“Please, don’t!” Ryan screamed, crumbling to floor as the man stood over him with the pitchfork. “Please don’t kill me! I beg you! I can make you rich! Richer than you ever dreamed of.”

The man with the black, dead eyes looked down at him.

“Rich,” Ryan cried, tears streaming down his face. “I can make you rich.”

“Kill him,” came a small voice from somewhere. “Kill him.”

The man seemed to hear it. He raised the pitchfork higher, intending to bring it down onto Ryan’s chest.

Ryan screamed and closed his eyes, bracing for the impact.

“What’s the matter?”

Chelsea’s voice. Ryan just continued screaming.

“What the fuck is the matter?”

He opened his eyes. Instead of the man with the pitchfork, his sister stood over him. She looked pissed.

“What is going on?”

“The man!” Ryan shouted, getting back to his feet. “Where is he? We’ve got to get out of here! He’ll kill us!”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Did you do too much coke?”

Ryan glared at Chelsea. “The man! He has a pitchfork! We’ve got to get out of here!” He grabbed her hand and began pulling her toward the door of the study. It was wide open now.

Chelsea shook off his grip. “Did you drop acid or something? Or are you doing crystal meth again?”

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Ryan shouted. “The man!”

“There’s no man!” Chelsea shouted back at him. “I’m upstairs, trying to sleep off this hangover, and I hear you screaming. And were those gunshots?” She looked down at the floor, stooping to pick up her father’s gun. “Who were you shooting at?”

“The man! The man with the pitchfork! He locked me in here and was going to kill me! You had to have seen him! I was right there!” He pointed to the spot behind the desk where he’d been cornered. “He was standing over me with the pitchfork when you came in!”

Chelsea made a face. “You are so fucked up on something, big brother. Don’t tell me you didn’t snort something up your nose.”

“I didn’t! I’m totally sober! Totally straight!”

Chelsea laughed. “I came down here, and the door was open, and I saw you cowering behind Daddy’s desk. You were alone, Ryan! Alone! No man with any pitchfork!”

“There was a man! I shot at him! The bullets didn’t even slow him down!”

Chelsea rolled her eyes, not unlike the way Ryan had done earlier. “Okay, whatever. Just go upstairs and lie down, okay? Just chill. And no more of whatever you were smoking or snorting.”

Ryan couldn’t form the words. What had just happened to him?

His sister pushed past him. “I’m going back to sleep. Please! No more screaming or shooting guns!”

He grabbed her arm. “He must still be in the house,” he told her. “He must have snuck out when you opened the door. We’ve got to get out of here!”

Once again she shook him off her. “The door wasn’t closed, Ryan. It was open. I could see you from the hallway. Listen to me! There was no man!”

Her eyes held his. Ryan began to shudder. He wrapped his arms around himself.

Chelsea walked out of the room and headed back up the stairs.

Ryan couldn’t stop trembling. He looked around the room, ran out into the hallway, peered out the windows into the yard. There was no man. No sign any man had ever been there. The front door was locked. He checked every room in the house.

There was no man.

He returned to the study and looked around. Was Chelsea right? Had he done some coke? Maybe he had. He often resorted to blow when he was crazed with work and stress. Maybe he’d been feeling stressed out about leaving for Maine tomorrow and had decided to get a little high. Maybe he’d done a line and now he couldn’t remember doing it. Maybe it was bad stuff. Crack. Maybe it was crack. And maybe it had done things to his mind…

It was only then that he remembered the wall.

He hurried over to look at it.

He gasped.

They were there.

Five holes.

Five holes where the prongs of the pitchfork had pierced the plaster.

Chapter Eleven

“There is simply no way he wouldn’t have seen him,” Carolyn mused to herself, reenacting for the third time the order of events as Harry Noons had described them.

She stood on the terrace that led into the kitchen of the great house. Off to her right was the former entrance into the servants’ quarters. Once it had consisted of a series of stone steps that led into the basement. Now it was sealed over with concrete. But it was still plainly evident that anyone leaving that way would have had to pass right by this terrace. The place where Harry Noons had been standing when he rushed out of the house after hearing the screams from downstairs.

“And he saw no one come out,” Carolyn said to herself. “No one. He ran down there himself and saw no one. No one passed him on the stairs.”

Clem may have hid in the basement. That was the only logical explanation. He could have been hiding in the basement when Harry Noons came running back down the stairs. But by then, everyone in the household had come running themselves, and they searched everywhere for Clem. Surely they would have searched the basement. Surely, if Clem had been hiding, someone would have spotted him-if not immediately, then when he tried to make his escape.

No, the only answer was that Clem must have made a run for it up the steps into the main house and escaped through the front door. It would had to have occurred in the few seconds between the time Noons ran out of the kitchen and back down the steps into the servants’ quarters. But that was awfully unlikely, too: Carolyn had been up and down the staircase into the main house many times now, and Clem would have had to run out through the front foyer while the house was filled with people. How odd that no one would have seen him. But it was the only logical answer to how he had gotten out of the basement.

That is, the only logical answer if Clem had actually been the one to kill Beatrice.

The morning was cool, with a hint of autumn. The dew was still on the grass when Carolyn had tiptoed out of the house to once again reenact in her mind the day Beatrice was killed. Mr. Young and Douglas were still asleep; the servants had yet to arrive to begin cooking their usual sumptuous breakfast. The sun was still rising over the trees, the sky a wash of rosy pink with flecks of yellow. Carolyn walked back and forth through the wet grass imagining Harry Noons coming out of the sealed-up entrance and crossing the terrace, going inside the house to tell Mrs. Young he was finished for the day, then coming back out here when he heard the screams.

“Good morning.”

Douglas’s voice startled her. She turned quickly, then smiled. The morning sun cast a soft pink glow on his face. His hair glowed. He looked incredibly handsome in that light.

“Oh, good morning,” she said.

“Still perplexed about how the brute escaped?” he asked.

She nodded. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“He must have run past while Noons was standing in the doorway to the house, talking to my great-great-great-grandmother,” Douglas said.

Carolyn shook her head. “Look for yourself. He would have had to run right past here. Right here! This is where Noons would have been standing. He would have seen him!”

“Then when and how did Clem make his escape?”

“He could have left the basement immediately after Noons did, in those few moments when Noons was inside the kitchen, talking with Mrs. Young. That was the only moment when Noons might have missed seeing someone leaving the basement.”

“But the screams came only after Noons was inside the kitchen. If Clem left immediately after Noons did, as you say, he couldn’t have been down there killing Beatrice.”

“Precisely.” Carolyn raised her eyebrows. “In some ways, the timing actually offers a bit of an alibi for Clem.”