The Clockwork House

by Wendy Saunders

  ‘Sold,’ he grinned and dropped a kiss on her lips. ‘If I hustle, I’ll be up at the house in time for lunch. Do you need any help getting everything in the truck?’

  ‘I’m good,’ she shoved him playfully, ‘get going.’

  He gave her one more glance before heading out. Smiling to herself she whistled for Bailey who had made herself at home on Kelley’s couch, wincing when she saw the sheer amount of dog hair stuck to the fabric.

  ‘We’re definitely going to have to brush you later,’ Ava announced.

  Bailey howled and rolled over onto her back.

  ‘Drama queen,’ Ava rolled her eyes. ‘He won’t love you if you keep shedding everywhere you know.’

  Still, she thought to herself as she grabbed her keys and headed out of the apartment, he certainly wouldn’t be sleeping on the couch tonight.

  Kelley’s apartment was more or less right on the edge of town, so she left the truck and took a pleasant walk down to the waterfront. Although she’d not been before, Rosie’s wasn’t hard to find. She opened the door to the merry tinkle of bells and found Drew already sitting in one of the aqua colored booths.

  ‘Hey,’ she greeted as she slid in opposite him.

  ‘Hey,’ he returned as a well-rounded, middle aged woman headed toward them with a pot of coffee and two mugs.

  ‘Drew,’ she smiled widely, ‘nice to see you back on the island. You back for long? Your mama was in the other day with Kelsey.’

  ‘My sister,’ he told Ava. ‘Ava this is the famous Rosie, best pancakes on the island.’

  ‘Oh, go on with you,’ Rosie flushed.

  ‘Rosie this is Ava,’ he grinned. ‘She’s the one who’s inherited the scary ghost house.’

  ‘So I hear,’ she smiled warmly and offered her hand to Ava. ‘You’re braver than I am, but welcome to the island sweetheart. I heard you’re giving me a run for my money, “cooks like a dream” is the word.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Ava shook the offered hand. ‘I’m looking forward to trying your pancakes though, Kelley says the blueberry’s the best.’

  ‘Oh, that boy,’ she shook her head fondly, ‘the blueberry was his favorite. He ate his way through stacks of them all the way through high school, I have no idea how that boy stayed so skinny. I had the three of them in here constantly. Drew, Killian and Kelley, the three musketeers.’

  ‘I’ll try the blueberry then,’ Ava decided.

  ‘Me too,’ Drew grinned.

  Rosie grabbed a rolled-up order pad from the front pocket of her apron, and a stubby pencil from behind her ear, and made a quick note. Then with a smile in their direction she headed behind the counter.

  Ava took a slow sip of her coffee and turned to study Drew.

  ‘You said you found out something about the house?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Drew replied with an excited smile, reaching for his briefcase.

  ‘The blueprints?’

  ‘Still in the wind,’ he shook his head, a little of his frustration bleeding through the excitement, ‘but I managed to get my hands on these instead.’

  He lay out a folder on the table and flipped it open; the pages appeared to be copies of something.

  ‘The originals are all part of an exhibit about Talbot’s life and work, housed in Boston, but I managed to get the curator to send me copies. These are all the original notes and ledgers.’

  ‘Okay,’ she stared down at them, not really sure what she was looking at. ‘Why don’t you explain it to me.’ She eyed what appeared to be a hand drawn sketch of some sort of honeycomb.

  ‘These here are all the ledgers he kept while building the house on Midnight Island. It details all the materials and laborers etc. It’s mostly boring stuff, but it’s the notebooks that are the real find. He talks about finding naturally occurring caves in the cliff.’

  ‘My cliff?’ Ava replied.

  ‘Yeah,’ Drew nodded. ‘These sketches are of the caves he found, though it’s drawn by hand and not entirely accurate. After all it’s not like they had access to ground penetrating radar or anything, but it gives you a rough idea of the size and scale of the tunnels and caves that ran through the cliff. It was like honeycomb.’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ Ava frowned. ‘I mean, if there’s caves beneath the house won’t it collapse? Is that why the floor gave way?’

