TWENTY-ONE
Daphne was loath to pick them up, as the teeth were covered with saliva. But as near as she could tell, they were plastic.
“Plastic teeth,” she breathed.
Christopher had come to stand beside her. “You mean,” he said, looking down, “that clown isn’t real?”
“Oh, it’s real all right,” she said. “That’s just the thing. It’s very real. As real as you or I.”
Daphne realized she had been right to doubt the supernatural explanation. They didn’t face a ghost. She was now convinced, yet again, that their foe was very human.
Who
it was, she didn’t know.
But clearly it was someone who, as the sheriff had speculated, was obsessed with the original killings, and who, for reasons they couldn’t fathom, was trying to re-create them. Someone, perhaps, who had a vendetta against the Witherspoons. . .
No
, Daphne told herself as the thought crept back into her mind.
It is not Gregory.
But the clown had, so far, spared her. Was that a twisted, perverse message that he cared about her, that his grudge didn’t extend to her, that he’d spare her—even if he forced her to witness the carnage all around her?
No, that’s crazy
, Daphne told herself.
Gregory saved me from the crypt! The clown—
She stopped in her tracks as she thought of something terrible.
She had passed out when the clown entered the chamber. And when she’d awakened, Gregory was there. If he was the clown, then that would have given him time enough to change out of the suit, wipe off the makeup, and appear to be Daphne’s savior, and not her tormentor.
But why would he scare her at all in the crypt, if that was the case? What purpose would that serve if his mission was to get revenge on the Witherspoons?
It could give him the beginnings of an alibi.... Daphne would tell the police of the clown, and that Gregory had saved her, and then the clown had come and killed the family... .
This is absurd! Gregory would never do any of this, no matter how much anger and resentment he held against Pete Witherspoon!
Was she sure? She hadn’t known him very long, after all.
“Come on,” she whispered to Christopher, pushing the thoughts out of her mind and grabbing the boy’s hand.
Daphne and Christopher took another few steps and discovered something else on the floor.
A clown suit.
Not just
a
clown suit.
The
clown suit.
In the lamp’s glow, Daphne saw dried blood covering the suit’s red and green polka dots. Crumpled cloths were covered with gooey white makeup. Off to the side she spotted the white mittens and purple shoes and wild orange wig. And beside the shoes ... a tiny tape recorder.
Daphne didn’t need to turn it on to know the only thing that recorder played was “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
The killer had come down here to change out of his costume. Perhaps that meant he was done with his reign of terror. Maybe he assumed Daphne and Christopher had escaped and so had given up—which would mean they were now safe.
Or—it could mean they were in more danger than ever.
If the killer had come down here to change out of his clown suit, Daphne realized, then he could still be in the basement somewhere. He might be hiding. In fact, he might be watching them at this very moment....
“Come on, Christopher,” Daphne urged again, and they walked quickly toward the corridor that led to the storage room.
Once there, Daphne first used the lamp to illuminate all the dark corners and assure herself no one had hidden there to surprise them. Then she bolted the door from the inside. But her next task was just as important as the first two. She lifted the lamp toward the place on the bottom shelf where she had removed the box marked M. At the time, she had been too focused on the box itself to look behind it. But now, sure enough, she saw a panel on the wall. This was where she and Christopher would have emerged had they taken the left-side passageway. And this was where the killer could still get in to kill them.
“Christopher,” she said loudly. “Help me shove this chest against the panel!”
She quickly removed the box marked M that she had left sitting on top, and grabbed ahold of one end of the chest. Christopher joined her, and they began to push. It did no good. The chest was just too heavy to move.
“Maybe we can take some stuff out and make it lighter,” Christopher suggested.
“We want it to be heavy!” Daphne cried. “So he can’t move it if he tries to get in. Push again!”
This time they succeeded in moving it a few inches. Another shove produced another half a foot. The chest had been sitting there so long it had become stuck to the floor. With extraordinary effort, fueled by the adrenaline caused by knowing a killer was somewhere in the house, Daphne and Christopher managed to shove the chest across the room. Then they pushed it up onto the bottom shelf, pressing it against the wall and wedging it under the shelf immediately above. Doing so effectively sealed over the secret panel. Nothing was going to be strong enough to push that chest from the other side of the panel, not with it being wedged between the shelves in this way. And there wasn’t enough room on the other side of the panel to swing the ax, either, so chopping through the chest wasn’t a possibility. For the moment, therefore, Daphne felt relatively safe.
She sat back against the shelves and let out a deep breath. Christopher nestled in beside her.
“That clown can’t get us in here?” he asked.
“Not here,” she told him, slipping an arm around the little boy. “We’re safe, here.”
“Those voices were wrong,” he said.
Daphne looked over at him. “What voices?”
“The voices I’d hear at night, telling me if I got rid of you, my mother would come back.”
“You heard voices telling you that?”
He nodded, and the tears sprang from his eyes again. “That’s why I locked you in the crypt. I thought ...” His tears took over for a moment, and he couldn’t speak. “I thought if you were dead, my mother would come alive again. I’m sorry, Daphne.”
“It’s okay, Christopher. It’s all in the past now.”
She pulled him in tighter.
What were the voices Christopher heard? Were they in his head, part of his deep emotional problems?
