dark hair, half of a handsome face, a sturdy arm, and a broad chest.
And I see his T-shirt.
Black and emblazoned with an image that’s only half visible.
The Rolling Stones logo.
My mind flashes back to that dingy room at the Two Pines. Dane stepping inside, looking so good that I couldn’t help but stare. When he caught me, I complimented his shirt. I hear his voice loud in my memory.
I’ve had it since I was a teenager.
And I hear his voice now, coming from the study door, where he stands with his arms at his sides and a dour look on his face.
“I can explain,” he says.
JULY 15
Day 20—Before Dark
I woke up on the floor.
Where in the house, I didn’t know.
All I knew when I regained consciousness was that I was somewhere inside Baneberry Hall, flat-backed on the floor, my joints stiff and my head pounding. It wasn’t until I opened my eyes and saw the portrait of Indigo Garson staring down at me that everything came rushing back.
Me in the Indigo Room.
Scraping at the painting.
Seeing the snake in Indigo’s hands.
A snake that, the longer I looked at it, the more unnerved I became. I wanted to believe Indigo’s pose with the snake was one of those Victorian-era eccentricities. Like death masks and taxidermied birds on hats. But my gut told me there was something far more sinister behind it.
That the snake represented Indigo’s true nature.
A predator.
I assumed it was William Garson who’d ordered it painted over. An attempt to hide the truth about his daughter. I suspected he couldn’t bear to paint over the whole portrait. The artist—poor, besotted Callum Auguste—had done too good a job for that. So the rabbit replaced the snake, an ironic reversal not found in nature.
Now the snake was exposed again. With it came grim understanding that I’d been wrong about so much.
It wasn’t William Garson making fathers kill their daughters inside Baneberry Hall.
It was Indigo.
I understood it with icy clarity. Just like the snake in her hands, she slithered her way into the minds of men who lived here, making them obsessed with what happened to her. I didn’t know if she died by her own hand or her father’s. In the end, it didn’t matter. Indigo was dead, but her spirit remained. Now she spent her days seeking vengeance for what her father had done. She didn’t care that he, too, was long gone. To her, every father deserved punishment.
So she made them kill their daughters.
Six times that had happened.
There wasn’t going to be a seventh.
I made my way back to the kitchen slowly, too sore from my night on the floor to move quickly. After hobbling down the steps, I found myself in front of the bells once more.
“Curtis,” I whispered, fearful Indigo was also nearby. Lurking. Listening. “Are you there?”
Three familiar bells rang.
YES
“It was Indigo, wasn’t it? She made you kill Katie.”
Another three rings.
YES
“What can I do?” I said. “How can I stop her? How can I tell if she’s here?”
Five bells rang a total of six times. At the final chime—the first bell on the first row—I realized he had spelled a word new to this weird form of communication.
CAMERA
I knew what he was referring to. The Polaroid camera in the study.
“Thank you, Curtis.” As I whispered it, I realized I was never going to hear from him again. He’d told me everything he could. The rest was up to me. So before leaving the bells, I added a somber, sincere “I hope this frees you from this place. I really do. I hope you find peace.”
With that, I made my way up three sets of stairs, my joints creaking the entire climb. In the third-floor study, I found what I was looking for in the closet.
A blue shoebox full of Polaroids.
I sorted through them, seeking the ones I’d neglected to look at the day I discovered the box. Photo after photo of Curtis Carver’s increasingly haunted face. I wondered if, when he took them, he felt as helpless as I did. If he was as worried and racked with the same guilt that weighed on me.
The images of Curtis were so similar that I needed to look at the dates scribbled below them to indicate which ones I hadn’t already seen. July 12th. That was one was new. As were pictures from July 13th and 14th.
The last Polaroid sat facedown at the bottom of the box. Flipping it over, I saw that, like the others, the date it had