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They took Marcia’s car and drove there at night. Police tape still hung from the front door, and the glass in it was still broken, though someone had nailed a board across it to protect from the weather. Deirdre shivered, standing in front of that door, feeling the house towering over her. She desperately wanted to run back to the car, throw herself inside, close and lock the doors. Drive back to the city. On her own if the others wouldn’t come.
Instead, she stayed where she was, legs locked and frozen in place.
‘Are you all right?’ one of the others whispered. She couldn’t tell which one had asked, and it didn’t matter. She shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Uh uh, no, I’m not all right.’ A hand touched her shoulder, rested there, and she tried to be grateful for the scant comfort it provided. Or maybe it was just there to prevent her from racing back to the car. She shivered. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
The house was still a crime scene and even after three weeks, none of them had been allowed back inside to collect their things. Deirdre had asked about it every time she’d been brought in for questioning, and every time the detective had told her it was still being processed. How long did it take? she wondered. She thought they were holding out on her just to apply some more pressure.
Marcia’s hand was trembling when she put her key into the lock and turned it. She had a set of the keys from when she’d come down with Darryl to stay a couple days before everyone else arrived. It was a stroke of luck, really, that Darryl had picked up her handbag and taken it to the hospital when she’d been admitted. Otherwise, they’d have to find another way in, and she was sure the place was locked down tight.
‘Are you ready?’ Marcia breathed, pushing the door open a crack. Deirdre could barely hear her over the pounding of her heart against her ribs. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them and took a deep breath.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ she said.
They flicked on their torches as soon as the front door was closed behind them, and stood in a huddle in the foyer, all of them staring at the place at the bottom of the stairs where Jeremy had died. Marcia was the only one who hadn’t seen him lying there, but even she was looking in that direction. Deirdre wondered if his spirit was still in the house. She bit her lip.
‘Marcia?’ she asked. ‘Are they still here? Their...spirits?’
She was standing close enough to the older woman to feel the tension thrumming through her body. But Marcia shook her head. ‘I think so, but they’re hiding,’ she said.
‘Do you feel her?’ the Professor asked. They all knew who he meant. Deirdre sidled even closer to Marcia, close enough to feel her breath on her cheek.
This time Marcia nodded. ‘She’s still here. The house is one giant scream.’
Deirdre didn’t want to know precisely what the medium meant by that. She thought she got the gist of it. ‘What do we do now, then?’
‘We follow the plan,’ the Prof said.
Upstairs, then. Into the room Marcia and Darryl had shared. The room where Deirdre had woken up under the bed. Next to a dead man with his eyes pecked out. She swallowed, and wondered if the others had heard the dry clicking of her throat. Her torchlight wavered on the tiled floor and she waited for the others to move.
Moments passed, then the Professor broke their paralysis, and walked across to the stairs. He looked back at them and grimaced. ‘Coming?’
She didn’t want to, but on the other hand, there was no way she was staying down here on her lonesome. A few wobbly steps, and she was at the bottom of the stairs, avoiding a few stray sparrow feathers that lay on the floor, and desperately hoping that wasn’t going to end up being the way she went as well, choking on a mouthful of feathers. She reached out to grab at the bannister, horrified at the thought of dying that way. Poor Jeremy. He’d seemed a pretty nice guy. Certainly hadn’t spent his time ogling her, not like Martin had.
That made her feel worse. Martin had died too, and here she was thinking bad things about him. It wasn’t as if ogling was a crime. He certainly hadn’t deserved to die, and definitely not by jumping through a window. The police had said there were a lot of sparrow feathers around his body too. They’d harped on about those for quite a while, unable to explain them, no matter how they looked at the equation. All Deirdre had been able to tell them was that they belonged to the ghost they’d invented.
Like that had gone down well. Ghosts weren’t real, and even if they were, the police were highly sceptical about their ability to murder people. They thought Deirdre a much more likely prospect, and she knew she’d be in jail right now, waiting for a trial, if they’d been able to find even one small piece of physical evidence. Whatever Stacy had done, she’d saved Deirdre from prison.
