The House Above Vesper Hollow I

It opened.

The woman who opened it was perhaps thirty-five, in the dark dress of a senior servant — not a maid, something above that, the housekeeper or a personal attendant of long standing. She held a lamp at chest height and looked at Kaito with the expression of someone who had been told to expect a visitor and had been given instructions about what to do when the visitor arrived, and was following those instructions precisely, and was doing nothing beyond them.

"Mr. Nozomi," she said.

Not a question.

"Yes," he said.

She stepped back from the door. He came in.

The entrance hall was warm — fires had been lit, recently, the smell of them still settling into the room — and it was well-maintained in the way of a house whose maintenance was a matter of discipline rather than comfort, the surfaces clean and the furnishings arranged with the correctness of a room that was kept ready rather than lived in. The lamps were lit at intervals along the hall. Portraits hung between them at the spacing of a family that had accumulated enough generations to fill the walls without crowding them.

He noticed the bolt.

It was a heavy bolt, iron, the kind that required two hands to draw and that sat in its bracket with the solidity of something that had been used regularly for a long time. It had been shot when he knocked. The housekeeper had drawn it back to admit him, and as she closed the door behind him he heard her shoot it again.

Bolted against something outside, or against something inside that might try to leave through this door.

He did not ask.

He looked at the portraits as he followed her down the hall. The family had a consistent look across the generations — a particular set to the jaw, a quality of self-possession that had been either bred or cultivated over enough time that it had become structural. The frames were all present. One space, midway down the hall, showed a slightly different shade of paint on the wall — the ghost of a frame that had been removed and not replaced, the wallpaper around the space marginally less faded than its neighbors.

The housekeeper did not look at him. She looked at the corridor ahead and walked at a pace that was efficient without being hurried.

At the corridor's end she opened a door and stood aside.

"Mrs. Vael will receive you in the drawing room," she said. "She asks that you make yourself comfortable. She will be with you shortly."

He went in. The door closed behind him. He heard her footsteps recede down the corridor, and then a door at the corridor's far end, and then the specific quality of silence that indicated he was alone in the room.

He looked at the drawing room.

It was a comfortable room — the kind of comfort that came from money applied over time rather than money applied all at once, the furniture a mixture of periods and styles that had accumulated rather than been chosen together. A fire. Two chairs angled toward it and a third angled slightly away, the preferred seat of a person who liked to face the room rather than the fire. A writing desk with papers on it, the papers turned face-down.

He went to the window.

The view was the valley and the village below, the fog still moving through it, the lights of the village absent — no lights in any window at this hour. The road he had walked was invisible in the dark. He could see the sundial in the garden, the stone of it pale against the dark lawn, and the gravel path that curved from the gate to the front door.

He turned away from the window and looked at the portraits in this room.

Three. A man of perhaps fifty, formal, the painting recent enough that the style was not more than a generation old. A woman of the same era, perhaps forty, with a quality of containment in her expression that might have been dignity and might have been something else. And a third — a young man, perhaps twenty-five, in a style twenty years older than the other two, positioned not on the main wall with the other portraits but on the narrower wall beside the fireplace, where a portrait could be placed and still be part of the room without being the first thing you saw when you entered.

He was still looking at the third portrait when Mrs. Vael came in.

---

She was perhaps fifty, though she might have been younger and carried her years in a particular way, or older and carried them well. She was dressed in the kind of dark elegance that spoke of a social position that had been maintained through effort rather than ease, and she moved through the room with the specific assurance of someone who had been the primary person in this house for long enough that her authority in it was not something she thought about.

She looked at Kaito and her expression was composed and direct and told him very little.

"Mr. Nozomi," she said. "Thank you for coming."

"Mrs. Vael," he said.

She went to the chair that faced the room — the one angled slightly away from the fire — and sat. She gestured to the chairs near the fire.

"Please," she said.

He sat. He chose the chair that gave him the better angle on the door.

"You received my letter," she said.

"I receive letters of a particular kind," he said. "Yours arrived through the appropriate channels."

"I was told you were the right person to contact," she said. "By someone whose judgment I respect. They told me you were discreet and that you understood certain kinds of difficulty."

"What kind of difficulty are you in?" he said.

She looked at the fire for a moment. When she looked back at him it was with the expression of someone who had decided how much to say and was now saying exactly that amount.

"I have a member of my husband's family confined in the lower rooms beneath the west tower," she said. "He has been there for four years. He is fed and clothed and his physical needs are attended to. He is not mistreated." A pause. "He is also extremely dangerous, and the confinement is not optional."

