Chapter 20 - The Mirror in the Guest Suite
Ethan didn't shout. He didn't smash the workbench. The revelation burned away every trace of panic, leaving behind a cold, lethal clarity.
Julian was alive. Julian was four years old. And he was not fifty feet beneath the earth in the concrete bunker; he was somewhere inside the estate grounds, close enough for a low-power analog transmitter to broadcast clearly to the attic antenna.
Ethan grabbed the signal scanner from the bench, unplugged its auxiliary battery pack, and connected a handheld directional antenna to the input port.
He swept the antenna around the attic. The signal strength meter jumped to maximum when he pointed the antenna not down toward the basement, and not out toward the dark garden, but south—directly toward the abandoned guest wing on the second floor.
The south guest wing had been closed off since Clara’s passing. It consisted of four suites that had housed Clara’s extended family during summer holidays, long since covered in canvas drop cloths and dust.
Ethan descended the service stairs with absolute silence, moving like a ghost along the unlit carpet of the second floor. He passed his own bedroom, passed the nursery where Thomas stood guard, and crossed through the heavy velvet curtains that divided the living quarters from the vacant guest wing.
He watched the scanner's signal meter. Three bars. Four bars. Five bars.
The needle pegged at maximum outside Suite 204—the former suite of Clara’s younger sister, Evelyn.
Ethan tried the handle. Locked.
He didn't waste time picking the lock. He stepped back, raised his right leg, and drove his heel directly beside the deadbolt. The antique pine doorframe shattered with a splintering crack, swinging inward into the dark room.
The smell of lavender and cedar greeted him, unchanged for years. Furniture stood like white specters beneath canvas sheets.
Ethan swept his flashlight around the master bedroom. Nothing. The bed was bare. The wardrobe was empty.
He moved into the adjoining bathroom. An enormous antique mirror with an ornate gilded frame was bolted to the marble wall above the dual sinks.
As Ethan stepped in front of the mirror, the signal meter on his scanner shrieked with acoustic feedback. He reached out and touched the glass. It wasn't cold like ordinary plate glass. It was warm.
Ethan inspected the gilt frame. At the bottom right corner, hidden within the carved acanthus leaves, was a tiny pinhole camera lens.
Behind this mirror was another room.
Ethan grabbed a heavy brass towel bar from the wall, ripped it from its plaster anchors, and smashed it against the center of the mirror.
The glass did not shatter into shards. It cracked like safety laminate, spiderwebbing outward to reveal a pane of two-way reflective security glass. Behind the fractured glass lay a brightly lit interior space.
Ethan drove the brass bar through the fractured glass again, clearing a jagged hole large enough to see through.
Inside was a cozy, fully furnished bedroom. On a small wooden table sat a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal and a glass of milk. On the bed lay an open storybook.
And sitting on the rug in the center of the hidden room, staring back at Ethan through the broken mirror with wide, terrified blue eyes, was a little boy with golden curls and Clara’s high cheekbones.
He was wearing a blue sweater identical to the one baby Leo wore on the terrace. But this boy was not eighteen months old. He stood upright with the balance and stature of a healthy four-year-old child.
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"Daddy?" the boy whispered, his voice trembling.
Before Ethan could swing the brass bar to clear the rest of the frame, a heavy shadow lunged from the blind corner of the hidden room, and an iron hand slammed a steel sliding panel shut across the mirror, cutting off Ethan’s view in a deafening bang of interlocking deadbolts.
