Page 69 of Little Deer
“Alright, put me down, honey,” Amara tells Lazaro. He kneels down and helps her off his shoulders, before following her over to the painting and then the window seat.
Amara pulls up the cushions on the seat, checks all around it. Her expression grows frustrated when she finds nothing. “Maybe this room is only meant as a distraction,” Papa suggests gently. “Make it look different so you think something would be in here, while it’s in another one.”
“Why this room? There has to be a reason she made it this way,” Amara mutters. I only hear her because I’m so close.
“The view is nice here,” Sienna remarks, moving to sit on the seat. She looks out, eyes critical. “You can see a lot of the back of the property, and you can see the New York skyline nicely from here, too. Look at all those lights. I mean, maybe this was her spot to think and be at peace? No one came up here, and it was quiet. There’s a desk in here, so maybe she thought this would bea good place to work when she didn’t want to risk getting caught going into her hidden office?”
“What’s under this room?” Amara asks Nico and Dante.
Dante is the one to answer. “Just another bedroom. Below that one the main floor it’s the one next to the pool room.” His eyes sharpen. “You think that it’s a hidden staircase out?”
“Well, I mean, pools need a maintenance room, right?” Amara reasons. “No one would think to look for anything in there. Is there a secondary way into that room? One that leads outside?”
“No, the only way into that room is from a locked door in the basement,” Davide answers. “We’ve had to let guys in there when the pool malfunctioned a few times a few years ago. It’s windowless, and full of equipment. Nothing more.”
“The pool was built at the same time as the rest of the house?” I ask Nico.
He nods, but his eyes narrow. “But I remember my mother getting upset one time with a tech that came in to service it. He didn’t watch what he was doing and almost toppled a bunch of shit along the wall. She blew up at him. It was over the top, but I brushed it off because she was so strung out that she often overreacted to things like that.”
“Why was she in the service room in the first place?” Papa asks.
“She wandered in while the tech was explaining to us what was wrong. It was a lot of issues and money,” Dante answers, looking at Nico for confirmation.
“She was always fucking wandering, so we didn’t pay her any attention. Son of a bitch.”
“So now we just have to figure out how she can get from that room to there,” Sienna tells Amara. Amara nods. “Do you think it’s a tiny lever like last time?”
“If she stays true to pattern, probably.” Amara gets on her knees beside the window seat, running her hands over the edge carefully, slowly. Sienna mirrors her on the other side and does the same.
“The rest of you get looking to see if you find anything,” Nico orders tersely. Then he looks at Caesar and Davide. “And you two, get down to the pool room and start looking.”
Both nod and hurry out.
Lazaro and I go to the painting, both of us running our hands over the wall and the painting itself, looking for anything. Even the tiniest of pinholes. Thankfully, with his height, Lazaro can look at the upper parts of the painting.
Suddenly, Amara starts to laugh. “Fucking genius,” she declares. We all turn, and I watch as she puts her hand on the window sill seam where it connects to the wall on the far left side, and presses in. A low creaking sound echoes and then we see the floor directly in front of the window seat pop up just a little bit.
Sienna gasps and we all stare at each other.
Once again, Amara is the one to find what we all missed. I look at Lazaro who stares at her in shock then pride.
“Want to bet it’s full of spider webs?” Sienna jokes lightly. Amara grins and nods.
Dante moves forward, grabs the lifted edge and pulls. The hidden door swings to stand upright, revealing the hidden staircase. It’s dark, musty-smelling, and like Sienna said, full of webs and spiders. No one has used it in years.
Using our phones as flashlights, we descend the stairs, taking us deeper and deeper until we finally reach the bottom. They’re straight down, no turns or curves, so it looks like Caesar was right. She ran this along the exterior wall, and when we reach the bottom I can hear the noise of the pool pump on the other side of the wall. I put my hand on the wall. It’s thin, not soundproofed.
“If someone knocked something hard enough into this wall, they probably would puncture it,” I tell them thoughtfully. “Probably why she freaked out. You were all too close to her hidden exit.”
Dante opens the door slowly, carefully, and peers outside. We follow him out and I take in the woods ahead of us. Dark, ominous and secluded. The perfect way for Nico’s mother to get in and out without being spotted.
Makes me wonder if she has any other ways that we’re about to discover. And it’s a good thing we found it before Marco’s men, because they could have gotten in without any of us being the wiser.
33
LUCY
My eyes aregritty and tired when I finally close the journal. Fuck, that was a painful read right to the end. I look over at Soren, still asleep in his bassinet, before I glance to the other side of the bed where Kida is sleeping. She stumbled in an hour again, looking exhausted, and collapsed into bed before I could ask her what they found. Or if they found anything at all.
