She looked horrified. "Of course I didn't," she said. "When I knew she was dead I ran out of the tunnel. I... put up that barricade. From stones near the entrance. I was crying the whole time, it kept collapsing, I kept piling it up. And then suddenly the stones started staying where I put them. Balancing themselves. The house was helping me, you see. Because now I belonged to the house. I was never going to leave."
"So how do you know she didn't wake up two hours later and go out the back way?"
"She was dead, Don!"
"That would explain why the boyfriend never came back. She went and met him and told him how you were going to turn her in for cheating and they split."
"It didn't happen that way. I wish it had!"
"But how do you know it didn't happen?"
Sylvie looked at him, horrified at a possibility she had never considered. "She had to be dead. I had hit her so hard."
"Like you said. You never hit anybody before. You're not very big. Getting blood from somebody's scalp is easy. Killing them isn't." Don knelt in front of her. "She isn't down that tunnel, Sylvie. She's out there, alive. For ten years she's been out there having a life and you've been in here doing penance for a murder that never happened."
"She is dead! How would you know anything! You weren't there!"
"But I'm here now," he said. "And I'm going to go down that tunnel and see for myself."
She started to cry again. "She haunts me, don't you get it? When I sleep, I dream of her coming for me, dragging me down in the tunnel, strangling me. I wake up, I can't breathe, because she's come to get even with me."
"She doesn't haunt you, Sylvie, you haunt yourself. You're doing all this to yourself." He picked up the flashlight and started down the tunnel.
It felt old to him. Dank, heavy, cool. No, cold. It had been sturdily built. The stones formed into walls on the left and right weren't structural, they were more like a retaining wall to keep the sides of the tunnel from eroding when it rained. The real structure was wood as thick as railroad ties, vertical posts every four feet or so, bridged by wood the same thickness, and then the whole tunnel spanned by more railroad-tie-sized beams forming a continuous ceiling. This was a lot more tunnel than any rum runners would need, he thought. Like the house, it was built to last forever. But why would Dr. Bellamy need a passage like this? It made no sense.
He could hear Sylvie behind him. She was coming down the tunnel after all. Well, good. She should see for herself. If Lissy had really died, there would have been an investigation. Policemen would have come to the house, asking Sylvie questions. Since that never happened, Lissy didn't disappear. It was Sylvie who disappeared, hiding out for years. But no one came looking for her because the diploma really doesn't matter. In fact they probably mailed it to her. They probably thought she was off in Providence, Rhode Island, starting her new job. Maybe some professor was a little hurt that she never wrote to him. Maybe at some professional conference, years later, somebody from UNCG met somebody from Providence and asked how Sylvie was working out and found out that Sylvie had never shown up for the job. But by then where would he start looking? The house where she used to live was boarded up. She had no family to write to. And in the end there was no reason for anyone to search for her.
She sacrificed her life for nothing.
The tunnel had sloped downward rather steeply, but now it began to level out.
"Don, please!" she called from behind him.
He stopped to wait for her. "Come with me if you want," he said. "Or not. But I think it's about time you faced what you did. Or what you didn't do."
She came into view, stumbling in the darkness. "Don't project your own problems onto me. You're the one who's eating himself alive with guilt over what he didn't do. You didn't get your daughter away from your ex-wife legally, and you didn't kidnap her in time, either."
Lissy wasn't the only one who went for the jugular. "Don't talk about things you don't know anything about."
"It's you who needs to face the fact that you couldn't help what happened, you didn't do anything wrong. Not me! I killed her!"
"I haven't seen a body anywhere down here," said Don. He turned away and continued down the tunnel. Four candles up on the stone retaining walls, right? That's what he was looking for now.
And there they were. The flashlight beam found the burnt-out stub of a candle, and a quick pass of the light showed the other three candles. For a moment he couldn't bring himself to point the flashlight downward, or even to look down in the spilled light. For all his bravado, he wasn't at all sure what he'd find.
Then he looked. And now he was sure. There was the mattress lying on the packed dirt, and on the mattress was a desiccated body, skin like parchment, lying on its back, rictus smile staring upward.
"Oh," he said.
He heard Sylvie coming up behind him, picking her way through the darkness again. He moved the flashlight away from the body.
"Sylvie, I was wrong," he said. "She's here. You don't want to look."
"After all these years, I've come this far. It's time. Show me."
How could he have doubted her? She said she knew what death was. And she was right. He was the one who had never faced death. It happened at a distance for him. It happened on the TV news. She had held death in her hands.
Even in the darkness, she knew where to look. He turned from her and shone the flashlight onto the corpse.
"Listen, Sylvie," he said. "Whatever you did, you've been paying for it, don't you see? Trapped in this house. It wasn't first-degree murder, it was in a rage, I'm no lawyer but it was probably only manslaughter, you would have been out of prison before now."
She didn't say anything, just panted. Then groaned, a sound torn from the depth of her soul. Was she all right? He turned the flashlight from the body on the mattress to Sylvie's face. It wasn't grief or guilt that he saw there. It was horror. As if she were seeing this scene for the first time. She pointed at the corpse.
"What is it?" Don said. "She can't hurt you now, Sylvie."
"What she's wearing," said Sylvie, her voice weak. "Look what she's wearing."
Don shone the flashlight back on the body. He looked closely this time. The clothing was dark with tunnel grime, but as he stepped closer he could see that it wasn't the t-shirt Sylvie had described. It was a dress. A faded blue dress. He turned the flashlight back on Sylvie. She was plucking at her skirt like a little girl. The identical skirt.
"Same dress," said Don stupidly, trying to make sense of it.
"That's not Lissy," said Sylvie.
She sank down against the stone wall.
"It's me," she whispered.
16
Ballroom
It took Don a moment to realize what she was saying. "How could it be you?" he said lamely.
"I thought it was a dream," she said. She was shaking, leaning against the stone wall of the tunnel. The flashlight in his hand made her look like she was on stage, with a tight but feeble spotlight picking her out of the darkness. "I dreamed I came back down the tunnel and I was shaking her again, trying to wake her even though I knew she was dead, and then her hands... shot up and took me by the throat and I tried to apologize, I said I was sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to hurt her, but then I couldn't breathe and it hurt and I kept thinking, any time now I'll wake up, any time."
"She strangled you."
"Her face. So hateful. I thought it was what I deserved. I thought it was her ghost, haunting me. I've dreamed it a thousand times since then. I thought I was dreaming then. Because. Because it all went black, and then I woke up and it was dark because the candles had burnt out but I tripped over a body, lying on the mattress, a body right where I had left her body, I tripped over my body." She turned and looked over toward the corpse on the mattress. "Show me," she whispered. He turned the light toward the body. She crawled over. Touched it. Touched the parchment skin of the bare leg. Touched the damp rotting fabric of the dress. Then touched her own dress, the same dress, but not rotting.