The Devil's Scribe Read Free Page A

the house was occupied. Lace panels hung in the windows, and the rosebushes in the front yard were well tended. The house’s foundation had been built into a hill, and the house itself loomed above the sidewalk like a giant empty skull staring back at me, as though it knew why I was there.
    The house had been built onto in the years since I last saw it and was now enormous. I tried to circle the building, but the back end was blocked off by a stockade fence. It would be impossible to get beyond the fence without destroying the latch to the gate.
    I hugged close to the walls, running a hand along the stone as though feeling for something. I was reminded of the fairy tale in which a pea is buried under twenty mattresses and can be detected only by a princess of great sensitivity. Here, too, was a case in which something was hidden that could be detected by only one person: me. Edgar followed a few steps behind, observing me as I circled the house like a thwarted tiger.
    “What are we doing here, Lanore?” he asked at one point when I paused in my pacing. He seemed unconcerned that we were casing a house like a pair of thieves. “What are you up to?”
    I already felt half mad for daring to tell my secret to someone, and decided to ease my way into the story. “I’m looking to see that the foundation stands firm and that it hasn’t been disturbed.”
    He blinked at me. “The foundation of this house? I don’t understand.”
    “I used to live here, you see, but I left something behind when I moved away. I left something . . . buried.”
    “What might that be? A doll, a favorite toy?” he asked, impatient.
    “Nothing so benign, I’m afraid.” I took a deep breath: the time had come to unburden my conscience. “There’s a man hidden in the cellar of this house. Bricked up in a wall. I put him there.” My words did not come out as I’d expected: not giddy and triumphant, not small and ashamed, but somewhere in between. Spoken tentatively as though I was lying, and I was anything but lying.
    Edgar staggered backward a step. “I—I don’t think I heard you correctly. I thought you said—”
    “That I sealed up a man in this house. That is what I said.” Both my palms were pressed against the stone now, as though I could feel the heartbeat of the trapped man on the other side—as though his heartbeat had become the heartbeat of the house—but I felt nothing. Nothing.
    Edgar didn’t move from the spot. He leaned away from me slightly but held his ground. He continued to cast his inquisitive gaze over my face, looking for a sign that I might be deceiving him, while at the same time eager for every morsel of my tale. “You made this house his crypt! How . . . macabre of you. Tell me, Lanore, how you came to kill him. Did you shoot him? Or perhaps you poisoned him. They say poison is a lady’s weapon. . . . Or had he passed already and you found his body in bed?”
    I didn’t want to answer him directly and indict myself, but I was seized by the desire to confess, as though he were capable of granting me absolution. “No, he hadn’t died in his sleep. It wasn’t peaceful at all. You see, he was alive when I sealed him in his tomb.”
    I had wanted to tell someone the truth for a long time. The secret had been an inescapable weight on my chest that had grown heavier every day. And what had I risked in telling Edgar, really? Very little. He knew nothing of me that mattered. He wouldn’t be able to lead the police to me. He was my momentary confessor. He’d asked me to share my secret with him, implying silence in exchange for the privilege. I’d poured my guilt into him and now he was obligated to carry this awful secret inside his head, and by doing so I’d unburdened myself by a small measure.
    His dark eyes swept over me uncertainly. “There are easier ways to kill a man. To put him in the wall while he is still alive . . .”
    To this, I could say nothing, for what he said was true: there were easier