Chapter Forty

CHAPTER FORTY

JULIET 2018

When Juliet tried to retreat into the corridor, Duncan strode across the bedroom and shut the door, keeping his hand braced against the wood. "We're just going to talk," he repeated.

"If all you wanted to do was talk, you wouldn't have broken into my house."

"I wouldn't have had to break in if you'd only been reasonable and answered my texts like you should have."

How the hell had Duncan found me? Juliet let that question settle for later, knowing she needed all her wits about her. He wasn't drunk, but she was pretty sure he'd been drinking. But where? And how did he get himself to Havencross in the middle of a blizzard?

An image fell into her mind, perfectly formed, as though she'd seen it herself: Duncan picking the lock of a side door and hiding himself in the many rooms and passages of Havencross for days. Spying on her, keeping one step ahead of her nightly rounds, waiting for the right moment to confront her.

Tilting her head and aiming for nothing more than a tone of curiosity, Juliet asked, "How long have you been at Havencross?"

"Clever girl," he purred, his gaze stroking down her body in the manner she'd once loved. "Not clever enough to have worked out the tracking app I put on your phone years ago, but still. I've been here two whole days, watching you perform your security checks"—the last two words clearly had invisible air quotes—"listening to you talk to yourself, and on the phone. Who is he?"

He shot the question at her, and Juliet jumped. Realizing she still had her back pressed against the door, she forced herself to step sideways, away from both the door and Duncan, wondering how to spin out the time before Noah got here without further angering her ex-husband. But she was also determined not to play his games. She had tried for years to anticipate Duncan, to placate him, to guess at his intentions and give him what he wanted. All it had gotten her was an empty hospital room and the tiniest of graves.

"Noah's a friend," she said. "His family lives nearby and helps look after the house."

"A friend? I heard the way you talked to him last night. How long have you been sleeping with him?"

"I'm not doing this, Duncan. I don't know what you think you're doing, but we are over. I don't owe you explanations about my life. I don't owe you anything."

He slammed his palm against the closed door. "You. Owe. Me. Everything. Because of you I'm on suspension. Because you drove me out of our bed and out of our house and that bitch Kelsey was just waiting in the wings—"

"Enough! You brought everything on yourself, Duncan. You always have. You're a third-rate professor in a second-rate college, and you think screwing a twenty-one-year-old student makes you hot. But it just makes you sad. You're a sad, bitter man who—"

He slapped her so hard that she stumbled back against her the desk. If he hadn't hit her open-handed, she was pretty sure she'd be unconscious on the floor. Juliet braced herself, one hand at her aching jaw and the other scrabbling behind her on the desktop to find something—anything—useful.

Duncan closed in, his pupils so wide his eyes seemed almost entirely black. Juliet's searching hand closed on the owl paperweight behind her and she tensed, waiting for her moment.

Without a flicker of warning, the lights cut out and her bedroom plunged into darkness. Juliet reacted instantly, swinging the paperweight in Duncan's direction and hitting him somewhere hard enough to shift his position. Knowing her space perfectly well by now, Juliet dashed around him and flung open the door.

The darkness was absolute. The medieval corridor had no windows at all, and if she hesitated she knew she would lose all sense of space and position. Juliet ran to her right, to the door that connected the medieval section with the Victorian. She heard Duncan, swearing freely, begin to follow her.

He would have to be careful. But Juliet could afford to move faster: in her wool socks, any creaks the old floors made were covered by the howling wind outside. She made straight for the main staircase, heading for the Victorian kitchen and Clarissa's old-age suite of rooms beyond. Where the landline telephone waited.

Call the police first, or the Bennetts' farmhouse? The farm was only two miles across the fields; if they had a tractor capable of getting through a blizzard, no doubt they'd be much quicker getting to her than the police would. All she had to do was keep out of reach of Duncan.

