He glanced sideways at me. I couldn’t see enough of his face to know if he was surprised by the news.
“Mrs. Riley has a way of coaxing information out of people,” he said, “then feeding it back to them in a different form, so that they think she’s telling them something new.”
“But she guessed where the clock was found. And though I told her the landscape was moved to the music room, she knew it was hung over the Chinese chest.”
“Megan, think about the size of the painting. Where else would you hang it in the music room? As for the clock, a lot of people keep them in entrance halls. Every old house in Maryland has a grandfather clock in the hall or on the stairway landing.”
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” I insisted.
“Mrs. Riley makes her living off coincidences. I hope you didn’t pay her a lot.”
“She didn’t charge,” I replied somewhat smugly.
“She’s counting on you to come back. Then she’ll charge double,” he said, sounding just as smug.
We rumbled across the Wist bridge. I turned back to look at it, remembering that Sophie had seen the ghost there.
Didn’t ghosts haunt battlefields and other places where they died? If Avril had died somewhere between the mill and the doctor’s, could it have been while Thomas was driving over the bridge?
“Where’s the mill?” I asked.
“On the creek. About a third of a mile beyond Grandmother’s driveway there’s a road to the left. It runs down to the mill.”
“We’ve got some time,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“No,” he responded quickly.
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing to see,” he said. “It’s been abandoned for years and is full of mice and rats.”
“Okay, I’ll go later without you.”
He shook his head. “Pigheaded.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “amazing, isn’t it? We’re not related by blood, but we share that family trait.”
“Listen to me, Megan, you can’t go inside the mill. Most of it’s made of wood, and it’s rotting. The structure’s unsafe.”
As he said that, he drove past Grandmother’s driveway. I tried not to smile.
“Don’t smirk,” he told me.
“Another family trait.”
“I’m taking you there so you don’t go by yourself,” he said.
“Understand?”
“Yes. Thank you, big brother.”
Mutual smirk.
The road down to the mill was bumpy, its stone and shell layer worn away, leaving long bare spots and deep ruts.
Bushes and small trees grew close to the road and scratched the sides of the Jeep. Matt muttered a few choice words. Then suddenly we were in a clearing with a sea of tall grass washing around us. The soft weathered wood of the mill rose above it, two stories, topped by an attic under a sloping roof.
“It’s the one in the painting,” I said.
Matt nodded.
A structure like a dormer window projected out of the middle of the steep roof, but it was larger, framing a door.
The roof door gaped open, leaving a dark cavity in the light gray building. The first and second stories had doors that lined up beneath the roof entrance, but they were closed, as was a side door. All the windows were shuttered.
“Where’s the waterwheel?” I asked.
“Around the side.”
I got out of the Jeep.
“Megan? Don’t go inside.”
“I’ll be back.”
A moment later he trudged behind me to the bank of a stream that ran toward the basement wall of the mill. The large, motionless wheel next to the wall looked like the rusty paddle wheel of a steamboat.
“Not exactly rushing water,” I observed.
“The mill works from a pond,” Matt explained, pointing toward a rise in ground on the other side of the road. “When the gates are opened, the water comes in over the top of the wheel, using gravity to turn it.”
I nodded, then gazed up again at the dark entrance into the roof. “Have you ever seen a ghost here?”
“There is no ghost,” he replied.
“This is where Avril came, the day she died.”
He looked at me surprised. “How do you know that?”
“Mrs. Riley told me. She said Avril came with our grandfather. Thomas was Grandmother’s boyfriend first, then Avril stole him from her. This was Thomas and Avril’s secret meeting place.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Do you have any reason not to?” I asked.
“Mrs. Riley is a gossip and she’s always been out to get our family.”
“That’s a pretty flimsy reason.”
“We’ve spent enough time here,” he told me abruptly, then started toward the Jeep.
I caught up with him. “Mrs. Riley said-”
“I think it’d be a good idea,” he interrupted, “if you, Lydia Riley, and Grandmother started living in the present.”
“Not knowing what happened in the past can keep you from living fully in the present.”
“It’s not relevant,” he argued, and opened the door on my side of the Jeep. “Get in.”
“No.”
He reached for my arm.
I pulled back, but he held on, so tightly I winced. “You’re hurting me!”
He let go.
“I have some more looking to do.”
Matt leaned against the Jeep and said nothing.
I headed around the other side of the mill. As the land sloped down to the water the ground beneath my feet became soft and claylike, perhaps flooded by the creek, which was about twenty feet away. The mill looked tall from the creek side, four stories of it towering above me, the basement’s brick wall exposed. At the base of the building was a Dutch door, its lower half open. It was an inviting mouse hole-and people hole.
I walked over to the double door and pushed on the top half. It didn’t budge. I knelt and crawled through the bottom, tumbling into the darkness head-first-there were two steps down on the inside. The floor was wet, covered with gross stuff. Ahead of me I could see nothing but vague shapes.
Standing up, I turned toward the door and ran my hands over the top portion until I felt a bolt. After several tries, I slid it back and pulled open the upper half of the door, letting in more light.
When I turned to face the basement again, I gasped. At the far end of the long room were wheels-big gears-one interlocking with the next, the largest as tall as 1.1 was in the basement of my dream, where I had hidden from Matt. I sank down on the doorstep, afraid to cross to the other side, afraid to get close to those wheels.
How had I come to dream of this place? I doubted I was reading the images of my mother’s mind. The voice, the dreams, awakening in Avril’s room, the movement of objects to where Avril would expect them-it was Avril I was connecting with.
My skin felt cold and clammy. I stood up quickly. “Leave me alone,” I said, stumbling out of the entrance. “Just leave me alone!”