"Dangerous in what way?" Kaito said.

"He has killed," she said. "Members of this family, over a period of years, in ways that were made to appear natural or accidental. I understood what he was doing before he understood that I understood it, which is the only reason I am alive to speak to you now." She said this without drama. As a statement of a chronology. "When I moved to confine him, two of the servants who assisted me did not survive the process."

"And the others?" Kaito said.

"Have left," she said. "Some at my instruction, because I could not ask them to remain in a house containing what this house contains. Others left on their own initiative, after—" She paused for the first time, a genuine pause rather than a rhetorical one. "After he spoke to them."

"He speaks to the servants," Kaito said.

"The room is not soundproof," she said. "He is intelligent and patient and has had four years to refine what he says to people who come within hearing. He tells a story. The story is compelling. It is also false, but compelling and false are not mutually exclusive, and frightened people do not always make good judges of which they are hearing."

"What does he tell them?" Kaito said.

"That I murdered my husband and his brother," she said. "That I imprisoned him to prevent him from exposing me. That the servants who left did so after discovering the truth, and that the servant who disappeared—" She met his eyes steadily. "He claims I had her killed."

"Did you?" Kaito said.

She did not flinch. "No," she said. "She left. I believe she went south, to her family. I have not been able to confirm it."

"You believe," he said.

"I believe," she repeated. "I cannot confirm it because I cannot leave this house. Not while he is in it and the household is as reduced as it is." She looked at him. "Which is why I wrote the letter. I need someone to determine whether his influence has spread beyond the locked room. Whether there is anyone remaining in this household who has been persuaded by what he says. I cannot trust my own assessment of the people around me. That is an uncomfortable position."

"What is his name?" Kaito said.

"Aldric," she said. "Aldric Vael. My husband's younger brother."

Kaito looked at the portrait on the narrow wall beside the fireplace. The young man, the older style, the position that was present without being prominent.

"The portrait," he said.

She did not look at it. "Yes," she said. "That is Aldric. Painted before my time here. I have left it because removing it would require an explanation, and the alternative explanations are worse than having it visible."

He looked at the portrait for a moment. The young man in it had the family jaw, the family quality of self-possession. He also had the quality of the third portrait in a room — the one that was there for a reason other than the obvious reasons, that had been placed with a specific intention.

"You said he has killed members of this family," Kaito said. "Which members?"

"My husband's father," she said. "Who died of a cardiac episode six years ago. The physician who attended him had concerns but could not establish anything definitive. And my husband himself, three years ago. A fall on the tower stairs." She said this with the composure of someone who had had three years to build the composure around it. "Aldric was in the house on both occasions."

"And after your husband's death," Kaito said, "you moved to confine him."

"Within the month," she said. "Yes."

"Why not go to the authorities?" he said.

She looked at him with something that might, in a different person, have been impatience. "With what evidence?" she said. "A cardiac episode that a physician found unremarkable. A fall that could have been an accident. The testimony of a widow who inherits everything." She paused. "I went to the authorities. They were sympathetic. They could do nothing. Aldric remained in this house and I remained in this house and one of us was going to have to resolve that situation."

"And you resolved it by chaining him beneath the west tower," Kaito said.

"Yes," she said.

He looked at her. She looked back at him. The fire moved between them.

"I'll stay the night," he said.

---

Supper was served in the dining room by the housekeeper and one other servant, a young man who moved efficiently and looked at nothing that was not immediately relevant to the task of placing food on a table. The dining room had a long table that could have seated twelve and was laid at one end for two. The unused length of it had the quality of a space that had been set and re-set in this way for long enough that the gesture had become habit rather than decision.

Kaito counted the portraits. Six, in this room, spanning what appeared to be four generations. The gaps were less visible here — the spacing was wider — but he counted five hooks without portraits, distributed across the walls with the irregularity of removal rather than planning.

Mrs. Vael ate with the economy of someone for whom meals had become functional. She answered his questions with the precision he had already come to expect from her — answering what he asked, exactly what he asked, and not the adjacent questions he had not asked.

He asked about the family history. She described it with the fluency of someone who had learned the official version and understood it to be the version she was expected to provide. The Vaels had been in this property for six generations. The family had been involved in various commercial interests across the region. The current generation had seen difficulties — reduced circumstances, the house requiring more maintenance than current resources easily permitted.

"Difficulties beginning when?" he said.

