Read Chapter 12: The Missing Page

The nursery clock read half past eleven when Evelyn finally allowed herself to open the ledger again. The children were asleep in their beds—Thomas curled tightly around his pillow, Clara breathing soft as a kitten—and the house had settled into that peculiar silence of old walls and older secrets.

She sat at the small writing desk near the window, Annabel's locket warm in her palm. She had not yet opened it. Some instinct told her to wait, to save it for when she could give it proper attention. Instead, she spread Miss Reeves's ledger before her and began turning pages, hunting for something she could not name.

The dates. She traced her finger down the column of Miss Reeves's careful script. Visits to the east wing, noted in the cipher she had broken. Every Tuesday and Thursday, three o'clock. The regularity of it chilled her—a governess stealing to a forbidden part of the house with the same methodical rhythm as a heartbeat.

Evelyn reached the page where the ledger's entries ended. But her fingers stopped on something wrong. She turned back a page, then forward again.

The pages were numbered in the top corner, neat as anything. Page forty-one ended with an entry from March 1857. Page forty-three began in May of that year. April was gone entirely.

She checked again, running her thumb along the spine. The stub remained—a thin fringe of torn paper, so close to the binding that whoever had removed it had done so with deliberate care. Not a page fallen out. Not a page lost to age.

A page taken.

Evelyn sat back, her heart picking up its pace. Miss Reeves had been thorough in everything she recorded. Locked doors, hidden passages, missing girls—she wrote it all down in her cipher. The idea that she would leave a two-month silence in her record was impossible.

Unless she had not been the one to remove it.

Evelyn's gaze drifted to the desk's surface. The wood was dark and scarred with ink spills from years of letter-writing. But near the edge, where the ledger's spine rested, she saw something fresh. A stain of dark blue ink, still glossy at its edges, spread like a small bruise across the grain.

She touched it. The ink came away on her fingertip.

Still wet.

Someone had been here. Someone had opened this ledger, torn out the missing pages, and done it recently enough that the ink from their pen had left its mark on the desk. How recently? Evelyn glanced at the window. The sky beyond was pitch black. The house had been quiet since midnight.

She thought of the footsteps outside the nursery door. Of the sound that had followed her through the east wing. Of Lord Blackwood's face by candlelight, terror flickering behind his eyes.

She rose and crossed to the door, pressing her ear to the wood. Nothing. Just the creak of old timbers settling.

Evelyn returned to the ledger, forcing her mind to slow. If she could not read April's entries, perhaps she could still learn something from what surrounded it. She studied the last line of March.

*March 28. She grows stronger. Her uncle visited today. He spoke of the sea.*

Her uncle. The phrase caught in Evelyn's throat. The children had called Lord Blackwood their uncle. If Annabel was his sister, then her children would call him uncle too.

Evelyn flipped forward to May's beginning.

*May 2. The doctor came again. I did not like the look he gave my charge. I have hidden the letters where I trust they will be found.*

Letters. What letters? Evelyn tried to remember the hollow tree, the locket, the careful way Miss Reeves had planned her disappearance. She had left the children a locket. Had she left them letters as well?

Then the edge of something caught her eye. At the bottom of the May 2 entry, in the margin, a word had been scratched out so forcefully the page had nearly torn. Evelyn held the candle closer, tilting the page to catch the light at an angle.

MARY.

The name had been written in the same ink as the rest of the entry. Someone—Miss Reeves herself, or another—had marked it out with such violence that the nib of the pen had shredded the paper.

Mary. Evelyn said the name aloud, testing it. The children's mother. The woman Clara claimed had not died but "gone away." The portrait in the west hall showed a woman with dark hair and Lord Blackwood's sharp cheekbones. Her name, engraved on a brass plate beneath the frame, was Margaret.

But perhaps Margaret was not the name she had used.

Evelyn reached for the locket, thumb pressing the clasp. It opened with a soft click. Inside, two faded photographs. The first was of a young girl with braided hair and a smile that showed a missing tooth—Annabel, Evelyn was certain. The second was a woman in a high-collared dress, her face narrow and beautiful, her eyes fixed on something beyond the frame with a look of quiet exhaustion.

On the inner face of the locket, scratched in letters so fine they might have been engraved by a needle, was an inscription: *For M. Never forget.*

M.

Evelyn sat very still. The candle flame guttered. Outside, somewhere in the house, a floorboard groaned.

She closed the locket with a click and tucked it back into her pocket, then turned to the ledger's final page, where the pencil notation still sat beneath Miss Reeves's last frantic entry.

*Trapped.*

But trapped where? And trapped with what? Evelyn traced the word with her finger. The page had been written in haste—the letters tilted forward, the pressure of the pencil uneven. Miss Reeves had not meant this entry to be read. She had meant only to set down a record in case—

In case she never came back.

Evelyn turned to the front of the ledger, to the pages she had already read a dozen times. Miss Reeves had begun recording her observations two years earlier, and the early entries were mundane. Lessons. Walks. Household matters. But she had written them in locations across the estate, and a pattern had emerged—one Evelyn had noticed but not yet followed.

The same four locations repeated again and again. The nursery. The library. The chapel. The east wing.

Three floors of the house and one place beneath it.

Unless the fourth location was not the east wing itself but something farther down. A cellar. A storeroom. A space cut into the very foundations of Blackwood House, hidden beneath the floorboards of a room no one was meant to enter.

Evelyn looked at the torn page stub again. April. The month Annabel had vanished. The month Miss Reeves had recorded the truth of what had happened, and someone had stolen it away.

She pressed her palm flat against the desk, feeling the still-wet ink smear beneath her touch.

Someone in this house had taken the page. Someone in this house knew what had happened in April. And that someone was still awake, still moving, still close enough to have left the ink damp.

Evelyn stood. The ledger went back into its hiding place beneath the loose floorboard beneath the nursery rug. The locket she kept.

She did not sleep.