Or did someone—or something—deliberately try to plant that idea in his head to get rid of me?
Daphne closed her eyes. Her mind was having a hard time accepting everything that had happened this night. Everyone in the house was dead, except for the two of them. Her friends and her foes alike. Everyone she had met when she first came to Witherswood those few months ago—which now seemed like years ago—had been brutally murdered. Every single one! Donovan, Suzanne, Louella, Abigail, Axel, Boris, Gabriel, Ben, Ashlee, and Pete. She could scarcely comprehend the fact that she and Christopher were the only ones left.
And how long would they have to stay in this room? Until the blizzard passed, she felt certain. And even longer than that, she realized, until the roads were passable again. Abigail had been right: no one could get up that twisting cliffside road until the snow and ice were removed. That might take days. And they had nothing in here to eat or drink. It was going to be difficult. But it beat being out there, in the house, where the killer waited with his long sharp blade.
“How long will the clown stay out there?” Christopher asked, as if reading Daphne’s mind and anticipating her next question.
“I don’t know,” she answered, but she had her suspicions. Whoever he was, he couldn’t get down the hill any more than someone could get up to rescue them. He was as stranded here as Daphne and Christopher, waiting out the blizzard. That meant their wait could be very long indeed.
Daphne glanced over at the box marked M, now sitting beside them on the floor. Reaching inside, she pulled out a letter at random, and opened it, reading it by the dim glow of the kerosene lamp.
This was the only solution, of course. My parents had turned me out. This was the only place that would accept me. She will have a good life here. I assure you.
Signed,
M.
Daphne put the letter back into the box. What did Maria mean, “This was the only place that would accept me”? Had her parents disowned her because she had become pregnant by Pete—the son of the notorious serial killer?
Is that what Pete meant when he’d said to her upstairs that his father’s heinous crimes had ruined all of their lives? He had looked at Daphne when he’d said it, implying his monstrous father had left an imprint on
her
life, as well.
Was she, then, Pete’s daughter?
She looked over at the little boy resting his head on her shoulder.
Was Christopher her brother?
The lamp flickered and died at that moment, and they were left in darkness. Christopher began to whimper.
“It’s okay,” Daphne assured him. “It’s okay.”
The blackness was absolute in the room. There was no place where any light could seep in. They wouldn’t be able to distinguish between night and day if they were forced to spend a long stretch of time in this place.
Daphne tried to keep her mind focused.
If Pete was her father, then what had happened to Maria? From the letters, it would seem that Maria had started off raising her daughter herself. But if Daphne was, in fact, that daughter, then at some point Maria had turned her over to the sisters at Our Lady. Why? Where did Maria go? Was she dead? Or was she—Daphne’s mother—still alive somewhere?
Questions lingered, but so much was starting to make sense. Now Daphne understood why Pete would send for her out of the blue to come live with him. Now she understood why Mother Angela would say this place was her destiny.
But was it her destiny to die here?
Was it Daphne’s destiny to die just as she had stumbled upon the first clues to her true identity, before ever finding out the whole truth?
No doubt the clown had slit Pete’s throat upstairs just as he had done to everyone else. So there would be no answers forthcoming from Pete. If anyone in this house had known the truth, they had taken it with them to their graves.
She thought of Pete, slunk down in his chair with his face twisted from an apparent stroke.
Her father.
That was her father.
She started to cry.
All her life she’d longed to know who her parents were. And now that she had found out, it was too late.
But the truth seemed clear to her now. More answers might be found in the box beside her, and hopefully she’d have a chance to go through everything that was in there, at some safe, relaxed moment in the future.
But at the moment, she thought she knew the basic fact.
She was ... a Witherspoon.
And with the thought came another one, immediately following.
So maybe that’s why Gregory would want to torment me.
She reacted forcefully, arguing with herself.
Stop that! Gregory is not the killer!
But
if
he was, and
if
he knew the truth about her, maybe that explained why he’d put her through all this. He’d certainly carry his hatred of Pete toward his daughter. Daphne struggled against believing it, but if Gregory really was the one who’d put on the clown suit and slaughtered the entire family, then he wouldn’t stop until the last Witherspoon blood had been spilled. Maybe he hadn’t, in fact, spared Daphne. Maybe he was outside that door right now, waiting for her, waiting to slit her throat.
Daphne shuddered.
Christopher noticed. “Are you okay, Daphne?”
“Yes,” she lied. “Just feeling a little cold, that’s all.”
“I’m cold, too.”
She tightened her grip on him.
“Listen, Christopher” she said. “It’s going to get colder. And we’re going to get hungry. And we are going to have to get used to the dark. I don’t know how long we are going to have stay in here—”
Her words were cut off by a rapping at the door. Both of them froze.
“Daphne? Daphne, are you in there?”
The voice was soft, difficult to hear, because the door was so thick.
“Daphne? Oh God, Daphne, are you there?”
“It’s Ashlee,” Daphne whispered to Christopher.
Ashlee was alive!
“Ashlee?” Daphne asked through the door. “Is that you?”
“Oh, yes, Daphne, it’s me! I got away! I got away!”
“Where is he?” Daphne asked, her ear pressed up against the door to hear better. “The clown?”