Wax

  Poppy inhaled. Was it the police? Or maybe the crazed arsonist, back to finish the job? “What do we do?” she asked Jill. “Hide?”

  “They’ll still see our cars!”

  “So?”

  “So your car is the most recognizable car in Vermont!”

  “Not to a deranged mountain hermit arsonist who doesn’t own a TV!”

  While they argued, the car crested the top of the hill, rendering their conversation moot. And the driver turned out to be much worse than a deranged mountain hermit.

  Blake got out of his car​—​Poppy didn’t know what kind it was, only that it probably cost more than her house​—​and looked at the two girls standing before him. Confusion muddled his face. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  At the sound of his voice, Poppy recoiled. She’d worked hard to get rid of this habit, but it never failed to crop up in his presence, as if he were crumpling her soul like a used-up Post-it. But this time, with her innocence on the line, she managed to scrape up an ounce or two of bravery and stand her ground. “What are you doing here?” she shot back.

  “Asked you first, Your Porkness. Surprised those stumpy little hooves of yours were able to get up this hill.” Cue the hyena laugh.

  But . . . it didn’t seem as though his heart was in it. And his eyes weren’t narrowed and penetrating and mean the way they usually were. He seemed distracted, his gaze darting around the trees as if he thought he was being watched. As if he was going through the motions of insulting Poppy because that’s what he was supposed to do, but in reality he had more important things on his mind.

  Out of all the arson-related questions she could have asked next, even Poppy was surprised to hear herself blurt, “Who did you hire to make that sculpture of me?”

  Blake glanced anxiously at the tanks. “I didn’t.”

  He left it at that. And that’s when Poppy knew something was wrong. Blake Bursaw never, ever missed an opportunity to boast about his reprehensible accomplishments. He hadn’t shut up about “Hogwash” for one second since Halloween. But now he wasn’t rubbing his wickedness in her face. He wasn’t bragging or swaggering​—​it was as if the prank had become an afterthought, only a day later.

  “Oh, come on, Blake, I know it was you,” Poppy said. “I saw the video — that was your voice. You obviously​—”

  “I didn’t hire anyone to sculpt it,” he said, “because it was already sculpted.”

  “What?”

  But by this point Blake was full-on ignoring her. He walked right past the girls, toward the trees beyond the tanks​—​on a mission, it seemed. “Blake, wait!” Poppy sputtered. “Did you set the fire?”

  He didn’t answer. He kept walking until he reached the edge of the clearing, then disappeared into the trees.

  “Forget about him,” Jill said, pulling on Poppy’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here before someone sees us​—”

  Before she could properly think it through, Poppy took off running, flying through the trees in an effort to keep Blake in her sights. Dodging branches and taking care not to trip over any tree roots, she soon spotted him up ahead, moving quickly but assuredly down the hill until he burst out of the trees. Moments later, so did Poppy.

  She stood there, staring, as the dimensions in her brain reprogrammed themselves. She was looking at the Grosholtz Candle Factory, but from behind​—​an angle she’d never seen it from before. The retail store was in the distance; slightly closer was the warehouse area, a mess of delivery trucks and loading docks. Closest of all was the rear of the factory​—​including the charred ruins of Madame Grosholtz’s studio. Bands of bright yellow police tape roped off the perimeter, but they didn’t seem to deter Blake, who was confidently striding toward them.

  That flutter of yellow snapped Poppy out of her confusion. Why would he return to the scene of the crime?

  And where is everyone?

  The rubble was deserted. There wasn’t a single police officer, detective, or fire marshal on site.

  Blake didn’t seem at all surprised by this. He ducked under the caution tape without hesitation.

  Poppy shouted his name. He froze in an awkward crouching position.

