The Fate of Mercy Alban (32 page)

Within a few moments, he opened his eyes. “I’m Matthew Parker,” he said, stretching and putting an arm under his head. “And you are?”

“Just a wayward soul who called you last night when she had no one else to turn to.”

“How lucky for me.” He smiled, his sleepy eyes bright. “Ensnaring a wayward soul has been on my list for quite some time now.”

“I’m happy to oblige,” I whispered, and melted into him.

Later, we ordered breakfast from room service. Omelets, sausage, coffee, and croissants. It all felt blissfully ordinary and normal—no decades-old mysteries to solve, no aunts to deal with, no half brothers to think about.

I knew the normalcy was just an illusion—every one of those problems, and more, hung in the air just outside the hotel’s front door, waiting to affix themselves to me when I emerged. But for those scant early morning hours, I luxuriated in the simple everydayness of just being a couple eating breakfast together, like millions of other couples around the country were doing at the same time.

We were savoring the last bites of our omelets when the muffled ring of my cell phone pulled me back to my other reality. I groaned. “Can’t I let it go to voice mail?”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Matthew crossed the room to the sofa where I had left my purse. “It could be Amity. Or the police. Or the hospital.” He fished the phone out of my purse and handed it to me.

“Miss Alban?” said a soft, accented voice on the other end of the line. “This is Marie Bouchard, your aunt’s nurse. I’m at Alban House, and I’m afraid nobody is answering the door. Were you not expecting me?”

I slapped my forehead with the heel of my hand. “I’m so sorry! No, I didn’t know what time you were coming. I’m afraid we’ve had a bit of a situation here and …” My words trailed off. No point in explaining everything over the phone. “Just wait right there, Marie,” I continued. “You can get out of the rain under the second-floor patio—do you see it? Good. I’ll be there in a few minutes. And again, my apologies for not being home when you arrived.”

We got dressed, scrambled down to Matthew’s car, and drove through the pounding rain with lightning crackling through the sky, thunder growling in the distance. On the way, I checked my phone for voice mail messages and found one from the chief, sent early that morning, telling me it was okay to return to the house.

“But one thing, Grace,” he cautioned me, “your aunt is still at large. We’ve checked the house and the grounds, but we’ve turned up nothing. I’m sending a squad car back to you later today, but until then, just be careful.”

When we reached the house, Matthew handed me an umbrella from the backseat and I unfurled it as I stepped out, waiting for him to run around the car to join me. We hurried up to the patio steps, expecting to find Marie huddled under the second-floor patio’s overhang, but the nurse was nowhere to be seen.

Matthew tried the door—it was locked. I fished my house key out of my purse and unlocked the door. We stepped across the threshold and looked this way and that, but the house seemed as empty as it had been the day before. Our footsteps echoed as we walked through the foyer to the living room, parlor, and library, flipping on the lights in each room as we went.

“Do you think she came inside and then locked the door behind her?” Matthew wondered.

“Miss Bouchard?” I called out, but there was no reply. “Marie! Are you here?”

Matthew shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe she went upstairs? Or …” He walked toward the kitchen as I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse and hit redial. The nurse’s cell rang and rang, eventually landing in voice mail.

“Miss Bouchard, this is Grace Alban,” I said. “We’re here at the house now. Not sure where you are. Please give me a call when you get this message. And again, I’m sorry for this mix-up.” I clicked off and dropped the phone back into my purse.

Matthew came from the direction of the kitchen, shaking his head. “She’s not in there, either.”

“I’m betting she got into the cab that brought her here from the airport and went to a hotel or something,” I said, glancing up and down the main hallway.

“But why would she do that?” Matthew squinted at me. “You told her we were coming right away.”

He was right. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere. With that realization, a seeping sense of dread began to fall around us, as real and tangible as the rain outside.

“The chief said Mercy is still at large,” I said, wrapping my arms around Matthew’s waist and eyeing the staircase. We both stood there for a moment, neither knowing quite what to do, before he unwound my arms from around his waist and held my hands. “Let’s do a quick check of the upstairs and—”

But his words were cut off by the sound of the buzzer, soft and low and distant. I frowned at Matthew and hurried toward the ringing, pushing open the kitchen door, with him at my heels. I stopped short when I saw the display. Somebody was buzzing from the master suite, over and over and over again. I shot Matthew a look—his face was a mixture of confusion and suspicion—and I hit the intercom. “Hello? Who’s up there?”

The ancient device crackled and sputtered with static, but behind all that noise, I heard a thin, faraway voice. “
Mama …? Mama, is that you …?
”

I held Matthew’s gaze for an instant, and then we both burst out of the kitchen and bounded up the stairs, headed down the hallway toward the master suite in a full-on run. I flew through the door, Matthew close behind. “Amity!” I shouted, checking the closet, the study, the bathroom, the patio. But nobody was there. No Amity, no Mercy, no nurse, nobody.

While Matthew checked the media room and Amity’s room, I dialed my daughter’s cell phone.

“Hey, Mom,” she answered, and the relief that washed over me was so strong that I thought it might knock me to the ground.

“So, you’re okay,” I said, leaning against the doorframe.

“Sure,” she said. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said too quickly. “But remember, don’t come back to the house right now. You can stay at Heather’s for a while, right?”

“Yeah, Mom. Not a problem. But … is this about Jane?”

“No, honey,” I said to her. “Jane’s resting in the hospital and she’ll be fine. Just promise me you won’t come back to the house until I call you to tell you it’s okay.”

“That’s fine,” she said, and I could almost see her shrugging her shoulders. “It’s raining too hard to go anywhere, anyway.”

I told my daughter I loved her and hung up, and the tears I was holding back began to fall. Matthew was at my side in an instant and took me into his arms.

