Rituals (25 page)

No one had to be told to hit the floor. They all had recent and painful memories of the things fire-hot smoke could do to a human being's lungs. Faye pressed her cheek to the time-worn oak and reached out for her daughter's hand.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The tiny oil lamp still rested on the table, casting its weak light around the room. Even from the floor, Faye could see that the crystal ball was gone. She looked at Dara, lying three feet away. She was clinging to Myrna with one arm and the crystal ball with the other.

The ball taunted Faye. Several scenarios had been proposed that attempted to explain how Tilda and her crystal ball had escaped her burning house. Faye didn't believe any of them.

She didn't believe that Tilda ever removed it from its spot in her séance room. It had sat at the heart of her house as if it must always be there.

The practical part of Faye also understood that it was heavy and awkward to carry. Moving it would have required a second stand to hold it, or something else to keep it from rolling around in its new location. When Faye pictured Tilda's actions after she and Amande and Myrna left on that fatal night, she imagined her leaving the room and closing the door with the ball still inside. Or she imagined her lingering there to spend a few more moments in spirit. She didn't picture her hauling a heavy lump of crystal out of the room for no reason.

This meant that the ball was still in the room when the killer nailed the door shut. Tilda was in one of two places, outside the room or inside the room. If she'd been outside the room, the question was, “How did she get the ball out?” And if she'd been inside the room, the question was, “How did she get the ball and
herself
out?”

Since Faye needed rather desperately to get herself, her daughter, and her friends out of an identical room, she decided to go with the second question. It implied that there was a way out of her predicament. If Tilda got herself and the ball out of an identical room in an identical situation, then Faye could do the same. This room where she was trapped had served as a site for spiritual readings for generations, and she had seen letters from one of those Spiritualists to a known faker. Everybody around Faye believed in the traditional honesty of the Armisteads, but this didn't mean that they were right. Maybe this room had secrets.

If Faye were building a room where she planned to fool people into believing in ghosts, she was pretty sure she'd build some tricks into the very structure of the room. The very first trick she'd install would be a secret exit. The mysterious escape of Tilda and the crystal ball was perfectly explainable if she'd had access to a secret door.

Faye began feeling her way across the floor, looking for escape.

***

Avery always claimed later that Faye's voice, calling her name, was the thing that woke her. Faye denied it, because she'd been frozen silent with fear.

It takes a great deal of will to shake off a powerful sedative but, whether she was goaded to it by Faye's voice or not, Avery managed it. She rose from the spot where she had fallen, dragging herself vertical and asking her eyes to focus.

The first plumes of smoke were drifting out an open window. They were so tenuous and new that Avery thought that the arsonist couldn't possibly have had time yet to leave. If this was true, she knew where her adversary was. She crept around the house and slipped through the back door.

***

Faye remembered Myrna saying that Tilda had assisted her father, but that Myrna herself never had. Maybe the secrets shared by father and daughter had included a way out of the room, and maybe the knowledge of that secret passage had died with Tilda, but Faye intended to use her last moments to look for it. She circled the small space, ignoring Amande's hissed orders to “Get down!”

Completing her circuit of the room, she crawled up under the slant of the staircase. Trying each stair, she found that one of the risers shook slightly. With effort, Faye was able to remove it, revealing an opening less than a foot tall. Slender Tilda could have squeezed through it, but not Myrna.

Here was the reason Tilda had been chosen as her father's assistant. The only “psychic ability” that had enabled Tilda to assist her dishonest father was her slender form. She could easily have sneaked into séances through this entry, performing “magic” in a darkened room before slipping out again. Myrna would have been too large for such things by the time she was past toddlerhood.

Tilda had been thin enough to sneak in and out of the room, faking the sounds and apparitions that her father passed off as spirits. Myrna was too large to help, so she'd been spared the knowledge of her father's dishonesty. And her sister's. On the night of her death, Tilda had performed a Houdini-like illusion. She'd been nailed into this room, but “miraculously” exited through this hidden escape hatch. And she'd brought her treasured crystal ball with her.

