Craven Manor(36)

Partway through straightening the fourth room, he began to wonder how much he was actually helping. The cloths were all rags, and most of the furniture was collapsing, too. If anyone wanted to inhabit Craven Manor, most of its insides would need to be thrown out.

But Bran still lives here… even if it’s just part-time. He seems to care about the house. Seeing it torn apart like this is going to smart, even if the items are worthless.

Daniel worked through the floor methodically. Glimpses through collapsing curtains showed him different views of the garden. Daniel found himself appreciating the property more and more. Trees and vines pressed close to the glass, but he thought its garden must have been designed thoughtfully to provide every room with an attractive view.

Once he’d righted as much as he could in the second floor, Daniel turned towards the third with growing reluctance. He’d begun to suspect he knew where the jewels had come from.

Bran had said Eliza Myricks had been so paranoid that she’d chased her staff out of the house. She certainly wouldn’t have had guests, in that case, and Annalise was too young to own such jewellery. They must have been Eliza’s.

Daniel bypassed the hall that led to the tower’s door and turned right. Only two doors hung open there; the first was the room Kyle had been thrown out of, and the second led him into a woman’s opulent bedchamber.

He had no doubt who had owned the room. Eliza Myricks had commissioned a painting of herself, which hung on the wall above her bed. As large as Annalise’s, the portrait was no less striking. Daniel approached it cautiously.

She looked like a proud woman. High cheekbones and full lips gave the impression of beauty, but a tightness around her eyes and brows hinted towards viciousness. She posed like a queen, seated, hands clasped in her lap and her head inclined slightly towards the viewer. Her black hair had been tied into an elegant knot. The only hint of resemblance between her and her daughter was the paleness of their skin.

Daniel looked into the satchel he held. An elaborate diamond necklace inside matched the jewels Eliza wore in her portrait. He turned towards the bureau and found gaps in the dust.

“I’m sorry.” He spoke to the shadows as he replaced the necklaces, earrings, and hairbrushes. Eliza’s eyes seemed to bore into his back as her visage judged him silently. Kyle had gotten only as far as her second drawer before he’d been interrupted, and Daniel put things back into their places as best he could.

Poor Annalise. Eliza must have been a difficult parent to please.

Daniel briefly wondered if he would find Annalise’s room somewhere on the third floor, but he’d already overstepped his bounds more than he was comfortable with. The satchel and backpack were empty, so he threw them over his shoulder and returned to the hallway, shutting Eliza’s door behind himself.

Only one area of damage remained, and it was the one Daniel had been most nervous about approaching. He squared his shoulders as he returned to the landing, then he faced the stone passageway that led to the tower’s door.





Chapter Sixteen





Kyle hadn’t succeeded in breaking open the door, but he’d gotten close. Three of the four locks lay in a heap on the floor, and the wood they’d been bolted to was splintered. The final bolt, a narrow bronze shape, had been kicked until two of its screws came out. It hung in place, but only barely. Daniel could have pulled it off with his bare hands.

Daniel approached the structure. A barely audible sound came from behind the wood. It reminded him of the noise Annalise had made at his door the previous night. Fingernails dragging across wood.

His throat tightened. Underneath the scrabbling was an urgent gasping noise. Daniel frowned as he bent closer, breath held, and grazed the tips of his fingers over the door.

He could feel the scrape of nails against wood as something scrabbled to get out. His eyes drifted towards the broken locks littering the ground. They were frozen with rust. No one’s opened this door in over a hundred years. Whatever is inside the tower isn’t alive anymore.

A wheezing whine escaped the being on the other side of the door. The scrabbling grew louder. He could feel the trajectory; the nails scraped from a space just above his head down to waist length, over and over and over again, as they tried to dig their way free.

The strange crystals he’d noticed the first time he saw the door still sparkled on the ground, but they weren’t as neat as they had been. It took him a second to realise what had happened: Kyle had scuffed them in his efforts to break through the door. Instead of running in a clear line along the wood’s base, the delicate structures had been broken and smudged.

Another whine floated through the wood. Daniel pulled away. Shivering, he folded his arms around himself then jogged back down the hallway and into the closest room. He found a chair beside the bed. It was made of wood, and its structure was still sound, so he carried it back down the stone hallway and placed it so that its back was jammed below the door’s handle. It was a sad substitute for a real lock, but he hoped it would help.

Bran was prepared to kill to keep whatever is in the tower inside. I’ll have to trust that there’s a good reason for that.

As Daniel moved down the stairs to the foyer, he rolled a word around in his mind. Trust. He’d trusted Kyle, and his cousin had taken advantage of it and tried to destroy Daniel’s new life for the sake of personal gain. Kyle was his cousin, a man he’d thought was his friend, and had been his roommate for six months. Bran was a stranger, a man whose face he’d never seen. Daniel prayed he wasn’t being a fool for putting his trust in his peculiar, dangerous employer.