“You made this mess, you can help clean it up. This is a big house. Come on,” Dylan ordered, his rapid stride fueled by rising alarm. Distantly, Dylan realized he’d been waiting for some kind of explosion on Alice’s part. He was afraid it had just occurred outside of his watch. From the edge of his attention, he noticed that Thad Schaefer was even further surprised by Dylan’s terse command to join him. But he came after a pause, jogging up the steps behind him.
“You continue up to the third floor and look for her,” Dylan said when they reached the second level. He started to stride down the hallway but paused. “Check every room. Come and find me the second—and I mean the second—you locate her. If you finish looking before I do and come up short, then go up to the fourth floor and start searching for her there. And keep your voice down,” he bit out quietly over his shoulder. Surely the kid wasn’t so insensitive or stupid that he’d send up an alarm with all these people in the house. “Let’s keep this simple, don’t talk at all unless you’ve found Alice and are calling out to me. Got it?”
Schaefer’s mouth slanted irritably, but he nodded.
Dylan’s own bedroom suite was empty. Skipping all the bedrooms in between, Dylan headed straight for the suite where he’d found Alice the other night: Addie Durand’s former one.
It, too, stood hushed and devoid of life.
“Alice,” he called out when he was in the hallway again, torn between wanting to bellow her name so that he could be heard in every corner of the mansion and muting his shout to prevent being overheard by someone at the cocktail party downstairs.
“Alice?” he called out a moment later, switching on a light. He stood at the entrance of Alan Durand’s suite. It had once been Alan and Lynn’s, before Lynn had passed. Dylan hadn’t been in the room since Alan had finally succumbed to cancer seven years ago. Most of the furniture was covered in dustcloths. It struck Dylan as empty as a tomb, and yet filled with memories: dead and alive at once.
He entered the room farther and stood stock still in the middle of it, listening. After a moment, he turned and shut off the light, closing the door behind him.
Part of Dylan still existed in that room, the memories of Alan Durand kept alive forever inside of him. Alice, however, wasn’t there. He’d bet his life on it. But being in that room reminded him of something Alan had told him in passing a few times.
He approached the back staircase, suddenly highly aware of the sound of his hard leather soles on the wood floor of the hall. He came to a halt at the side of the stair rising up to the third floor. He held his breath, listening. Unlike in Alan’s room, he experienced a full, hushed sense of anxious anticipation.
He knelt by the wooden paneling beneath the stair. Recalling both Alan Durand’s references and something Deanna Shrevecraft had once shown him when she’d visited Castle Durand, he used his hands to pry back a portion of the wood paneling. The three-by-two-foot panel slid aside.
Peering into the black void, he heard slight rustling and then a barely audible sound like a gasp or a whimper.
“Alice?”
Silence.
He awkwardly tried to maneuver his large body partially into the opening, squinting his eyes. A whisper came from the darkness.
“Dylan.”
A shiver snaked under his skin. She’d sounded odd. Distant. Spooked.
“I’m right here, baby,” he said evenly, even though alarm had started to bubble in his veins. He backed out of the cramped opening in order to go back in a more navigable angle. “I’m coming in, Alice. Everything’s okay.”
“I know.”
He blinked.
“I remember Addie.”
His skin pulled tight at her whispering voice, the hairs on his arm and nape springing to attention.
“I mean . . . not everything,” she continued breathlessly.
Dylan barely contained a blistering curse because he couldn’t see even her shadow. She was a disembodied whisper in the darkness.
“I ran up here, and I wasn’t really thinking . . . just feeling cornered by everything, you know?” She continued in a tiny, shaking voice. “And I had this thought that I wished I could hide and stay there forever, but I needed a good spot. Then it just came to me in a rush, how she and I would play hide-and-seek. She knew all my spots, because she was the one who had shown me the good ones . . . all the secret, hidden places like this one. They were her hiding places, too. I’d hide and she’d look for me like she didn’t know where I was, but I knew she did. She’d call out to let me know where she was as she looked around in the area, to let me know when she was getting close. Aadddie, where are you?”
She made a sound like a choked laugh or a sob.
Dylan jerked at the eerie sound, banging the back of his head on the paneling.
“Dylan? Are you okay?”
He pried his eyes open from a wince of pain, because her voice sounded closer. Suddenly, her pale face emerged from the shadows. She was crawling toward him on her hands and knees. He reached for her single-mindedly and propelled himself back, as if he thought he could manually pull her out of her disturbing memory like he could haul her out of that secret compartment. They landed with a thud just outside of the opening, his body taking the impact of their fall.
“Dylan?”