Tilda must have been beside herself when she couldn't rouse her sister. Even if she'd had a key to Myrna's door, it was probably inside her own burning house. Faye knew from experience that it took a ladder to reach the windows on both houses' first floors, so Tilda would never have been able to break in, not in her condition. And she wouldn't have known whom to trust. With tempers running high over the Marlowe development and all the money it represented, anybody in town could have been suspect.

An agoraphobic in her eighties who lived within walking distance of everything in her life would have needed no cell phone. If Tilda had been thinking clearly, she could have stopped at a gas station once she left Rosebower and called for help, but by then she was dying of smoke inhalation. Coming up with a new plan would have been too much for her. She was probably only capable of continuing to carry out her original plan to chase down the only person who surely had no motive to hurt either of the Armistead sisters—their brand-new friend Faye.

The brimstone smell of another newly struck match crept into the room. Lingering near the tiny opening, Faye looked at the people in the room behind her. All three of them were hugging the floor, where the little fresh air left would be driven when the house went up in flames. Amande was dialing 911, as Faye had known she would be. They were doing all the right things, but they would be dead in minutes, unless the call to 911 brought help in time.

And where were Avery and Joe? Their absence told Faye that they were probably in trouble, too.

Faye's daughter weighed half again as much as she did. Dara's full hips were too large to fit through the gap, and Myrna's entire life had been shaped by the fact that she was too big to squeeze through this secret exit. Faye was the only one in the room small enough to escape. If she could get out without being seen by the arsonist—by Willow, she was sure—then maybe she could get help. Maybe there was an ax in Myrna's shed that she could use to break down the door.

There was time to kiss her daughter once, but then she must go.

***

Joe held his hands in front of his face. There were four of them. He had twenty fingers total. This could not be a good thing.

There was a knot forming at the base of his skull. It promised to be the size of Tilda's crystal ball. Willow had swung wildly and been lucky enough to connect. If his aim had been good enough to strike Joe in the temple, his skull would have shattered like an egg. As it was, Willow had flattened a much bigger man with a single blow. Rolling onto his belly, Joe tried to convince his arms and legs to lift him. No luck.

The only part of his body that he could get off the ground was his aching head. He lifted it and scanned his surroundings, not such an easy trick with double vision. He could see an Avery or two climbing the back steps. This was good, because Joe thought it might be a while before he'd be able to get in the house to fetch his wife and child. Then he began to wonder whether he was suffering from some kind of bizarre mirror-double vision, because somebody was also climbing the front steps.

Focus. He needed to turn his head and focus. Who else was barging into Myrna's house? It was a slender man with graying hair.

Samuel.

Why was Samuel here? Joe didn't like it. He put his hands on the ground, palms down, and shoved himself onto his knees. Without waiting to find his equilibrium, Joe staggered to his feet and used the momentum of his falling body to propel himself toward the door where Samuel stood.

Joe had been sitting in front of the open front door while keeping watch, so it was still open. Samuel barged into Myrna's house without knocking, without even pausing. Joe's wife and child were in that house. He had to get in there, whether his body wanted to help him or not. He stumbled after Samuel as quickly as his uncooperative legs would take him.

***

Myrna's house was huge, far too large for Avery to cross the entire first floor quickly and silently enough to reach her assailant unseen. There he stood—and she was pretty sure she was looking at a “he”—wearing a jumpsuit so tight that it looked like he had been dipped in black paint. Even his eyes were covered by heavy black netting. He was sloshing gasoline around the nailed-shut séance room door. As Avery paused to plan her next step, he slid open the box of matches in his hand. He lit one, and all her firefighter instincts kicked in.

She knew he could probably fling the match into the spreading puddle of gasoline before she got there. She knew he probably had her gun. She knew that being drugged had slowed her reflexes and that the agony of her broken hand would slow her even more. She didn't care. Her only conscious thought was, “Get that match.”

As if to prove to Avery that it was still possible to be more confused, a trim man with salt-and-pepper hair stepped through the open front door. What was Gilbert Marlowe doing here?

