“Why did Alex call you DahliaMcPhee?” Oona said.
I shook my head. Quin gave up on me and swept past, throwing open the door of the toilet stall. “There’s no exit through here?”
“Actually, can I use the bathroom?” Rooster said. “I didn’t need to before but that was a lot of guns, you guys.”
“No exit through there,” Lourey said. “Just a toilet seat at the coldest center of hell.”
“Is the center of hell cold?” Lumpy Jim said.
“Doll,”Oona said loudly.
Everyone hushed and turned her way. She’d sounded like a voice with solutions. “He called you DahliaMcPhee.”
“That’s not your name?” Quin said. “Wait.”
“He’s never called me that before,” I said.
“Could it be a signal?” Quin said. “He wants you to understand something?Dosomething? What did he say, exactly?”
“That’s a little… conceptual for Alex,” I said.
“You don’t think it was some kind of goodbye, right?” Oona said. “He wouldn’t do something stupid, right?”
“‘Dahlia McPhee, look at yourself,’” Sicily said. Everyone looked her way. In the spotlight of our attention, she wilted into Marisa. “That’s what he said.”
“Look at yourself,” I repeated, flipping the words over in my mouth.
I pivoted toward the toilet stall.
“The mirror?” Quin said as I slipped past him into the cold, narrow space. The medicine cabinet mirror hung crooked. The crack through the reflection split my face and turned my features inward.
“Look yourself in the eye,” I said.
Quin reached past me and opened the mirrored door on the cabinet, but it was only a shallow set of shelves with a lone bottle of aspirin long past its expiration date.
“I could use a couple of those,” Marisa said from the door.
They’d all gathered behind us, Pascal on tiptoes and Lumpy Jim peering over them all from the back.
Quin poked around the cabinet frame. “Well, there’s some severe weather blowing in from behind this mirror. What’s on the other side?”
“Winter,” Suzy said. “It’s always winter behind there.”
“Maybe it’s the treasure,” Sicily said.
Marisa said, “Maybe it’s another magical escape route. Out of this house of horrors.”
51
We all turned to Marisa. The crawl through Oona’s closet must have prepared her to believe in just about anything. The idea that we might get out through the medicine cabinet rippled through the group.
“That’s whatIwould have named the pub,” I said. “McPhee’s House of Horrors.”
Quin was looking to me, waiting.
“Itcouldbe a way out,” I admitted.
He sent Pascal to listen at the door to the hallway, and when the all-clear was passed back through to the bathroom, Quin steadied himself with a foot against the wall and pulled at the box of the medicine cabinet. It didn’t budge.