  ‘No,’ Drew shook his head. ‘We still don’t know why the floor gave way, but the caves, their natural formation gave them stability, just like the honeycomb. Talbot loved the caves so much he strengthened them and then made them into hidden rooms and corridors for his children to play in.’

  ‘So, they were part of the original building?’

  ‘Definitely,’ he replied, ‘and it looks like there are more of them down there.’

  ‘More hidden rooms?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘I don’t exactly have a map to work with here, but this is what I’ve been able to find out from the notes. There’s the one in the study, there’s the one in the scullery, there’s one hidden somewhere in the butler’s pantry, and another in the billiards room.’

  ‘They all have concealed entrances?’ Ava asked.

  ‘They do. Some of them are small, little more than hiding spaces, like the one in the scullery. Talbot originally designed those ones as hiding spots for when the children were playing hide and seek. He created a few more of these tiny spaces on the second and third floors, and in the attic space, but it’s the ones on the ground level that are really interesting. These lead down to lower levels inside the cliff itself. Many of these were made from the naturally occurring caves.’

  ‘They didn’t look like caves.’

  ‘That comes from his need to make everything look neat and tidy. He clad the walls in plaster and paneling to hide the fact that they were pure stone. I only noticed myself when I saw the part of the wall that had collapsed in the room you and Kelley found the bodies in. Although, on closer examination it wasn’t the wall that had collapsed just the plaster and wood paneling.’

  ‘So, there’s a load more hidden rooms, but we don’t really know where.’

  ‘We have a rough idea, with the exception of one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ava asked.

  ‘Talbot talked of a tunnel, the biggest of all of them. He implied it ran all the way down from the top of the cliff to the private beach at the bottom, but he didn’t say where the entrance to it was in the house and I’ve been down to the beach. I’ve never seen any caves or entrances down there.’

  ‘Could it be underwater now?’ Ava wondered. ‘I mean, it’s been over a century and a half.’

  ‘It’s possible I suppose,’ Drew scratched his freshly shaved jaw. ‘I’ll look into any documented cases of costal erosion on the island. Tom, who mans the lighthouse at the other end of the island, would probably know the most about that.’

  ‘Well if there are more hidden rooms,’ Ava grimaced, ‘I just hope there are no more bodies.’

  ‘Could you imagine it though,’ Drew grinned, ‘if after all this time, we managed to solve the mystery of what happened to Luella Lynch and all those missing kids.’

  ‘I guess,’ she frowned,

  ‘I wonder if she did kill them.’

  ‘I’d rather not think about that,’ Ava frowned. ‘There’s enough sadness and misery connected to that house without adding in the corpses of little children.’

  ‘I know,’ he replied softly in sympathy. ‘Sometimes I get carried away and I forget you weren’t raised with the legend. I guess after all this time, you kinda stop thinking of them as real people.’

  ‘Well they were real people,’ Ava muttered.

  ‘Do you think all the other rooms and passageways are hidden by those same clockwork mechanisms?’ Drew changed the subject slightly, leaning back and smiling as Rosie delivery two plates stacked with delicious looking pancakes dripping with butter and syrup.

  ‘Enjoy,’ she smiled before disappearing again.


  ‘I don’t know,’ Ava picked up her fork and cut away a mouthful, ‘maybe… oh my god.’ Ava almost purred as her eyes rolled back in her head, ‘this is so… I wonder if I can convince her to give me the recipe.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Drew laughed, ‘many have tried and failed. Family secret and all that.’

  ‘Damn,’ Ava muttered as she went back to devouring her stack with gusto. ‘Anyway, I think that I know who designed the clockwork locks,’ she mumbled around a mouthful of pancakes.

  ‘Ephraim Lynch?’

  She swallowed hard.

  ‘How did you know?’ she reached for her coffee.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he took a mouthful of his own breakfast. ‘I just put two and two together and came up with a master horologist. There’s no proof as of yet, but it seems like too much of a coincidence. Those locking mechanisms didn’t come off an assembly line, they took time and an insane amount of skill. I have had trouble coming up with anyone of note during that time period, who would have been capable of producing work not only on that scale but of that quality, but it was widely acknowledged that Ephraim’s work was commissioned by royalty. We need to get a look at the other hidden rooms to see if they also have the same mechanisms. How did you find the one in the study?’

