Her eyes were still pointed at Ben's memorial, but they'd lost focus. "I saw something . . . once. Something horrible and impossible, and I had to watch and couldn't stop it or even run away because they'd have killed me too." Her hand squeezed his to the point of pain, and he felt the shakes starting again.
He held her, trying to think calm through his arms, the way Aunt Alice could, and waited. "You don't have to tell me, ever. If you can tell Aunt Alice, she might be able to help. I don't think anything you did, anything you saw, could shake her."
Gary had explained about Aunt Alice, about the Haskell House, about the Dragons and the Morgans, quiet ramblings with Jane snuggled against him warm and soft and more relaxed than he'd ever felt her, during the two-hour ride through darkness and fog and into dawn. Lots of things he never should have told an outsider, things Dad had probably never told Mom through all the years of their marriage.
But Gary didn't intend to have a marriage like that. Or whatever sort of pairing Jane might be able to accept, with memories of her parents haunting any relationship she had.
He breathed in the scent of her, nose buried in her hair, smelling the fear under Aunt Alice's lilac soap. They'd stopped in and cleaned up before coming over here, even took time for a cup of coffee that Aunt Alice had somehow known to have hot and waiting. "Are you sure you can face this?"
"I've got to quit running away from trouble. Most times before, that's worked. If I ran far enough and fast enough. But that was when I never had anything I couldn't stand to leave behind." She squeezed tighter against him, reminding him of her fears and his need to protect her.
"Just remember, this place is designed to be a trap. I don't know if Ben's in there, but if he is, he'll see us long before we see him. And it's dangerous, even if he isn't there. I don't know all the tunnels and all the dangers. Like Ben says, 'Never show 'em all your cards.' His translation of the family coat of arms. I think he even keeps secrets from himself."
"Are we going to get killed in there?"
"If I thought we would, I wouldn't take you."
"That's not a particularly encouraging turn of phrase. Too vague. Not decisive, you know?"
She shook herself and stood up straighter. "Let's get it over with. I can't believe your sister stays so calm through everything. She on drugs or something?"
That made Gary laugh, in spite of what they were facing. "Calm? Caroline? She's wound up tighter than a trawl winch drum. You're seeing her 'noble savage' face, stoic and inscrutable. She only puts that on when she needs to hide her feelings. You scare the shit out of her. You, or the fear of failing Aunt Alice and the House. Maybe both."
Jane was right about getting it over with. 'Ave, Caesar, nos morituri te salutamus.' Gary reached over to the side of the mausoleum door, fiddled with one iron hinge while screening his motions from Jane, and then unlocked the outer gate with several more twists and turns of the key than normal locks required. She didn't need to know the family codes quite yet.
They stepped into cold damp darkness, musty, granite crypts to right and left with Morgan names and Morgan dates from the 1800s, an empty stone slab for winter use if a coffin needed to wait for the spring thaw. She traced one date with her fingers, 'Gary Morgan, 1763-1821,' and looked a question at him.
"We recycle names. Best I can remember, he sailed as first mate on a privateer in the Revolution, killed a man and begat a man and commanded a prize ship into port before his seventeenth birthday. Nothing actually in that tomb — 'Lost at Sea.' Or maybe not. He might have been dodging the hangman's noose. Our family, you never know."
That blither had covered his hip's pressure on one end of the coffin slab and steps on certain paving stones. He set his hands low against the rear wall of the mausoleum and pushed, and a single slab shifted away from him, opening a low narrow door and steps down into blackness.
She stared at them, not moving.
"Second thoughts?"
She nodded. "And third and fourth and fifth. But I have to quit running away from trouble. Go ahead and lock the door behind us."
He took her at her word and locked them in, switched on lights inside the tunnel, and led the way down those steps. Closed and set the stone slab entry. Felt her tension like a squall line bearing down across the water, the sense that the trap had closed around her and there was nothing she could do to escape. He took her hand, offering what calm and strength he could. But he'd walked into the trap with her, and had no guarantee he could walk out again.
Down musty tunnels and around corners and up dimly-lit stone stairs worn into hollows by centuries of Morgan feet, passing from carved granite bedrock into shaped stone masonry that told him they climbed within the tower wall, up the curving stair and he didn't bother to hide because he saw active cameras and motion sensors and disarmed traps that told him his father waited up above. And then they stepped off onto a landing and faced a closed door and another security camera. He paused and took
