Saying that sent shivers up and down my spine. “Oh, and the other thing. Airlie, you were in the garden when this happened. I did some sensing at the driveway, right where it meets the road. The water flow from the marsh toward the old house is a trickle, but it’s clear—fresh. The water flow from the house to the drainage ditch smells a bit rank. And I know this sounds extra strange, but I think it’s salt water.”
“Any chance that house is situated on one of the rumored salt springs this island is named for?” Tanner asked.
I shrugged, turned my hands palms up. “Maybe?”
“I think it’s odd that you didn’t sense a flow from the marsh all the way to the road.” Christoph’s face was a map of questions. “Let’s table further discussion of that property. I’d like to tell you two what we found, and then maybe tomorrow morning we can all go across the road and see if our findings are somehow tied together. River? Tanner?” Both men nodded. Christoph cleared his throat. “We think we found another underland. Tanner, you said you had pieced a map together?”
Tanner seated himself in the overstuffed chair in the corner. His laptop was on the little table beside, and the papers we’d snuck out of my old office were stacked on the floor. He rifled through the topmost ones, opened his laptop, and said, “I want you all to see these.”
We set aside our plates and cleared more space on the rug. I hadn’t been on my hands and knees in this part of the house in a long time and the dust and dirt was seriously embarrassing. “Please ignore the lack of vacuuming,” I said, making a note to add that, along with sweeping, to the teens’ chore list. “My minions have had a lot on their minds.”
“You know there’s a spell for most any household task, Calli?” Airlie’s smile was sweet, and her wink suggested she might be teasing me. “Including timely reminders for the minions.”
“I’ll look forward to the practical magic section of the Basics of Witchcraft course.” I returned my attention to the papers Tanner was taping together. My eyes caught what he was doing before my brain registered. “I’ll be right back,” I said.
When I returned, Christoph was standing, arms crossed. Everyone else was seated on the floor or sitting back on their heels. I handed a yardstick to Tanner and set a jar of pens and pencils on the floor. “This should help.”
He thanked me, chose an orange colored pencil, and began to trace the property lines. “I want to draw everyone’s attention to the shape that is made when these properties are viewed together.” Tanner made three long strokes and lifted the ruler, leaving an inverted triangle bisected by Fortune’s Folly Road. He tapped the uppermost section. “This is where Airlie and Calli were today. Calli, this center section is your property, and the lowest part of the triangle is where we found the underland. It’s positioned roughly like—” he sketched in a small rectangle inside the bottom tip of the triangle “—this.”
River plucked a red pencil from the jar. He darkened the property lines. The inverted triangle now had two squarish side pieces. The top of each paralleled Fortune’s Folly Road. Viewed as parts of a whole, the borders of the five properties formed a point-down wedge driven into the center of a horizontal rectangle. The druid added, “I suspect the properties comprising the triangle were once a single plot.”
“Keystone,” said Christoph, pointing to the overall shape of the three plots of land. “Calliope’s property is situated at the center of a keystone.”
“In masonry, the placing of the keystone locks everything else into position,” River offered, tapping at the hand-drawn map. He swept his finger from my land, down to the Pearmains’, then again down the other side, to an unmarked property.
A couple of low whistles circled the group. My chest sank at an implication I didn’t fully understand. “Are the property lines too exact for it to be a coincidence?” I asked.
“I would say yes, Calli-lass. This looks very deliberate.”
Airlie picked up a pencil and asked, “May I?” She leaned forward, rested on one hand, and sketched in the house across the street, complete with the marsh and the path.
She handed the pencil to me. “Add what’s important about your land,” she said.
I drew the outlines of my house and garden, drew a circle where the Old One grew, and added a compass rose, noting the designations of the cardinal directions. I was beginning to see what Tanner, River, and Christoph had noticed. “Everything lines up perfectly,” I said. “The lowest point of the triangle connects to the midline of the top property, exactly east to west. The stone circles Tanner and I started to uncover sit on the midline.”
“Not only that,” said Tanner, bringing up a satellite-style image on his laptop. “Here’s the Pearmain property, here’s where their underland is situated, roughly. And here’s the one we found.”
Using the eraser end of the pencil, I traced a straight line from one to the other and asked the obvious. “Do you think they’re connected physically or by whatever type of magic is involved in the creation of an underland?”
River nodded. “Yes. I do think they’re connected.”
“How do we figure out if that really is an underland?” I asked, tapping the tiny rectangle with my finger. “And how do we get the Flechettes to sell these two pieces? The way things are going around here, I’m going to need more land and another house.”
“I’m sorry my room’s not bigger,”
