The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(114)
Before I could find it, the door flung open, ripping the knocker from my mother’s grasp, and slamming against the inside wall of the inky black foyer. The wind howled, sending slashing rain into our faces, pushing at our backs until we stumbled into the house, the door slamming closed behind us.
It was still and quiet inside, like being inside a cocoon, the rain and thunder oddly muted. I slid my hand toward where I knew the light switches were and flipped them all, but nothing happened. “The electricity’s out,” I said.
I sensed we weren’t alone, but the curtain had been pulled down again, blocking me from seeing. Whatever had been here opening and slamming doors was gone. I only knew that for certain because the hair on the back of my neck had settled, the gooseflesh on my arms gone.
“Jack?” I called out, my voice eerily reed-thin, as if it had been whispered through a metal pipe. We held our breath for a moment and then I pulled out my phone, not surprised to find No Service in the top left corner of the screen.
“At least the flashlight on my phone works,” I said with forced cheerfulness as I pressed the app button and flooded the space with light.
“That means I have one, too, right?” my mother asked as she began to fish through her raincoat pocket, the album hampering her movements. “Why on earth did Jack want us to bring this tonight? I hope he has a good reason.”
“I’m sure he does,” I said, reaching for the bag. She let go just a second before I had a good grasp on it, and the album slid from the bag and onto the floor, its splayed binding facing up, its position like that of a dead bird crashed to earth.
She guided her light to help as I knelt down to pick up the album and gather anything that might have fallen from it. The flashlight glinted off the gold-embossed number of the year on the spine and my hand froze—1984. The missing album. Slowly, I picked it up and turned it over, relieved to see that nothing had shaken loose. I closed it quickly, but not before I saw two pages filled with photographs of a small baby with a bow in her hair and swaddled in a blanket. I stood to face my mother.
“Jack said he’d visited the housekeeper of the lake house in Alabama, who admitted to taking a few things from the house before it flooded.” I placed the album on the hall table. “I think this is one of them.”
My mother’s eyes were lost in shadow. “So Button would have left this album in the house and brought the other ones here. Knowing it would be destroyed. But why?”
I nodded, seeing the date again written on the photograph I’d found in the van. May 30, 1984. I remembered talking with Jayne after she’d found the saltshaker in her room and wanting to know if I’d been the one who put it there. “I thought maybe because it had the year I was born on it. You thought I might want it as a souvenir.”
My thoughts spun and bounced, refusing to settle in the obvious place. I thought of Jack initially avoiding my mother after his return from Alabama, and then the fiasco with Jayne at the party where, if I now admitted to myself, it had looked more as if he was comforting her than anything else. And then Jack’s attempts to speak with my mother, and Rebecca telling me that Jack had found an incredible story idea but couldn’t move forward with it because it could hurt people he knew and loved.
A loud crack of thunder rent the air. I threw back my head and shouted, “Jack! Jayne! Where are you?” I wondered if it was my imagination or if I had really heard a muffled voice.
“The cat,” Ginette said, pointing toward the stairs with her flashlight. “I think it wants us to follow it.”
Feeling like a stupid heroine in a horror movie who runs up the darkened stairs in a spooky house, I followed the cat, with my mother close behind me. My flashlight caught the flash of the fluffy end of a tail and we dashed after it around the landing and then up to the second floor, then down the hallway to Button’s bedroom and through the partially opened door.
“Jack? Jayne?” I yelled again.
“In here!” It was Jack’s voice, coming from the bathroom—the same one I’d been trapped in. Where I’d seen Anna’s reflection in the mirror, with hollowed-out eye sockets and bruising on her neck.
I might have hesitated, but Jack was inside. My Jack. And I wasn’t going to leave him there. “We’re here, Jack. We’ll get you out.”
I saw the doorknob twist, and then heard the door shake as he pulled on the knob. “Hang on,” I said, looking for a key or something to tear down the door. I thought back to my own ordeal, and how Sophie had simply turned the knob. I held the cool brass knob in my hand for a moment before I gave it a gentle twist.
The door opened easily and I tumbled inside as Jack simultaneously pulled on the door. His familiar arms wrapped around me and I felt his kisses in my hair. “Oh, Mellie. There’s so much I have to tell you.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day. I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions when I saw you and Jayne. And then when I heard Marc’s announcement—”
“Shh. We’ll talk about it all later. We need to find Jayne first.”
Ginette shone her flashlight in our faces. “Where is she?”
“I’m not sure. We were in the secret staircase and we found Hasell’s notebook, and a whole lot of partially filled medicine bottles and empty syringes. It was the proof I needed that her mother slowly poisoned her. That’s why Anna had the secret stairs put in—so she’d have access to Hasell without anybody else knowing.”