Page 9 of The Inheritance At Bourton

"The only one down here."

She tried to picture the downstairs bathroom. She'd used it a hundred times. It was a tiny room, with a toilet and a sink barely big enough to wash your hands. It was a room you could barely turn around in.

She walked to the end wall and put her hand flat against a shelf. "How wide is this room?"

"I don't know. Twelve feet?"

"How wide is the bathroom?"

She watched him think it through. He looked at the wall, then at the door they had entered, and then back at the wall.

"Not twelve feet," he said slowly.

They were both moving before either of them said anything else.

She led the way down the hall, Rowan following. The only light came from the ceiling fixture near the stairs. First, they passed the library door, then a stretch of wall, and finally the bathroom door. She stopped at the bathroom, looked at the wall, and tried to figure out the measurements.

Rowan went into the library. She heard him counting under his breath, the slow, measured tread of him pacing the width of the room. Then he came out and went into the bathroom, and she heard it again.

He came back out and stood with her in the hall.

"Library's twelve paces," he said. "Wall to wall."

"And the bathroom?"

"Six."

They both looked at the stretch of hallway wall between the two doors.

"Six feet," she said. Her pulse had picked up, a flutter high in her chest. "There's six feet of this house unaccounted for."

They went back into the library. A narrow console table stood against the suspicious wall, and a lamp with a pleated shade sat on it. A wooden chair with a cushion sat beside the table—a very uncomfortable chair. No one would choose it over the other more comfortable pieces of furniture in the room.

Just furniture. Just camouflage. Something for the eye to slide past.

"That's the whole trick,” she murmured. “You don't hide a door. You put a table in front of it, and everybody stops looking. A chair that is a lot easier to move than the larger ones over there.”

"Move the chair," he said.

She pulled it away. Rowan lifted the lamp. They moved everything clear, and now they stood in front of six feet of empty wall.

“It has to be here, right?” Leah asked. She hoped he would say yes. She needed to hear that she wasn’t imagining things.

Rowan ran his hand along the wall at shoulder height, then lower, fingers flat, pressing lightly as he went. She watched his hand travel the plaster and stop.

"There's a seam," he said.

She came close. At first, she couldn't see anything. Then she turned her head, letting the light catch the wall at an angle, and there it was. A hairline, vertical cut running from the chair rail down to the baseboard. It didn't match any of the other seams in the plaster—a cut, not a crack.

"There's another one." He was further along now, crouching, his hand near the baseboard. Two vertical lines, three feet apart. A door-shaped absence in the wall.

"How does it open?"

He ran his fingers along the chair rail where the seam met it, then along the baseboard. She watched him press, one section of trim at a time, working down the length. His hand stopped at a piece of molding near the floor. He pressed it, and there was a click. Forty years of secrets behind a latch like a kitchen cabinet.

The panel swung inward, silent on its hinges, into the dark.

Cold air came out of the opening and washed over them. It smelled old. Air that had not been breathed in a long time. She couldn’t see anything inside, only darkness.