that year. Ellie even saw her decades-old engagement photo. She dug the nails of her shaking hand into her thigh.
“This is some serial killer shit, this is,” Oliver said, startling her. He’d stuck close to her in the passage and remained close to her side now. She didn’t like the way he looked at her. Like he was trying to see inside her head. Like he no longer completely trusted her.
“Yes. It’s disturbing,” she said, stepping away from him. He followed.
“There are some doors down here that aren’t boarded up,” Lorna said, making her way down the length of the ballroom.
Ellie’s gaze focused on one picture. Oliver moved the light away.
“Hang on.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled it back to that spot. “I recognize this picture.”
“I recognize a whole fucking lot of them.”
“No, not like that.” She plucked it from the wall. The pin that had held it in place skittered to the floor. An adult couple in their forties, in a picture taken very much in the eighties, smiled in front of Wolfheather House.
“Why do they look familiar?” Oliver asked.
“Because Callum kept this picture stuck on the wall above his desk. I remember warning him that if he used Blu Tack it would ruin the walls and he might not get his security deposit back. Oliver, these are Callum’s parents. Do you remember how he used to say he was from Inverness but that his family didn’t live there anymore? That his dad had bought a place farther out?”
“You think this is Callum’s house?”
“Leave me alone, Maeve!” Lorna’s voice echoed to the back of the ball-room. Lorna waved her mobile. “Check over there for a way out.”
“All right! I’m sorry.” Maeve crossed to the other side of the room.
“We need to get out of here. Fast,” Oliver whispered to Ellie. “Find anything, girls?” he called out.
As he moved down the other end of the ballroom, Ellie tried to return the photo to the wall but couldn’t find the tack. It seemed important, somehow, to return the picture where she found it, like she had further upset some balance by removing it. That this was somehow a more grievous error then the death of the man in the study. She knelt on the floor and rifled through the rubbish and belongings there, searching for the tack, until her hands fell upon a stack of notebooks.
One stood out from the rest, squarer and fatter with a cloth cover. Some daylight peeked through the boarded windows and she tilted the notebook to get a better look. The Cahill logo emblazoned the front, along with a familiar name written in fat permanent marker across the top: Eleanor Hunt. Inside, some of the ink was smudged and water damage warped the pages, but she recognized her own handwriting. Certain pages were marked with little tabs. The dates were printed neatly in the upper right-hand corner: 14 September 1994, 2 December 1994, 6 May 1995. She snapped the diary shut.
She was stuffing it down the back of her waistband, underneath her jumper, when Lorna called out.
“Hey guys. I think I found—”
A door slammed, cutting her off.
“Lorna?”
“Lorna!”
Ellie ran down the ballroom to where Oliver and Maeve were tugging on the door that must have shut on Lorna.
“Lorna?” Maeve asked. “Are you okay?”
A scream echoed through the hollow ballroom.
Ellie could barely keep track of what was happening. Oliver and Maeve banged on the door, trying to open it. Lorna banged on the other side. They were screaming her name and she was just screaming. Ellie’s hand shook again, and she covered her ears.
Like a rainstorm winding down, sounds faded away. First Lorna’s screams. Then Oliver’s banging and shouting. All that was left was a pitiful “Lorna?” from Maeve. Oliver leapt back and it took Ellie a moment to realize why. Something seeped under the doorframe. Oliver shone his light on it. Red.
“Oh, my god, Lorna,” Maeve spoke softly. Suddenly, she threw her body at the door. It didn’t budge, and she backed up and tried again. “We have to get her out of there. We have to—”
Oliver took Maeve by the wrist and held her back. “Do you see that? Do you see it?” He pointed again at the wet stain. “We don’t know who’s in there.”
“Lorna’s in there!”
“And who else?”
“Does it matter?” Maeve asked.
“It does if you don’t want to be next.”
“She could be alive. Head wounds bleed a lot.”
“Yeah,” Oliver grunted. “Just ask Hollis.”
Ellie slapped him. Not too hard but enough to hurt. Enough to make him shut up.
“Give me your light,” Ellie said. He stared at her, and she didn’t think he’d listen. Then he slapped his phone into her palm.
Oliver kept Maeve back as Ellie knelt down, careful to avoid the stream of blood. She shone the light in the crack between the floor and the door. Lorna’s glassy eye stared back. Her head rested in a pool of blood, the wound obscured by her hair and her position on the floor. Her half-lidded eye did not blink; no breath from her gaping mouth rippled the blood that passed beneath.
“Lorna?” she whispered, but Lorna wouldn’t answer.
Ellie sat up and handed Oliver his phone back. There was no need to tell them what she saw. Oliver kept looking at the door, then the floor, as if trying to figure out how they fit together.
“If we all try the door,” Maeve said, tears glistening on her face, “if we all kick it together we can get it . . . we can open it . . . if we—”
“She’s dead, Maeve!” Oliver clenched his fist, like he was ready to thump her, but he kept his hands at his sides. “There’s no point in opening the door. She’s dead. We lost her, okay? We . . . She was an idiot for wandering off like that anyway. She was an idiot.”
First Hollis. Now Lorna. Another connection snapped. Another broken strand of a web. They were unmoored. Ellie could see them all drifting further apart when the three of them needed to remain closer than ever.