  She stared at him as she slowly chewed and swallowed.

  ‘Luck,’ she finally answered carefully, ‘just stumbled across it.’

  She wasn’t ready to tell him the truth, not when she didn’t fully understand it herself. Somehow, she’d just known where it was, just as she had with the one in the scullery. The same way she’d known how to reveal the skeleton key concealed inside the pocket watch.

  Drew leaned back in his seat, patting his completely flat belly beneath his expensive suit.

  ‘Damn I’ve missed Rosie’s pancakes.’

  Ava smiled softly.

  ‘You grew up here then?’

  ‘Yeah, with the two Ryan assholes,’ he grinned.

  ‘Do you come back often?’

  ‘Not as often as I’d like,’ he shook his head, ‘not as often as I should. I started my own architectural firm about two years ago and it keeps me pretty busy.’

  ‘I don’t know, you seem to be here quite a lot.’

  ‘At the moment I am, I cheated,’ he smiled. ‘I passed some of my workload off to some of my staff. I’m not known to do that usually. I’m pretty picky but I couldn’t pass up this project. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, to not only work on a Talbot but to help unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the town I grew up in. There’s still enough of the boy in me that I can’t resist.’

  Ava nodded in understanding.

  ‘It’s too easy to get caught up,’ Ava stared out of the window. ‘There’s something about that house, that just…’

  ‘Pulls at you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she turned back to look at him, finding him staring at her with a small smile playing at his lips.

  ‘Kelley’s a lucky guy,’ he chuckled. ‘If he wasn’t one of my best friends, I’d steal you away.’

  Ava laughed. She liked Drew, there was something very honest and open about him. She’d never liked pretenses and inherently distrusted anyone in a thousand-dollar suit, but Drew just had this way about him. Just like Killian and Kelley, maybe because they’d grown up together. Killian was quiet and sturdy; the practical one you could always count on. Kelley was smart and funny, the one who’d always make you smile when you were down and who was so easy to be around. Drew was all fire and manic energy, driven and ambitious but not in a bad way. He was the kind of guy who could make you believe anything is possible if you just set your mind to it and work hard enough.

  ‘Well,’ Drew drained his coffee and nipped the bill off the table before Ava could protest. ‘I’ll take care of this and visit the restroom. I’ve got to stop by and see my mom quickly or she won’t forgive me. Then I can meet you guys up at the site later?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ava nodded, watching as he headed to the cash register.

  She glanced at the guy sitting in the booth behind them as Drew moved. For a second they made eye contact but then he quickly looked away, turning his attention back to his phone. Picking up her coffee she turned to gaze once more out the window, watching the gulls circling the bay and the ferry heading back out for another run.

  Suddenly she felt a tight grip on her wrist and turned sharply to look. It was a woman in her thirties, with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes. She was leaning in close, her eyes wide and her skin pale.

  ‘GET OUT!’ she hissed.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Ava frowned, pulling on her wrist, trying to get the woman to let go.

  ‘You need to get out, it isn’t safe. She’s watching you.’

  ‘Who?’ Ava tugged her arm again but for such a slight woman she had a fearsome grip. ‘Who’s watching me?’

  ‘She’s watching you and she won’t let you go,’ the blonde woman’s fingers tightened causing Ava to wince in pain. ‘There’s so many of them, she won’t let them go.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Rosie’s voice cracked firmly. ‘Let her go Julia.’

  ‘You have to listen to me,’ the woman called Julia yanked on Ava’s arm, causing a sharp pain to shoot through her wrist. ‘Why won’t you listen to me?’

  There was a jangle of bells and the diner door swung open with a clatter. Another blonde woman, this one older, hustled into the room and headed for Julia.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized, ‘I’m so sorry, she got away from me for a moment. I was at island market and I turned around and she was gone.’ She grasped onto the younger woman and pulled her away, ‘Julia let go of her.’