Her first check came when she picked up the vintage telephone at Clarissa's bedside and heard nothing—no clicks, no dial tone. Damn stupid blizzard , she cursed silently. The second check came hard on the heels of that disappointment: the distinctive, shattering sound of a gunshot.

Where in the hell had Duncan gotten a gun?

"Do you hear that, Juliet? I've got plenty of bullets. Enough to shoot at every shadow and still have one left for you. I know you're in the house. I'll find you. I've been here for two days, prowling around and finding all the places to hide. If only you would have talked to me, it wouldn't have come to this."

He sounded almost sorrowful through the pulse beating in Juliet's ears. She reminded herself sharply that any sorrow he felt was for himself only, and thought frantically about where she could safely hide. She'd never be able to reach the farm in a blizzard, what with all landmarks wiped away. And she didn't relish the thought of creeping through the dark house, trying to keep one step ahead of Duncan.

Outdoors? The old stables were still standing, but she had no coat, no hat, no boots. She'd freeze to death even if she had light enough to make her way carefully from house to stables. Except …

Duncan had moved on for now—his voice was getting farther away. Juliet crept through the Victorian kitchen into the scullery, through which she'd first entered Havencross all those weeks ago. Just as she remembered, there was the assortment of heavy outdoor garments hanging on hooks, stiff from age and disuse. There were also two pairs of Wellington boots.

She hesitated, still unsure what was safest. Glancing out the scullery windows told her nothing—it was as dark inside as out. Help me , she prayed, perhaps to Liam.

A light began to shine outside, dimly at first but slowly growing. It was not the light of a farm tractor or car—it was the same shivery, otherworldly light she'd seen in the corridor outside her bedroom once before. Ghost light.

Come hide with me.

Only this time, the light did not outline the shape of a young boy but that of a woman in long skirts, beckoning to Juliet in an undoubted gesture of urgency.

You'll be safe.

Juliet allowed the universe to decide. She shoved her feet into the smaller pair of Wellingtons and shrugged on the heaviest coat, clearly made for a man but waterproof and lined with flannel. There was even a felted wool cap shoved into one pocket that she tucked her hair into. After one deep breath and a final prayer, she opened the scullery door and plunged outside.

The wind stole her breath and the cold battered her. But the light remained, and Juliet set herself grimly to follow it to the stable. She was so focused on the pale female form that she didn't realize they weren't headed for the stables. Only when the form slipped inside the ruined walls, precariously capped with snow, did Juliet understand that she'd been brought to the old chapel.

Her immediate thought was This is no help at all , until the light stopped and bent over. It was the same motion Juliet had seen days before over Noah's shoulder—a woman grasping the edges of a false grave slab to move it.

The tunnel, whose opening she and Noah had discovered. The tunnel that she knew she could access safely, and whose opening could be covered and uncovered from the inside. It might not be much warmer down there, but at least it would be dry and protected from the wind. And Duncan would never find her.

Her decision was made by a shout from the house and another gunshot. "I see your footprints, Juliet. Do you really think you're safer outside? Just come back and talk to me!"

The offer would have been more enticing if Duncan hadn't screamed the last part. Whatever was happening with him, he was clearly on the edge.

Juliet headed into the chapel, trying to make her path look as uncertain as possible. She stamped down, flung snow with her arms every which way, and swept clear as many grave slabs as she could find so that Duncan couldn't be sure where exactly she'd gone. She doubted his first thought would be secret tunnel .

She squatted down at the false grave slab and gripped the edges with the sleeves of the coat covering her hands. It moved easily enough to allow her to slip through the space and onto the ladderlike steps. She stopped partway down to slide the slab back into place and paused. Would she have enough air if she shut it completely? Better leave an edge open just in case.

Her biggest worry, though, was unpredictable Duncan and that gun. Like all bullies, he was primarily concerned with his own survival, and she didn't think he'd confront Noah in any kind of fair fight. When a farm tractor blazing light and sound appeared in the fields, Duncan would likely make a run for it. Probably. But he might just be unhinged enough to take shots at someone unaware that he was armed.