  She hurried down the rest of the hill, blowing past a Paraffin Resort personal sauna in the process​—​then retreating and turning left at the structure instead, as she’d blundered into a patch of thistles. She tried not to think about Madame Grosholtz when she finally stepped onto the warped wooden floor of the studio, but reminders of her were everywhere​—​piles of scorched fabric, the smell of burned lacquer in the air, the sheer cragginess of it all. And wax​—​so much wax, the molten residue of all those beautiful sculptures, colors swirled together, smooth and puddled and hardened on the floor in one big sheet, like a marbled ice-skating rink.

  Poppy’s breath caught. There, poking up out of the solidified wax​—​

  Madame Grosholtz’s glasses.

  A few feet away: Her heavy black dress. A wad of hair. And a pair of dainty black boots that couldn’t have belonged to anyone else.

  It was one thing to pull facts from Wikipedia or read what had been written in the stone candle’s engraved message. It was quite another to stand atop the proof, to literally walk across the melted remains of a centuries-old wax sculptress.

  Poppy did what she could to pull herself together. “Where are the police?” she demanded of Blake. Her distress at Madame Grosholtz’s disappearance had nowhere else to go, so it bubbled over and splashed directly onto him. “And what are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “You started this, I know you did!” Poppy had no idea where all this nerve was coming from, but she kept rolling with it. “And in the course of trying to prove that, I came into possession of something . . . weird . . . and it came from this factory, and​—​and​—” And the owner of this studio, who was supposed to be very much dead, was very much alive until yesterday, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t trust Blake with something as big as that. “And I’ve got a lot of questions, but then someone burned down the only way I can get answers. And pretty soon the police are going to think I was the one who did it! But I didn’t!”

  Blake looked at her​—​not as a snake looks at a mouse, but as one decent person might look at another decent person. “I didn’t either.”

  “Then, seriously, why are you here?”

  Reluctant, Blake sucked his lips into his teeth. He looked back up the hill, then out toward the town. “Late Friday night, the Chandlers called my house to talk to my dad and my grandma. My dad said it got heated. Then yesterday, Dad and Gram left early in the morning​—​which is weird, because they usually sleep in on the weekends. They wouldn’t tell me where they were going, but I heard them say something about candles or scents or something as they left.”

  He scratched his head, looking pained. “They came back a little while later, but something was off. I don’t know how to describe it. Like . . . different. Like they weren’t themselves. Dad​—” He paused. “This is going to sound crazy, but Dad’s face? It looked, like, wrong. Like he’d gotten plastic surgery. Probably not noticeable to anyone but me, but I could tell something was different. And Gram wasn’t wearing her glasses,” he continued before Poppy could answer. “I’ve never once seen Gram without her glasses. Whoever heard of an eighty-year-old woman’s eyesight getting better overnight?”

  “She is an extraordinary woman,” Poppy deadpanned.

  As a mark of how preoccupied he was, he didn’t stop to retort. “I just can’t​—​I don’t know. Something is off,” he repeated.

  Poppy was about to keep giving him the badass treatment, but the wounded way he was talking made her soften her tone. “What had the Chandlers called about the night before?”

  “They were threatening to press charges against me for theft.”

  “What did you steal?”

  “That sculpture of you.”

  P
oppy started. “Wait wait wait. You stole the sculpture from the Chandlers? Why did the Chandlers have a sculpture of me?”

  He turned his head away from her, but it sounded like he muttered, “Not just you.”

  “What?”

  Blake let out a huff. “Why should I keep talking to you about any of this, Palladino? So you can run off to the police and turn me in?”

  “I’m the one they’re looking for! I was caught on camera in the factory, in an area I was not supposed to be in, not long before the fire was set!” Blake scoffed, but Poppy wasn’t letting up. “Can you at least tell me where you got it?”

  “I broke into their property. Actually, I didn’t break into anything, it was already open. So, really, it was just there for the taking.”

  “The Chandlers had a sculpture of me that was just there for the taking.”

  “Yes.”

  Poppy was baffled. “Why?”

  “I don’t​—” Blake’s face remained pensive for another second or two, but then he made a dismissive noise and narrowed his eyes. “You should go,” he said, reverting to his sneering self.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m gonna dig around and see what I can find. So you should get out of here.”

