Page 47 of Bonetide

I know I closed that door, I know I did. I haven’t been up there since earlier.

House settling? It’s always a house settling, right? It was one thump, it’s possible.

As silently as I can, I creep to the bottom of the stairs and listen again.

Nothing.

I climb, the creak of the stairs giving me away to anyone who might be up there. My stomach churns, making me feel a little empty and sick with fear.

The hallway upstairs is the same as earlier. The door to the guest bedroom is still closed. I turn the knob, the sound loud and ominous, and push open the door.

The room is empty.

The single bed is against the far wall, the pale quilt smoothed flat. The jawbone is where it last was, which is kind of a relief in itself, and kind of not.

I stand in the doorway in the dimming light and make myself look at the room as carefully as I can, even though every new spot my eyes land on scares me. The rafters above me. The small window onto the bay. The wardrobe on the left wall, doors closed. The closet in the corner.

I look at the closet again, which remains locked and without a key after I tried to open it the first night.

The door is at the back of the room, set into the wall under the slope of the eaves, painted the same white as the wall with a small brass keyhole. The wood of the door looks older than the room somehow, and the handle is dark with use.

There are marks on the floorboards in front of it. I don’t remember seeing them before. It’s enough that I slowly cross the room toward it, the floorboards creaking noisily as I go. Which is another relief, because if someone really had been walking around up here, I would have heard it.

Up closer, I can see two small curved scuffs in the wood, the shape a door makes when it has been opened against floorboards more than once over the years. I carefully kneel and run my fingers along the scuffs. The arcs are recent enough that they have not gathered the same fine grey dust as the rest of the floorboards.

The closet has been opened. But when? Days ago? Weeks? Months? Years?

I’m about to get up when I noticed a gleam. I peer closer. There’s salt on the floor at the base of the door.

Just a few grains of coarse sea salt, the kind sprinkled all over the house. They sit just outside the closet’s threshold, on the floorboards, as if they spilled inside and have not been swept up.

I touch one. It dissolves slightly on the pad of my finger. I lick the next one to be sure.

Yup. Salt.

Someone has been pouring salt inside the closet, and, at some point, opened the door, making salt come out the opening.

And that someone was not me.

I sit back on my heels with my finger still pressed to the grain of salt and I look at the brass keyhole of the closet door. All this time I’ve been assuming it’s just a closet because that’s what the solicitor said—the spare bedroom upstairs has a large closet for storage—but now that I think about it, it takes up most of the room. A narrow A-frame like the rest, judging by the shape and length of the house, but there’s got to be at least four or five feet in there. It could be more of a small room than a closet.

I think about the wooden box downstairs.

I think about the carvings on its lid that look like letters from an alphabet I don’t know.

I think about Effie putting a key in a box and the box in the bottom of the trunk and the trunk under the stairs.

Did she leave me a map of some kind, like some sort of mystery to solve?

And if so, what’s the map for, and have I been reading it right?

The trunk was addressed to me, and her note was cryptic and disturbing as shit, but everything else in the trunk doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason other than she wanted me to discover them. She wanted me to learn something from them.

Only problem is, the more I discover, the more confused I get.

I think I have more questions for my new neighbor.

Chapter