Your bridegroom is six feet under in the frozen timber, Clara, and crying won't buy your fare back to Missouri.
The morning crawled by under Elijah’s watchful eye. He instructed me to help Thomas with chores, deliberately keeping us separated.
He wanted to make sure I couldn’t whisper a word, not about the blood, not about the asylum. The implication hung in the air like dust motes in sunlight.
Around noon, Elijah announced he was riding out to inspect the perimeter fences. “Wouldn’t want any squatters laying claim to our silver vein,” he muttered, cinching his saddlebag. His eyes flickered to me, a warning.
The moment he was out of sight, a cold resolve settled over me. Delirium or not, the blood had been real. The scraping had been real.
I had to find proof.
I remembered his locked trunk, tossed carelessly into a corner of the parlor. He’d locked my own trunk, too.
I crept back inside, my heart thumping against my ribs. The parlor was still, the air heavy with the scent of old woodsmoke.
Elijah’s trunk sat near the fireplace, a heavy brass lock glinting on its clasp. I didn’t have a key.
My gaze fell on the iron fireplace poker. It was long, sturdy, with a hooked end.
Gripping the cold metal, I knelt beside the trunk. The lock was old, stubborn. I jammed the poker into the keyhole, twisting, prying, ignoring the scraping noise it made against the brass.
It took five agonizing minutes, my muscles trembling, before the lock finally groaned and then, with a sharp crack, sprang open.
I threw open the lid, my breath catching. Inside, neatly folded clothes and a few worn books. Nothing immediately sinister.
Then, tucked beneath a false bottom, I spotted a small velvet pouch. It felt heavy in my hand.
My fingers fumbled with the drawstring. Inside lay a silver pocket watch. Its casing was tarnished, but even in the dim light, I could see the etched initials: “S.D.”
Silas Delaney.
I turned the watch over. The glass was cracked right across the face, a spiderweb of damage. The hands were frozen, stuck at precisely 3:15 AM.
My gaze dropped to the back of the watch. It wasn’t just tarnished. It was caked in something wet, dark, and foul-smelling. A thick, viscous black silt. It smelled of stagnant water, of decay, of something ancient disturbed.
This wasn’t just mud from a boot. This was the distinct, reeking mud that only came from the bottom of a deep, subterranean water well.
Silas had not died peacefully in his bed from lung-rot. He had been somewhere else at 3:15 AM, covered in this black filth, his watch broken. The same time I had heard the scraping. The same time I had seen the blood.
My hands began to tremble. This wasn’t delirium. This was proof.
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