  “I am absolutely not going anywhere.”

  “You’ll slow me down!” He took a step toward her. “I want to find out what’s going on with my family!”

  She took a step toward him. “And I don’t want to get arrested!”

  Suddenly the floor gave way beneath them. They fell a couple of feet, flailing, crashing into each other, and finally landing painfully on a set of concrete stairs.

  “Owww,” Poppy groaned, rubbing her bruised back. She picked up a piece of the shattered wooden floor, a portion of the Grosholtz Candle Factory logo carved into its surface. She looked up to find a rectangular opening. “A trapdoor,” she said, realizing the spot they’d stepped on was the sunken area she’d noticed the day before, the divot in which that big toe had swirled around.

  Blake agreed with a grunt. “Must have caved under the weight of the wax. And us. Well, you.”

  Poppy ignored the barb, taking a few steps down the darkened stairway. Maybe Madame Grosholtz is inside! she thought, hoping that the old woman had used the crawlspace as an emergency shelter. But when the stairs ended in a dark, narrow hallway, she realized it wasn’t a crawlspace.

  It was a tunnel. And it led directly into the mountain.

  Poppy hesitated, but only for a second. Jill had probably lost interest and gone home by now. And this spurt of bravery certainly wasn’t going to last forever.

  Slowly, she turned to Blake and held his gaze. “I’m game if you’re game.”

  Blake heaved a grunty sigh​—​but didn’t say no.

  Poppy felt around as she walked through the tunnel, using her cell phone as a flashlight. The walls were made of black stone that was smooth and frigid to the touch​—​as if it were made of solid ice.

  “Where are we?” Blake whispered after they’d walked for a minute.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to go in front?”

  Poppy did want him to go in front​—​she would have preferred any bullets or butcher knives or flaming arrows to go into the guy who’d made her life a living hell​—​but her utter aversion to acting like a damsel in distress won out. “No, I’m fine,” she said, turning around to look at him so that he could see how fine she was.

  “Then you might want to watch out for that​—”

  “Ow!”

  “Door.” His smirk was nearly audible. “You seem to have a lot of trouble with doors.”

  Poppy shook off the embarrassment and raised her cell phone flashlight. In place of a doorknob was a metal ring shaped like a figure eight, through which Poppy looped her finger. It felt cold in her hand, and heavier than seemed possible for its size​—​as if it had been forged out of some metal that didn’t play nice with the laws of physics. When she gave it a yank, it yanked back, slipping from her hand and dropping back onto the wood with a crash.

  Poppy cringed. “Well, now we’ve knocked.” She backed up, careful not to bump into Blake. “Guess we just have to wait.”

  “For what?” Blake said with a laugh as the door swung ajar beneath his touch. “It’s open.”

  And he slipped inside, as if this place, like everything else in Paraffin, belonged to him.

  12

  Trespass

  POPPY HAD EXPECTED WHATEVER WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the door to be as cold and dank and dark as the tunnel they’d gone through to get there, but when she stepped over the threshold, what struck her was:

  Warmth.

  Comfort.

  Tranquillity.

  And light.

  Hundreds of thin white tapered candles in every direction she looked. In sconces on the walls, in candelabras hanging from the ceiling, in elaborate wrought-iron stands groping up from the floor. Countless little licks of flame, bathing the room in a flickering, buttery glow.

  “What is this place?” Blake asked, craning his head up.

  “I don’t know,” Poppy whispered. Whispering felt appropriate. “It looks like a cathedral.”

  It certainly echoed like one. Even with the luminosity of the candles, the empty space yawned out in front of them, a disquieting hollowness that sent shivers up and down Poppy’s arms. Though the architecture of the cavern was undoubtedly Gothic​—​pointed arches, dramatic ornamentation, and ribbed, vaulted ceilings​—​there was something alien about it too. The space felt unnaturally tall, taller than it should have been, given its depth inside the mountain. No windows. The ridges in the walls seemed almost organic in nature​—​sinewy, like tendons. Wax coated every surface, ranging from smooth pools to bulging globs. Hardened stalagmites stuck up out of the ground, and precarious stalactites hung from the lofty roof above, poised like the teeth of some great beast. It was as if the entire structure had been trickled into existence, drip by drip.

