I found a few dozen copper handfuls (that’s what they’re called, “handfuls”) hidden in a jewelry box with Vera’s rings and necklaces. As I stuffed my pockets, I noticed a strange shadow at the back of the room. One of Vera’s pictures, a fruit tree whose limbs swarmed with birds, looked as though it was thicker on one side. No, I saw as I stepped closer, the painting itself concealed a door that hadn’t quite shut all the way.

I froze. Did that mean Vera was here? But why the secret door? Was it an escape tunnel? Had she heard the shouting and decided discretion was better than valor?

I opened the door and discovered a passage, walled with brick, that stretched ahead and down, vanishing around a corner. A lit torch hung in a bracket. Someone was almost certainly down there. But just as I was turning away, I heard the Smyler-Belle donnybrook crash out of my bedroom and into the hall behind me, thumps and gasps and the wet slish of knife in flesh. No matter which one of them survived, my route to the rest of the house was blocked. I had nowhere to go but down.

I held the poker in front of me like a rapier as I crept forward into the tunnel, since it was going to be a lot easier in that low, narrow passage for me to stab than to swing. The brick walkway curved then curved again, always sloping down, so that within just a few moments I knew I must be lower than the house itself. Soon I could hear voices, or perhaps one voice thickened and complicated by echoes. I took a few more steps, then saw there was more light ahead of me, so I made my way as quietly as I could down the passage, staying close to the wall and stopping at every bend to peer ahead, until suddenly the corridor widened dramatically.

I was in a subbasement, I guess, but that doesn’t do it justice. It was a cave, was what it was, a cave underneath Vera’s house, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, all pointing in the proper directions. As I moved out of the light of one torch and through a darker area toward the next torch, I suddenly heard Vera’s voice clearly. I couldn’t make out all the words—something about “disappointed,” and “you certainly know”—but it was obvious she was talking to someone. That worried me. I had no urge to fight with Vera, who was quite a package by herself, and if she had allies I definitely wanted to avoid a confrontation. I thought about just turning and heading back, but by now either Belle or, more likely, Smyler had finished up with the other and would come looking for me.