Chapter 4: The Cellar
“She isn’t in the house,” I told Julian. My voice sounded strange to me, flat and fast. “I’m standing in it. There’s no one here.”
“Get out of there. I’m calling the FBI agent. I’m on my way.”
“It’s an hour and a half, Julian.”
“Tessa—”
“Share your location with me,” I said. “I’ll share mine with you. Stay on the line.”
I already knew where she was. I’d known the second I saw the policy.
Behind the barrel room at Marlowe Estate, dug into the hillside, there’s an old wine cave from 1890 that hasn’t been used in thirty years. Damp stone, a rusted iron gate, a heavy oak door at the end. When I was a kid, it was the only place on the whole estate nobody ever came looking for me. My father had padlocked it when I was ten, saying it wasn’t safe.
The rain had started properly by then, cold October rain blowing sideways off the Mayacamas. The vines were black shapes on either side of the path. Up at the house, every window was dark, and for the first time in my life the place I’d grown up in looked like something that wanted to swallow me. I kept thinking about the folder in my father’s drawer. Five weeks. He’d bought that policy five weeks ago, two weeks before Celeste ever walked into Julian’s office. He’d known before she did.
I ran down the hill with my phone in my jacket pocket, the call still open, my location glowing on Julian’s screen somewhere on Highway 29.
The barrel room was dark and smelled of oak and fermenting grapes. The iron gate at the back was standing open. The padlock hung on the hasp, unlocked. Fresh tire tracks were in the mud by the service door. My father’s truck.
The oak door at the end of the tunnel was bolted from the outside.
I slid the bolt back with both hands.
The cave was black except for a battery lantern on the floor, almost dead. Against the far wall, among stacks of dusty old barrels, someone was sitting on a camping mattress with a wool blanket around her shoulders.
“Celeste.”
My sister lifted her head. Her golden hair was matted. Her face was gray. On the floor beside her stood a plastic water bottle and an orange prescription bottle with my father’s name on the label.
“Tessa?” Her voice was thick and slow. “How did… Dad said nobody would come looking.”
I was on my knees beside her before she finished. Her skin was ice. Her pupils were too big.
“What did he give you?”
“Something to help me sleep. He said we’d talk when I’d calmed down.” She blinked hard. “He said… he said when the wedding was over, he’d fix everything. Tessa, I think he’s been putting it in the water.”
I knocked the water bottle away from her. I pulled her arm over my shoulders. She weighed nothing.
“Nobody ever looks for me,” I told her. “That’s how I knew where to find you.”
She laughed, a broken little sound, and started to cry.
“Julian,” I said to my pocket. “I’ve got her. The old wine cave behind the barrel room. She’s drugged. Send an ambulance.”
“Already done,” his voice said, tiny and distant. “Twelve minutes out. Tessa, get her out of—”
Light hit us.
A flashlight, white and blinding, from the doorway at the end of the tunnel.
Behind it stood my father, in his navy blazer, rain dripping from his silver hair. He was perfectly calm.
“You were supposed to be the one who never asked,” he said.
And he pulled the heavy oak door shut behind him, and I heard the bolt slide home.
