Chapter 1 - The Hand Beneath the Floor
Three years after my bride vanished on our wedding day, a maid found her veil under the floor of the room where she had disappeared.
I was standing in the old bridal suite when Rosa held it up.
Yellowed lace.
Pearl stitching.
One corner torn exactly where I remembered Evelyn catching it on the dressing table that morning.
My knees nearly gave out.
“Where did you find that?”
Rosa pointed to a warped floorboard beside the window seat.
“It was caught underneath, Mr. Mercer.”
The room had been closed for three years.
No reason for Evelyn’s veil to be under the floor.
I knelt and pulled the board.
Rosa brought a pry bar.
The wood lifted half an inch.
“There’s space under there,” she whispered.
The board rose with a metallic click.
A hidden panel shifted beside it.
Then something moved in the darkness below.
A hand appeared through the opening.
The fingers reached once, trembling.
Then a woman’s voice came from below.
“Daniel?”
My entire body stopped.
There are voices you can forget.
Evelyn’s was not one of them.
I dropped to the floor.
“Evelyn?”
A sob came from the dark.
“Oh God.”
I tore at the panel with both hands.
Behind it was a narrow iron ladder descending into blackness.
“Call the police first.”
The ladder opened into an old stone service passage beneath Mercer House.
Twenty feet away, behind a rusted gate, a woman stood wrapped in a gray blanket.
The woman police told me had probably run away.
The woman my family told me to stop searching for.
The woman I had mourned for three years.
She stared at me like she was not sure I was real.
“Who did this to you?” I whispered.
Evelyn gripped the bars.
“Your sister.”
Then footsteps sounded in the passage behind me.
Slow.
Familiar.
May you like
My sister Claire’s voice came out of the dark.
“Daniel, don’t open that gate.”
