chapter sixteen

The next morning, Nolan is waiting for me when I get off the elevator, and relief courses through my veins. I half worried he wouldn’t be here, that he would want an Irish good-bye. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

“There’s one last thing I want to show you,” he says. “Before you go.”

He sounds unsure, and I wonder what could be so big as to cause him to hesitate when he has already shown me his sisters’ graves.

“What is it?” I ask with forced brightness. “Do you collect weird taxidermy in glass jars?”

He snorts. “No.”

“Do you have an embarrassing stack of failed internet memes that you tried to make before you launched your illustrious writing career?”

I make up all sorts of nonsensical things over breakfast at the café, each more ridiculous than the last.

“Christmas movie scripts,” I decide. “N. E. Endsley has authored some of the world’s most heartwarming kisses on berry farms.”

Nolan isn’t listening to me as we rise from the table. But instead of going to the stairs, he heads to the Orman room and stops halfway there. He looks down the long hallway and pokes his head into the last two rooms at the end, a paranoid meerkat scouting for predators.

“We have to be quick,” he says with great urgency, and my mind goes blank as he falls to the floor and moves a square piece of the carpet, exposing a slatted door with a leather strap. He pulls on the strap, the door puckering open like a folding window shutter, revealing a short ladder that extends into the darkness of this … hole in the bookstore.

“Wait, what?” I hear myself ask. Is this the part where I’m finally murdered by the crazy, reclusive author? Maybe it’s research for a murder mystery he wants to write and he needs to know whether anyone can hear me scream in his creepy bookstore dungeon.

“Come on,” Nolan moans, slipping down the ladder. And because he can read my mind he says, “Amelia, get that look off your face. Nobody’s going to kill you. Get in before someone sees.”

I am unceremoniously pulled after him by my calves, our bodies much too large to both occupy the ladder at the same time.

As soon as my head is clear of the opening, Nolan scoots the carpet back into place and raises the door back up with a soft click, effectively leaving us in total darkness.

I’m thinking about testing my scream theory when he clicks on the light.