But the others were climbing the stairs. Stacy looked up and saw the phoenix staring back at them from the window. Without the moon or sun behind, it had only muddy eyes to look at them from. Still, they felt like they were following her up the stairs. Deirdre looked away, dread and fear churning a poisonous cocktail in her gut.
The room had a nasty smell to it. But when the Prof sent the light from his torch skittering over the floor, there was no dead man there, just a dark stain. She’d known he wouldn’t be there, of course, but still breathed a sigh of relief when she saw he’d been taken away. Crossing the room on shaky legs, she pushed open the window a crack and turned around to look at the others.
‘I can’t bear the smell,’ she said.
‘We can’t have the drapes open,’ the Professor said.
‘Damn.’ Of course not. Turning, she closed the window and drew the heavy curtains back over the glass, holding her breath. ‘We better be quick then.’
‘Do you want to wait somewhere else?’ The Professor’s voice was kind.
‘On my own? You have to be kidding!’
His light shuffled over her feet. ‘I meant in the car, actually.’
She opened her mouth to reply, but Marcia broke in. ‘No. I need her in here.’
The lights congregated on Marcia. ‘What do you mean?’ Deirdre asked, not sure if she really wanted to know.
But Marcia just shook her head. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Right now, let’s do what we came here for, and go through Darryl’s things. Quickly.’
Part of Deirdre wanted to know what the medium had meant, but an even bigger part was content to leave it well alone. She had a feeling she’d find out sooner rather than later anyway.
‘Who’s going to check in there?’ she asked instead, shining her light into the wardrobe, which opened onto a black hole behind the hanging clothes. Shuddering, she shook her head. ‘Not me.’
James stepped forward, his light taking over from Deirdre’s. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, and Deirdre guessed he might even be curious about the secret passageways, seeing as how he’d missed that particular adventure. Lucky man.
She turned her attention to Marcia as the Professor reached into the wardrobe to go through the pockets in Darryl’s clothes. Marcia was opening drawers, and pawing through the contents. Her face was focused and frowning. Deirdre didn’t know what she should do. Her torchlight hovered over the bed, then slid into the darkness underneath it. That’s where she’d woken up. Under this very bed, wearing only her underwear, Stacy’s jeans on the floor next to her.
She checked her hypothesis again. If she was practically naked, and Stacy’s discarded clothes were on the floor next to her, it stood to reason that Stacy had taken the bird costume and put it on.
‘She hid me,’ Deirdre said. ‘Under there.’ Nodding towards the bed. ‘Since she hid me, right...’ She looked at the other two, who had stopped their rummaging to stare at her. ‘Doesn’t it stand to reason that she was hiding me from something?’
‘From the Sparrow Girl?’ the Professor asked.
Deirdre shook her head. ‘That wouldn’t make sense. I think she was hiding me from someone.’
‘But everyone else was dead.’
‘Everyone else in the Ghost Crew was.’ She had her eyes fixed on the dark space under the bed. ‘Someone else must have been in the house that night.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I bet that’s where Stacy is.’ Found a bit of saliva and swallowed. ‘Whoever came in the house that night has her. She knew they were after the bird girl, and so she took the costume, and they took her.’ Deirdre looked from the Professor to Marcia, and back again. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. You have to know I’m right.’
The Professor looked at her, and she saw the sympathy on his face. ‘She might just have taken the costume off you thinking it was a way to get the Sparrow Girl away from you.’
‘Why’d she hide me, then?’
‘Because she was afraid that if the Sparrow Girl was attached to the costume, and you weren’t wearing it anymore, then she might go after you.’
‘Go after me?’ Deirdre didn’t understand.
‘Ah, make you the next, ah, victim.’
‘Oh.’ Deirdre hadn’t thought of that. Her heart fell. For a moment there, she thought she’d stumbled on the right answer. The one that meant that maybe Stacy was alive somewhere.
‘I’ve found something,’ Marcia said, and held up something narrow and white in her hand.