“She’s okay,” he said into my hair. “She’s okay.” He pulled away and looked me in the face. “But Mercy is obviously here, playing with you.”

“Let’s find her,” I said to him, clearing my throat. “I want this to end. I’m tired of being afraid in my own house.”

We headed down the hallway, calling the nurse’s name all the while, and found that the guest rooms where Mr. Jameson’s lads had been staying were similarly empty, the disarray of unmade beds, half-full water glasses, and clothes strewn on the floor—as the boys had hastily gathered their belongings to move to the hotel—a stark contrast to the neat, untouched silence of rooms unoccupied.

Matthew took my hand. “Come on,” he said, leading me to the back stairs. “She’s probably on the third floor.”

At this, I stopped. “Should we call the police, do you think?”

Matthew pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed. After a few quiet words with the police, he hung up.

“I didn’t realize this storm was so bad,” he said to me. “They might not be able to get here for a while. Apparently, it’s a mess out there. Trees down, roads impassable. There’s some flooding downtown. They said to wait for them in the living room.”

“But the nurse!” I protested. “We can’t just stand here and do nothing until they show up. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“Agreed. If Mercy is still armed, that nurse is in danger. And by the time the police get here, we can have the third floor checked out. I think we can handle her together if we find her before they get here.”

She was a seventy-year-old woman, for goodness’ sake. Armed, dangerous, yes, but if we found her, Matthew and I could certainly subdue her.

Still, as I climbed those stairs, the gnawing in the pit of my stomach tightened into a hard knot. I hadn’t been up to the third floor in years—it was a part of the house my family rarely used. There was the extensive nursery and children’s quarters where Mercy was living, along with the children’s library and a few guest rooms in one wing. A ballroom, closed off from the rest of the floor, with a set of double doors on one end and an elevator on the other, so party guests would neither be troubled by children nor the prospect of climbing the stairs in high heels.

As we crept hand in hand through the children’s quarters—several small, connected rooms—we saw my aunt’s clothes hanging neatly in the closet and her bed made with tight corners, just as Jane had always done. If Mercy was here, she hadn’t slept in this bed since she’d put Jane in the hospital. I checked the secret doors—locked. The other guest rooms were silent and unused, dust hanging in the air.

“Let’s check the ballroom,” I whispered to Matthew, leading him down the hallway, turning the lights on as we went.

We pushed open the double doors, and as our eyes adjusted to the darkness, with the rain beating down on the floor-to-ceiling windows on the wall facing the lake, I squinted at the sight of something that shouldn’t have been there.

I exchanged a puzzled glance with Matthew and crossed the room to flip on the light to get a better look.

There, in the middle of the ballroom’s dance floor, was a ring of stones obviously brought up from the lakeshore. In the middle of that ring, a silver bowl containing the ashes of what had been a small fire. Strewn about outside the ring—photographs. As I looked from one to the next, my throat felt dry as I recognized shots of Amity, myself, Jane, Carter, Mr. Jameson.

Under it all—symbols, thick black lines that looked Celtic in nature. Matthew blanched, gulping in a mouthful of air. “What
is
this?”

That knot in my stomach was working its way through my whole body. “It’s for the girl in white,” I said, my voice a harsh whisper. “It looks to me like this is where she dances these days. What better place than a ballroom?”

Matthew was staring at the fire ring, his eyes wide and round. “But wouldn’t the police have found this when they searched the house earlier? Why—”

I interrupted his thought. “Maybe she came back after they had gone. Or maybe she never left at all.” I turned around in a slow circle. “I’ve always thought it was sort of futile, the police searching this house. It’s a game of hide and seek they can’t win. There are too many places to hide.”

Matthew crossed the room to take my hand. “I think we should go downstairs. Now. We can wait for the police in the library or even in the car.”

We pushed through the double doors and made our way down the hall toward the staircase, descending it hand in hand, me squeezing his a bit tighter than I had intended. As we passed the second-floor landing, I heard voices coming from the floor below. Not voices. A voice.

Matthew and I stopped in our tracks to listen, my heart pounding.

“Miss Grace!” I heard. “Reverend Parker! Are you here?”

Matthew and I hurried down the rest of the stairs to find Carter standing near the front door, holding a massive umbrella in one hand.

“Oh, Carter, thank God!” I ran to him and threw my arms around his neck, trying to catch my breath.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Miss Grace, I’m all wet!” he fussed, pulling away. But I saw the smile on his face and the twinkle in his eyes. “I just returned from my wonderful stay at the hotel—thank you so much for that—and I saw the reverend’s car in the driveway.”

We got him up to speed—the police were on their way, Mercy was still missing, her nurse was now also missing, and we had checked the entire house and found nothing.

“Nothing, except a very strange sight in the ballroom,” I said.

Carter squinted at me. “What do you mean, strange?”

I told him about the fire ring and the photographs and what looked to be Celtic writing scrawled on the floor. He let the umbrella drop from his hand.

“I meant it, Miss Grace, what I said in the hospital waiting room yesterday,” he said to me, a frightened look in his eyes. “She cannot stay in Alban House for one more day. She simply cannot.”

I shot Matthew a look and said, “Carter, I think it’s time you told us everything you know about Mercy.”

“Indeed, Miss Grace—” he started. Then there was a massive crack of thunder and lightning, and everything went black.

I fumbled for the long matches on the hearth in the parlor, and soon the kindling I’d laid in the fireplace ignited, bathing the room in a warm, yellowish glow.

“It’s terrible outside,” Carter said as he slipped off his overcoat and draped it on one of the chairs. “Power is out all over town. The poor taxi driver had quite a job of it getting me home from the hotel. It’s like a puzzle trying to drive anywhere because so many trees have fallen onto the roads. They’re predicting straight-line winds and hail before it’s all said and done.”