Chapter 2 - The Door Under the Carpet
Julian moved first.
He dragged the heavy carpet away from the center of the funeral room.
Beneath it was a rectangular seam in the hardwood.
A hidden hatch.
I had attended services in that room for fifteen years.
I had never seen it.
Julian hadn’t either.
“Open it,” I said.
Victoria smiled.
“No.”
Chloe tightened her arms around my neck.
“Mama says bad children go downstairs.”
Julian stared at his wife.
“What did she just say?”
Victoria’s expression flickered.
I crouched beside Chloe.
“Sweetheart, have you been downstairs?”
She nodded once.
“How many children are there?”
She held up four fingers.
Then hesitated.
Added another.
Five.
Julian staggered backward.
“That’s impossible.”
Victoria laughed softly.
“What exactly is impossible, Julian? That your family has a basement?”
“My family?”
That wording mattered.
I looked at him.
He had owned the funeral home property for eight years.
Or claimed he did.
His father, Raymond, purchased it decades earlier as an investment attached to the family estate.
But Julian rarely handled the building himself.
Victoria managed almost everything after they married.
Accounts.
Staff.
Scheduling.
Renovations.
Even the locked lower records room Julian told me was “structurally unsafe.”
I suddenly remembered Chloe asking me something six months earlier.
Grandma, why does Mommy bring food to the dead people downstairs?
I thought she was confused.
Children mixed dreams with reality.
That was what Victoria always said.
I had accepted it.
Now I hated myself for it.
Julian grabbed a fireplace poker and forced it beneath the hatch.
Victoria snapped:
“Stop.”
He looked at her.
“Give me one reason.”
Her calm finally cracked.
“Because once you open it, there is no putting your family back together.”
He tore upward.
The hatch opened.
Cold air rose from below.
A narrow staircase disappeared into darkness.
Then came the sound.
Crying.
Children.
I stepped toward it.
Victoria grabbed my arm.
“You don’t understand what’s down there.”
I ripped free.
“Then explain.”
She looked at Chloe.
“You want to know why she was in that casket?”
“Yes.”
“Because she saw one of them.”
Julian stared.
“One of who?”
Victoria whispered:
“The children your father paid us to hide.”
Silence.
Raymond.
Julian’s father.
Dead for four years.
Julian shook his head.
“My father never—”
Victoria smiled bitterly.
“You really think this started with me?”
Then a little boy’s voice drifted up the stairs.
“Mrs. Vale?”
Victoria closed her eyes.
The child knew her name.
And Julian whispered:
“Vale?”
May you like
Our family name was Mercer.
Victoria had just been called by a name none of us recognized.
