“But Iwouldhave if I’d been given the chance,” Wilhelmine reiterated right before she struck a match that she’d obviously had the foresight to pick up from the table, the weak flicker of the flame penetrating the darkness. “Let me find the candle, and then we’ll look more closely at those prints.” With that, Wilhelmine climbed over Irma, needing to strike a second match before she finally located the candle.
A blink of an eye later, and holding a candle that was once again lit, Wilhelmine pulled Irma to her feet, did the same with Drusilla, then held the candle aloft, nodding as the weak light traveled over a single set of footprints that marched down the hallway.
“Shall we follow them?” Wilhelmine asked.
“Don’t you think it would be smarter to find that door Norbert told us about and get out of here as quickly as possible on the chance that whoever left those prints is still in here with us?” Irma whispered.
“I never thought about that,” Wilhelmine whispered back,the whispering somewhat questionable since it wasn’t as if they’d been being overly quiet up until now.
“If they were left by a member of Ottilie’s staff, that member is long gone by now, although...” Drusilla squatted down to look more closely at the tracks. “I think these are too fresh to have been made over a year and a half ago.” She frowned and rose to her feet. “They’re traveling away from the door we’re supposed to be looking for, which means ... we need to follow them to see if they lead to the stairs or travel down the other side of the hallway.”
“Because?” Irma whispered.
“What if they were made by someone posing as that ghost that came to visit you in your room? And the reason we couldn’t find that supposed ghost was because the person impersonating a ghost hustled themselves right into this hidden staircase, and hence, avoided detection.”
“Or maybe no one could find the ghost because it was a ghost and it simply vanished into thin air like ghosts do.”
“I think my explanation is more plausible, so we need to follow the prints.”
“I don’t believe we need to do any such thing,” Irma protested. “I mean, honestly, Drusilla, it’s not as if any of us are Pinkertons. We certainly won’t know what to do if we run across whoever left those prints. I say we go back and fetch Rhenick and Norbert and let them investigate for us, or maybe this would be a wonderful task for Seraphina to take on, what with how you told me she spent years living in a spooky old boarding school. She probably has scads of experience with ghosts.”
Drusilla took the candle from Wilhelmine and resisted the urge to roll her eyes yet again, an urge she’d certainly been resisting quite often. “You may go fetch Rhenick and Norbert if you want, but as I’ve vowed to learn how to deal with whatever life sends me without the assistance of gentlemen,I’m going to follow the tracks. And no, I’m not going to ask Seraphina to do it for me. This is my castle, which means it’s my responsibility.”
“I’m not certain I care for this assertive attitude you’ve adopted of late,” Irma complained, even though instead of heading for the door Norbert had told them would lead to a linen closet, she gave a wave of her hand toward the hallway. “I suppose you might as well get on with it, but know, if all of us come to a grisly end, I’m holding you responsible.”
“Duly noted,” Drusilla said before she edged past her mother and began heading toward the staircase, keeping the candle trained on tracks that turned toward the stairs and seemed to go up, although there was another set of tracks going down.
“This is a really bad idea,” Irma said when Drusilla headed up the staircase, climbing her way to the next landing and then continuing upward when the tracks didn’t head into the third-floor hallway but stayed on the steps.
“I might need to consider abandoning these widow’s weeds once and for all as they’re definitely far too heavy to accommodate any type of physical exertion, something I seem to be experiencing today,” she heard Irma say to Wilhelmine as they continued to climb, cobwebs once again glancing over Drusilla’s face. She slowed to a stop when she caught sight of a door looming in front of her, and a door where the stairs simply seemed to end.
Drawing in a deep breath, she forced feet that didn’t want to move into motion again, then took hold of the doorknob, but before she had an opportunity to give it a twist, Irma was peering over her shoulder.
“Are you quite sure you want to open that instead of seeking out Rhenick to open it for us? He does seem to be a gentleman who’d probably know what to do if we found ourselves confronted with a real live ghost on the other side,” Irma said.
“I don’t think ghosts can be real live.”
“You know what I meant, and who’s to say that some of the ghosts that might be haunting this castle aren’t of the malevolent type?” Irma countered. “If they’re mean ghosts, they might attack us as soon as we open the door, and then we’ll all be dead, and on the very day you learned that a gentleman had actually lost his senses because of you, which you know is a day we should be celebrating instead of courting death.”
Drusilla grinned. She simply couldn’t help herself.
“We are not courting death, merely contemplating walking through a door, and as has already been discussed, there was a reason Rhenick lost his senses around me, that being him having misconstrued who I am at heart.”
“I don’t believe he misconstrued who you were at all,” Wilhelmine said as she crowded in behind them. “Especially not when you didn’t hesitate to traipse on after these footprints, which suggests Rhenick’s right and that you’re a most exceptional young lady.”
Having nothing of worth to say to that since it wasn’t as if she was accustomed to anyone extending her any type of compliment, especially not one that had the wordexceptionalin it, Drusilla settled for sending Wilhelmine a small smile before she returned her attention to the doorknob.
“Any thoughts on what we might discover on the other side of this?” she asked.
“As long as it’s not ghosts or more ravens, I think we’ll be fine,” Irma murmured.
“I think I’d rather take on a ghost than another raven,” Drusilla murmured back before she gave the knob a twist and then stumbled through the door when it opened with barely any effort at all, quite as if it had been recently oiled.
Light blinded her as a stiff wind blew out the candle, and after shading her eyes with her hand, she realized she was now standing on one of the turrets, and...
A shriek rent the air, one that, of course, came from Irma, who stumbled into Drusilla a second later before she pointed a finger that was definitely shaking at something in the distance—something that was white, almost transparent, and wafting on the breeze.
Twenty-One
