Even though it was the dead of night, I made Oren take me to the armory. Following him through twisting hallway after hallway, all I could think was that someone could hide forever in this house.
And that wasn’t counting the secret passages.
Eventually, Oren came to a stop in a long corridor. “This is it.” He stood in front of an ornate gold mirror. As I watched, he ran his hand along the side of the frame. I heard a click, and then the mirror swung out into the hallway, like a door. Behind it, there was steel.
Oren stepped up, and I saw a line of red go down over his face. “Facial recognition,” he informed me. “It’s really only meant as a backup security measure. The best way to keep intruders from breaking into a safe is to make sure they don’t even know it’s there.”
Hence, the mirror. He pushed the door inward. “The entire armory is lined with reinforced steel.” He stepped through, and I followed.
When I’d heard the word armory, I’d pictured something out of a movie: copious amounts of black and Rambo-style cartridges on the walls. What I got looked more like a country club. The walls were lined with cabinets of a deep cherry–colored wood. There was an intricately carved table in the center of the room, complete with a marble top.
“This is the armory?” I said. There was a rug on the floor. A plush, expensive rug that looked like it belonged in a dining room.
“Not what you were expecting?” Oren closed the door behind us. It clicked into place, and then he flipped three additional dead bolts in quick succession. “There are safe rooms scattered throughout the house. This doubles as one—a tornado shelter, too. I’ll show you the locations of the others later, just in case.”
In case someone tries to kill me. Rather than dwelling on that, I focused on the reason I’d come here. “Where are the Winchesters?” I asked.
“There are at least thirty Winchester rifles in the collection.” Oren nodded toward a wall of display cases. “Any particular reason you wanted to see them?”
A day earlier, I might have kept this secret, but Jameson hadn’t told me that he’d looked for—possibly found—the clue corresponding to his own middle name. I didn’t owe him any secrecy now.
“I’m looking for something,” I told Oren. “A message from Tobias Hawthorne—a clue. A carving, most likely of a number or symbol.”
The etching on the tree in the Black Wood had been neither. Mid-kiss, Jameson had seemed convinced that Toby’s name was the next clue—but I wasn’t so sure. The writing hadn’t been a match for the carving at the bridge. It had been uneven, childlike. What if Toby had carved it himself, as a kid? What if the real clue was still out there in the woods?
I can’t go back. Not until we know who the shooter is. Oren could clear a room and tell me it was safe. He couldn’t clear a whole forest.
Pushing back against the echo of gunshots—and everything that had come after—I opened one of the cabinets. “Any thoughts on where your former employer might have hidden a message?” I asked Oren, my focus intense. “Which gun? Which part of the gun?”
“Mr. Hawthorne rarely took me into his confidence,” Oren told me. “I didn’t always know how his mind worked, but I respected him, and that respect was mutual.” Oren removed a cloth from a drawer and unfolded it, spreading it across the table’s marble top. Then he walked over to the cabinet I’d opened and lifted out one of the rifles.
“None of them are loaded,” he said intently. “But you treat them like they are. Always.”
He laid the gun down on the cloth and then ran his fingers lightly over the barrel. “This was one of his favorites. He was one hell of a shot.”
I got the sense that there was a story there—one he’d probably never tell me.
Oren stepped back, and I took that as my cue to approach. Everything in me wanted to shrink back from the rifle. The bullets that had been fired at me were too fresh in my own memory. My wounds still throbbed, but I made myself examine each part of the weapon, looking for something, anything, that might be a clue. Finally, I turned back to Oren. “Where do you load the bullets?”
 |
I found what I was looking for on the fourth gun. To load a bullet into a Winchester rifle, you cocked a lever away from the stock. On the underside of that lever, on the fourth gun I looked at, were three letters: O. N. E. The way it had been etched into the metal made the letters look like initials, but I read it as number, to go with the one we’d found on the bridge.
Not infinity, I thought. Eight. And now: One. Eight. One.