Avery had no time to consider an answer to that question, because there was an open flame that needed to be doused. She launched herself at the unidentified killer in head-to-toe black.

***

As Faye removed the stair riser that hid the room's secret entrance, she refused to let herself think about what would happen if she couldn't get Amande, Myrna, and Dara out. Her plan was simple. First, she had to get out of the séance room. If Willow was still in sight, she needed to dispatch him…somehow. That part of the plan was murky. Then she needed to find a tool that would get the door open. An ax. A hatchet. A crowbar. A magic wand. She didn't care what it was.

She slithered through the opening, then stopped with her feet still dangling into the séance room. Willow was not finished setting the fire that would kill them all. It would probably kill Avery, too, because the arson investigator was running past her like a linebacker hoping to sack a star quarterback. As she struggled to pass from one room into another, Faye watched a gray-haired man walk through the front door. She'd never seen him before, so she had no idea whether he had come to stop Willow or to help him kill people.

The match in Willow's hand gave off the scent of burning sulfur. It joined the odor of gasoline that rose from the wet, stained floor. Avery went after the match, leaving Willow with a free hand that he used to slam her against the wall. Faye, finally free of the tight access hole, launched herself at Willow's slim, muscular form, carrying no weapon but the stout oak board that had once masqueraded as a riser in a grand antique staircase.

Willow was at a disadvantage, caught off-guard by a law enforcement professional and a determined archaeologist wielding a stout board, but he was a trickster so he used what he had—the fuel can in his hand. He sloshed gasoline in Avery's face, a lot of it. Her trained reflexes allowed her to fling her arm over her eyes in time, but this gave Willow an opportunity to struggle free.

It also gave him an opportunity to douse Faye, too. A single spark would turn both women into walking torches. Faye and Avery locked eyes and achieved their own brand of mindreading. Silently, they agreed on the timing of the only blow they were going to have a chance to land. They tackled him, and all three went down in a puddle of gas growing ever larger as the toppled fuel can emptied itself.

Straddling Willow's torso and pinning his shoulders to the floor, Avery clapped the lit match tight between her bare hands. They were gasoline-soaked, but the fuel would not combust without oxygen. Faye knew that, in theory, Avery could snuff the match this way without going up in flames. In theory.

Faye waited for Avery to ignite. She didn't. Instead, she kept the hot match clutched between her palms and nodded. Faye responded by whamming the board down on Willow's black-sheathed head. He lay still.

Avery leapt to her feet and took charge. “The place could go up any second. We need to get that door open. Faye, there's an ax in Myrna's storage shed. Get it.” She ran to study the board barring the door.

The gray-haired man ignored Avery, running for the hinged side of the nailed-shut door. Faye tried to remember what Gilbert Marlowe looked like. Was this him? The fumes seemed to be snarling Faye's mind, because she could not figure out why Marlowe would be here. When he hired killers, did he chase them around to make sure they got the job done?

Joe shoved him away, hard. “Get away from that door, Langley. My daughter's in there.”

What on earth was he talking about? Had he mistaken Marlowe for their client, Samuel Langley?

Joe was clearly less worried about the man's identity than he was about Amande, because he merely shoved him to the floor and kicked the door off its hinges. Amande, Myrna, and Dara scrabbled out of the room on their hands and knees, just in time to see Willow roll over onto his belly. He was too stunned from Faye's blow to do more than raise his torso and prop himself on his elbows. His white locks, no longer sleek, were matted into the dirt and gasoline that coated the old wooden floor.

In a deadly act of sleight-of-hand, he made a match appear in his right hand. Then he struck it.

***

Avery understood the thermodynamics of what she was seeing. The vapors rising from the puddle around Willow were highly flammable. The flame in his hand didn't need to touch the gasoline visible on the floor. The vapors, invisible but inarguably there, would be igniting immediately. They
were
igniting immediately. And Willow's hair was serving as a long and beautiful wick, drawing fuel from the puddles on the floor to feed the flame.