had a little workshop for a short time. There’s another panel behind the shelving. The rest I had sealed. A compromise.”
Now she managed to smile at him. “Your grandfather let me have my way, and I let him have his. So we didn’t seal those two, and completely close a Bluff House tradition. I didn’t even tell your father, not even when he was old enough not to be foolish.”
“Why?”
“His place was Boston. Yours is here. If you need to hide, to get away, use the panels. No one else knows, except Stoney Tribbet, if he remembers.”
“He remembers. He drew me a blueprint of where the panels used to be. But he didn’t tell me two were still open.”
“Loyalty,” Hester said simply. “I asked him not to tell anyone.”
“All right. Now I know, and you don’t have to worry about me.”
“I need to see his face, the man who was in the house that night. I will see it. I’ll put the pieces together.”
“Why don’t I fix you that tea now?” Abra offered.
“It’s past time for tea.” Hester squared her shoulders. “But you can help me get up, get myself downstairs. Then you can pour me a good glass of whiskey.”
Twenty
TWICE DURING THE NIGHT ELI ROSE TO PROWL THE HOUSE, the dog padding faithfully by his side. He checked doors, windows, the alarm, even slipped out to the main terrace to scan the beach for movement.
Everyone he cared about was sleeping in Bluff House, so he’d take no chances.
What his grandmother remembered changed things. Not the intruder—he’d already believed there was one on the night she fell. But the location. She’d described seeing someone upstairs, then running down, or trying to. Not someone on the main floor, someone who had come up from the basement.
That left three options.
His grandmother’s mind was confused. Possible, of course, given the trauma she’d suffered. But he didn’t think so.
It was also possible they were dealing with two different intruders, either connected or completely separate. He couldn’t and wouldn’t discount that avenue.
Last, a single intruder, the same one who had broken in and assaulted Abra, the same person who had excavated the old basement. Which posed the question: What had he been looking for upstairs? What had been the purpose?
Once the family left for Boston, he’d go through the house again, room by room, space by space looking for answers from that angle.
Until then, he and Barbie were on guard duty.
He lay wakeful beside Abra, trying to piece it together. An unnamed intruder partnered with Duncan? Move to the “No honor among thieves” theory, and the unnamed kills Duncan, then removes all records associated with him from Duncan’s office.
Possible.
Duncan’s client, the intruder, hired him. Duncan learns the client’s breaking and entering, attacking women. Confronts the client, either threatening to report him to the police or attempting blackmail. And the client kills him and removes the records.
Equally possible.
The intruder or intruders weren’t related to Duncan in any way. In doing his job, he discovered them, and was killed.
Possible, too, but unlikely, at least it seemed so at four in the morning.
He tried to shift his mind to his work. At least there were channels and possibilities in his plot he could solve before dawn.
He’d boxed in his main character—with the antagonist, with a woman, with the authorities. With his life in turmoil, he faced conflict and consequences on every level. It all came down to choices. Would he turn left or right? Would he stand still and wait?
Eli considered all three as his mind finally started to fuzz with sleep.
And somewhere in the maze of his subconscious, fiction and reality merged. Eli opened the front door of the house in the Back Bay.
He knew every step, every sound, every thought, but still couldn’t make himself change any of it. Just turn around, walk back out into the rain. Just drive away. Instead, he repeated the loop he’d taken the night of Lindsay’s murder and revisited in dreams ever since.
He couldn’t change it, and yet it changed. He opened a door in the Back Bay and walked into the basement at Whiskey Beach.
He held a flashlight as he maneuvered in the dark. Some part of his mind thought, Power’s off. The power’s off again. He needed to kick-start the generator.
He walked by a wall of shelves filled with gleaming jars, all carefully labeled. Strawberry preserves, grape jam, peaches, green beans, stewed tomatoes.
Someone’s been busy, he thought, circling around a mound of potatoes. A lot of mouths to