Read Chapter 7: The Handwriting

The note had slipped beneath her door sometime before dawn, and Elowen had read it twice before folding it into her pocket with the others. Now, at the kitchen table spread with butcher paper, she laid out every letter the house had given her—six in total, including the one that had arrived last night, ordering her to ask Merrick what he had buried.

The handwriting was identical across all of them. Neat. Unhurried. The slant of the letters suggested a right-handed woman, someone educated before the war, when penmanship was drilled into schoolgirls until it became muscle memory. The loops were tight but not fussy, the crossbars on the *t*s perfectly level.

Elowen slid the old shoebox across the table and lifted the lid. Inside: thirty-one letters from Lillian, spanning twelve years. Birthday cards. Postcards from Edinburgh and Prague. A handful of real letters, the ones her sister had written during her worst year, when she’d checked herself into a clinic in Devon and asked Elowen not to visit.

She pulled the oldest one from the box. Lillian had written it when she was nineteen, two years before she vanished. *Dear El, I know you think I'm being dramatic but I swear this town is trying to swallow me whole.* The handwriting was girlish then, the loops wider, the pressure lighter. But the bones were there—the way her *g*s curled, the sharp flick she gave her lowercase *f*s.

Elowen set Lillian's letter beside the newest one from the house.

The *f*s matched.

She pushed back from the table so fast the chair scraped the flagstones. Her heart was doing something ugly in her chest. She grabbed the lamp from the sideboard and dragged it closer, angling the bulb over both sheets of paper. Same ink, too. A blue-black that had faded on Lillian's page but sat fresh and dark on the house's note.

*Stop,* she told herself. *There are millions of people who write like that. Handwriting analysis isn't real. It's not.*

But she had already opened the third drawer of her desk, where she kept the things she couldn't throw away. Lillian's last postcard—the one from St Ives, postmarked three days before the crash—was wrapped in tissue paper. Elowen had never been able to read it without crying. She unwrapped it now with shaking fingers.

*El—*

That was all. The rest of the card was blank, as if Lillian had started to write and changed her mind. The handwriting on those two letters was larger than the house's notes, slightly rushed, the pressure uneven.

But it was the same hand.

Elowen pressed her palms flat against the table. The wood was cold, the way everything in Merryn House was cold, as if the warmth leached out of any surface the moment you stopped touching it. Outside, the wind threw itself against the mullioned windows, and for a moment she heard it as a whisper, a long exhalation that might have been her sister's name.

She picked up the phone. Her mobile had one bar of signal if she stood by the eastern window, and she crossed the kitchen in three strides, pressing her shoulder against the cold glass as she dialed.

The publisher's number rang once. Twice. At the third ring, a woman's voice said, "Holloway and Thorne, how may I direct your call?"

"Margaret Ashworth, please. This is Elowen Ash."

"One moment."

Music kicked in—some classical piece Elowen didn't recognize, strings and a hesitant piano. She watched the garden through the window. Merrick was nowhere in sight, but the roses he'd been pruning yesterday had been stripped of their dead heads, and the lawn had been cut. The garden was immaculate in a way that made her uneasy, as if it had been tended by invisible hands while she slept.

"Elowen?" Margaret's voice was tinny, distant. "You're early—we weren't expecting your pages until—"

"I need you to tell me something." Elowen's voice cracked. She cleared her throat. "The sample chapters I sent you. The ones from *The Drowned House*."

"Yes?"

"Did I send you the scene with the ring? The one where the woman finds it in the attic?"

A pause. Elowen heard papers shuffling. "The chapters you sent end at the lighthouse. You've written more than you told me?"

"Just answer the question."

"Elowen, is everything—"

"Margaret, please. Did I send you anything about a ring?"

"No. The last thing I have from you is chapter four. The manuscript's been quiet for three weeks—I assumed you were on schedule."

Something cold slithered down Elowen's spine. She pressed her thumb against the ring on her left hand, and it was warm beneath her skin, warm as a living thing, warm as if it had drawn heat from her body and kept it.

"I've been sending you chapters," she said carefully. "Every Tuesday like we agreed. Five chapters since I arrived."

"Elowen." Margaret's voice was gentle now, the voice she used when she had to tell an author their advance wouldn't be renewed. "I haven't received anything from you since the nineteenth of August. Not a word."

Elowen opened her mouth to argue, but the line went dead.

She stared at the phone. Full signal now—five bars, glowing green, mocking her. She pressed redial. The call connected instantly this time, but all she heard was static, and beneath it, something rhythmic. A heartbeat. Her own? No. It was slower.

She ended the call. Redialed. This time the static resolved into a sound that made her throat close: a woman breathing, shallow and quick, the way Lillian had breathed on her worst nights, when panic clawed its way out of her chest. Elowen had heard that sound a hundred times on bad phone calls, had talked her sister down from ledges both literal and figurative.

"Lillian?" Her voice was barely a whisper.

The breathing stopped.

The line clicked. Dial tone. Elowen lowered the phone and realized she was shaking so hard she had to grip the window frame to stay upright. The garden outside seemed darker than it had been a moment ago, as if the sun had been smothered behind a cloud she couldn't see.

She turned around.

Every letter she had laid out on the kitchen table was gone.

The butcher paper remained, blank and expectant. Her sister's shoebox sat open by her elbow, the letters still inside. But the six anonymous notes—the ones from the house, the ones addressed to her by name, the one that had quoted her own unwritten novel back at her—had vanished as if they had never existed.

Elowen crossed the kitchen and ran her hands over the paper. Nothing. No residue, no disturbance, no sign that anything had been there except the faintest ghost of ink, a shadow she couldn't quite catch under the lamplight.

The kitchen was very quiet.

She became aware, slowly, of the walls. Of the way they seemed to lean in slightly at the corners, not enough to notice unless you were looking, but enough to make the room feel tighter than it had before. The flames in the hearth had sunk low, though she had banked them properly that morning. The air was colder. She could see her breath.

*Ask Merrick what he buried.*

The words were not on paper anymore. They were in her head, in a voice that was almost—but not quite—her own.

She crossed to the window again, phone clutched in her hand. Merrick was there now, in the far corner of the garden, standing motionless beside the hedge he hadn't finished trimming. His head was lifted. He was looking at the house, at her window, at her.

He raised one hand and beckoned.