‘CAN YOU SEE THEM?’ LILY calls out to Tom from the staircase.
Tom is already at the end of the landing on the floor above, looking out over the woods and drive. ‘Not yet,’ he says.
She walks towards him, puffing slightly. She’s glad she wore her red trainers, weird as they look with her dress. Her feet hurt enough as it is without walking the house in heels.
‘You sure they’re wrong? The clue said the key was in the forest,’ Tom continues.
‘And that’s why it isn’t,’ Lily says, reaching for her breath. ‘Liliana would never be that straightforward.’ She swallows a burp. Heartburn is climbing her oesophagus much more quickly than she ascended the stairs. She should have nabbed a croissant to line her stomach.
‘There! I saw a flash of Sara’s red coat,’ Tom says as she joins him in front of the window. ‘And again! She never moved that quickly when we used to play rounders. There she is, in the clearing.’ He pauses, scanning the woods for the rest of them. ‘And there’s Ronnie!’
‘Do you remember what that clearing is?’ Lily asks, when she gets her breath back. Couldn’t they have put in a lift at some point in the house’s history? She sits down on the window seat. She can feel her pulse in her swollen ankles. So much for pregnancy glow.
Tom turns to her, head cocked. Then his brow unfurrows. ‘Of course.’ He looks down at the clue in his hand. “‘Where animals are stiff and laid to rest.” Then there’s the “bones” and “cloth-lined wood”. It’s the pet cemetery. Although “trunked falsehood”? Did someone bury an elephant there? Or is it that we shouldn’t forget?’ His smile fades. ‘Not sure I really wanted to be reminded of that place. Hamish is buried there.’
Lily remembers a letter she received from Tom, after his own mum and dad died in a car crash a few miles from Endgame House. His dog, Hamish, a lovely and licky Labrador, had been in the car, but, somehow, he’d survived the terrible accident and limped home. It was Hamish who’d led the housekeeper to the smashed-up car. Hamish died a few years later, but Tom told her in his letters that Hamish wasn’t the same dog again.
‘We should go to the cemetery later,’ Lily says. ‘Say hello to Hamish.’ And to the other resting pets, including TC, Isabelle’s cat, who’d made Lily laugh as much as he made her sneeze.
‘They’re not going to dig up the graves, are they?’ Tom says. He looks like a little boy again, worrying about his dog.
Lily thinks Sara or Philippa could be absolutely capable of digging up a pet cemetery. These are the people she’s spending Christmas with.
Tom sees her hesitate. ‘Shit. Of course, they would. What’s a few bones to them when there’s a house up for grabs?’ He moves away. ‘I’ll go and stop them, tell them they’re looking in the wrong place.’
‘I’ll go,’ a voice says from below them.
Gray is standing halfway up the staircase, looking up at them through the finials. His face is spectre pale. ‘Sara won’t listen to anyone else. She might not even listen to me.’ Gray then turns and walks silently down the stairs.
‘How does he move so quietly?’ Lily asks.
‘You’re the same,’ Tom says.
Lily turns to him. ‘What?’ She always sees herself as lumbering, especially now.
‘You always won grandmother’s footsteps when we were little. And you always knew which stairs to avoid when we played hide-and-seek.’
‘True,’ Lily says. So many things to re-evaluate.
‘So, where do you think the key is?’ Tom asks.
‘Liliana loved an anagram, as well as outliers and oddities,’ she says, ‘so first you look for anomalies, things that stand out. Something that could be a mixed-up word or phrase.’ She points to ‘aria moans, mor n rise’. She takes out one of the coloured pencils from her pocket and underlines the ‘n’. ‘This is out of place.’
‘Could be a typo,’ Tom says.
‘Liliana doesn’t make mistakes.’
‘I’d say this whole thing was her making a massive error,’ Tom says. He looks so sad. ‘Why couldn’t she give the house to blind cats, if that’s what she wanted?’
‘Why are you here, then?’ Lily asks.
Tom looks thoughtful. ‘Honestly? I liked the idea of us all being together, in a place where we’ve all been stuck in some way for so long. I thought it might be cathartic, and we could all move on.’ He sighs. ‘Judging from dinner and breakfast, I was horribly naïve. Not for the first time.’
Lily squeezes his hand. ‘You’re perfect as you are. And I’d like catharsis, for both of us,’ she says.
Tom smiles back. ‘So would I, so we’ll get it. That’s kinda how it works.’
‘Like Gray’s rituals.’
Tom nods. ‘Invest meaning in something, and it helps it become real.’
‘Liliana always said that’s there’s meaning in everything.’ She looks back down at the clue. ‘Chamber – could point to one of the bedrooms.’
‘But the hotel must have loads of bedrooms. Where do we start?’
‘It wouldn’t just be a random room. And, if I’m right, she lets us know exactly whose bedroom it is.’
The mentioning of music, and aria mean there’s only one person it could be. But she needs to be sure.
On the back of the clue, she splits the line up, so the letters lie far apart:
A R I A M O A N S M O R N R I S E
And there it is. If she removes the letters, ‘n rise’, as they are separated from the rest, it spells out exactly where to look.
‘Are you OK?’ Tom says. He’s staring at her in concern. ‘What’s wrong?’
Lily doesn’t reply. She just rearranges the anagram, writing it down in red:
M A R I A N A S R O OM