ADDITIONAL CHAPTER EIGHT: A NIGHT WITHOUT SIRENS

One Friday, the electricity failed across Hensley Lane during a windstorm.

The house fell silent except for rain against the windows and the branches scraping the roof.

Luis had already gone home, and Sophie was staying with Rachel.

I found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer and checked the basement to make certain no water was entering.

The narrow doorway beneath the stairs looked different in the dark.

Its steel frame caught the beam, while the surrounding plaster seemed to swallow the light.

I understood how a frightened person might build an entire nightmare around that shape.

Then somebody knocked at the front door.

I checked the peephole and found Nora Wynn holding a portable lantern.

She had been visiting a relative nearby when the streetlights failed, and she noticed my porch was dark.

She offered the lantern because she remembered that renovations could leave a house short of emergency supplies.

I thanked her and invited her only as far as the kitchen, where we stood beside a cold kettle.

Nora told me that her mother had kept a second emergency key to Margaret’s old laundry room.

The key was probably gone, but her mother sometimes mentioned its red thread loop.

She had never understood why Margaret insisted the key remain separate from the others.

I wrote down the detail and promised to pass it to investigators.

Nora asked whether I was afraid to sleep in the house.

I told her fear visited at inconvenient hours, but it was not the only thing living there.

We talked about the kitchen tiles, the upstairs windows, and the trouble of finding honest carpenters who respected old wood.

When the power returned, Nora started toward the door and stopped.

She said her mother used to describe Margaret as a woman who could be stubborn about almost anything except children.

Margaret had once canceled a holiday dinner to sit with Leah while Iris traveled for an emergency.

That memory complicated the image of Margaret as a guardian of dangerous secrets.

I walked Nora to her car beneath the wet willow branches.

For the first time in days, I went back inside without checking my phone for a new recording.

ADDITIONAL CHAPTER NINE: THE MAKER OF THE CABINET

A small brass stamp inside the basement cabinet led Luis to a furniture maker named Bernard Pike.

Bernard had retired to a town twenty miles away and now repaired clocks for pleasure.