CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Robin retired to her room after dinner. She tried to work on the brief she’d brought but she was so exhausted that she put it back in her bag at ten and dropped off to a deep, troubled sleep.
In her nightmare, Robin found herself in a dark tunnel. The air was close and damp, and she had trouble breathing. She had to touch the walls to get her bearings. They were cold and slimy with mold.
It seemed to Robin that she had walked for hours when she heard footsteps and shallow breathing behind her. She stopped to listen. The sounds stopped. She was about to start again when she heard a low growl and claws scraping on stone.
Robin’s heart rate sped up. The sounds behind her grew louder. She started running. She came to a turn in the tunnel and she stumbled over something and fell. When she looked down, a corpse soaked in blood stared up at her.
Robin screamed in her dream and jerked up in bed. Her heartwas beating wildly. Robin swung her legs over the side of the bed and rested her head in her hands. It took her a moment to realize that she was awake and there was no corpse on the floor of her room and no werewolf following her. But there had been something important in the dream. What was it?
Obviously, the werewolf legend had inspired the dream, and she’d seen more than one bloody corpse in real life, including two at Black Oaks. There had to be something else. She ran through the dream again. There was the werewolf and the corpse and she’d been in a tunnel…
Suddenly, Robin was wide awake. Was there a tunnel—or something like a tunnel—in Black Oaks? No one had mentioned one—or had they? It wasn’t while she was at Black Oaks. It was in Portland in Loretta’s account of the Black Oaks legend. Robin concentrated. There was the dagger, the horror of the wedding night, and… That was it!
Robin dressed hurriedly, grabbed her gun and a flashlight, and knocked on Ken’s door.
“Get dressed,” she said as soon as he opened it.
“What happened?”
“I think I know how Zelko got out of Black Oaks, or where he is if he’s still here.”
As soon as Ken was dressed, Robin led him down the hall. It took a few minutes to wake Nelly, and she looked bleary-eyed when she opened the door. When she saw Robin, her look morphed from confusion to alarm.
“Has something happened?” Nelly asked.
“Black Oaks is a brick-by-brick copy of the original, right?” Robin asked.
“Yes.”
“I had my associate research the history of Black Oaks. She told me that Niles McTavish held orgies and satanic rites in the dungeon and secret passageways of the manor house. Did your mother include the secret passages in this version?”
“Oh my God!” Nelly answered, immediately seeing where Robin was going.
“Where are they?” Robin asked.
“There’s one on the second floor in the room where Niles McTavish and his bride spent their wedding night. He used the passage to escape onto the moors after he murdered Alice.”
“We have to see if Zelko is hiding there, or if there are signs that he escaped through the passage.”
“Let me get dressed and I’ll take you to the room.”
“Do you have any flashlights?” Ken asked.
“Yes. We keep several around in case there’s a power outage.”
Nelly dressed. Then she handed Ken a flashlight, took one for herself, and led Robin and Ken to the second floor, where she entered the hall across from the servants’ wing. As she did, Robin remembered the person she thought she’d seen walking into that wing and disappearing. Could that have been Zelko?
Nelly stopped in front of the door at the end of the corridor that Robin had entered. Nelly opened it and turned on the light. Robin remembered that there had been no furniture in the room.
“My mother never got around to furnishing the rooms on this wing before she passed,” Nelly said, her voice dropping as she thought about her mother.
“Where is the entrance to the passage?” Robin asked.
Nelly walked over to a fireplace with an ornate wood mantel decorated with an elegantly carved forest scene featuring foxes and deer drinking from a stream shaded by overhanging trees.She pressed a knob on a side of the mantel, and a wall that had appeared to be flush with the side of the fireplace opened.
There was no light in the hidden recess. Robin directed her flashlight beam into the opening. It revealed damp stone walls covered in mold and cobwebs. Robin pointed the beam at the floor of the passageway. The dust had been disturbed.