“No wonder the neighbors didn’t hear anything that night,” Jane said, gazing at dense woods. “I don’t even see any neighbors.”
“I think it’s just ahead, through those trees.”
Another thirty yards, and the road suddenly widened, their car emerging into late afternoon sunshine. A two-story house loomed before them. Though now in disrepair, it still had good bones: a redbrick facade, a wide porch. But nothing about this house was welcoming. Certainly not the wrought-iron bars across the windows, or the NO TRESPASSING signs tacked to the posts. Knee-high weeds were already taking over the gravel driveway, the first wave of invaders, preparing the way for encroaching forest. Wardlaw had told them that an attempt at renovations was abruptly abandoned two months ago, when the contractor’s equipment had accidentally touched off a small fire, scorching an upstairs bedroom. The flames had left black claw marks on a window frame, and plywood still covered the broken glass. Maybe the fire was a warning, thought Jane. This house is not friendly.
She and Gabriel stepped out of the rental car. They had been driving with the AC on, and the heat took her by surprise. She paused in the driveway, perspiration instantly blooming on her face, and breathed in the thick and sullen air. Though she could not see the mosquitoes, she could hear them circling, and she slapped her cheek, saw fresh blood on her hand. That was all she heard, just the hum of insects. No traffic, no birdsong; even the trees were still. Her neck prickled-not from the heat, but from the sudden, instinctive urge to leave this place. To climb back in the car and lock the doors and drive away. She did not want to go in there.
“Well, let’s see if Wardlaw’s key still works,” said Gabriel, starting toward the porch.
Reluctantly she followed him up creaking steps, where blades of grass grew through seams between the boards. On Wardlaw’s video, it had been wintertime, the driveway bare of vegetation. Now vines twisted up the railings and pollen dusted the porch like yellow snow.
At the door, Gabriel paused, frowning at what remained of a padlock hinge that had once secured the front entrance. “This has been here a while,” he said, pointing to the rust.
Bars on the windows. A padlock on the door. Not to guard against intruders, she thought; this lock was meant to keep people in.
Gabriel jiggled the key in the lock and gave the door a push. With a squeal it gave way, and the smell of old smoke wafted out; the aftermath of the contractor’s fire. You can clean a house, repaint its walls, replace the drapes and the carpets and furniture, yet the stench of fire endures. He stepped inside.
After a pause, so did she. She was surprised to find bare wood floors; on the video, there had been an ugly green carpet, since removed during the cleanup. The banister leading up the stairs was handsomely carved, and the living room had ten-foot ceilings with crown molding, details that she had not noticed while watching the crime scene video. Water stains marred the ceiling, like dark clouds.
“Whoever built this place had money,” Gabriel noted.
She crossed to a window and looked through the bars at the trees. The afternoon was slipping toward evening; they did not have more than an hour before the light would fade. “It must have been a beautiful house when it was built,” she said. But that was a long time ago. Before shag carpets and iron bars. Before bloodstains.
They walked through a living room empty of furniture. Floral wallpaper showed the wear of passing years-smudges and peeling corners and the yellow tinge from decades of cigarette smoke. They moved through the dining room and came to a halt in the kitchen. The table and chairs were gone; all they saw was tired linoleum, the edges nicked and curling. Afternoon sun slanted in through the barred window. Here is where the older woman died, Jane thought. Sitting in the center of this room, her body tied to a chair, tender fingers exposed to the hammer’s blows. Though Jane was staring at an empty kitchen, her mind superimposed the image she had seen on the video. An image that seemed to linger in the sunlit swirl of dust motes.
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Gabriel.
They left the kitchen and paused at the bottom of the staircase. Looking up toward the second-floor landing, she thought: Here is where another one died, on these steps. The woman with the brown hair. Jane gripped the banister, her hand clasping carved oak, and felt her own pulse throbbing in her fingertips. She did not want to go upstairs. But that voice was once again whispering to her.
Mila knows.
There’s something I’m supposed to see up there, she thought. Something the voice is guiding me toward.
Gabriel headed up the stairs. Jane followed more slowly, her gaze focused downward on the steps, her palm clammy against the railing. She came to a halt, staring at a patch of lighter wood. Crouching down to touch a recently sanded surface, she felt the hairs lift on the back of her neck. Darken the windows, spray these stairs with luminol, and the grain of this wood would surely light up a spectral green. The cleaners had tried to sand away the worst of it, but the evidence was still there, where the victim’s blood had spilled. This was where she died, sprawled on these steps, this very spot Jane was touching.
Gabriel was already on the second floor, walking through the rooms.
She followed him to the upper landing. The smell of smoke was stronger here. The hallway had drab green wallpaper and a floor of dark oak. Doors hung ajar, spilling rectangles of light into the corridor. She turned into the first doorway on her right, and saw an empty room, walls marked by ghostly squares where pictures had once hung. It could be any vacant room in any vacant house, all traces of its occupants swept away. She crossed to the window, lifted the sash. The iron bars were welded in place. No escape in a fire, she thought. Even if you could climb out, it was a fifteen-foot drop onto bare gravel, with no shrubs to break the fall.
“Jane,” she heard Gabriel call.
She followed his voice, moving across the hall into another bedroom.
Gabriel was gazing into an open closet. “Here,” he said quietly.
She moved beside him and crouched down to touch sanded wood. She could not help mentally superimposing yet another image from the video. The two women, slender arms entwined like lovers. How long had they huddled here? The closet was not large, and the smell of fear must have soured the darkness.
Abruptly she rose to her feet. The room felt too warm, too airless; she walked into the hall, her legs numb from crouching. This is a house of horrors, she thought. If I listen hard enough, I’ll hear the echoes of screams.
At the end of the hall was one last room-the room where the contractor had touched off the fire. She hesitated on its threshold, repelled by the far stronger stench of smoke in this room. Both broken windows had been covered with plywood, blocking out the afternoon light. She took the Maglite from her purse and shone it around the dim interior. Flames had scorched walls and ceiling, devouring sections all the way down to charred timber. She swung the Maglite beam around the room, past a closet missing its door. As her beam swept past, an ellipse flashed on the closet’s back wall, then vanished. Frowning, she swung the Maglite back.
There it was again, that bright ellipse, briefly flickering across the back wall.
She crossed to the closet for a closer look. Saw an opening large enough to poke a finger through. Perfectly round and smooth. Someone had drilled a hole between the closet and the bedroom.
Beams groaned overhead. Startled, she glanced up as footsteps creaked across the ceiling. Gabriel was in the attic.
She went back into the hallway. Daylight was rapidly fading, dimming the house to shades of gray. “Hey!” she called. “Where’s the trap door to get up there?”
“Look in the second bedroom.”
She saw the ladder and scrambled up the rungs. Poking her head into the space above, she saw the beam of Gabriel’s Maglite slicing through the shadows.