“I don’t either,” Carolyn agreed. “But I keep thinking about it. The children, caught in a fire. Tonight, our children, caught in a fire. And the other people who have died in the mill. Your brother. And Jeff Bailey. The Baileys had an interest in the mill once, didn’t they?”
Phillip nodded reluctantly. “But what about Alan?”
“The reconstruction,” Carolyn whispered. “Don’t you see? Your father was right. The project never should have started to begin with.”
Phillip’s head swung around, and his eyes met hers. “And what about Beth?” he asked. “What did she do to deserve what happened tonight?”
At last Carolyn’s tears began to flow. “I don’t know,” she said through her sobs. “She was such a sweet child. I … I just don’t know!”
Phillip put his arms around his wife, and tried to comfort her. “It was an accident, darling,” he whispered softly. “I know how it all seems now, but whatever happened tonight, it couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened a hundred years ago. It was just a terrible accident. We have to believe that.”
And then, against his will, a picture of his daughter came into his mind.
Alan Rogers had died, and she’d gazed into the mill at the broken body of Beth’s father.
Her eyes had glittered with malicious hatred, and her lips had been twisted into a satisfied smile.
He held his wife closer, and shut his eyes, but still the vision lingered.
Late the next afternoon, both Phillip and Carolyn stood with Norm Adcock as a pair of workmen pried away the metal plate that had covered one face of the loading-dock wall for the last hundred years.
Samuel Pruett Sturgess, in the last pages of his diary, wrote of the metal plate, and his hopes that it would seal the room from the outside, as the firmly bolted metal door sealed it from the inside. It was his intention, in the last days of his life, that no one ever enter the workroom behind the basement stairs again.
Grayish wisps of ash still drifted toward the sky from the smoking ruin, and its heat still caused a shimmering in the summer air.
The men, their shirts stripped off against the combined heat of the sun and the fire, worked quickly, using a cold chisel and a maul to break away the bolts that secured the metal to the concrete of the dock. At last it fell away, and the window, its glass long ago broken out of the frames, was exposed to the sunlight for the first time in a century. The workmen stepped back, and Norm Adcock, with Phillip at his side, moved forward.
Residual heat drifted from the room, but when Adcock reached out and gingerly touched the concrete itself, he realized that it was no longer too hot to go inside. He dropped to his knees, and shone a flashlight inside.
At first he thought the room was empty. Opposite the window, he could see the remains of the metal door, twisted and buckled by the intensity of the heat that had all but destroyed it, hanging grotesquely from its broken support rail.
He worked the light back and forth, examining the floor.
Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but blackness.
And then, at last, he shone the light straight down.
“Jesus,” he whispered, and immediately felt Phillip Sturgess’s grip tighten on his shoulder. “I’m not sure you’re going to want to look at this, Phillip,” he said quietly.
“They’re inside?”
Adcock withdrew his head from the window, and faced Phillip. “They’re there. But I really think you should let us take care of it. Take Carolyn home, Phillip. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Phillip hesitated, but finally shook his head. “I can’t. I have to see it for myself.” When Adcock seemed about to protest further, he spoke again. “Carolyn and I have talked about it,” he said. “And we decided that whatever is in there, I have to see it.”
Adcock’s brows rose. “Have to?”
“I’d rather not explain it,” Phillip said. “Frankly, I doubt that it would make much sense to you. But I do have to see what happened.”
Adcock weighed the matter in his mind, then reluctantly nodded. “Okay. I’ll have the men put the ladder in, then we can go down.”
When the ladder had been lowered, Adcock disappeared through the window. Phillip followed him. He carefully avoided looking down until he was on the floor and had stepped carefully away from the ladder. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the shadowy light of the little room, he let himself look at what Adcock had already seen.
The heat of the fire had all but destroyed the remains of the two girls.
Their clothes had burned, as had their hair. There were still fragments of skin clinging to the skulls, and the skeletons themselves were wrapped in the emaciated remains of the soft tissues of their bodies.
Phillip was reminded of photographs he’d seen of the Nazi concentration camps after the war. He struggled against the nausea that rose in his gorge, then made himself kneel, and reach out to touch what was left of his daughter.
Tracy’s body lay curled tightly, as if she’d died trying to protect herself against the heat.
Around her neck there was a chain, and attached to the chain, clutched in the bony remains of Tracy’s right hand, was a jade pendant that he recognized as having been his mother’s.
If it had not been for the pendant, he was sure he wouldn’t have known which of the hideous, almost mummified bodies was Tracy’s.
His gaze shifted to Beth’s body. It was stretched prone on the floor, one hand up; its fleshless fingers seemed to be reaching toward the window.
Slowly, he became aware of the marks on the wall. At first they were only a blur, almost lost in the blackness on which they had been smeared. But as he stared at them, they gradually began to take shape, and he realized that before the girls had died, one of them — he couldn’t be sure which one — had left a message. Now the message was clear.
It consisted of only one word: AMY.
“It looks like blood,” he heard Norm Adcock say. “There’s some more on the floor.” Then his voice dropped. “Phillip?”
“I’m listening,” Phillip replied.
“I can’t be sure, but right now I’d say only Tracy died from the heat. I think Beth was already dead before the fire started. Look.”
Reluctantly, Phillip made his eyes follow Adcock’s pointing finger.
Despite the damage done by the fire, the seared skin and the shrunken flesh, the marks were clearly there.
Either before, or just after she’d died, Beth Rogers had been hacked nearly to pieces.
Phillip groaned as he realized what it must mean; then his mind rejected the knowledge, and his body finally rebelled. He could fight the nausea no longer. His stomach heaving, and his throat already filling with the sour taste of bile, he retreated to the far corner of the room.
Ten minutes later, pale and shaking, but once again in control of himself, he emerged from the little room into the daylight outside. Carolyn was still there, standing where he’d left her, waiting for him. She looked at him, her eyes asking him a silent question.
He took her in his arms, and held her close. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s all over now.”
Carolyn shuddered, and let her tears flow freely. She felt numb, empty, as if she’d lost everything that she had loved.
But that’s not true, she insisted to herself.
I still have Phillip, and we still have our baby.
And then, for the first time, she felt their unborn child stir within her.
She took Phillip’s hand and pressed it to her belly. “It’s not over, darling,” she whispered. “We just have to begin again. And we can. I know we can.”
