Page 91 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“The farther away we were from Thornchapel, the sillier it all started to seem,” he says slowly. “Who cared about a door in the woods? Why did it matter? Let it stay open. It wasn’t hurting anything. I should have known then.”
He looks over to Poe, his blue eyes full of pain. “I should have known she would go back—” He breaks off. Samson slides an arm around his shoulders and pulls him close.
“You couldn’t have stopped her, David,” Samson murmurs. “She was determined.”
“I still wonder . . . did she know?” David asks. He’s asking everyone and no one—his daughter and the son of his wife’s killer. “Did she know what he was going to do? Did he tell her? Or did he simply beg her to come back to help him close it?”
Auden clears his throat. “I don’t—I don’t know if the police mentioned to you. But when they were searching through my father’s things, they looked through his phone records. They found a call from a phone number here in Kansas, registered to the University. It was her old faculty number, not her current one, and it wasn’t her cell phone, which is why you wouldn’t have found it when you were investigating her phone records the year she disappeared.”
Poe’s father looks down at the scotch. “Yes.”
“The records show the call was short,” Auden says quietly. “Less than ten minutes. If it’s any comfort at all, and I understand that it may not be, I think she couldn’t have known what my father intended. I think she called to check on him, and he begged her to come back, and she did—because she was a good person, and because she loved Thornchapel, and because she wanted to help.”
David nods, blinking fast, and Poe’s eyes are burning too. She suddenly misses her mother so much that she can’t breathe, that she can’t speak, that her throat and her chest are knotted tight.
“Thank you for sharing all this with us,” Auden goes on. “I know—I know it’s not worth much. But I am truly sorry for what my father did to your family. I would give anything to undo it.”
“I don’t hold you accountable for Ralph’s sins,” David says heavily. “I hold Ralph accountable. And that cursed place. If only we’d refused to celebrate Lammas there . . . the door wouldn’t have opened. No one would have needed to die.”
He gives a tearful, unhappy look to Poe. “And your mother might still be alive.”
Part III
Chapter Twenty-Two
Proserpina
“We can’t go out there again,” Auden says as he paces in front of the fireplace, one hand stabbed into his hair and the other balled at his side.
Rain lashes against the tall library windows, as if the very sky is mirroring Auden’s mood, and even though it’s almost July, the space is filled with a dim, stormy gloom. Every so often, thunder cracks and rolls over the moors and down to the house, rattling the panes in the windows and sending Sir James Frazer to his feet to bark indignantly at the air.
“I’m not going to argue with you,” Rebecca says. She’s sitting on a sofa with Delphine’s head in her lap, and she strokes her submissive’s hair while she talks. “But I do think we need to qualify what we mean when we say go.”
Murmurs of agreement come from around the room. From everyone except me.
“Do we mean only for Lammas?” Rebecca continues. “Do we mean no rituals at all? Do we mean we shouldn’t go out there at any time, for any reason?”
Auden drops his hand from his hair. “I don’t know,” he says. “Definitely not for Lammas. As for the rest . . . ”
He looks over to me, and I look down at my hands, which are currently fussing with the hem of my dress. I know he’s trying to protect me, and I’m grateful.
I also have no idea what to do.
It’s been three days since we returned home from Kansas. Three days since my father and Samson told us their story, and three days since we learned what they did in the thorn chapel that summer. I also told the group everything Dr. Davidson told me, and confessed my dreams of Estamond and her death.
We agreed to talk about it once we met back here at Thornchapel, but now that we’re here, I feel more confused than ever.
It should be a simple solution. Easy math. Avoid the thorn chapel, and nothing bad will happen to us like it did to my mother and Estamond. The end.
But then why do I feel so uneasy?
“Do we actually believe in this, though?” Saint asks after a moment. He’s standing behind the sofa, as still as Auden is in motion. “It’s not that I think your dads were lying,” he says to me and Rebecca, “but it’s hard for me to imagine the door is a real thing. And even harder for me to imagine that—if it is real—that it could possibly matter to us. The only reason it mattered for your mother, Poe, was because of Auden’s father, and we’re not murdering psychopaths like him. No offense, Auden.”
“None taken,” says Auden mildly. “Although I feel compelled to remind you that he’s your father too.”
“I’d be sad not to have Lammas in the thorn chapel,” Delphine says from Rebecca’s lap. “It’s not like we’re going to go starkers and decide to kill each other. It’s just a door. So what if it shows up? We’ll just pretend it’s not there.”
“I don’t think we’ll have to pretend very hard, Delphine,” Saint says.
