The McAdams were eating breakfast.
But how was that possible? I’d just seen both trays still sitting by the respective doors.
I leaned closer. Their faces were hidden, but I could see the meal clearly enough. Soft-boiled eggs in old-fashioned cups and what looked like grapefruit halves. Which was strange, because back in our room, Heath was shoveling down pancakes and bacon.
“What the hell . . .” I said softly.
So Luca cooked different breakfasts for different guests? That was an extraordinary amount of work for one person, and above and beyond providing dietary substitutions. Something about this felt off. Way off. I backed out of the room, headed down the stairs, but stopped dead at the pocket door.
Both breakfast trays still sat outside the McAdams’ and Siefferts’ doors. They looked exactly like they had when Luca had dropped them off, like they hadn’t been touched at all. I hesitated. I knew what I’d just seen—the McAdams eating their made-to-order eggs and grapefruit. Was it possible that in the time it had taken me to climb down the stairs, they’d put the tray back out?
I crept toward the McAdams’ door and the tray, knelt, and lifted one of the metal lids. The plate underneath was empty. Not just cleared of food but absolutely clean, like it had just come out of the cupboard. I lifted the cover off the other plate, and it was the same. A perfectly pristine plate. No food. Nothing.
I unscrewed the lid of the coffee carafe and turned it upside down. Nothing came out. It was completely, utterly empty. I dropped it, ran over to the Siefferts’ tray, and lifted those covers too. The plates were clean.
I flung the covers across the hall. Kicked at the tray, and utensils and glasses and carafe shot in all directions, clattering across the runner and bouncing off the opposite wall. My brain wasn’t computing the images. They didn’t make any sense. Not in the world where I was living and breathing—the dark hallway in a crimson house hidden away on a mountain. Where my fiancé ate syrupy pancakes down the hall like everything was perfectly normal and right.
But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
There was something terribly wrong here. Utterly and irrevocably wrong. I couldn’t zero in on what it was exactly, but I did know a few things: I knew Matthew Cerny had led me and Heath to believe we were on a retreat, a weeklong retreat with two other couples . . .
. . . who were nowhere to be found.
. . . who were being delivered trays of empty dishes for their meals.
But the other couples had been here at one point, hadn’t they? I’d met the McAdams, Jerry and Donna, just a few days ago. I’d seen them with my own eyes. Had they left? Gone down to Dunfree, like Reggie Teague, for some reason? But why would they? And why had Glenys and her husband left too?
Was it possible that Heath and I were actually alone here?
I tore down the hallway, charged back up the cramped staircase to the hexagonal attic. Sure enough, on the monitors, the McAdam and Sieffert rooms were buzzing with activity. Mrs. McAdam was making the bed while, across the room, her husband tied his shoes. Mr. Sieffert was pulling on pants, tucking in his shirt, staring at his reflection in the mirror on the closet door. Glenys was nowhere in sight.
I moved closer to the Sieffert monitor. Waited until the bathroom door opened, and a woman emerged, then sat on the bed, her back toward the camera.
It looked like Glenys, but honestly, I couldn’t see her face, only her back and profile. It could have been anyone. Any woman who was tall and slender with lightish hair. The next monitor over, Jerry McAdam—or somebody that looked a lot like him—watched his wife disappear into the bathroom and shut the door. He waited a second, then pulled out his old-school flip phone.
I spun to face the wall behind me. Studied the massive blocks of metal, their complicated faces of knobs and dials and gauges humming and clicking away. It sounded the same as every other time I’d been up here, but I’d just assumed it was part of the doctor’s J. Edgar Hoover setup. And I’d never bothered to really examine it.
Even though it was broad daylight outside, the attic was still dark. I ran my hands over the machinery, and all the way at the end, I found a section of boxy-looking green metal units, stacked four high. They were almost hidden, wedged between the bigger machinery and the wall. Each of them had one vertical slot.
Four in all.
I studied them, waiting for my brain to catch up with what my gut was already telling me. I knew what this was, I did. It was just that I was used to seeing one of these gadgets as a slim black box, sitting on top of a TV, with one horizontal slot and a few buttons underneath. But this was the same thing. It was the exact same goddamn thing.
A VCR.
A whole VHS system connected to the monitors up on the shelf.
I stuck my hand in one of the slots, and my fingers hit plastic. I could feel the mechanism whirring under my touch. I pushed on it, thinking it might release and eject, but it didn’t. I stepped back. Started randomly pressing every button, turning dials and knobs indiscriminately. I hit a black square button and, like magic, one of the tapes popped out from the last slot on the row.
“Shit.”
I pulled it out of the slot and looked at the label. Sieffert, Randall & Glenys—2006.
I practically smashed the other buttons, and another tape popped out. I yanked it out and looked at the label. McAdam, Jerry & Donna—2007. I dropped it, then shoved the Sieffert tape back into the deck. The tape chunked into the player and began to whir.
When I turned back to the monitors, the woman—the Glenys Sieffert doppelganger—was on camera. She was dressed in a sweater and trousers, her hair still dripping from the shower. She stood in the middle of the room, in a block of sunlight from the window, fluffing her hair. I watched her, mesmerized.
I couldn’t believe that I’d missed it. It was so obvious. I’d expected to see the Glenys I knew—I’d wanted to, and so I had. But this woman wasn’t Glenys. She was tall and thin, yes, but her face was all wrong. Her eyes too close together, her nose long and slightly hooked in profile, instead of Glenys’s straight, elegant one.
I felt my breath go shallow, my whole body tingle in alarm. The woman I’d been talking to all week had told me her name was Glenys. Cerny had made sure he had a tape of her look-alike playing at all times on the monitors. All of this was part of a carefully thought-out plan. A plan designed to fool me and Heath.
But why?
What possible reason could Cerny have for hiding the identity of the woman I’d befriended?
I heard a door slam somewhere downstairs. I backed out of the attic and flew down both flights of back stairs just as Luca was entering the kitchen from outside. We each stopped dead at the sight of the other.
I waved at him, wildly, probably looking like a crazy woman. “You need to go. Get out of here.”
He shook his head. I could tell he was worried about me, that he wanted to stay and help, which was sweet. But this was not a time for chivalry. No good could come from either of us hanging around here for one minute longer.
“I’m fine. I’m safe.” I looked over my shoulder. “But Dr. Cerny is crazy—he’s a fucking lunatic—and you don’t need to be in this house with him.” If I could’ve physically pushed him out the door I would have, but he retreated of his own accord, right out the door he’d come in.