Indy stares at the phone long enough to feel the blood drain from her palm. Then she calls him. "I need you to take me back."
"Take you back?" Jude says. His voice sounds weak, like more of a croak, but Indy forces herself not to worry. "To where?"
"Dobbs's house. I need to look around. There's something else I need to find in there; I'm sure of it."
"Whoa, Indy. Wait wait wait. Did you talk to Dr. Clover? Did you not see my message? What did you say to him?"
Indy doesn't reply. She's nearly to the other side of campus now, the parking lots coming into view.
"What did you say?"
"Are you going to take me or not?"
A pause. Indy closes her eyes.
"No, Indy. I can't take you."
"Fine."
She hangs up, and dials another number.
She got lucky; with Sterling it's never a guarantee that he's even still in the same country. He picks her up behind the football stadium, clearly concerned at the sense of urgency written all over her face, but thankfully he is not the type to ask. They spend most of the ride in silence, and Indy pulls Elizabeth's journal from her lap and pages through it again, one more time. Finally they pass the city line into Erskine and he says, suddenly, "Indy, IâI need to know. You're not wrapped up in something bad, are you?"
She doesn't hear him at first, her focus honed in on the journal and the journal alone. She turns over the last page.
"Indy, are you listening to me?"
The floors were always uneven is a new line at the top of the page. Indy swallows.
"Indyâ"
"No," she answers at last, folding the journal shut over her finger. "Even if I was, Sterling, it wouldn't be any of your business. I can handle myself."
She wants there to be some flash of hurt, anything, across her brother's face, but his expression is remarkably still. That is the thing about Sterling. He's always the same. "Am I not allowed to worry?"
"You never have before," Indy says. "Why start now?"
The car turns down a familiar residential street, the road wide but the houses close together. Indy presses her face to the glass like an excited child on a field trip. "Here. Right here is fine."
Sterling lets out a harsh sigh and parks, turning to her. "Indy, if you need help with anythingâ"
"Thanks. I'll see you later, Sterling," she says, and hops out, the journal tucked under her arm.
The floors were always uneven.
As twilight settles around her, the sky a faded, stormy mauve, Indy treks slowly through the overgrown grass to the house's backyard. She finds the window she broke last time, some of the glass shards still settled there in the grass below it, speckled with dirt. Indy holds her breath, ducking her head and climbing inside.
Mildew and sawdust, old wood, all the smells of a home that has not been anyone's home for years attack her senses as they did the first time she crossed the house's threshold. She can retrace her own footsteps with the prints her boots left in the film of dust over the floor, each corner of the room littered with trash and the dried crunchy bodies of bugs.
Indy knows she doesn't have much time left before the sun is down, and she loses her largest source of light. She tosses the journal to the floor with a thud, sending up a cloud of dust with it. Then she gets down on all fours.
She crawls around, testing each panel in the floor with her palm, ignoring how foolish she feels as she does. There is something here she missed, something that would answer everything. She's not sure how she knows. Perhaps it's not her that knows at all.
It takes her twenty minutes of searching before she reaches the kitchen, plastic trash bags from which suspicious scents emanate leaned up against the island, and her hand creaks and gives way against one of the floorboards. Indy inhales sharply, pausing. She tests it again, just to prove it's not a fluke, not just an old slat of wood that's finally given up. But no. It moves beneath her fingers almost the way a hinge does.
The floors were always uneven.
Indy smiles to herself, and hopes Elizabeth can see it, too. "Thank you."
She feels around the grooves until she finds one deep enough to slip her fingers into. Covering her mouth with other hand, she pulls, until a square big enough to qualify as a trap door hinges up from the floor.
Excitement and worry mingle together in her stomach, threatening to upset it, but she swallows away the nausea. A narrow set of stairs arch down into darkness, cold air wafting up from below. Fear presses in from the edges of Indy's chest, and she lets it. She steps down anyway.
The lower she descends, the thicker the darkness becomes, until it is something physical, resting on her skin. When her foot creaks off the last step and onto level ground again, Indy pulls her phone from her pocket and clicks on its flashlight, its glaring white beam splitting the darkness.
Indy gasps. It's like she's in the warehouse again; she's stumbled somehow into a maze of artworks. The paintings range from small, minute wall decorations to paintings in frames nearly twice her size. They're all different: different scenes, different color schemes, presumably painted by different artists. Indy shines her flashlight over one of a pond in morning time, a sunrise reflected across its surface, three girls huddled around it. Another is a man staring into a mirror.
All of them evoke a strange feeling in her, stranger for the reason she's felt this exact sensation before. Fear. Even in the most peaceful of images, that is the emotion that bleeds from every one of the paintings.
The back of Indy's hair stands up as she continues to sift through them, until her eyes settle on one that makes her stop in place.
A young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen, wears a deep blue dress and stands at the edge of a high and craggy cliff, a wild sea raging below her. The girl's arms are spread wideâthough whether because she intends to jump or because she is enjoying the wind tossed through her brown hair, it's difficult to tell. Indy brings the flashlight closer to the girl's etched face, the beam once again catching the hint of terror captured in the oil. Indy's blood cools in her veins as she realizes the face is one she recognizes.
Lydia?
The room floods with a glaring yellow light, making Indy wince and stagger backwards.
Something metal presses into the small of her back, and she hears a dangerous click.
"Took you long enough," says Detective Kelso.
The air is chilly and the sky is gray with rain, both of which, to Sylvia, are valid excuses to skip her Shakespearean literature class. She camps out at the cafe on the bottom floor of the library instead, headphones over her ears, the mock-ups for Good Cheese's newest album cover pulled up on the computer in front of her. Technically she was supposed to report back with her preferences a week ago, but she knows, or at least she figures, the other band members will understand.
Something moves one of her headphones aside, and cafe noise, humming voices and the screaming of the milk steamer, interrupt her solace. "Hey, what the hellâChernenko?"
She's not sure it's truly him for a second; the look on his face is so dire, his eyes dim and sleepless, that he resembles a much older version of himself. "Sylvie, I think Indy's in trouble."
"How'd you even get in here?" Sylvia says. She's almost positive the gate at the front of the building requires a student ID to get into.
"That's not important right now, okay?" Jude mumbles, grappling the chair across from hers with knuckles gone white. "I...Indy called me, okay, and I think she's headed back to poke around Elizabeth Dobbs's place again, and I'm pretty sure that's the last place anyone should go right now."
Sylvia examines the genuine concern on Jude's face, and then laughs to herself. She goes back to clicking through the mock-ups. "Please, Jude. Indy does this sorta shit all the time. I'm sure she'll be fine, and even if she isn't we can let Percy do all the scolding later."
Jude shuts her laptop gently, so she has nowhere to look but into his face. "No. I'm telling you, Sylvie. She's in trouble."
There is certainty in his voice, a weight to his words, like he's stating nothing but pure fact. More convincing than that is the terror in his eyes. Sylvia didn't think Jude could be scared of anything.
She asks, slowly, "How do you know?"
Jude sucks his lip beneath his teeth, glancing around the cafe. There's tension in his shoulders, a decision happening behind his eyes.
At last, he exhales. "I'll tell you," he says, and gives a quick shake of his head. "But I can't tell you here."