Had Gemma Lou been allowed to stay with them, they might have read more fairy tales, might have heard more stories about children who opened doors to one place and found themselves stepping through into another. Had they been allowed to grow according to their own paths, to follow their own interests, they might have met Alice, and Peter, and Dorothy, all the children who had strayed from the path and found themselves lost in someone else’s fairyland. But fairy tales had been too bloody and violent for Serena’s tastes, and children’s books had been too soft and whimsical for Chester’s tastes, and so somehow, unbelievable as it might seem, Jacqueline and Jillian had never been exposed to the question of what might be lurking behind a door that wasn’t supposed to be there.

The two of them looked at the impossible stairway and were too baffled and excited to be afraid.

“Those weren’t there last time,” said Jillian.

“Maybe they were, and the dresses were just all on top of them,” said Jacqueline.

“The dresses would have fallen,” said Jillian.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Jacqueline—but it was a fair point, wasn’t it? If there had always been stairs in the trunk, then all the things Gemma Lou had left for them would have fallen. Unless … “There’s a lid here,” she said. “Maybe there’s a lid on the bottom, too, and it came open, and everything fell down the stairs.”

“Oh,” said Jillian. “What should we do?”

Dimly, Jacqueline was beginning to realize that this wasn’t just a mystery: it was an opportunity. Their parents didn’t know there was a stairway hidden in Gemma Lou’s old closet. They couldn’t know. If they had known, they would have put the key somewhere much harder to find than the kitchen junk drawer. The stairs looked dusty, like no one had walked on them in years and years, and Serena hated dust, which meant she didn’t know that the stairs existed. If Jacqueline and Jillian went down those stairs, why, they would be walking into something secret. Something new. Something their parents had maybe never seen and couldn’t fence in with inexplicable adult rules.

“We should go and find all our dress-up clothes and put them away, so that we’re not making a mess in Gemma Lou’s room,” said Jacqueline, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.