e where to find her body. She was also telling me what I’d meant to her. I was the clean part of her, sent away to thrive in the light.
I wasn’t my biological mother, no matter how much I looked like her. Evan had been right when he’d said I might as well have been from another planet; I was so essentially different from her. I wasn’t responsible for the cancerous corruption that Noah Madaster had passed on to his daughter, and which—I believed—had probably been passed on to Noah by some other Madaster ancestor, and that Madaster by a previous Madaster, and so on and so on, back through the centuries… through all the spidery tendrils of that elaborate, malignant family lineage I’d found in the North Twin library.
I had a vivid image flash into my brain of all those Madasters, and the complicated flourishes of various colors beneath their names. I recalled that Elizabeth’s was, perhaps, the most complex of all, the scroll done almost exclusively in scarlet.
Why did I suddenly have the suspicion that Theodore Madaster’s choice of colors and the design of the embellishment somehow were associated with the supposed “purity” of the entrant’s genes? Had the nearly exclusive use of scarlet ink on Elizabeth’s entry somehow been associated with how many Madasters had participating in her ultimate creation?
My scroll might have been even more scarlet, had it ever been drawn. But it wouldn’t. This ugly cycle was about to end.
I left the room and headed in the direction that I believed led to the South Twin.
I walked perhaps a hundred feet down the stone tunnel, my light bouncing off the pale gray walls. I finally arrived at a mundane looking wooden door. Anxiously, I tried the knob. What if the entrance was locked? I wanted the element of surprise in confronting Madaster. But also, I eventually, I wanted to show police the tunnel. I wanted to show them Elizabeth.
I heard a distinct click, and swung the door inward. Relieved, I walked into what appeared to be a large subterranean room with some boxes, an ancient sawhorse, two old pickaxes, a bunch of folded tarps, and an ancient looking lantern. The walls were made of stacked, interspersed slate stones of various sizes. I turned my flashlight behind me, and was shocked to see that the door on this side was also made of the same slate, pieces of stone protruding irregularly at the edge like jagged teeth.
A thought struck me, and I shut the door into the wall. It was like sliding two perfectly matched puzzle pieces together. I heard the click of the latch.
The door had disappeared. I stared at a seamless slate stone wall. Noah had hid his secret well. Did a similar room and door exist in the North Twin? I’d never seen one. But this room had to be farther underground then the beach-level floor that I had always considered the lowest level of the North Twin.
I needed to find stairs.
I found them easily enough with my dive light. I ascended up not one, but two steep flights of rough wooden stairs. At the top of these was another door. I entered a room filled with natural light. I realized it was a changing room, with benches and hooks for clothing. Sure enough, when I looked out the window, I saw the beach. I was inside the South Twin proper now. When I pulled the door shut, it blended into the white, wood paneled wall of the changing room.
Not a half a minute later, I strode through the shadowed, musty-smelling great room toward the steep staircase, and Madaster’s tower.
Chapter Thirty-One
I neither heard nor saw any one as I made my way down the nearly pitch-black hallway on the second floor. Hopefully, Lorraine was on one of her walks.
I recalled that the small elevator motor had been quite noisy. The mechanical hum would surely give away my presence to Noah or his nurse. Moving stealthily, I opened door after door along the hallway, shining my dive light inside one unused room after another.
Finally, I found the back stairs that hopefully led to Noah’s tower.
When I reached the top, there was another door. It opened when I tried it. I peeked inside and looked around, anxious that someone might be in it. It was empty. I was in a bedroom, furnished simply with a double bed, nightstand, and chest of drawers. On the wall was an old-fashioned pewter bell contraption—a maid’s bell, I realized. Someone could ring from a distance in order to request service. A pair of tennis shoes with Velcro straps was tucked just beneath the bed.
Ima’s room.
I left the nurse’s room and padded silently in my bare feet down a carpeted hallway. Just as I reached the entrance to a small kitchen on my right, I heard a voice in the distance.
“That will be all. Go,” I heard Noah Madaster say curtly.
“I have some laundry to do. If you should need me—”
“I won’t need you. Leave us be, ” Noah cut off Ima impatiently.
Us? Who else was in the tower room with Noah besides his nurse?
I stood in the middle of the short hallway, panicked for a moment. Was Ima about to walk through the wooden swinging door ahead of me? I swiftly moved into the kitchen and hurried to the shadowed depths. A second later, I heard the slight squeak of the hinges on the swinging door. I held my breath, sure Ima was about to switch on the kitchen light and reveal me standing there stupidly.
Instead, I watched from the shadows as she walked past, her face set in that severe expression I recalled too well.
I heard a door shutting at the other end of the hallway. Cautiously, I left the kitchen and went to the swinging wood door. Standing an inch away from it, I put my ear to the crack.
“So you told them both. Separately? As I told you?” It was Madaster’s rasping voice. He sounded eager.
“I saw Anna walking in the distance when I pulled up in the car.”
I started slightly, recognizing Wes Ryder’s voice. Had he come here to give the results of the genetic testing to Madaster? “Evan said she’d gone for a walk, and he was worried about her.”