Vincent Blake believed his son was dead. He believed the body was here. I thought about the Blake family seal, the fact that Toby had stolen it, his father’s reaction when he had.
You know what I left there, Toby had written my mother long ago. You know what it’s worth. A teenage Toby had stolen the seal—and left a hidden copy of “A Poison Tree” by William Blake for his father to find.
“He wanted you to know that he knew the truth.” It felt right somehow to be addressing Tobias Hawthorne. This was his legacy.
All of it.
“What did you do,” I whispered, “when you found Vincent Blake’s son on your property?”
When he’d realized that a man had come at him through a sixteen-year-old girl. That girl might have fancied herself in love, but Tobias Hawthorne wouldn’t have seen it that way. Will Blake was in his twenties. Mallory was only sixteen.
And unlike Vincent Blake, Tobias Hawthorne didn’t believe that boys would be boys.
What happened to him? I could hear Eve asking. Your Liam. And all Mallory Laughlin had said was Liam left.
Why did he leave? He just did.
I started walking and ended up in Toby’s old wing, reading the lines of “A Poison Tree” and the diary that Toby had kept in invisible ink on his walls. I understood young
Toby’s anger now, in a way I hadn’t before. He knew something.
About his father.
About the reason the adoption was kept secret.
About Will Blake and the decision to hide a dangerous man’s only grandchild in plain sight. I thought about Toby’s poem, the one we’d decoded months ago.
Secrets, lies, All I despise.
The tree is poison, Don’t you see?
It poisoned S and Z and me. The evidence I stole
Is in the darkest hole. Light shall reveal all I writ upon the…
“Wall,” I finished now, the way I had then. But this time my brain was seeing all of it through a new lens. If Toby had known what the seal was when he stole it, that meant he knew who Will Blake was, who Vincent Blake was. And if Toby knew that…
What else had he known?
The evidence I stole Is in the darkest hole.
When I’d recited this poem for Eve, she’d asked me, Evidence of what? She’d been looking for answers, for proof. For a body, I thought. Or more realistically at this point, for bones. But Eve hadn’t found any of it yet. If she had, Blake wouldn’t have laid this task before me.
I want the truth that Tobias Hawthorne hid from me all these years. I want to know what happened to my son.
Hawthorne House was full of dark places: hidden compartments, secret passages, buried tunnels. Maybe all
Toby had ever found was the seal. Or maybe he found human remains. That thought was insidious because some part of me had suspected, deep down, that that was what we were looking for, before Vincent Blake had ever told me as much.
His son had come here. He’d targeted a child under Tobias Hawthorne’s protection. In his home.
Where would a man like Tobias Hawthorne hide a body?
Oren had disposed of Sheffield Grayson’s body—how, I wasn’t sure. But Vincent Blake’s son had disappeared long before Oren had come to work for the old man. Back then, the Hawthorne fortune was new and considerably smaller. Tobias Hawthorne probably hadn’t even had security.
Back then, Hawthorne House was just another mansion.
Tobias Hawthorne added onto it every year. That thought wound its way through my mind; my heart pumped it through my veins.
And suddenly, I knew where to start.
 |
I pulled out the blueprints that Mr. Laughlin had given me. Each one detailed an addition that Tobias Hawthorne had made to Hawthorne House over the decades since it was built. The garage. The spa. The movie theater. The bowling alley. I unrolled sheet after sheet, plan after plan. The rock- climbing wall. The tennis court. I found plans for a gazebo, an outdoor kitchen, a greenhouse, and so much more.
Think, I told myself. There were layers of purpose in everything Tobias Hawthorne had ever done—everything he’d built. I thought about the compartment at the bottom of the swimming pool, about the secret passages in the House, the tunnels beneath the estate, all of it.
There were a thousand places that Tobias Hawthorne could have hidden his darkest secret. If I came at this randomly, I’d get nowhere. I had to be logical. Systematic.
Lay the plans out in chronological order, I thought.
Only a handful of blueprints were marked with years, but each set showed how the proposed addition would be integrated with the House or surrounding property. I needed to find the earliest plan—the one in which the House was the smallest, the simplest—and work forward from there.
I went through page after page until I found it: the original Hawthorne House. Slowly, painstakingly, I put the rest of the blueprints in order. By dawn, I’d made it halfway through, but that was enough. Based on the few sets that had dates on them, I could calculate years for the rest.
I’d been focused on the wrong question in Toby’s wing. Not where Tobias Hawthorne would have hidden a body— but when? I knew the year that Toby had been born, but not the month. That let me narrow it down to two sets of plans.
The year before Toby’s birth, Tobias Hawthorne had erected the greenhouse.
The year of Toby’s birth had been the chapel.
I thought about Jameson saying that his grandfather had built the chapel for Nan to yell at God—and then I thought about Nan’s response. The old coot threatened to build me a mausoleum instead.
What if that hadn’t been a threat? What if Tobias Hawthorne had just decided it was too obvious?
Where would a man like Tobias Hawthorne hide a body?
