Tracy hesitated, then shook her head. “That wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “What we have to do is get her spirit out of the mill.”
Beth swallowed. Her heart was suddenly pounding. “How?” she whispered. “The mill’s all locked up, isn’t it? How can we get in?”
“I know where Daddy hid the keys,” Tracy replied. “So we’ll do it tonight. All right? We’ll go down there together, and we’ll let Amy out, and bring her up to the mausoleum. Then she’ll be where she belongs, and she won’t be angry anymore, and you can visit her anytime you want to. See?”
Beth nodded, but said nothing.
“Keep the book in here, okay? Hannah’s always coming in to clean my room, and if she finds it, we’re dead.”
“But what if she finds it in here?”
“She won’t. But even if she does, it won’t be so bad, because you can say you didn’t know you shouldn’t have taken it out of Grandmother’s room. Just stick the book in your desk, and hide the box in your closet.”
“But what—?” she began again, but this time Tracy didn’t let her finish her question.
“Just hide it, then come down to the stable. There’s some stuff we’ve got to get ready for tonight.” Then, before Beth could say anything else, Tracy slipped out of her room, closing the door behind her.
After Tracy was gone, Beth stared at the book for several long seconds, then slowly read it through once more.
Everything she read fit together with what she already knew about Amy.
So Amy was real after all, and even Tracy finally believed her.
Tracy, she decided as she hid the box in her closet and slipped the book into the top drawer of her desk, wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was starting to look like they were going to be almost real sisters after all.
Tracy could hardly believe it.
She skipped down the path toward the stable, doing her best to keep from laughing out loud.
Beth had actually fallen for it. Just because of a name written in an old book, she’d actually been stupid enough to think it was proof that her dumb ghost was real.
She sauntered into the stable. Peter Russell was mucking out the stalls. He looked up at her and frowned.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to come down here anymore,” he said.
“There’s some stuff I have to get,” Tracy replied, her eyes narrowing angrily.
“What kind of stuff?” Peter challenged. “Your dad told me the stable was off limits.”
“None of your business,” Tracy replied, but when she tried to brush past Peter, he stepped out into the aisle and blocked her way.
“It is too my business. And until your father says different, you stay out of here.”
Tracy hesitated, wondering if she should try to talk him out of it. And then she had an even better idea.
She’d just wait for Beth, and tell her what to get out of the tackroom. And Beth would do it, too. Now that she’d shown Beth that old book, she was sure Beth would do anything she asked her to do.
Anything at all.
25
A kind of somnolence hung over the house all that day, and more than once Carolyn had to resist an urge to go to her room, close the curtains, then lie down in the cool half-light and let sleep overtake her. But she hadn’t done it, for all day long she found herself obsessed with the idea that hidden somewhere in the house was the key to whatever evil lay within the mill.
For a while, after breakfast, she tried to fight the growing obsession, telling herself that Phillip was right, and that there could not possibly be anything inherently evil about the old building. She reminded herself that Phillip’s father, in his last years, had been senile, and that Abigail, in those last weeks of her life when she had changed her mind about the mill, had already been weakened by a heart attack.
And yet every argument she presented herself with fell to pieces in the face of her growing certainty that there was something in the mill that neither Conrad nor Abigail had quite understood, but had nevertheless finally been forced to accept.
Finally, after lunch, she started searching the house.
She began in Abigail’s rooms, opening every drawer, searching through the stacks of correspondence the old woman had kept filed away, looking for anything that might refer, even indirectly, to the mill.
There was nothing.
She went to the basement, then, and spent two hours