"With my father-in-law's death," she said. "And compounding after my husband's."

"And before that?" he said.

She looked at him. "Before that the family was comfortable," she said.

He noted that comfortable was not the same as honest, and that she had not said honest. He did not say this aloud.

He asked about the servants. She described, without visible discomfort, the reduction in the household: the cook who had retired, the two footmen who had left within a week of each other eight months ago, the housemaid who had gone south without notice, and Mrs. Crane — the housekeeper — and Thomas, the young man currently removing the soup course, and a gardener who came three days a week from the village.

"The gardener comes from the village," he said.

"Yes," she said.

"The village knows about the household's difficulties?" he said.

"Villages know everything about the houses near them," she said. "Whether they understand what they know is another matter."

He looked at the window. Beyond it, the fog and the dark valley and the village with its unlit windows.

"The village is afraid," he said.

She was quiet for a moment. "The village has been in a particular relationship with this house for a long time," she said. "That relationship has not always been a comfortable one."

She did not elaborate, and he did not press it, because the not-elaborating was itself a kind of answer and he had heard enough to know the shape of what she was not saying.

At some point during the main course, faintly, from somewhere in the walls or beneath the floor — the specific topology of an old house made it difficult to locate — there was a sound. Rhythmic, patient. Knocking.

Mrs. Vael set down her fork and picked it up again.

"The pipes," she said. "The plumbing in the older sections of the house is unreliable in cold weather. The expansion and contraction causes—"

"Yes," Kaito said.

The knocking continued for perhaps thirty seconds and then stopped. Thomas, who was at the sideboard, had gone very still during it and resumed his movement only after it stopped, with the careful resumption of someone who had made a decision about their own stillness and was reversing it.

His hands, Kaito noted, were not shaking. But they had been.

---

The guest room was on the second floor, west corridor, with a window that looked toward the tower rather than toward the valley. Mrs. Vael showed him to it herself, carrying a lamp, and at the door she turned to him with the expression she had used throughout the evening — composed, direct, telling him precisely what she had decided to tell him.

"The west tower staircase is at the end of this corridor," she said. "The lower door is chained and padlocked. I would ask you not to go to it."

"You're asking rather than instructing," he said.

"You are a guest," she said. "I cannot instruct you. I can tell you that Aldric has convinced people before, and that the consequences of that convincing have been severe, and that I would prefer you did not speak with him before you have had the opportunity to observe the household with clear eyes." She paused. "In the morning I can show you records, correspondence, the documentation of what has happened here. I would prefer you to have seen that before you speak to him."

"Why?" he said.

"Because he is very good," she said. "At what he does. And you are, I understand, a person who listens carefully. Those qualities are not always a protection against someone who understands how to speak to careful listeners."

He considered this. It was not an unreasonable concern, and it was expressed in a way that did not demand agreement, which made it harder to dismiss than a demand would have been.

"Goodnight, Mrs. Vael," he said.

"Goodnight," she said.

She left. He listened to her steps on the corridor and the sound of a door.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his coat and looked at the window.

---

Thomas came at the second hour.

Not boldly — the knock was three soft taps, the knock of someone who was not certain they wanted the door opened and was giving whoever was inside the option of not opening it. Kaito opened it.

Thomas stood in the corridor with a lamp turned low and the expression of a young man who had made a decision and was not entirely certain it had been the right one.

"I brought additional coal," Thomas said. "For the grate. In case it became cold."

The grate was adequately stocked. They both knew this.

"Come in," Kaito said.

Thomas came in and went through the motion of attending to the grate and then straightened and held the lamp and looked at a point slightly to the left of Kaito's face.

"You're here about the house," Thomas said.

"Yes," Kaito said.

"Mrs. Vael wrote to someone," Thomas said. "We knew she had. She told us she was going to."

"She told the servants she was seeking help?" Kaito said.

"She told Mrs. Crane," Thomas said. "Mrs. Crane told me." He paused. "I've been here fourteen months. I came after most of the others had already left."

"Why did they leave?" Kaito said.

Thomas looked at the grate. "Some of them will say they left because of Mr. Aldric," he said. "Because of what he said through the door. What he told them about the house." He paused. "I don't know if that's the whole truth."

"What's the part that isn't the whole truth?" Kaito said.

Thomas was quiet for a moment with the quiet of someone who was deciding how far to go.

"Miss Hartwell," he said. "The housemaid. Mrs. Vael says she went south. To her family."

