go around the back of the hotel and find another way.”
“You’re hiding,” he said.
Her blond hair hung in wet, dark strands. Looking into her eyes was painful. She was desperate.
“Has someone threatened you?”
Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks, mixing with the rainwater there. “I can’t say,” she whispered. “If you don’t let me go it might be very bad for me.”
He took a risk Marley probably wouldn’t like. “How did you get those marks on the back of your neck?”
If possible, she turned paler. She wrapped a hand around her neck. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.” She shook her head hard.
He wasn’t getting anywhere with the direct approach. “Are you still living with Sidney?”
No response.
“Sidney’s coming to Millet’s soon, did you know that?”
Still no response.
“Were you trying to talk to Marley before Sidney got there?”
Pipes shook her head hard. “I…I need…” She made a choking noise. “You mustn’t try to follow me or do anything at all about seeing me. Don’t tell anyone. If you do—” She tried to push past him.
“If I do?” He caught her by the shoulder and moved her hair aside. Two long red marks marred the white skin at the back of her neck.
“Let me go!”
He stood aside at once. “You need help,” he told her.
“We need to live,” Pipes said, racing away, her arms flapping.
Marley closed and locked the door to her workroom behind her and hurried to the bench.
Fate had smiled on her and Uncle Pascal had been tied up with a customer when she and Winnie passed through the shop and went upstairs. But he had made signals that were supposed to make her stay down there and wait until he was free.
She had smiled and jogged up the stairs. She didn’t want the interrogation to begin and she had a lot to do.
Any talk of the Mentor must wait for Gray to agree. The story was his.
“Lie down,” she told Winnie, who jumped on the recliner and did a lot of sighing.
With the lights over the workbench fully on, the red house looked garish and out of place. Marley deliberately rested both hands on the roof with its curly corners. Her tummy made a nasty flip. She held still while her breathing speeded. She realized she was waiting and expecting the Ushers and the formation of a funnel with a tacky texture that stuck to her hands.
Nothing happened.
She pulled on her magnifying goggles and settled them above her eyes, ready for when they were needed.
With the naked eye she could see how crazed and chipped the paint had become, but in a fine, close way typical of an old piece. At some time, she thought the dollhouse had been refinished—probably more than once. She could see the suggestion of a flake beneath another flake. It was set on a base about four inches thick and painted green.
Here and there artificial bushes remained although she could see the places where others had been lost over the years. A low, wooden fence surrounded the garden. A border beside a pathway to the corner door was worn down to a gray stubble and more paths made a pattern across the grounds. Beds dotted with dusty flowers looked unlikely. An outbuilding could be a supposed stable. She pulled open a tiny door and found a tiny horse inside.
There was a potting shed, a teahouse, a pool and elaborate white pool house. She smiled. Any child would have loved this when all the pieces were there.
The corner door to the house troubled Marley. It didn’t fit with the rest of the architecture. Set at a forty- five-degree angle to the corner of the house, with a tiled roof, a window on either side showed piles of little painted cakes—or bread rolls. Like a shop.
There was no name over the door.
With great care, she turned the house on its side. A small space showed between the bottom of the angled door and the base, and when she flipped the magnifying lenses down and used a tiny scalpel to explore the crack, she felt the whole facade of the entrance move.
Sweat popped out on her brow and she swiped at it with a forearm.
A few tiny, prying movements with the scalpel and the space around the door widened. Without warning, it popped off and Marley barely caught it before it would have fallen to the floor.
With her hands behind her back and her nose only inches from the house, she studied what was a corner of the house that matched all the others, apart from the color of lacquer. Here the wall was a washed-out terra-cotta, very faded, but absolutely level with its neighbors. The color reminded her of stucco. The door on the corner had been an addition.
She went from one side to the other, looking for any sign of another door. For the first time she realized there was no other door and the back of the house, which should open to allow a child to play with furniture inside, was secured shut.
With pressure on one side of the base where it lay on the workbench, another gap had formed. The bottom was coming loose.
Marley made a few more delicate motions, working the scalpel between the bottom of the house and the board it stood on. Slowly, the gap widened until the green-painted base, with the grounds, separated on three sides and slowly dropped away.
She turned up the lights in her magnifying goggles, not that what she saw needed to be any clearer.
A web of tiny pipes formed a grill beneath the bottom. Marley got a finger and thumb grip on these in two places and pulled gently. They parted and came wide-open in two panels.
“A drain field?” she murmured. “Or something.”
With the two parts of the grill open she looked into the open space behind them.
She was looking at a basement.
The walls inside were gray and were taller on one side than the other. In a square hole cut out in the middle, she saw the bottom of a flight of stairs descending. The stairs continued down and with the base closed would rest on the supposed floor. In one corner of the space a cubicle was walled off and there was a wide door. She pulled it open and jerked her hand back.
What looked like little caskets or ice boxes had fallen to the side of the room. Attached to an overhead pulley system, doll-like bodies in harnesses hung from hooks—like the hooks she had seen revolving behind Liza and then Amber when she traveled to the place she couldn’t find. The sickening little figures also hung to the side closest to the workbench.
With her heart pounding, Marley righted the house again and set to work on the sealed back. She levered the panel open and hinges long coated with adhesive that had solidified, broke off.
There was no furniture on any of the floors inside, but off a room lined with wooden cabinets that was obviously a kitchen, was a miniature cupboard surrounded with shelves. The shelves were loaded with tiny cans and other goods, glued in place. And on a bottom shelf she saw a group of packages wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
She also saw another door that opened from the cupboard onto the top of a flight of stairs, the same flight that ran all the way into the basement.
Marley wrapped her arms around herself. She had seen it all before. She had gone down those steps. With her eyes shut, she shuddered violently.
Chapter 41
