Or at least, I think it’s a cellar—it’s whatever is waiting beneath the trapdoor in the pantry, the creepy one with the big lock and the carved symbols. I haven’t pulled up the rug since that first day I found it, but it tugs at me. It feels magnetic, or gravitational, like I could set a marble down anywhere in the house and it would roll toward it.
Elizabeth Baine seems to surmise its existence somehow.
Is there a basement or crawl space in the house?
I reply with that shrugging emoticon.
A terse silence of several hours, then: Please find out if there is a basement or a crawl space in the house.
I let her stew for a while before writing back, I’m really scared of spiders sorry. I add an emoji shedding a single tear, because if she’s going to blackmail me into selling out a man who quietly doubles all his recipes for me, I’m going to make her regret it.
Baine replies with a string of annoyed texts, which I ignore. She mentions karst topography and ground-penetrating radar and includes several blurry aerial maps of Starling land.19 I turn my ringer off.
The next time I check my phone there’s a picture of the Muhlenberg County High School. It’s an odd angle, taken behind the football field, where the bleachers back up onto a sea of feed corn. It wouldn’t be remarkable at all, except that I know it’s where Jasper eats his lunch every day—and so does she.
I stare at the picture for a long time, feeling that cold place in the middle of me.
The next day I roll back the rug in the downstairs pantry and send her a picture of the trapdoor. She’s thrilled. Exactly where is it located? Is it locked? Do you know where the key is? And then, inevitably: Could you find it?
I’m not surprised by the request—you don’t drug a person and threaten their only family member if all you want from them is a nice conversation and a couple of email attachments—but I’m a little surprised how much I don’t want to do it. I delay as long as I can, backtracking and seesawing, sending back obnoxiously long lists of all the places I’ve looked for the key without finding it. She urges me to try harder and I send even longer lists in response, with footnotes. She suggests that perhaps I could pick the lock, making delicate mention of my school disciplinary reports; I reply that I was a shitty teen who knew how to open cheap doors with a credit card, not an old-timey bank robber.
In the end I receive a text that directs me very simply to open the cellar door by Friday. There are no threats or dire warnings, but I scroll back up to look at that picture of the high school until the chill spreads from my chest across my back, as if it’s pressed against a stone wall.
The next day I wait until I hear Arthur’s footsteps on the stairs. The sullen scrape of the coffeepot, the squeal of hinges, the squelch of boots on wet ground. Then I put down my paintbrush, thump the lid back on the can with the butt end of a screwdriver, and go up to the attic room.
It seems to take a very long time to get there: the staircase stretches endlessly upward, doubling back on itself more times than is strictly logical, and I make a dozen false turns on the third floor. The fifth time I end up standing in the library I sigh very hard and say, to no one in particular, “You are being a real dick about this.”
When I turn around, the narrow staircase is behind me. I brush my fingers along the wallpaper in silent thanks.
Arthur’s room isn’t messy after all. It’s bright and clean and hot, floorboards baking in the lavish light of May. There’s a desk beneath the window and a bed under the eaves, quilt tucked neatly around the mattress because of course he makes his bed every morning. I consider rumpling his sheets just to be a pill, but the thought makes me feel suddenly sweaty and restless, and anyway the hellcat is curled in the middle of his bed giving me a one-eyed glare. I stick my tongue out at her and look elsewhere.
On the wall at the head of the bed, hanging in a heavy bracket, there’s a sword. It doesn’t look like a toy or a Ren faire prop. The blade is rust-mottled, chipped and scored, but the edge is sharpened to invisibility, like the point of a snake’s tooth. There are symbols running from hilt to point, inlaid in soft silver, and I know with chilled certainty that Elizabeth Baine would have a seizure if I sent her a picture of it. I turn to the desk instead.
The surface is painfully tidy, all the pens nib-down in a coffee cup, all the books stacked and sticky-noted. The top drawer contains an array of overlong needles and pots of ink, a few paper towels stained a watery red. It should have occurred to me before now that the nearest tattoo place is in E-town. That he must sit up here with his sleeves rolled high and his hair hanging in his eyes, pressing the needle into his skin again and again.