“Well?” She prodded Silas in his bare, romance novel–cover abs.
He scratched the back of his head and squinted three stories up at the cardboard she’d put in two windows. Between them was a single octagonal window. “Could be decorative.”
“It could be,” she agreed. “But it’s not in the closet of the front bedroom. I paced it off in the hallway. I think there’s about ten feet unaccounted for.”
“Too big for ducting and mechanicals,” he observed.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Maybe it’s a passageway that connects the rooms? I’ve seen them in old houses with rooms that used to be nurseries.”
“That’s a possibility,” Maggie agreed.
“Well, what are we doing down here then? Let’s go find us a secret passage.”
It took them twenty minutes of careful, dusty searching before Silas found a seam in the back of the smaller bedroom’s closet. Their eyes met as he depressed a nearly hidden switch along the molding. There was a distinct click from inside the wall, and then one of the panels sprung toward them.
“Do you want a camera for this?” Silas asked, when she reached for the doorway.
She shook her head. “Not until we know for sure there aren’t any corpses or creepy ceramic doll collections inside. Some things shouldn’t be commemorated.”
“All right. Then let’s do this.” He grinned.
He hooked his fingers in the opening and tugged. The hinges gave a haunted house–style creak as the door swung open.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, poking his head in after Maggie stepped over the threshold. She shined a flashlight over the walls.
It was a small room. Barely bigger than ten-feet square, it smelled stale. There was a thick layer of dust covering every surface. One entire wall was buried under shelves of books and thick scrapbooks. There was a wingback chair covered in gold silk in the corner. Next to it was a small table that held a pipe and heavy ashtray. The other wall was covered in framed sepia-toned photos and newspaper clippings.
A thick black curtain hung on the front wall, exactly over where the window in question should be.
Silas distracted her by sneezing three times in rapid succession.
Maggie glanced at him. “Bless you?”
He sneezed again. “Better stop there. These’ll just keep going. Allergies.”
“You can wait outside,” she offered.
“No way in hell, Mags.”
“I’ll get you an antihistamine with your dinner,” she promised and drew the curtain back.
There was the octagonal window. Afternoon light filtered through the dirty glass. Beneath the window sat a small desk, a stack of neatly handwritten pages and a blue-glass inkwell next to it.
She picked up the top sheet.
“Holy crap,” she breathed. “I think we found Aaron Campbell’s real study. This looks like a book he was working on.” There were handwritten notes in the margins. Tidy, loopy script.
“Why hide out up here when there was a perfectly comfortable room downstairs?” Silas asked, skimming the page.
She opened the top desk drawer and peered inside. “Who knows? Writers are weird artistic types,” she told him. “I knew a girl in college who ended up writing romance novels. She says she hides in a closet with a bag of fast food to hit her deadlines.”
“Wallace is going to have a heart attack over this room,” Silas said.
“We’ll have to break the news to him carefully,” she decided. She turned and watched Silas as he examined the wall of framed photos before moving on to the bookshelves. She cleared her throat.
He glanced up at her.
She held out her hand, palm up. “Five bucks, sneezy.”
“I don’t have my wallet on me,” he said, gesturing at his still unfastened shorts. “However, I’ve got something I think you’ll like better.”
“We’re not having sex in here. You’d probably have an asthma attack.”
“I am capable of thinking of more than just sex, Nichols,” he said wryly.
She wrinkled her nose in feigned uncertainty. “Are you?”
“Close your eyes,” he ordered suddenly.
She shocked the hell out of both of them by complying.
His fingers skimmed her skin, and something cool and heavy slipped around her neck.
“If you just put some kind of creepy antique BDSM collar on me, we are going to have words,” Maggie said.
“Open your eyes.”