The first thing Daniel Hayes noticed was that Eleanor Whitmore had pushed a heavy walnut desk against the bedroom door from the inside.
The second thing he noticed was the blue ribbon tied around the brass handle.
It was a strange ribbon to find on a door that the mistress of Willow Creek Ranch insisted nobody must open.
Eleanor stood beside the window in a cream dress that looked expensive enough to buy three horses.
Her face had the pale, exhausted appearance of someone who had not slept in days.
Daniel remained near the threshold while the housekeeper, Mrs. Ada Bell,
waited halfway down the hall.
Eleanor told Ada to leave them alone.
The housekeeper hesitated before withdrawing, and Daniel heard her shoes retreat toward the servants’ staircase.
He asked again what needed fixing.
Eleanor touched the edge of the desk instead of answering.
She said she had heard someone moving inside the wall behind her bed every night for a week.
Daniel looked toward the paneled wall, where a small iron grille stood above the fireplace.
He asked why she had not summoned the carpenter.
Eleanor swallowed and told him that her husband owned the carpenter’s wages, his home, and nearly every acre surrounding the ranch.
Daniel understood that this was not a request about a squeaking floorboard.
He asked whether Richard knew she had called for him.
She shook her head.
Then she admitted that Richard had left for three nights, and she believed he had made certain plans before departing.
Daniel moved closer to the desk but kept his hands at his sides.
He told her that the warning he was about to give could ruin his employment and place both of them in danger.
Eleanor asked him to speak plainly.
Daniel pointed to the blue ribbon.
He said he had seen the same ribbon tied to the stable gate before an injured mare disappeared last autumn.
He had seen it again on a storage-room door before a locked chest was carried away in the dark.
Eleanor stared at the ribbon as though it had crawled onto her bedroom door by itself.
She insisted she had never tied it there.
Daniel said somebody had marked her room for a visit.
Eleanor asked whether Richard had ordered it.
Daniel did not pretend to know.
He only knew that the ribbon had appeared on two previous occasions before somebody took something that was not theirs.
She stepped back from the desk, and the look in her eyes made Daniel regret speaking so quietly.
Eleanor said she had pulled the desk against the door because she heard a key turning in the lock during the night.
Daniel asked who else possessed a key.
She named Richard, Ada, and the estate steward, Thomas Vane.
Then she admitted that she had found another key beneath the edge of her mattress that morning.
Daniel asked to see it.
Eleanor opened a jewelry box and handed him a narrow iron key with an unusually square bow.
He recognized the metalwork before she could explain where it came from.
He had repaired a similar key for Vane two days earlier.
Vane had claimed the key belonged to an unused cabinet in the grain office.
Daniel laid the key on the dresser beside a framed miniature of Eleanor’s late mother.
He told her that he believed someone was preparing to enter her room while her husband was away.
Eleanor whispered that she had feared exactly that.
Daniel asked why she had chosen him instead of a magistrate or a family friend.
She opened the drawer of the heavy desk and brought out a thin piece of paper.
The paper contained a charcoal sketch of the iron grille above her fireplace.
Beneath the sketch someone had written a single instruction in a hand she did not recognize.
The instruction read, ‘Ask the man who mends iron why the wall has two faces.’
Daniel looked up so sharply that Eleanor recoiled.
He had received almost the same message the previous morning, scratched onto the inside of a horseshoe.
His message had been shorter, but it had ended with her name.
He asked her whether she trusted Ada Bell.
Eleanor said Ada had cared for her since the day she entered Willow Creek as a bride.
Daniel told her to ask Ada to bring an oil lamp and wait outside the room.
He then approached the fireplace and knelt to examine the iron grille.
One screw was older than the others, and the soot around its edge had been disturbed recently.
Daniel pressed the grille with his thumb and felt something shift behind the wall.
He did not open it immediately.
Instead, he turned back to Eleanor and asked one question.
He asked whether she had ever been told what had happened to the first Mrs. Whitmore.
Eleanor went still.
Richard had always told her there had never been a first Mrs. Whitmore.
Daniel said he had no wish to accuse her husband without proof.
Nevertheless, the ironwork behind her bed carried a maker’s mark dated six years before her marriage.
The mark included the initials of a woman whose name Daniel had heard whispered in the town of Ashford.
Her name was Lydia Whitmore.