"You don't believe that," Kaito said.

"I don't know what I believe," Thomas said, which was a more careful answer than the one Kaito had expected. "I know that Miss Hartwell had no family south. She told me once. Her family was east, near the coast. She talked about them sometimes." He paused. "And I know that the household ledger shows wages paid to her name for three months after she supposedly left. Mrs. Vael says it was an error in the accounting."

"But you don't think it was an error," Kaito said.

"I don't know," Thomas said again. "I don't know enough to say. I know what the ledger shows and I know what Miss Hartwell told me about her family." He looked at Kaito. "I know that Mr. Aldric, through the door, told me once that there were two people in this house who knew the truth of Miss Hartwell's disappearance. Him and Mrs. Vael." He paused. "He said he would tell me which of them was guilty if I opened the door."

"Did you open the door?" Kaito said.

"No," Thomas said. "I didn't." He said it without apparent virtue, as a fact. "I was afraid to."

"What are you afraid would happen if you opened it?" Kaito said.

Thomas thought about this seriously. "I don't know," he said, for the third time. "And that's the problem, isn't it. I don't know enough to know what I should be afraid of." He looked at the lamp in his hand. "Mr. Aldric has been down there for four years. Mrs. Vael says he's dangerous. The servants who left — the ones who spoke to him through the door — some of them tried to open it. Mrs. Vael stopped them. She says that when they tried to open the door something happened to the two who helped confine him." He paused. "But I've never heard her say exactly what happened. Only that they didn't survive it."

"She told me the same thing," Kaito said. "Without the details."

Thomas nodded. "There's a record in the house," he said. "A household journal. Mrs. Crane keeps it. There might be something in it." He paused. "I shouldn't have told you that."

"Why did you?" Kaito said.

Thomas looked at him. "Because Miss Hartwell had no family south," he said. "And someone should know that."

He left. Kaito sat in the chair by the window and looked at the tower.

---

The household journal was in the housekeeper's room, which was on the ground floor and locked. Kaito had expected this. He had also found, in the course of being shown to his room and noting the layout of the house with the attention he brought to the layout of houses, that the library was on the ground floor, east corridor, and that the library was not locked.

He went down at the third hour.

The library had three walls of shelves and a fourth wall with two windows and a fireplace and a desk. The fireplace was cold now but had been used recently. The desk had papers on it. He looked at the papers: household accounts, two years of them, organized with the care of someone who maintained records with deliberate thoroughness. He found the wage records for Miss Hartwell. Fourteen months ago she had begun receiving wages. Eight months ago the wages had stopped. Three months after that, a different hand — not Mrs. Vael's, which he had seen on letters in the drawing room — had added three more months of entries to the Hartwell column.

Not an accounting error, then. An addition. The question was who had added it and why.

He moved to the family records section. The Vael family bible was there — he found it by the quality of the binding, the specific gravity of a bible that had been used to record family events across generations. He opened it.

Births, marriages, deaths. Six generations. He read backward from the current generation.

Aldric Vael. Born. Not married. A note beside his name in a different ink, added later: *removed from family record, circumstance of death contested.*

He read the date beside the notation.

The date was three years ago.

Which was the same year Mrs. Vael had said her husband died. Which was the same year she had said she moved to confine Aldric.

The family bible said Aldric Vael had died three years ago.

He stood at the library desk with the bible open to that page and held both facts at the same time: Aldric Vael recorded as dead three years ago in the family bible, and Aldric Vael speaking through a door in the west tower to a young servant eight months ago.

One of these things was wrong. Both could not be true.

He was still at the desk when he heard the sound in the corridor.

---

It was not the knocking from dinner. It was a different sound — something falling, or being moved, the specific thud of an object and then a second sound that was less easy to name. He put the bible back and went to the corridor.

At the end of the east corridor, near the door to the kitchen passage, Thomas was on the floor.

Not unconscious — he was moving, trying to stand, with the specific difficulty of someone who had been hit or had fallen badly. His lamp had gone out. Kaito reached him and helped him up.

"What happened?" Kaito said.

Thomas shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "I heard something in the kitchen passage. I came to look. Someone—" He stopped. "Something caught my lamp and it went out and I fell."

"Someone or something?" Kaito said.

Thomas looked at the dark of the kitchen passage. "I don't know," he said. "I didn't see clearly." He paused. "The passage goes to the west tower's external door."

Kaito looked at the passage. It was dark, the lamp on the floor and cold. He picked up the lamp and relit it from his own and went to the end of the passage.

