“Because it’s not safe for you here.” Just the thought of Mercy being hurt made his guts tighten painfully.
“Oh, that.” She pursed her lips for a minute, then smiled. “I’m not going. There’s no need.”
“Mercy,” he said with a sigh, “I’m not feeling up to yet another verbal battle.”
“Good,” she said, taking his hand in hers, and gently rubbing his hurt fingers with her thumb. “Then don’t argue. Also, can we leave the relationship talk for another time? Later tonight, maybe? Because I have something important to show you, first.”
“What?” he asked, following her when she headed toward the main staircase.
“I want to show you that floor you fell through.”
He stopped her before she could get to the second floor. “No. It’s not safe. I meant what I said, Mercy—I don’t want anyone else getting hurt.”
She squeezed his hand on the part that wasn’t grazed, and gave him a fleeting smile. “Don’t worry, no one is going to be hurt. I want to show you what I barely had time to see before I realized the railing was about to come loose.”
“The floor is dangerous—”
“Not anymore, it isn’t,” she said grimly.
“Don’t let the hole fool you into thinking that was the only weak spot,” he warned, following her up the second flight of stairs. He wanted badly to get her out of the house, to tuck her away somewhere safe and sound, preferably a place that had a nice bed, and ashower big enough for two. “If the floor is weak in one location, it will be weak in others.”
“I doubt that,” Mercy said, the words drifting over her shoulder as she leaped up the last couple of stairs, and started down the long gallery. “She didn’t have time to do the whole thing.”
“She? She who? Mercy!” He caught at her arm when she continued forward, shaking it a little. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, gesturing down the hall. The hole gaped rough and black in the twilight, and even the lights that Mercy flipped on didn’t do much to illuminate the damage to the floor. She walked toward it, keeping to the wall, with one hand in his. “It’s OK, it’s safe over here. This is where Lisa was standing.”
They stopped a few feet from the broken floorboards.
“Am I supposed to see something that will make me change my mind about how dangerous the house is?” he asked, nodding toward the gaping blackness. “Because from where I stand, all I see is weak floorboards and a drop that could have been quite harmful, if not downright deadly.”
“Knees,” she said, kneeling. “You have to get down close to see it. Look. See that?”
He knelt next to her, and cautiously leaned forward to where the hole began. He didn’t see much but broken hardwood, crumbled underflooring, and the wooden ribs that held up the floor. Except two of the ribs were missing. “All I see is broken floor.”
“Then you’re not looking close enough. I saw it as soon as I realized what had happened—and for that, I thank the University of Strathclyde Forensic Detectionclass, because they taught us to look closely at all the bits surrounding an accident site.”
He looked where Mercy was pointing, frowned, and edged forward to touch the broken piece of hardwood floor.
It wasn’t broken. The edges were too neat. And a closer look at the underflooring and ribs showed that they, too, did not display the edges of wood that had simply rotted away. He looked back at Mercy, his mind struggling to process this information. “Someone did this deliberately? Someone deliberately sabotaged it?”
“Cut the floor, you mean? I don’t think so. Look at the wood underneath the top layer. That stuff is old, really old, and it doesn’t show signs of any fresh cuts. I think what you have here is basically a trapdoor that led down to the little passageway.”
“Hmm.” He examined it more closely, carefully testing the floor before he put his full weight onto it. “I believe you’re right. There are no signs that the wood was sawn. That simply means that it gave way, and is, as I said, dangerous.”
“I don’t think it did it on its own,” Mercy said slowly, sitting with her back to the wall. “If you look at the edge nearest me, you’ll see some scratches. They do look fresh, although someone has tried to cover them up with a wood crayon. What I think happened is that someone found out about the trapdoor, took a look at it, peeked into the passage, saw a lot of wood and stone debris in there, and decided it would make a grand booby trap. They just kind of helped it along by loosening the trapdoor so that it wasn’t resting on the supports the way it was supposed to—and voilà. The second you stepped on it, down you went.”
“You think this is deliberate?” he asked, appalled at the thought that someone would dislike him so much as to want to seriously harm him.
“I do.” She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “And I know how they did it, too. The only person other than me who has access to papers about the house.”
“Lisa?” He shook his head. “I can’t believe that she’d want to hurt me. And if she did—why? What purpose does that serve?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.” She patted his knee when he sat next to her. “Look, I know it’s hard to try to process the fact that someone wants you out of the way, but when you go through the evidence like I’ve been doing while I patched you up, you’ll see that it’s clear that the culprit is Lisa.”
“For some unknown reason,” he said skeptically.
“Yeah, well, I’m still working on that,” she admitted. “But think about it, Alden—ever since she got here, you’ve had more and more accidents.”
