I don't own any of this, except the characters who crawled out of my own twisted imagination. Thanks for reading!
"You were pretty rude to him," Isabel said accusingly, arms folded across her chest. Nancy noted for the first time that she was still wearing Ethan's tan shirt.
"He deserves it, always hanging around here," Celia said shortly, flouncing into the study and slumping into one of the wing chairs.
"But he's a preacher," Isabel protested, following. "You just threw a preacher out of your house!"
"He's no preacher," Celia said. "He's just nosy. The first time he came, Ethan was in River Heights getting groceries. I tried to turn him away at the door, but he barged in here like he owned the place. It was hours before I escaped. He talked me round and round in circles."
Nancy felt a familiar tingling of suspicion in the tips of her fingers. Could Brother Michael have been involved in Ethan's death?
"While we're here," she said, "why don't we investigate the secret passage Ethan mentioned? He said it was behind a print on the east wall…"
There was only one picture on the east wall. A faded, delicately tinted print in the medieval style, of a rather plump young woman regarding herself in a mirror, tucking a strand of her long, straggly blonde hair behind one ear. Behind her and out of sight, a grotesque skeletal figure hung with tattered and moldering flesh held an hourglass over her head. A man on the girl's right tried in vain to pull Death away, an expression of horror on his face.
"It's hideous," Nancy said.
Celia joined her beside it. "It's called Death and the Maiden," she said. "Ethan said it's actually quite famous, though I can't remember who it's by. I can't stand the thing. It belonged to Jonas," she added, shrugging at the west wall, whence Jonas Selkirk glowered down at them.
"That sounds about right," Nancy murmured, leaning forward to examine the wall and running her fingers along its pockmarked surface. She removed the print from the wall to reveal a small lever recessed behind.
"Here goes," she said, giving it a sharp tug. The three girls leapt backwards as a good-sized portion of the wall swung forward into darkness. Nancy could barely make out the shadowy outline of stone steps leading downward.
"Get a light," Nancy ordered Celia, but to her surprise it was Isabel who rushed off into the hall and returned seconds later with a massive, club-like flashlight. Celia too raised her eyebrows in amazement.
"I lost that ages ago," she said mildly. Nancy expected her to accuse Isabel of stealing it, but Celia too seemed transfixed by the gaping maw in the wall of the study. Cold, stale, murky air drifted from the darkness, carrying with it the dry reek of decay.
"Well, who's going first?" Nancy asked cheerfully.
"You," said Celia, smiling. "You're a detective, you're used to scary things."
"You," Nancy replied. "You lived in this house for nineteen years. You must be even more used to scary things than I am."
"I'll go," said Isabel, stepping forward and turning on the flashlight with a decisive click. She paused at the doorway, turning back with a fiendish grin. "I live in your orchard all summer and your greenhouse all winter, and the things I seen would stop your heart." With that, she started down the stairs, the flashlight casting a bobbing golden halo around her.
Nancy shrugged and followed, with Celia creeping behind. The air felt clammy and close as they descended, and more than once Celia grabbed Nancy's shoulder for balance on the wooden steps.
The stairs were not long, but it was slow going. Finally Nancy heard Isabel give a sharp gasp; they had arrived at the bottom, in a cramped and sepulchral chamber paneled in damp, warped wood. They stood in the hesitant glow of Isabel's flashlight, and the orb of light shivered slightly in her trembling hand.
"Give me that," Nancy said softly. Isabel wordlessly passed her the flashlight and Nancy trained its beam at the wall in front of them. The light reflected from a metallic-tinted, old-fashioned photograph of a handsome young man who looked uncomfortably familiar to Nancy.
"It's Jonas," Celia said suddenly from behind Nancy. "It's like the portrait upstairs, but younger."
And it was, Nancy realized, though she could not shake the feeling that she had seen him somewhere else, perhaps in a dream.
Hanging beside it was another photograph, this one a cameo-shaped portrait of a young woman; she wasn't quite pretty, but she had a cheerful snub nose and an open, smiling face.
"Maybe that's his wife," Nancy said.
"Elizabeth," Isabel murmured, and Nancy felt an inexplicable stab of suspicion that she could not quite put aside. There was so much about Isabel's story that was so unlikely and bizarre; was it really wise to allow her to remain at Selkirk End?
Nancy moved Jonas' portrait aside to reveal another lever, recessed in the wall. She pulled it, but there was only a sickly rasping deep in the bowels of the old house, followed by a shriek of rusted gears grinding on themselves.
"I don't think it's been opened in decades," said Nancy disappointedly. "The mechanism must be rusted. Ethan probably only got this far." Which means, she added silently, that somewhere around here must be…
She was right; behind Elizabeth's portrait she found a tiny keyhole.
