Chapter 14
The Red Coat
Bell reached the coat first.
He lifted it from the hook and searched the pockets. The breathing stopped. His hand emerged holding a small audio capsule, no larger than a button.
“This is not a child,” he said.
“I know,” Elise replied.
The capsule played when he placed it on the desk.
A child’s voice counted to seven. The words were slow and careful, as though learned from a language lesson.
“One room. Two room. Three room.”
At seven, the voice stopped.
Mara said, “June, tell Elise what she did.”
The child’s voice answered, “She opened the door.”
Elise felt cold spread through her fingers.
“Which door?” Bell asked.
The capsule clicked.
“The door that had no room.”
Simon turned his wheelchair toward the bookcase. “Enough.”
He reached behind a row of legal volumes and pulled out a thin metal rod. A section of paneling released with a quiet mechanical sigh.
Behind it was a stairwell descending into darkness.
Elise stared down. The air smelled of river mud and old tape.
“This goes beneath the house?” Bell asked.
“It goes to the first room,” Simon said.
“You built this?”
“The house was built over it.”
Bell shone his light down the steps. The beam caught a row of small red marks on the wall. Each mark was the same circle crossed by a line.
Elise remembered the mark from Mara’s notebook, the lock plate, and the archive map.
“Mara came down here,” she said.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“The night she asked you to sign.”
Elise looked at her father. “What did I sign?”
Simon’s silence answered first.
Then the capsule spoke again.
Elise’s own voice came from it.
“I consent to the preservation of my account.”
The recording was followed by a second voice, quieter and younger.
“She did not consent to the room.”
Bell turned to Simon. “Who is the child?”
Simon looked down the stairs.
“Celia’s daughter.”
Elise gripped the railing. “Celia had a daughter?”
“A daughter who was never listed in the file.”
From below came the sound of a door closing.
Bell began down the stairs.
Elise followed. The first landing held a table, a dead lamp, and seven numbered doors. The seventh was painted white. The others were black.
The white door stood open.
On the floor inside was Mara’s red scarf.
Elise picked it up.
The fabric was warm.
A voice spoke from the darkness behind her.
“You should have brought the wife.”
Elise turned.
June stood at the top of the stairs, wearing Elise’s face.
She held the white door key.
“The person who came with Bell,” June said, “is not the man Mara warned you about.”
She looked past Elise into the seventh room.
“He is the man who helped her choose him.”