Silence for the Dead(104)

“Mikael,” she replied. “I feel him. It’s Mikael.”

The hair stood up on my arms, but it was easier now. Anna had known him, loved him. Sweet Mikael. He had deserved nothing that had happened to him after all. I opened my eyes again. “We have to go forward, Anna. They need our help. Mikael needs our help.”

She hesitated, then nodded. But she didn’t let me go.

The west wing was now utterly decayed, like a tomb centuries old. “I’m not certain where we are,” I confessed. “I came here once before, with Jack. We found all of your old belongings.”

“In Papa’s gallery,” she replied. “It’s just to the right. I thought all of our belongings must be there. But it’s locked, so I couldn’t go in.”

We came to the door and I tried the handle. It was locked. I patted my pockets, and then I remembered. The key to this door was on the orderlies’ key ring—the one I had given to Creeton. “I don’t have the key,” I told her. “Only the orderlies have them. We have to keep going.”

“Kitty,” Anna whispered, “I don’t hear anyone.”

“Neither do I.” It worried me. What if everyone was hiding? Or dead?

The back of my neck prickled with cold, and then it was gone. My skin felt warm and humid again, clammy with damp from the rain and from my own fear.

Where did ghosts go when they left?

And then, from below us, I heard shouts. Two voices. Three.

I turned back to Anna. “Where is the nearest staircase?”

“This way,” she said, and she disappeared around a corridor without me. I followed, taking as much care as I could not to step on a nail or a mouse or a patch of rotten floor. I kept Anna’s figure in sight and only looked forward.

We had just reached the stairwell—the door was rotten, warped in its frame, and it took both of us to pry it open—when we heard a single gunshot. “The Luger,” I said, pushing past her, running down the rotten stairs that bowed and groaned under my weight. I’d spent enough time on servants’ stairs to last me a lifetime. I came out the door at the other end and ran in the direction where I thought I’d heard the sound. Shouts came from before me, and another somewhere to my right, voices echoing off the strange corridors. One of them was Jack’s.

I turned toward it, but another sound was closer to me, to my left. It was a groan of pain. I’d lost Anna now, but there was nothing I could do about it. I followed the sound and found Roger lying half inside a closet, his legs out in the corridor, his right arm and torso slicked with blood.

“He shot me,” he said without preamble as I knelt beside him. “He’s got the Luger. Shot me in the shoulder when I grabbed him. I think it’s broken. Good God, it hurts like the goddamned devil—”

So Creeton had found his Luger, then. “I don’t know what to do,” I said to Roger. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Give me a strip of something and we’ll tie it off. Who the hell is that?”

Anna had appeared over my shoulder. “Do you have something?” I cried at her. “A cloth of some kind. Something!”

She stared at me helplessly. I grabbed the hem of my apron and ripped a strip from it, my arms straining as the thick fabric nearly refused to give way. I handed it to Anna. “Follow his instructions,” I told her, “and tie it off. I’m going to find the others.”

“In the ballroom,” Roger said. “To the left.”

And then I was gone, racing down the corridor toward the big, grand double doors that had once led to the ballroom.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE


I had seen the ballroom from outside that day I’d sat on the lawn with Archie, what felt like years ago. From inside, it dwarfed both the common room and the dining room in size, and probably could have held both of them easily. The floor was marble, the walls accented in gold leaf that carried across the ceiling. Electric lights were installed in the walls, as well as sconces for lamps. It had been a beautiful room once.

Now the gold paint was peeling, the plaster was crumbling with damp, and the floor was slick with leaves and rain. The high windows were crusted with dirt, and the light they let in was murky. I saw a lone figure on the floor, on his knees, his head down.

At first I didn’t recognize him. And then I stopped short, just as I approached him, and stared at him in shock.

It was Creeton.

He looked up at me. The anger, the violence were gone from him, and the look he gave me was almost pleading, though he did not speak. He was bloodied on one shoulder, the blood running down his arm. He wasn’t holding a gun. We stared at each other for a long moment, in that huge, rotting room, as the rain fell outside and leaked through the ceiling.

“Where is it?” I said to him.

“What?”

“The gun. Your Luger.”

He shook his head.

“I mean it,” I said. “It’s over, Creeton. Give me the gun.”

“I was supposed to kill him,” Creeton said. “That was the assignment. But I couldn’t even do that. I failed. And now . . . now he’s gone from my mind. He left me alone at last.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You didn’t fail. You just shot Roger.”