"Celia," Nancy asked, "do you still have the key Ethan gave you?" She heard the click of the locket being opened.
"Here," Celia whispered, as if afraid of being overheard in the tiny airless chamber. The key felt cold and oddly heavy in Nancy's hand, and she quickly turned it in the lock, holding the flashlight at eye level. There was a click, and a small door, about the size of a bank lockbox, swung open.
"What's in there?" Isabel hissed into Nancy's left ear. Hesitantly, hoping there were no spiders, Nancy slipped her hand into the hole. Her fingers touched something hard: a small leather case with a gold clasp.
Passing the key back to Celia, Nancy opened the box. Inside, nestled on a bed of crimson velvet, lay an ornate hourglass; but not really an hourglass, she reflected. It was so tiny it could only have measured about three minutes. On the inside lid of the box was the same symbol as was carved on Celia's locket—an hourglass, much like the one in the box, haloed by leaping flames.
"Let's take it upstairs," Nancy said, convinced there was nothing else to find and feeling slightly claustrophobic. The other girls didn't need asking twice; Celia scurried up the stairs with Isabel and Nancy trailing behind. As they stepped into the blinding sunlight of the study, Nancy pushed the secret door shut behind them.
"All right," Nancy murmured, placing the box on the rolltop desk and opening it again. Isabel and Celia leaned over her shoulders; Nancy could feel their hot breath on the sides of her face, making her slightly nervous. She lifted the hourglass from its sumptuous nest. It gleamed in the white-hot morning sun streaming through the east windows. Inside the glass was a white crystalline powder, like salt or sugar but coarser and more reflective; it sparkled at the bottom of the container like the mirror shards in the hall.
Nancy unscrewed the top of the glass and was about to pour the powder into her hand when Isabel gasped, "Stop!"
"What?" Nancy said, but then she noticed too. An acrid, stinging odor rose from the glass, making her slightly light-headed. She quickly replaced the lid and laid the hourglass back in the box.
"It must be one of Jonas' experiments," Isabel said. "We shouldn't touch it 'til we know what it is."
"Thank you," Nancy said, her voice trembling slightly. It had been a close call; she suspected the powder was highly dangerous, and she was ashamed of herself for having done something so thoughtless.
Celia had backed away when Nancy had opened the hourglass. She stood under the windows, arms folded across her chest, biting her lip. "Well, we've seen what there is to see, I guess," she said. "And someone's got to clear up the breakfast dishes. No, I'll do it," she added hastily as Isabel moved to help her. She left the room hurriedly, knocking into the coat rack in the hall as she departed.
Isabel watched her go with a guarded look on her face. "What do you think's in it?" she asked finally.
"No idea," said Nancy, examining the outside of the box. "But the manuscript may tell us. Ethan meant Celia to find it, I'm sure. Did you see anything when you read it?"
"No," Isabel said, sinking into one of the wing chairs and tugging the tan shirt tighter around her. "But then, I'm not as clever as you and Celia."
"Don't say that," Nancy protested. "You just saved my life, maybe, if that powder really is something poisonous."
"Oh," Isabel replied, with a brittle laugh, "sure, I can sew and cook and pick corn and do things like that, but Celia thinks I'm stupid 'cause I don't speak French or play the piano or write books."
Nancy made a noise of dissent, but Isabel was not to be dissuaded. "Don't tell me she don't, either. She thinks I wasn't good enough for her brother." Nancy looked at the floor. "And you, too. You think I'm lyin' about Ethan lettin' me stay in here when he was writin'. You think I'm makin' things up." Her jaw was set firmly, her straggly eyebrows knitted together. "Well, I'm not."
"Isabel," Nancy said, looking up at her, "we're all going through a rough time right now. None of us know who we can trust."
"You're sayin' I'm a suspect," Isabel said flatly.
"Everyone's a suspect," Nancy said.
"Celia's not," Isabel pointed out.
"Celia asked me to solve the mystery," Nancy said, her voice rising. "I suppose it's possible that she could have killed her only, beloved brother, but it seems highly unlikely."
There was an uncomfortable pause in which the only sound came from the clock high on the south wall, its even ticking measuring and dividing the weighted silence.
"So you think I killed him," Isabel said. "Admit it, that's why you want me stayin' here. There's no one else could've done it, if you don't count Celia."
"I didn't say that," Nancy said weakly. "Maybe no one killed him. After all, there wasn't a mark on his body—"
"So he just died, all of a sudden."
"It's a possibility," Nancy admitted.
"Not in this house, it ain't," Isabel said, rising from her seat and striding from the room.