She returned to the back of the stairs and wedged the hammer in, first by the small claw end. The passage gave another inch or two, and she put in the end of the hammer handle and used it as a lever. The door did not want to open. Years of nonuse, or possibly a catch she could not see, made it resistant. It groaned in revolt.

“You’re going to break the stairs,” Nate said.

“Want me to try?” David asked.

“No.” Stevie shook out her hands from the pressure of holding the hammer. She went in one more time, putting all her weight on the handle of the hammer.

Then the back of the stairs swung open, revealing a small dark space.

“This is a good Halloween,” David said.

Stevie was able to nudge the doorway open a bit more, shine the light in, and reach around. At first she thought she was touching tar, but then she realized that it was about eight years of dust and dirt that had gone sticky and formed into a new and exciting substance. There was no difficulty finding the hatch. It was right there, in the floor, bolted closed. She tested the bolt, expecting to find that it was stuck in place, but it moved and slid open. She took the handle and pulled, revealing an opening about two feet around.

“This guy really liked crawl spaces,” David said, leaning over her shoulder into the space. “What is that?”

“It’s a hole,” Stevie said, trying to block the view.

“It’s got a ladder in it. Is that a tunnel?”

“Here we go,” Nate said.

Stevie pushed back and sat on her heels, taking in the view in front of her.

“How does this keep happening to you?” David said.

“Because I look,” Stevie replied. “A lot of things happen when you go out and do them on purpose.”

“Okay, Stevie.” Nate was squatting by her side. “I know this is a thing for you, but for real, Pix will be back and they’re kind of . . . Things are kind of sensitive around here, and you just got back. See what I’m saying?”

“Look at this,” Stevie said.

“Yeah, I know, but remember how these things can be unstable? That, is a hole. A small hole. Anything could be down there. There could be wires or something. There could be water.”

David hung down into the opening with the flashlight.

“I don’t see any water,” he said. “Or wires.”

“Seriously,” Nate said.

Stevie knew he had a point. Also, she had made one other promise—to Larry. No tunneling.

Still . . .

“Nate’s right,” she said.

She sprang up from her crouch and went looking for her phone.

“We can’t just go in there. Here’s what we do,” Stevie said. “We call Janelle. For sure she has a little drone with a camera or something and we fly it down there and . . .”

“Time for hole-diving!” David said, turning himself around so that he was feet first. He started lowering himself down.

“David!” she said. “Seriously. We don’t . . .”

“But we will,” he said. “If I don’t come back in ten minutes, avenge me. Or are you coming? You know you want to.”

Then he started climbing down. Nate shook his head and started to disappear into his robes.

“It’s cool down here,” David yelled up. “You should come in. There’s . . .”

He emitted a scream, which caused both Nate and Stevie to leap. Stevie almost threw herself on top of the hole. David peered up and smiled.

“Kidding. It’s fine,” he said, looking up at her. “You guys are so jumpy.”

“What if it collapses?” Nate said.

“Like, suddenly? Just when we’re in it? For no reason?”

“We could wait for Janelle. . . .”

“Come on,” David said. “You don’t get chances like this all the time. Come on come on come on come on come on. You can’t resist.”

Was it the smile? Was it the coat and the suit? The glint in his eye? Or was it just the pure tunnelness of it all? Because he was right. She could not resist.

“He can’t go alone,” she said to Nate.

“He can. We could shut the hatch.”

“Just watch for us?” she said. “I promise, promise, promise we’ll be careful, but I can’t let him go by himself.”

Nate yanked his beard down to his chest.

“Why. Do. People. Do. Stupid. Things.”

“Because we’re stupid,” she said. She tested the top rung with her foot. Nate grabbed her arm—not hard, but enough to get her attention.

“Hayes didn’t die from the tunnel coming down,” he said. “He died from a gas. You have no idea what’s down there.”

This gave Stevie a moment’s pause. He was right.

“But that gas wasn’t in the tunnel before,” Stevie said. “Someone put that dry ice there. The tunnel was fine before. I went in it. Look, we’re just going to . . . go a little bit.”

“You make it really hard for me,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But, dragons.”

“Don’t.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. But will you watch anyway?”

Nate rubbed a tired hand across his forehead.

“Do I have any choice?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Yeah, but you’d go even if I didn’t. He’s down there.”

Stevie wondered what that meant, but there was no time to wonder much. There was a tunnel to explore.

14

STEVIE HAD ENTERED A TUNNEL AT ELLINGHAM ACADEMY BEFORE—the famous tunnel. That tunnel was wide as a highway in comparison with this one. This was a crack in the earth, too tight, too low, and much, much too dark. Stevie turned her flashlight straight down, forming a pool that splashed up the walls around her. Unlike the tunnel to the sunken garden, which was made of even brickwork, this was made of rough rock, possibly pieces left over from the mountain demolition. They might not cut you open, Stevie thought, as she tentatively felt along the wall in front of her, but they would rub you raw if you made contact with your bare skin. She couldn’t extend her elbows more than a few inches in either direction, so she hesitantly reached overhead into the dark; the ceiling was only a little more than a hand’s length above her head. And with each step, the walls grew a little closer.

It was, in a word, unwelcoming. In two words, a mistake.

Some part of Stevie possessed enough basic self-preservation to know that structural integrity and air quality were important parts of staying alive, and not being in tunnels was an important part of Larry not busting her ass right off the mountain. But some louder, wilder, definitely stupider part of her kept her moving forward.

And it wasn’t just because David had gone down first, no matter what Nate said.

Stevie tucked her hands up into the arms of Poirot’s jacket to keep from being cut and numbly felt her way along, taking half-sized steps, and right into David’s back.

“That’s you, right?” he said. “I’m afraid of monsters. Also, it stinks down here.”

This was true. There was a lowlying funk in the air.

“The drone would work better,” she said. “You know, if that’s a leaking gas line or something.”

“Did you just say leaking gas line?” Nate said from above.

“Smells more like ass than gas,” David replied. “Tight, dark, smelly. This tunnel has it all! Five out of five stars.”

“It’s really okay to leave him to die,” Nate said. Then, perhaps remembering that someone actually had died the last time they went into the tunnel, he went silent.

The space felt like it was getting smaller, and she wondered if they might get to some point where they actually got stuck, like people who dove into caves and their hoses caught on rock and they never got out, except this wasn’t underwater. This was almost worse.

“Now this is a Halloween,” David said. Stevie could only see a bit of the back of his shirt. She kept one hand in the middle of his back as a way of maintaining pace. Now that they had proven there was a tunnel under Minerva, it was unclear to Stevie how far they had to go in this exercise. But if she knew anything about David, it was that he was going to find the other end of this passage, and if the other end was at the Great House, that was a good distance away.

So they went farther into the dark, step by step.

“So,” David said, his voice low, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe we just need to clean the slate.”

Stevie hesitated for a moment, losing contact with the back of his shirt.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Maybe I should give you everything so there’s nothing left for you to snoop for. Do you want to know about me? About my dad? Do you want to know the whole deal?”

Now? Now he was doing this? In some death crack under the ground?

But it made sense, in a way. It was dark. They couldn’t see each other. No one could hear them—not even Nate, who was too far away at this point. This was as private as you could get, and they were invisible to each other.

“Okay?” she said.

“I don’t tell people my dad is Edward King because he’s Edward King. But I also don’t tell people because it’s pathetic. It’s like every other dumb divorce story. But here goes.”