After pulling the grave slab as near to closed as she dared, Juliet rested her head on a step and whispered, "Don't let anyone get hurt tonight."

Before she'd even finished, the oppressive darkness lightened. She looked down and saw the same outlined woman making the same beckoning gesture as before.

Juliet remembered the property deeds and royal decrees she'd found in Nell's files: Said property to be held by the crown without prejudice or favor in the interests of a proven heir to the previous owner, Lady Ismay Deacon.

"Is that who you are?" Juliet breathed the words into the air between them. "Are you Ismay Deacon?"

If she'd expected an answer, she would have been disappointed. The form—oh hell, thought Juliet, might as well call it what it is—the ghost only continued to beckon. There was nothing threatening or frightening about the action, just that sense of urgency. And as Juliet had nothing else to do at the moment but wait for Duncan to grow tired of searching outside or for Noah to arrive, she might as well see what the ghost wanted.

She descended the rest of the steps and faced forward. "Lead on," she said.

It wasn't at all like following someone real—not only was there no noise except Juliet's own movements and breathing, but the ghostly light before her seemed to shrink and grow at will and, sometimes, appeared to be shining from out of the very tunnel walls. Juliet counted steps at first, but got lost around two hundred. Although the space was confining, she hadn't had to do more than stoop thus far. If it came to crawling on her hands and knees, she decided, then she was out. Imagine being stuck down here, slowly dying and no one ever knowing where you were?

But when the tunnel changed, it grew larger rather than smaller. And soon Juliet stepped upright into some sort of underground cavern. She thought it might have begun as a natural space, for much of the floor was irregular stone as though water had long ago flowed through here. It had been widened at the sides to create a space where threatened monks could hide with their precious gold and jeweled vessels.

One side had collapsed inward, and that was where the ghost hovered.

Picking her way carefully across the floor, Juliet reached the outer edges of the disturbed earth and saw bricks mixed in with the rest. A structure, then, or—

"The well," she said suddenly. The surveyor's map Noah had showed her was vivid in her mind. The medieval well that had been capped off when Gideon Somersby began building. If Juliet were to draw a line between the tunnel opening in the ruined chapel and the medieval icehouse where it might once have come out, that line would pass very near to the old well.

Juliet thought of how excited Daniel Gitonga would be, and she hoped there would be a proper excavation. And that she could be part of it. She looked up at the ghost, who had stopped both moving and beckoning.

"Is this what you wanted to show me?" Juliet asked, with no expectation of an answer this time.

But the ghost—who seemed to have taken on a more solid outline, whose face was young and whose hair, Juliet could now see, swung free around her shoulders—extended her right hand and pointed.

Juliet followed the pointed finger with her eyes. What was she meant to see? It's not as though the ghost were providing an especially strong light—no theater overheads or spotlights here—but Juliet crouched down and ran her gaze over the rubble of the collapsed well.

Something glinted. Holding her breath, Juliet reached out with a feather-light touch, afraid that it might vanish, but this was no ghostly object. Her hand closed around a ring. The glint came from the gold band, much dulled by time and dirt, but heavy enough that Juliet was sure it was solid gold. There was a dark square stone in the center. Trying to think of the safest place for it, Juliet slipped the ring onto the little finger of her left hand.

When she looked back at her ghost, the pointed finger had not wavered. So, not the ring. Or not just the ring. Juliet dropped to her knees for better stability and delicately began brushing at the dirt around where the ring had lain. It took only a minute or two for her fingertips to distinguish a new texture. Not dirt, not stone, not man-made …

Holding her breath again, Juliet drew back her hands with care and clasped them beneath her chin. It was an unconscious imitation of prayer, her body's recognition that what she'd uncovered demanded reverence even before her mind caught up.

Bones . The pitted, yellowed, distinctive bones of a human rib cage.

Juliet released her breath in a gasp and looked up at her ghost.

Who chose that very moment to vanish, taking all the light with her.