Again, she couldn’t find it. Was that a banging sound in the distance? Someone was coming. Panic rose in her. Lower still.
Using the shelves to support her wavering body, she bent and finally found the lever. She pulled. There was a click, and the back wall of the pantry loosened. Alice pushed, and the shelved wall swung inward. She hastened into the revealed space and pushed the wall back into place.
Her entire body began to shake. Or maybe it’d been shaking all along, and she hadn’t stood still long enough to feel it. Her rubbery legs gave way and she sunk onto the floor.
“There. You did it. You’re safe now, Addie.”
That was her imagined mother’s voice, talking to her. Alice wanted to believe her, but she wasn’t entirely convinced. Her body was finished running, however. She could go no further. She scooted a few inches, finding the corner of the hidey-hole. Her head fell back against the wall. She finally succumbed to the heavy, thick haze of unconsciousness.
*
THANKS to the loud beach party, Dylan didn’t hear the castle’s alarm blaring in the distance until he reached the horse path. He’d been running already, but he picked up his pace even more when he heard the alarm.
Something’s definitely wrong.
He’d already contacted Jim and told him to meet him at the castle, but hopefully the knowledge that the house had been breached would rush him all the more.
When he reached the terrace doors, he realized one was hanging open. A quick check informed him that the pane near the lock had been broken. Someone had busted the pane.
“Alice?” he bellowed as he entered, the screeching alarm obliterating his voice.
You’ve lost her. Again.
He willfully quashed down the unhelpful, panicked voice of doom. He sprinted through the media room toward the hallway.
*
ALICE’S eyelids fluttered open. The pain in her head had diminished to a throbbing ache, but her face, jaw, and hands burned like acid had been poured on the skin. Is that what had brought her to alertness? Where was she? In the distance, she heard the pulsing alarm.
Memory came sluggishly.
Kehoe.
He’d tried to kill her. All those horrible things he’d said about Lynn. What if the things he said were true? Did that mean that Kehoe could be her . . .
No. Don’t think about that right now.
Thad had been there. He’d saved her, and she’d dragged herself to the hidey-hole in the pantry of the kitchen. The childhood memory of it must have been triggered by the trauma and her fear.
In a pause of the throb of the alarm, she heard a thump outside in the pantry. The outer light switched on. Icy tendrils slithered beneath her skin. She stared in frozen horror at the slit of white light shining beneath the fake wall at the back of the pantry. Did the wall vibrate, or was that Alice’s entire world shaking?
The fingers of ice reached all the way to her heart and clutched as she watched the wall slowly swing inward. Light flooded the secret space. Someone stepped into the opening.
Kehoe stared down at her, looking like a horror with blood streaming from his temple and his right eye swelling. His preppy glasses—the very symbol of Kehoe’s fastidious personality—were now bent askew on his face. There was a smear of blood on one of the lenses. Alice couldn’t breathe.
A disgusted frown tilted Kehoe’s lips.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t find you? You’re bleeding like a stuck pig. Your tracks led me straight to you. I knew you were much stupider than Lynn, but I have to say, I’m disappointed, Addie.”
She hated her weakness; despised it. But she was paralyzed as he stepped into the little space, breaching her zone of safety. That was when she noticed what he held—a heavy meat tenderizer. He must have picked it up in the kitchen from the jar of utensils on the counter. The vision of it galvanized her. She braced herself on her hands and kicked at his legs as he stepped closer to her.
He kicked her back in her solar plexus, his manner almost casual. Alice made an oof sound. Her lungs locked. Pain splintered her hazy consciousness yet again.
“Don’t you just want to get this over with? I know I do,” Kehoe said with a weary grimness that terrified her almost as much as the weapon. He raised the arm that held the meat pounder. Everything seemed to go into slow motion.