The external west tower door was closed. The bolt on it was shot. He put his hand on the bolt. Cold. Whatever had moved in the passage had not come through this door.

He turned back. Thomas was standing where he had left him, holding the lamp, with the expression of someone revising their understanding of their situation.

"Go to your room," Kaito said. "Lock the door."

Thomas went.

---

The west tower's internal staircase was accessed from the main house through a door in the north corridor. Kaito found it with the map he had been building in his head since his arrival. The door was unlocked — the confinement was below, not at this level.

He went down.

The staircase was stone, older than the rest of the house, the kind of staircase that had been part of an earlier structure and had been incorporated rather than replaced. It curved and narrowed and then widened again into a lower corridor that smelled of old stone and lamp oil and the specific enclosed quality of a space that was inhabited but not aired.

The door at the end of the corridor was iron-banded oak. A chain ran through the iron brackets on the door and the wall beside it, and a padlock held the chain.

He stood in front of it and listened.

From the other side, silence.

Then: "Mr. Nozomi."

The voice was even and unhurried and came through the door without strain, the voice of someone who had learned the acoustic properties of the room and spoke at the level that carried through the door without appearing to project.

"You know my name," Kaito said.

"I have been waiting for someone to come for some time," the voice said. "I have had time to prepare. Your name came through channels that are not entirely closed to me." A pause. "She told you not to come down here."

"She asked me not to," Kaito said.

"The distinction matters to you," the voice said. "That tells me something about how you think."

"What does it tell you?" Kaito said.

"That you distinguish between social obligation and genuine instruction," the voice said. "That you are here because you decided to be here, not because you were permitted to be." Another pause, precisely calibrated. "She will have told you I am dangerous and persuasive and that you should see the household records before speaking to me."

"Yes," Kaito said.

"And have you seen them?" the voice said.

"Some of them," Kaito said.

"Then you have found something," the voice said. "She is careful but the records are extensive and she cannot control all of them. What did you find?"

Kaito looked at the door. "The family bible," he said. "You are recorded as dead."

"Yes," the voice said. "I am." A pause. "She recorded my death three years ago, at the time she confined me here. The intention, I believe, was to simplify matters if anyone came asking. A dead man cannot be found. A dead man who is found must have been dead all along." He paused. "It also means that legally I do not exist. Which means the confinement is not the confinement of a person. It is simply a room."

"You could have escaped at any time," Kaito said. It was not an accusation — a test of the logic.

"The chain and padlock are attended to," the voice said. "There are two people in this house who hold keys. Mrs. Vael and Mrs. Crane. They are careful people." A pause. "And the external door. You found it bolted. It is always bolted. She arranged it so that I could be heard from inside the house but could not be reached from outside."

"You said she killed members of your family," Kaito said.

"My brother," the voice said. "My father before that. The deaths were arranged. I understood what she was doing after my father and I made the error of telling her I understood it, which is why I am here rather than dead." He paused. "She is not stupid. A dead brother-in-law creates complications. A living one, declared dead, confined below the house, does not."

"And the servant," Kaito said. "Miss Hartwell."

A pause that was different from the previous pauses — shorter, more weighted.

"Miss Hartwell spoke to me through this door," the voice said. "She believed me. She went to find the key." He paused. "I heard her on the stairs. I heard Mrs. Vael on the stairs behind her. I did not hear Miss Hartwell again."

Kaito looked at the door.

"The ledger," he said. "Three months of wages recorded after she disappeared."

"To provide a paper trail," the voice said. "Someone receiving wages is someone who is alive and departed. Someone whose wages simply stop is someone who requires explanation."

Kaito thought about Mrs. Vael at the dinner table, describing Miss Hartwell going south to her family. Describing it with the composure of someone who had described it before and would describe it again and had arranged the description to be credible.

He thought about Thomas, saying: *she had no family south*.

"Tell me something I can verify," Kaito said. "Something in this house I have not yet found."

A pause.

"In the library," the voice said. "On the third shelf from the bottom, east wall. Behind the second volume of the county agricultural survey — a bound volume, burgundy, 1887. There is a letter. In my handwriting. It was placed there before my confinement, when I still had access to the house, against the possibility that someone might come looking." He paused. "I did not expect it to take four years."

Kaito went back to the library.

The agricultural survey was where the voice had said. Behind the second volume: a letter, folded, sealed with a plain wax seal. He broke the seal.

