She eyes the typewriter, gauging its weight, but when she makes a move for it, Malcolm brings one hand down on the device. The other lands on the stack of yellow paper.
“These,” he growls, “don’t belong to Sienna Wood.”
She shakes her head. “Unbefuckinglievable,” she snaps, grabbing her notebook and slamming the door behind her.
* * *
SIENNA DECIDES, THEN AND THERE, THAT SHEis going to win.
Notjustto spite Malcolm—though that will absolutely be the icing on the cake. This is her chance to break out, to break free, to start fresh with the backing of a major publisher and a seven-figure deal.
Money’s never been a motivating factor for Sienna—she used to write all the time, even when no one was paying her, and then, after she met Malcolm, she had his safety net, so it never mattered (to her) that the advances were modest, that they hardly ever earned out. The work was enough. But now that she’s taking an ax to the ropes of that net, she needs a soft cushion on the ground, a way to land safely. So she can get to her feet. Not as one half of Penn Stonely, but all of Sienna Wood.
Thanks to Arthur Fletch, she has a chance to do just that.
And she’s not about to let Malcolm stand in her way.
Her plan is to head straight to the cottage and tell Fletch’s editor she wants—no,needs—to write alone. Rufus will understand—she hopes—especially since it means having more samples to choose from. At least, that’s what she tells herself.
Because the alternative is that he’ll say no.
That they invited Penn Stonely, not Sienna Buchanan, soon-to-be Wood. That without Malcolm, she’s got no publishing clout, no credits to her name, no proof that she’s good enough to—
Sienna digs her nails into the notebook. She knows that the voice in her head is more Malcolm than Mr. Beaumont. Even so, she feels herself deflating, doubt slashing her sails. She’s still moving toward the stairs, but her steps are dragging now, her feet leaden and her mind scrabbling to stay afloat.
Maybe that’s why she slows between Jaxon’s and Millie’s rooms, then stops, eyes sliding over the wallpaper. Her memory flashes back to the library, the dollhouse, the hidden stairs leading up to the little attic room.Fletch’sroom.
She runs her hand along the wallpaper, her anger momentarily displaced by curiosity.
Not just curiosity. Research. After all, what better way to get insight into the late Arthur Fletch?
As for Rufus Beaumont, well, he isn’t going anywhere.
Sienna glances around—the floor seems empty—then traces her hand back and forth, studying the patterned wall until she sees it. The slightest offset in the paper. The faint outline of a door.
It’s flush, but she can feel the wood beneath, the slight give as she presses down. There’s no handle, of course, and the paper is ornate, an overlapping pattern of flowers, so it takes her a moment to find the keyhole, tucked like a shadow in the center of a bloom.
Sienna glances around again, then plucks the ballpoint pen from her notebook and kneels, popping off the cap and unscrewing the casing, tipping out the thin ink-filled chamber and sliding it into the keyhole, along with the clip on the cap.
She thinks about the time she first performed this party trick, at a writers’ symposium outside Chicago, the night she met Malcolm, when a fellow conference-goer got locked out of their room. She didn’t admit, then, of course, that it only works with this pen, or that itwasn’ta talent she’d just picked up, in the throes of research. Sienna had learned it as a way to impress the other writers.
And it did.
“Voilà,” she whispers now, even though there’s no one around when the lock clicks. She stands and presses on the door, and this time it bounces back, hinges open, revealing a steep coil of stairs that go up and out of sight.
Sienna slips inside, pulling the door shut behind her. For a moment, she’s plunged into darkness, but as she climbs the stairs, one hand on each wall for balance, the darkness thins, and when she reaches the top, the light spilling through the window is more than enough to see by.
She steps carefully, reverently, the floorboards groaning softly beneath her feet as she takes in the narrow bedroom, with its peaked ceiling.
It looks like a larger version of the room in the model, and yet, in person, it feels smaller. The bed is narrower than the others in the house, and while there are no papers spread across the duvet, it hasn’t been made; the sheets are flung to the side as if Fletch just got up. Kenzo mentioned that Arthur wrote in bed, but there’s no sign of a laptop, or a notebook. Only a polished black typewriter on a simple wooden desk beneath the window, a rickety old chair half tucked beneath, turned at an angle as if recently abandoned.
Sienna has been to three crime scenes in her life, all of them for research, and while there’s no blood here, no body beneath a sheet, the room has the same eerie pall. There is a stillness to the room, which holds the faint smell of unaired spaces, dust just beginning to settle. She realizes she’s holding her breath, as if a single exhale might upset the balance of this space. But when she finally lets the air slip out, nothing changes.
She drifts around the room, hoping to soak up something, anything. To be inspired. A blue-and-yellow robe, soft but well-worn, sags on a hook beside the wardrobe, and Sienna shrugs it on, closing her eyes as the fabric settles.
“I am Arthur Fletch,” she whispers, taking in the scent of sandalwood aftershave and sea-salt air. She opens her eyes. “What am I thinking?” she asks, crossing to the desk, running her hand along the wood as if it were a Ouija board.
There’s no hum of energy, no answering spirit.
