The Devouring Gray(77)
She hurried to her room and spent the next few minutes in a frenzy of activity, collecting all the evidence she could find. The photo of Stephen, Daria, and Juniper. The pictures on her phone of the poem she’d seen in the Hawthornes’ study. And finally, Stephen Saunders’s journal—the half she’d been able to find, anyway.
As Violet gazed down at her hoard of clues, wondering how she could tie them all together, something soft and furry rubbed against her ankles.
“I guess you count as evidence, too,” she said, stroking Orpheus between the ears. The cat let out his chain-saw mewl and bumped his head against something half-buried beneath a cardigan on the floor.
Violet’s heartbeat quickened as she recognized the smooth brown cylinder Daria had shoved into her hands.
“Maybe someone killed her because she knew something after all,” she said softly, tugging the cylinder out from beneath the cardigan and rising to her feet. She unscrewed the top, but before she could pull out the blueprints, her eyes caught on the wood grain on the side of the case.
The dark wood was uneven, faded. Violet held it up to the nearest lamp and squinted, grinning as her eyes made out a barely visible circle carved into the wood. A circle with four lines cutting through the edges, a slice of wood that was just the tiniest bit raised above the rest of the cylinder.
She pressed her thumb into the center of the founders’ symbol, and it moved inward with a slight click. What she’d thought was one cylinder was actually two.
Violet upended the case and dumped the smaller cylinder out into her hand. There was a lone sheet of paper rolled up inside the outer layer of wood.
It was another page of blueprints: this one depicting a single room. The founders’ symbol was scrawled in one corner of the page in blotched, faded ink, and beneath it was one word: spire.
“Of course there’s a creepy attic,” Violet said to Orpheus as she gazed up at the thin square of stone embedded in the ceiling above her head. “Because our family couldn’t just keep their secrets in a closet or something, like normal people.”
There were three spires on the roof of the Saunders manor, but Violet had known immediately which one the blueprints were referring to.
It was the one in the center of the house, directly above the foyer. The one she’d seen slicing through the trees when she’d been trapped in the horrific embrace of the Gray—the only spire that had been part of the house a hundred and fifty years ago.
And sure enough, here it was: a bit of reddish-brown stone that didn’t fit the rest of the ceiling.
A trapdoor.
Violet stood on a chair to investigate it further. Juniper had claimed she was going to the nearest coffee shop to work, so Violet had no qualms about making noise as she tried to figure out how to open the door. It seemed to be spring-loaded somehow—she could feel a mechanism behind it, but it was jammed. Violet wedged her fingers into the edge of the stone and pushed until it gave way, groaning on rusted metal hinges as it slid to the side.
In its place was a bit of slatted metal that Violet realized was the underside of a ladder, meant to be folded out. But it was secured to the ceiling by a combination lock. Violet tugged on the lock, frowning. It looked dirty, but it didn’t look centuries old. She recognized the brand from her gym locker in middle school.
While the padlock itself was secure, the bolt it had been fastened around was almost rusted through. She yanked on the edge of the lock again, but it didn’t give. So she fetched the hammer from the ancient tool kit inside the hall closet and slammed it down as hard as she could until the oxidized metal gave way.
The combination lock crashed to the floor, sending orange residue fluttering across her black jeans, but the trapdoor was hers to open. Violet tucked the hammer into the back pocket of her pants, in case she needed to hit something else. She wedged her fingers beneath the metal corners of the ladder and tugged.
The ladder unfolded with a squeal that made Violet wish she could cover her ears. She unfolded it as far down as it would go, coughing on the rush of musty air that had come with it.
She tried to gaze up into the spire, but whatever awaited her was cloaked in a deep, impenetrable blackness. Violet turned on her phone flashlight and raised a cautious hand up into the attic. But there was nothing menacing on the sloped stone ceilings, and the opening was too narrow to see much of the walls. So in the end, she tucked her phone away and climbed the ladder, her heart pounding a little too quickly in her chest.
She had never been more conscious of the fact that, if something went wrong, there would be nobody coming to save her. Justin, Isaac, and Harper thought her memories were gone. May had told her to keep her secret. Her mother couldn’t remember anything. And Rosie…Rosie was dead.
The inside of the spire was bigger than Violet thought it would be, larger than her walk-in closet back in Ossining, with perfectly circular walls and a ceiling that tapered upward into a point. Black velvet curtains disguised most of the wall. Violet caught a glimpse of a frame behind them, a window. She strode toward it, but before she could draw the curtain away, a dark shape sank its teeth into her ankle.
Violet stumbled back, yelping with surprise. But it was only Orpheus. As Violet gazed down at his hissing form, she saw that a panel of stone had been ripped out of the floor, replaced by a perfect circle of wood lined with white paint.
Violet tried to step around Orpheus’s furry body, but he darted in front of her once more. Her companion’s tail rose into the air, the tip twitching as his glowing yellow eyes met hers.