“What do we do now?” I said to him. “Where do we go? I thought he would come here to kill the patients.”
“I thought so, too, but he didn’t. I don’t know where he was bloody going. When he shook me off, he headed in the direction of the stairwell.”
I thought of what Creeton had said when he attacked me. He had wanted the key to the west wing, and he had wanted to get his Luger. “He may have gone to Matron’s office,” I said. “He’s looking for a way to get into her safe.”
“He won’t find it,” said a voice.
Behind us, inside the common room, one man had sat up on his mattress. It was Archie, hugging his knees, watching us. I hadn’t seen him move.
“Archie,” I said gently, “are you all right?”
He looked past my shoulder to Anna Gersbach. “He knows you,” he said to her. “The man that comes. He knows you.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you here to stop him?” he asked her.
Anna stepped forward, looking down at him, sitting so thin and vulnerable on his mattress. “I was hiding,” she told him. “I was afraid. But Mikael—Mikael came to me this morning. He begged me to help. He told me I was the only one who can.” She swallowed, but no tears came down her face. “He told me Papa is getting stronger, that he’s going to kill someone. He told me to stop it and set him free.”
Archie looked up at her from his sunken eyes, all traces of his stutter gone. “I see his face in my dreams,” he said. “I heard his thoughts last night. They were in my head. If that was your father, I am truly sorry.”
Her mouth opened, but she did not reply. She seemed to have lost her words.
“Do you know how to stop him?” Archie asked her.
Still speechless, Anna shook her head.
“He wants a sacrifice,” Archie said. “He’s tried, and he’s come close.” He glanced at me, then looked back at Anna. “But he’s never succeeded. If he gets his sacrifice, he will go.”
“That means someone has to die,” I said.
“Perhaps,” said Archie, “and perhaps not.” He looked at me again. “Creeton won’t get into the safe. The Luger isn’t in there anyway. You told him that, didn’t you?”
I’d told Creeton that Jack had the combination, but Creeton hadn’t believed me. “Yes,” I said. “Archie, how—？”
“It’s logic,” he replied. “I know what he was after. I know he tried to get it from you. Creeton won’t get into the safe himself, so he’ll move on. He’ll go to the west wing.”
“Why?” Douglas asked.
Archie’s eyes glittered. “Because the one he wants is there. The one he’s going to kill. He’s going to eliminate the weak.”
My breath came short. Creeton hadn’t killed Nina, and he hadn’t killed me. You aren’t the assignment, he’d said to me. I’d thought that meant he was coming to kill the other patients. But it hadn’t.
“Jack,” I said. “Jack is in the west wing. And so is Mabry.”
“We need to hurry,” said Anna.
I turned to Douglas. I reached into my pocket and took out a folded rag. Anna and I had made a stop on our way downstairs from the nursery; there was something I’d needed to retrieve from the nurses’ night duty desk.
I unfolded the rag and pulled out one of the needles I’d taken from the desk drawer and assembled. “If by any chance Creeton comes back, stick him with this.”
Douglas took it from me. His expression was as unsettled as if I’d handed him a live grenade. “I recognize this,” he said quietly.
Of course he did. Every man at Portis House could get the needle if he got out of hand. “It’ll do the trick,” I told him.
He squared away his unease and set the needle gingerly on his thigh, his hand cupped over it. “If he comes back, I’m ready,” he said, determined. “Go.”
? ? ?
“They’ve closed off the west wing,” I told Anna as we climbed the west servants’ stairs. “There’s only one door.”
“Actually, there’s a door through the cellar,” Anna said.
“What?”
“It was how I got into the house, through the cellar. There is an outside door and the wood was rotten around the lock. I got in that way and used the connecting tunnel through the cellar to hide in the west wing, where no one would find me.”
“I don’t understand it,” I said, hushed. “I don’t understand where you’ve been, why you came back.”
“After I killed Papa, Mama was hysterical,” Anna said. “She didn’t know what to do. I was in shock. I barely remember. Papa was going to kill us, too—that was why I did it. I still know it, that he would have killed us. But how can I prove that? He’d hurt us for years, but no one outside the family ever knew. He kept it so quiet, so hidden.”
“Even from Maisey Ravell,” I said.
For the first time she expressed emotion as she flinched in pain. “Maisey never knew. I hope to God she did not. I hid the bruises. Papa said that if I ever told—”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
She glanced at me thoughtfully, and then her face returned to its usual impassiveness. “He hurt Mama, too. He hurt all of us. Then Mikael came home disgraced as a coward. It was too much for Papa. He said we would never live down the shame, that we should not live at all. He said he would execute Mikael the way the army should have. He pulled Mikael from his bed one night and did it. He said it was only just. He took Mikael outside. I heard Mikael pleading with him, and I heard the shot, and when I came out I saw Mikael on the ground. So I grabbed the gun from Papa and I shot him.”
“Dear God, Anna,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Mama was hysterical,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. She had gone back into her strange trance, distant from the world. “She telephoned the magistrate and he came.”
“Maisey’s father,” I said.
“Yes. I remember he came, and he told us he would take care of it, that there need be no scandal. I had thought I would go to jail, that I would be hanged. But Mr. Ravell said that if we did exactly as he said, it would all go away.”
“And what did he tell you to do?”
“Leave,” she said. “He helped us book passage back to Switzerland under assumed names, with assumed passports. He told us he would see Mikael and Papa buried, and no one would know.” And make himself a nice profit, I thought. Anna continued. “Papa had dismissed the servants, because he’d planned very carefully to kill us. There was no one to gossip. Mr. Ravell gave us money and told us to go. I was terrified of being hanged as a murderer, so I took Mama and I went.”
We reached the landing and she paused, looking out the small window at the marshes. “We stayed in Switzerland until Mama got sick. When she died, all I wanted was to come home. I thought the house would be empty, that it would still be ours. When I saw that wasn’t so, I should have run. But where would I go? I had come into the country on an assumed passport. I wasn’t supposed to be in England. Someone had always taken care of us, even in Switzerland, but not now. If I’m found, I’ll hang as a murderer. So I broke into the cellar and hid.”