He approached the back staircase, suddenly highly aware of the sound of his hard leather soles on the wood floor of the hall. He came to a halt at the side of the stair rising up to the third floor. He held his breath, listening. Unlike in Alan’s room, he expe
rienced a full, hushed sense of anxious anticipation.
He knelt by the wooden paneling beneath the stair. Recalling both Alan Durand’s references and something Deanna Shrevecraft had once shown him when she’d visited Castle Durand, he used his hands to pry back a portion of the wood paneling. The three-by-two-foot panel slid aside.
Peering into the black void, he heard slight rustling and then a barely audible sound like a gasp or a whimper.
“Alice?”
Silence.
He awkwardly tried to maneuver his large body partially into the opening, squinting his eyes. A whisper came from the darkness.
“Dylan.”
A shiver snaked under his skin. She’d sounded odd. Distant. Spooked.
“I’m right here, baby,” he said evenly, even though alarm had started to bubble in his veins. He backed out of the cramped opening in order to go back in a more navigable angle. “I’m coming in, Alice. Everything’s okay.”
“I know.”
He blinked.
“I remember Addie.”
His skin pulled tight at her whispering voice, the hairs on his arm and nape springing to attention.
“I mean . . . not everything,” she continued breathlessly.
Dylan barely contained a blistering curse because he couldn’t see even her shadow. She was a disembodied whisper in the darkness.
“I ran up here, and I wasn’t really thinking . . . just feeling cornered by everything, you know?” She continued in a tiny, shaking voice. “And I had this thought that I wished I could hide and stay there forever, but I needed a good spot. Then it just came to me in a rush, how she and I would play hide-and-seek. She knew all my spots, because she was the one who had shown me the good ones . . . all the secret, hidden places like this one. They were her hiding places, too. I’d hide and she’d look for me like she didn’t know where I was, but I knew she did. She’d call out to let me know where she was as she looked around in the area, to let me know when she was getting close. Aadddie, where are you?”
She made a sound like a choked laugh or a sob.
Dylan jerked at the eerie sound, banging the back of his head on the paneling.
“Dylan? Are you okay?”
He pried his eyes open from a wince of pain, because her voice sounded closer. Suddenly, her pale face emerged from the shadows. She was crawling toward him on her hands and knees. He reached for her single-mindedly and propelled himself back, as if he thought he could manually pull her out of her disturbing memory like he could haul her out of that secret compartment. They landed with a thud just outside of the opening, his body taking the impact of their fall.
“Dylan?”
He was on his ass, and she was sprawled on top of him. He was tensed somewhere between lying down on the floor and sitting up.
“Yeah,” he muttered, pulling her tighter against him. She put her hands on his shoulders. He rose to a sitting position. Alice was in his lap, her legs bent and sprawled on either side of his hips, her black cocktail dress ruched up to her thighs, her pearls flung behind her shoulder. Her fingertips touched his jaw.
“It wasn’t that bad. You don’t have to look like that,” she said feelingly, and he realized belatedly she’d witnessed his naked alarm. “I mean . . . I thought it was going to be bad, too, to remember something about Addie, and to know I was remembering while I did it. Addie Durand is a completely different person. I thought it’d be like being possessed by someone else or something. But it wasn’t. It was—”
“Stop, Alice.”
“What?” she asked, appearing incredulous and hurt by his abrupt interruption of something that was obviously new and amazing to her.
“If you so much as mention a word of this to your pillow, let alone another human being, I’ll make you pay,” Dylan promised.
Alice turned, her mouth hanging open in shock. She’d realized he wasn’t addressing her.
“Thad,” she gasped. She tugged on her hemline, trying to cover her exposed legs.