Midnight in Austenland
Page 25

“Skulking back to the scene of the crime?”
Charlotte spun around. Eddie was coming up the stairs. Even his slight, surprised-looking smile brought out those dimples. He had such a harmless face.
“Eddie,” she breathed. “Don’t do that.”
“You look positively criminal, Charlotte. Are you sneaking sweets? Have you drawn on the walls or perhaps spilled your juice on the carpet?”
Charlotte let her shoulders relax. “If I did, would I get a spanking?”
Eddie raised a single eyebrow.
“Whoa!” said Charlotte, feeling a blush come on. “That’s not what I meant. I was trying to keep with your naughty-child theme, not add another kind of naughty something or other. Sorry, brother of mine.”
She giggled, then covered her mouth, not sure if she should appear more penitent.
Eddie narrowed his eyes. “What are you up to?”
She glanced up the hallway. The far window seemed to sink back even farther, the light barely shuffling down the hall.
“Come with me. I’d rather not do this alone.”
He approached slowly, his feet reluctant. “I don’t know if I should encourage this fancy of yours.”
“It’s already encouraged. It’s beyond encouraged. Just help me resolve it, if you would be so kind.”
She continued pushing on the wall as she went, feeling for give. “It can’t have been a normal door. There must be a disguised door here somewhere.”
“A secret door? Charlotte—”
“I know you all thought I was crazy, and I was ready to believe you. But by daylight, I don’t feel crazy. There’s got to be—aha! Here, push,” she said, taking his hands and placing them on one wall panel.
“See how it feels kind of … loose? A little bit?”
She stood with her back against the wall and slid along it, as she had been doing the night before, feeling for a lever or switch. He laughed.
“I wanted you here so you could help.”
“Actually, I believe you wanted me to protect you from the Pembrook Phantom.”
“Maybe.” She tried to sound cheeky, but truthfully she really didn’t appreciate him throwing around words like “phantom” while she was in a dim corridor looking for a secret passageway. Her goose bumps were getting goose bumps.
Then she felt it—a kind of knob, hidden in the wainscot. She flicked it with her finger. The wall at her back swung in.
She almost fell back again, but Eddie grabbed her arm and pulled her upright. His wide eyes took in the room behind her.
“See? See? I’m not completely crazy.”
“Not completely,” he whispered and went in, his hands together as if he were entering a holy sanctum, or perhaps Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Charlotte followed. The door shut behind them, making them both jump.
“It does that,” said Charlotte. “But I don’t like it that it does that. In fact, I wish that it wouldn’t do that. I really wish that it—” She shut herself up because she realized she was rambling, and she realized she was rambling because the secret room did in fact exist. Which also meant …
Charlotte met eyes with the sofa. That is, if the sofa had eyes, she would have met eyes with it. As it was, she just had the creepy sensation that it knew she was looking at it. Which of course it didn’t. It was just a sofa, after all. A sofa that seemed to have eyes, and if it did have eyes, it would be glaring—kind of smugly. A smug kind of glare.
She was still rambling, even in her thoughts.
Shut up, Charlotte, she told herself.
She pointed at the sofa. “It was there.”
Eddie didn’t speak. Perhaps if he had, he would have rambled too. Instead, he approached the sofa cautiously (almost as if the sofa had eyes and Eddie didn’t like the way it was smugly glaring) and lifted the velvet coverlet.
Nobody. No body at all. Not even a severed hand.
Charlotte’s relief was chased from her chest by an aggressive stampede of disappointment and confusion.
“But … there was … I swear …”
Eddie looked around. “I don’t know that we should be here. This is a bit of an underbelly, isn’t it? Like seeing backstage.”
“But it’s real, Eddie. Everyone thought I was crazy, but the room is real.”
He nodded, eyeing the wobbly stacks of chairs and old sofas with ripped covers. He knelt at a box and pulled out a fencing foil with stubbed tip.
“Ooh,” he said.
Charlotte examined the velvet coverlet and what wasn’t underneath it. She shut her eyes and saw again the hand, lit up silver by the well-timed lightning. It had been real, just like the room. Right? There was nothing on the sofa now but the coverlet, and its fringe could hardly imitate five fingers and a palm.
“I’m sure I saw … I touched it.” Her stomach squelched. “Oops. Excuse me.”
Eddie put back the foil. “Come along, Charlotte darling, I will escort you to breakfast. Breakfast should always come before sleuthing.” He went to the door … or what was an outline of a door. There was no knob.
“How exactly do we extract ourselves from the belly of the beast?”
“I’m not sure.” She studied the wall. “It was dark. And I think I was, well, flailing around.”
The wainscot was carved. She pressed it until she found a rounded bit that gave way under her hand, and the door swung in.
“Look out—that is alarming each time,” said Eddie.
The door clicked shut behind them. They’d just taken a step toward the stairs when a non-secret door opened and Mary peered out. She saw them, and her face turned very red.
“Hello, Mary,” said Charlotte.
“I’m … I’m in my room,” she said and shut herself back in.
“She’s perpetually jumpy,” Charlotte whispered.
“Let us keep the secret room a secret, shall we, Charlotte?” said Eddie, taking her arm and walking to the stairs. “Mrs. Wattlesbrook does not like guests to see anything dusty or untidy.”
“But … we should call the police. The secret room is real! So that must mean the body was real too.”
He took her hand and looked at her with concern.
He has brown eyes, she thought. So does my real brother. But Eddie’s have more honey in them.
“Are you certain, Charlotte? Are you absolutely certain you encountered a murdered human being last night?”