A Gothic short story
By Sister Leah
The first thing Detective Ezra Flynn noticed about Winding Hill House was that its windows had been cleared of snow.
Every one of them. Even those in the rooms the housekeeper said had been locked for years.
“Mr. Winters liked to see out,” Mary told him.
“And who cleaned them after he disappeared?”
She tightened her grip on the keys.
“No one.”
Flynn looked up at the highest window. Behind the glass, a curtain settled.
Silas Winters had missed an appointment with his bank manager on December fifteenth. By the following morning, searchers were walking the white slopes above Willow Creek. They found no tracks leading away from his house, no broken branch, no scrap of clothing.
His bed had not been slept in. His boots stood beneath a chair. His watch lay on the bedside table, still keeping excellent time.
Flynn had come from Philadelphia with a notebook, a change of clothes, and a firm preference for problems that could be solved by asking someone the same question twice.
He asked Mary when she had last seen her employer.
“The night before the bank appointment. Outside the cellar door.”
“What was he doing?”
“Listening.”
“To whom?”
“I couldn’t hear an answer.”
She led Flynn through a hallway smelling of coal smoke and floor polish. At its far end, the wallpaper had lifted along a narrow seam.
“He’d been walking the house at night,” she said. “Talking through doors. Sometimes he’d stop in the middle of a sentence and wait.”
“For an answer?”
“For the rest of it.”
Flynn wrote that down.
Mary watched his pencil.
“I thought he was forgetting his words,” she said.
“And now?”
“Now I think something was learning them.”
Jacob Keegan arrived before luncheon in a coat too fine for the weather. He was Silas’s business partner and had argued with him three days before the disappearance.
Flynn asked about the argument.
“A private financial matter.”
The bank manager was more useful. Keegan had requested that Silas’s share of their firm be transferred to him if Silas were declared incapable of managing his affairs. A document carrying Silas’s supposed approval had already reached the bank.
The signature looked remarkably like the one on Keegan’s letters.
When Flynn laid the papers before him, Keegan’s face lost its color.
“He was going to ruin us,” he said.
“That explains the forgery. It doesn’t explain where he is.”
Keegan stared toward the cellar passage.
“He said the house had begun asking for something else.”
“Something else besides what?”
“I thought he meant money.”
Keegan had been at an inn twelve miles away on the night Silas vanished. The innkeeper, a coachman, and two other guests placed him there through the evening. Flynn sent the forged papers to the local authorities and kept the disappearance open.
A dishonest partner was evidence of dishonesty. Flynn had seen enough investigations go wrong when a convenient villain was made to explain everything.
That afternoon, he searched the cellar.
Behind a hanging carpet, he found a low door. Mary said she had never been given its key.
The lock opened under pressure from his tools.
Inside stood a desk, a straight-backed chair, and a narrow mirror turned toward the wall. There was no window.
On the desk lay Silas’s journal.
The first entries concerned repairs. A leaking roof. A mason’s account. A complaint that the plaster in the upper hall would not dry.
Then the handwriting changed.
It became smaller. Tighter. As though the writer had begun to fear the space his words occupied.
November 21. Heard my name from the empty nursery. Mary was downstairs.
November 26. It answers in my voice now. Always a little late.
Flynn turned the page.
December 3. I found the old opening behind the plaster. There is no room beyond it on the plans.
December 7. I offered money. The house has had money enough.
Behind him, Mary drew a sharp breath.
“What?”
“That was what he said to Mr. Keegan.”
The final dated entry was December fourteenth.
It has learned my voice and my hand. Tonight my shadow stayed at the window after I moved away.
Beneath it, the pen had gouged the paper.
If someone finds this, do not sit in the chair.
Flynn looked down.
He had been sitting in it since he opened the book.
The lantern went dark.
From the other side of the wall came a patient scratching.
Pen against paper.
“Mary?”
She caught his sleeve. Her fingers were cold and solid.
Something behind the plaster said, “Mary?”
In Flynn’s voice.
He struck a match. The small flame showed the desk, the journal, and a strip of clean floor beneath the wall.
A gold cufflink rolled out of a crack in the skirting.
Mary made a sound he had not heard from her before.
“His sister gave him those.”
They backed into the cellar passage. Flynn locked the low door, though he knew perfectly well that he had opened it without a key.
By evening, the household had moved into the village.
Flynn wrote that Silas Winters remained missing. He recorded the cufflink, the concealed room, the disputed papers, and the witnesses to Keegan’s whereabouts. He left the whispered voice out of his preliminary report.
It was the first omission he had ever made out of fear.
He took the journal to his room at the inn. In good lamplight, away from Winding Hill, he meant to read it again.
The innkeeper brought supper. Flynn scarcely touched it.
Every page after December fourteenth was blank.
He checked them twice.
Then he opened his own notebook.
He had written Keegan’s name, the bank manager’s account, the location of the hidden room. Below those notes was a sentence he could not remember recording.
The detective will leave at dawn.
The handwriting was his.
He turned back to the journal.
On the first blank page, fresh ink glistened.
His shadow will stay.
Flynn stood so abruptly that his chair struck the bed.
The lamplight threw his outline across the wall.
He moved toward the door.
The shadow remained seated.
Slowly, its head bent over an open book.
Leave a Reply