The letter was dated four years and three months ago. It was addressed to no one. It described, in a careful and specific hand, the deaths of two members of the Vael family, with dates and circumstances and the name of the physician who had attended the first death and noted concerns. It named Aldric Vael as the author and stated that if this letter was found it was because the author was either dead or confined and the person confining him was the person whose account would otherwise be the only account available.

He read it twice.

The letter proved that it had been written four years ago, and that whoever wrote it had anticipated this situation, and had been correct in that anticipation.

It did not prove that what the letter said was true.

---

He went to the householder's door and knocked.

She answered after a moment, in a robe, with the composed expression of someone who had not been sleeping.

He told her what he had found. The family bible. The ledger. The letter. He told her without interpretation — stated what each document contained and what the voice through the door had said.

She listened without interrupting.

When he had finished she was quiet for a moment.

"The letter," she said. "He placed it there before I understood the full extent of what he was. I did not know it existed." She paused. "Or I knew he might have left something and I could not find it."

"The family bible," he said. "You recorded him as dead."

"Yes," she said. "I know how that appears."

"Tell me how it is," he said.

She looked at him with the expression she had used throughout the evening, and then something in the expression shifted — not dramatically, not the collapse of a performance, but the specific adjustment of someone who has been holding something at a controlled distance and is allowing it to come closer.

"My husband's father was not well," she said. "He had been unwell for several years. When he died I did not immediately suspect anything. It was Aldric who suggested to me, later, that the death was not natural. He said it with a quality of knowledge that alarmed me." She paused. "And then my husband. The stairs. Aldric was in the house, and I found him, afterward, at the foot of the stairs, and the expression on his face before he composed it—" She stopped. "I cannot prove it. I could not then and I cannot now. But I knew."

"And Miss Hartwell," Kaito said.

A pause.

"She believed him," Mrs. Vael said. "She went for the key. I followed her. When I reached the lower corridor she was at the door." She met his eyes. "I stopped her. We argued. She left the house. I paid her wages for three months because I did not want her simply to vanish from the record."

"She left," he said.

"She left," Mrs. Vael said.

He looked at her. "Where did she go?"

"I don't know," she said. "I did not follow her. She was alive and angry and she left." A pause. "I know how it appears."

"You keep saying that," he said.

"Because I know how it appears," she said again. "I have had four years to understand how everything in this house appears, from the outside. I have had four years to understand that the truth is not something I can simply show you. That everything I have done has the shape of something else, to someone who does not know what I know."

He thought about the voice through the door, which had the same quality: the shape of innocence, from the outside, to someone who did not know what it knew.

He thought about a servant girl who had been believed too late, and a young woman in a chapel who had paid the cost of his hesitation.

He thought about the woman with the black feather, who had told him once that some doors were locked to protect those outside, and who had told him years later that she had known what he would choose.

He put his hand in his coat pocket. The feather was damp.

He looked at Mrs. Vael.

"I need to open the room," he said.

She looked at him. "I have told you—"

"You have told me his account and your account and I cannot determine which is true without seeing what is in the room," he said. "A woman may or may not be missing. A man is confined below this house under a false death record. I cannot leave this house until I have seen what is in that room."

She was quiet.

"If you open the door," she said, "and he is what I have told you he is—"

"Then we will deal with that," he said. "Together, if you are willing. But I will not leave without opening it."

She looked at him for a long time with the composed, careful expression that had not changed since he arrived. Then she went to the bureau against the wall and opened the top drawer and took out a key on a length of chain.

She held it out to him.

"Then I am coming with you," she said.

---

The lower corridor again. The stone walls and the lamp oil smell and the door.

Mrs. Vael stood three feet behind him. She held her lamp and she did not speak.

From the other side of the door, the voice: "Mr. Nozomi."

"Yes," Kaito said.

"She came with you," the voice said.

"Yes," Kaito said.

A pause. "That is either very good or very bad," the voice said. "I am not certain which."

Kaito put the key in the padlock.

“One thing,” the voice said. “Before you open it. My name. You should know my name.”

A pause.

“Not Aldric Vael. My name is Renner. I was a physician’s assistant when I first came to this house fourteen years ago. The real Aldric Vael was already dead before Mrs. Vael confined me. His name was put over mine afterward, so that one dead man and one living witness could be hidden inside the same lie.”

Kaito held the padlock.

Behind him, he heard Mrs. Vael's breathing change.

He removed the chain.

The door was in front of him.

He pushed it open.