  ‘BUT SHE HAS TO LISTEN, SHE HAS TO RUN! SHE’S WATCHING HER!’ Julia yelled desperately.

  ‘It was you,’ Ava frowned with a sudden startling realization as Julia finally released her wrist and was pulled away from her. ‘You were the one who trashed my RV?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the older woman shook her head, ‘my daughter is unwell as you can see. Please, we’ll pay for any damages or inconvenience but please don’t involve the sheriff. I’ll keep her away from you I promise.’

  ‘NO!’ Julia began to struggle, ‘NO YOU HAVE TO LISTEN, SHE’S COMING FOR YOU! SHE’S GONNA HURT YOU!’

  ‘Come on Julia,’ Rosie took her other arm gently. ‘Joyce, I’ll help you get her to your car, you should probably get her home.’

  Joyce nodded miserably.

  She turned back to Ava. ‘Once again, I’m so sorry for my daughter’s behavior. She doesn’t mean anything by it.’

  Ava watched in shock as they pulled her from the diner, still yelling.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Drew asked softly as he reached for her wrist.

  She flinched slightly as he examined it carefully.

  ‘You’re gonna have a nasty bruise, but I don’t think it’s damaged.’

  ‘She had a really tight grip,’ Ava frowned. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Julia Mays,’ Drew blew out a slow sympathetic breath. ‘She’s something of a local legend around here herself.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘As a teenager, Julia, her boyfriend Todd and their best friend Declan all thought it would be a great idea to break into the Lynch House and spend the night. No one knows exactly what happened that night, but she was the only one who walked out alive and she’s never been the same since.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ Ava murmured as she glanced at the door the woman had been dragged through. ‘I think I remember Killian or Hope mentioning them when I first came to the island. Didn’t one of the boys fall off the cliff?’

  ‘One of them took a dive from the second-floor balcony and the other ran screaming from the house and ran straight off the edge of the cliff.’

  ‘I wonder what made him do that?’ she frowned. ‘Was he depressed?’

  ‘No,’ Drew shook his head, ‘honors student with a full ride to college. Loving home, great friends, just like the other two. There have been
a lot of rumors over the years, but like I said, no one really knows what happened that night except Julia and no one’s ever been able to get a straight answer out of her.’

  Ava wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly feeling cold and uneasy.

  ‘She’s watching you…’

  ‘Come on,’ Drew wrapped his arm around her, ‘why don’t I make sure you get up to the site safely? I can visit my mom afterwards.’

  She should have declined but she didn’t. At that moment something churned uncomfortably in her gut. She couldn’t put a name to it, but if she had it may have been something like dread. She found herself wishing she had Bailey with her. It didn’t feel right without the solid comforting presence of her furry best friend, instead she took the comfort Drew was offering and was grateful for it.

  But as he held the door for her and shuffled her out into the warm sunlight, neither of them noticed the guy who’d been sitting behind them lower his phone, having filmed the entire strange exchange.

  20

  By the time she was firmly settled at her makeshift, street food shack on the cliff top her nerves had settled, but then again cooking had always soothed her. She stirred the jasmine rice and checked on the samosas while Bailey settled happily at her feet. It felt good to have her at her side again, and although Killian had asked her to make sure she wasn’t roaming free about the building site, she had to admit she was missing spending time with her dog, so she was keeping her very close. She also realized that the altercation with Julia Mays had shaken her up more than she thought.

  ‘Hey,’ a familiar voice called as Bailey leapt up, not just her tail but her whole-body wagging in excitement.

  ‘Hey,’ Ava moved the pan off the heat, as Kelley strode toward her. ‘I didn’t think you’d be done for another hour or so.’

  ‘Miranda is covering for me,’ he reached down and scrubbed Bailey’s fur, until she collapsed to the ground in paroxysms of delight. ‘Drew called me,’ his serious green eyes fixed on her. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Is that why you came?’ she tilted her head, her heart thudding in her chest, ‘to check on me?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he straightened and crossed the distance between them. ‘You’re not just the woman I’m sleeping with Ava, I care about you.’