Cairn let his rough tongue exfoliate her chin for a minute before she ruffled his tufted ears and grudgingly rose from bed. “Come on, elephant paws,” she said. “Let’s investigate.”
She found her father passed out in the library with only half his body on the couch, one hard twitch away from completely rolling off onto the floor. Even as the antique grandfather clock bonged three times to announce the ungodly hour, Emile Delacroix snored sonorously with his cheek pressed into the sofa cushion. A wine goblet lay in ruins on the floor. The Malbec it once contained soaked into the fibers of the carpet in an indelible burgundy stain.
Cairn stepped over the shards, and with a groan, hoisted her father’s unwieldy limbs back onto the sofa. As far as she knew, he hadn’t slept in the queen-size bed he once shared with Ahna since her death. Cairn tucked the quilt around him tightly enough to immobilize him and used the corner to dab at the drool on his cheek. In the past two months, Emile Delacroix had devolved into a shell of his former self. He had taken an early sabbatical from the university and spent his nights raiding the impressive wine cellar he’d furnished with Ahna, as if by drinking every last bottle, he would purge the painful memory of her someday. Even the gray streaks at his temple, which once lent him a debonair allure, had proliferated, aging him ten years in ten weeks.
Cairn planted a kiss on his forehead and through the haze of sleep, he mumbled, “I love you.” She couldn’t be sure if the words were intended for her or the ghost of her mother.
She wandered off to find a broom to sweep up the shattered glass. Squall dutifully trailed behind her, but as they passed the dungeon-like door down to the wine cellar, Cairn noticed too late that her father had left it ajar. The mischievous lynx darted through the opening into the off-limits basement before she could slam it shut.
Cairn silently cursed her father as she descended the creaky stairs into the cool stone cellar and faced the veritable labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling wine racks. This room represented two decades of marriage, hundreds of bottles from every fertile corner of the globe. Portugal, Japan, Chile, New Zealand—every coastline Ahna had traveled for a marine biology expedition, every remote mountain town where Emile had sampled the geological record. They always returned with cases of wine, port, or sake from any vineyard they could find.
Now their prized cellar had become an accelerant for her father’s downward spiral into alcoholism, and as of two minutes ago, a playground for one mischievous kitten.
Cairn wandered the aisles, listening for the telltale whisper of Squall’s oversized paws on the dusty stone floor. Finally, she caught the fleeting sight of his tail vanishing around a corner, a plume of dust drifting in his wake. “Now you’re going to need a bath tomorrow,” she called out, “so the joke is on you, my filthy friend.”
She found the little Arctic tiger playing with a rogue bottle in the basement’s deepest alcove. Squall would swat it and watch, mesmerized, as it spun in lazy circles, before repeating the process all over again. He momentarily froze when he saw Cairn, whiskers drooping with guilt—then carried right along with his game as if she weren’t there.
As Cairn reached down to retrieve the troublemaker, she noticed a curious thing: Squall’s fur was bristling. His fluffy mane billowed around him as though caught in a light breeze. Sure enough, when she extended her hand, she felt a cool current originating, impossibly, from the cellar wall.
When Cairn lowered herself to the ground, she found air circulating through a three-foot section where the stone wall met the floor. Then the current turned abruptly vertical, as she traced it up through a nearly invisible gap in the mortar between the stones.
“What the …?” Cairn whispered.
Then it hit her.
She was standing in front of a secret door.
There was no visible handle, and Cairn slapped the stones surrounding it in vain, hoping to depress a hidden switch.
In the end, she stepped back and stared at the wall with arms crossed, demoralized. Squall nuzzled against her shins to provide moral support.
On a whim, Cairn picked up the bottle of Chenin blanc the lynx had been toying with. Her parents had attached tags to each bottle, identifying when and where they’d been acquired. As fate would have it, this particular bottle was dated July 9, 2002—Cairn’s birthday—and the tag listed its place of origin as the Loire Valley. She had been born there while her father was on an extended study of the French cave systems.
Cairn smiled softly. Maybe one day her father would share a glass of this special vintage with her. For now, she found the only empty spot in the nearby wine rack and deposited it back into its wooden cradle.
As she released the bottle, its weight triggered an unseen mechanism with a sharp hiss.
A blast of cool air enveloped her as the hidden door swung open. An eerie blue glow trickled out from within.
Cairn stepped into a small room that had been designed to look like an ice cave. Colorful fish darted past the glass of a long aquarium embedded in the frozen walls. The room was mostly unfurnished, except for a desk with a computer and a landline phone—bizarre since the Delacroix family hadn’t used a household line since the advent of cell phones.
Cairn collapsed into the desk chair, beginning to realize what she’d stumbled upon.
Her mother had built a lair.
Desperate for answers, she scrolled through the landline’s outgoing calls. There were hundreds of them—all to a single number.
Cairn’s finger hovered over the call button, but she hesitated. Presuming the mystery number’s owner knew of her mother’s passing, they would understandably be spooked if they received a call from beyond the grave, in the dead of night no less. She keyed the number into her phone instead, only to discover that she had no service in this underground bunker. That explained the landline at least, but not why her mother needed this level of privacy. Had she been having an affair? If she called this number, would she find herself talking to Ahna’s lover?
No matter the outcome, Cairn faced a chilling realization:
She hadn’t known her mother half as well as she thought she had.
Squall joined her in the room, batting at the glass every time a fish swam by. Her mother must have designed the aquarium to be self-sustaining for its inhabitants to have survived this long in her absence.
Cairn noticed a dark spot in the ice wall, a blemish in the otherwise pristine Arctic blue. It was a frosted glass panel, obscuring a human-size shadow within. As she approached, the door whisked open.
Cairn stumbled back in terror. A monster loomed within the shadowy recess of the enclosure. She backed into the desk and nearly toppled over it trying to get away.
But when the silhouetted figure remained motionless, she peered closer.
She had been frightened by a costume.
To her credit, the mask had been designed to inspire fear—a helmet of grays and blacks, textured to resemble a coral skeleton and punctuated by two dark eye sockets. Walrus tusks framed the jawline.
The dark suit that clung to the mannequin was sleek and form-fitting, with a lightweight armor plating the torso and thighs. The legs tapered down into a pair of half-calf combat boots.
“Oh, hell no,” Cairn said, before running out of the room.
When Cairn awoke the next day, she was lying on the lair’s floor, though she couldn’t remember falling asleep there. She groaned as she peeled her face off the fake ice and stretched her stiff limbs.