  Shadows jerked everywhere, the little flames throwing monstrous shapes onto the walls. Poppy’s and Blake’s figures looked distorted as they walked, their shoes squelching into the soft wax on the floor. “Look,” Blake said, pointing. “Footprints.”

  It was hard to tell how many sets there were. Poppy could identify a high heel and maybe a work boot, but she couldn’t get more specific than that​—​especially since they crisscrossed all over the wax, approaching five different doors. Two of them, labeled IN and OUT, were set into the right-hand wall, and two more, labeled UP and ACROSS, were on the left.

  Poppy turned around and looked at the door through which they’d entered: BETWEEN. “Where do you think the rest go?” she asked Blake.

  “Don’t know.” He tried each one in succession, but they were locked. Poppy knocked on ACROSS, but the solidness of it was a tangible thing​—​it tossed her fist back with cold indifference. A giant faucet stuck out of the door labeled IN, its surface made of clean, shiny metal, as if it had been recently retrofitted into the door. Nearly two feet in diameter, it emptied into a pool​—​almost like a baptismal font, but with a globby hill of wax accumulated around its drain.

  Also in keeping with the cathedral theme, a rectangular slab of heavy stone sat on a raised platform at the head of the space​—​an altar of sorts. Dark, dried drops oozed over its edges, layered on top of older, inkier stains.

  “Is that blood?” Poppy asked Blake.

  “How should I know?”

  Poppy pulled The List out of her bag, carefully placed it on the altar, and began to sketch out a general map of the cathedral, labeling each door so that she could obsess over them later. “You might not know, but you should at least care.”

  Blake was neither knowing nor caring nor listening to a word Poppy was saying. Behind the altar, the chamber ended in a rounded wall​—​further cementing the feeling of a church​—​and it was this wall that now commanded Blake’s attention. He walked to
ward it, frowning.

  Poppy looked up from her sketch and followed his gaze. “Are those photographs?”

  “Tintypes,” Blake said without thinking​—​then his eyes widened as he realized how uncool it was for him to know something like that. “I mean, I think. I saw something on TV about them.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” said Poppy, deciding to milk this moment for all it was worth. “Do tell me more about the history of photography, Professor.”

  He scowled at her. “They’re old, okay? That’s all I know. Like, eighteen hundreds.”

  They were old. The portrait on the left was of a young but severe-looking woman with a heart-shaped face and piercing, ambitious eyes. The portrait on the right was of a man with a thin black mustache and an expression that conveyed either puzzlement or indigestion. They both wore nineteenth-century attire, and each portrait was placed inside a gilded frame.

  Blake took a sharp breath. “Holy . . .”

  “What?” Poppy abandoned her diagram and stepped down from the altar to join him at the wall.

  He looked from the portraits to her, incredulous. “Are you not seeing it?”

  Poppy stared at the photos. Then stared some more. Then, like one of those hidden 3-D images, it snapped into place.

  “Whoa,” she said, backing away. “They look just like the Chandlers!”

  “Yeah.” His voice had gotten tighter, his breaths shallow. “They do.”

  “Must be their great-grandparents or something.” She took some quick snapshots of the portraits with her phone. No matter what angle she stood at, their eyes seemed to follow. “But wait​—​does that mean Anita and Preston are brother and sister? I always thought they were married​—”

  With a lunge, Blake tried to pry the frames off the wall, but they held fast. Poppy cringed as his grunts echoed through the cavern. “Calm down, Blake.”

  “No, I won’t calm down! These bastards did something to my family!” He walked up to each door and tried to kick them down as his rage intensified, railing and shouting, punching the walls​—​

  Click.

  The door marked UP parted down the middle, revealing an elevator.