The Coin That Opened the Floor
Chapter 01 - The Coin That Opened the Floor
The coin had belonged to Emily's mother. That was what her father said, anyway, and Emily had learned that there were things in the Ashcroft house you could ask about only once. Her mother was one. The east wing was another. The little gold coin with a bird pressed into one side and a number seven on the other was the third.
On rainy afternoons she carried it in her pocket and rubbed her thumb over the bird until the raised wings felt warm. Tonight there was a wedding downstairs, her father's third engagement party if you counted the one nobody was supposed to mention, and she had been told to stay in her room. Instead she followed the sound of a soft knocking into the long marble corridor outside the old library.
The knocking stopped when she stopped. Then it came again: three patient taps beneath her feet. Emily knelt. Between two marble squares, she found a thin bronze slot she'd never noticed. It was just the width of the coin. She tried the bird side first. Nothing. She turned it over, pressed the seven toward the floor, and heard a click that seemed to come from the foundations.
A section of marble rose half an inch. Emily moved backward on her knees. A narrow square hatch lifted on hidden hinges, exposing steep stairs and a weak amber light. The air smelled of old paper, extinguished candles, and the medicinal soap her grandmother used before she died. Emily knew she should run. Instead she leaned forward.
Someone was standing below, a woman in a cream nightgown, with tangled dark curls and the sort of tired face Emily had seen in photographs of people rescued from storms. The woman put one hand against the wall. For a moment she stared, unable to speak.
Earlier that afternoon, before the guests arrived, Emily had watched the kitchen staff arrange little sugared almonds in silver bowls. The bowls were a gift from Celia's mother, who came from a family that believed even an engagement party required assigned seating. Emily had asked for three almonds and been given two. She saved one for Mrs. Vale, who said she couldn't eat them with her teeth but slipped it into her apron pocket anyway.
From the upstairs windows the grounds looked like a painted landscape. Paths wound through clipped hedges toward a lake Emily wasn't allowed to visit without Daniel. Her father said the water had dangerous currents. She believed him until the day she'd found an old photograph of Alice sitting barefoot at the end of the dock. In that photograph the lake looked peaceful and the woman looked free. Emily had wondered why a beautiful place could be dangerous for one person and not another.
The Ashcroft house was full of rules that changed depending on who was watching. She couldn't touch the porcelain dogs in the drawing room, but visitors picked them up freely. She couldn't run down the stairs, but Daniel's friends raced one another after brandy. She wasn't allowed to mention the photograph over the landing, though Daniel stopped beneath it on evenings when he believed himself alone. Those were the evenings she liked him least, because he appeared to love somebody in that frame more than the daughter who was standing in front of him.
When she'd asked him once what death meant, he'd taken her out to the greenhouse and shown her a lemon tree damaged by frost. "Sometimes things don't return," he said. Yet in spring the tree had grown new leaves. Emily kept that fact to herself. She was beginning to understand that grown-ups offered lessons they hadn't bothered to check.
Tonight she had chosen the blue dress not because Celia liked it but because its pockets were deep enough for the coin. She had listened to music filtering up from downstairs and tried to picture her mother at a party like this, her dark hair pinned up, her shoes hurting. When the first tap came from beneath the hall she thought it was a pipe. When the second came she thought of Mrs. Vale's knee clicking. The third felt like a summons directed at her alone.
"Emily?" she said.
It was the way she said the name that frightened Emily most. Not surprise. Recognition.
"How do you know me?"
The woman took a step into the lantern light. Her eyes were gray-green, like Emily's, though everyone said Emily had inherited hers from a great-aunt in Boston. "I have waited a very long time to see you."
Emily gripped the coin. Her mother had died when she was two. There was a framed photograph on the landing showing a beautiful dark-haired woman holding a baby beside a lake. The woman below looked older, thinner, and impossibly familiar.
"Are you my mother?" Emily asked.
The woman covered her mouth, then reached toward the bottom stair. "Oh, darling. I—"
"Emily?" Her father's voice traveled from the far end of the corridor. His dress shoes made measured sounds on the marble. A man who never ran, Daniel Ashcroft always said that speed was a confession of poor planning.
The woman's hand dropped. Terror changed her face so quickly Emily felt it in her own body. "Please," she whispered. "Don't tell him you found me. Close it. Take the coin."
Emily looked at the hatch. "But you can't stay down there."
"I can survive another night. I don't know if you can survive him knowing."
Her father rounded the corner. Emily lowered the hatch with both hands, catching her finger as the marble settled. She sat over the seam and made herself cry about the finger because that seemed easier than explaining anything else.
Daniel knelt before her in his perfectly fitted tuxedo. He smelled of cedar and the expensive soap he used before parties. "What are you doing on the floor, sweetheart?"
"I dropped my coin."
His eyes went to her closed fist. For one second the face she loved turned strangely empty. Then he reached for her hand and examined her pinched finger with all the tenderness of a practiced father.
"I've told you that coin is precious," he said. "Things that are precious must be kept safe."
He tried to take it. Emily closed her fingers harder. From below came the faintest scrape, as if a chair had moved across stone. Daniel heard it. He looked over Emily's shoulder toward the blank, immaculate floor.
"Did you hear that?" she asked before she could stop herself.
"Old houses talk," he said. "They say the same things over and over, even when no one wants to listen."
He carried her upstairs and put her in bed, and when he left he turned the brass key on the outside of her bedroom door. He had never done that before.
May you like
At midnight, Emily slid the coin beneath her pillow. Its edge caught on a folded piece of paper she hadn't put there. In shaky handwriting, someone had written: Don't trust the woman in the photograph. Ask about the fire at Bellwether Lake.
Down the hall, the lock on her door began to turn.
