Chapter 3 - The Cold Gallery
They ran through the dark estate, their breath coming in ragged, white plumes in the unheated air.
Claire ran with a strange, awkward grace—her legs unaccustomed to long distances, her feet slipping on the polished parquet floor. Ethan kept his left arm wrapped around her waist, supporting her weight whenever her knees threatened to buckle.
Behind them, the high-pitched screams of Vivian echoed through the corridors: "Find them, Arthur! Don't let her touch the gate! If she leaves this house, the trust revokes!"
"Where does the east stair lead?" Ethan demanded as they reached a grand oak landing dominated by a stained-glass window depicting a hunting stag.
"To the conservatory," Claire gasped, her lungs burning from the unaccustomed exertion. "It opens... it opens onto the sunken gardens. But the iron gates are locked from the outside!"
"My chopper is parked in the lower courtyard past the glasshouse," Ethan said, guiding her down the spiral stone stairs. "Can you run thirty yards in the snow?"
Claire looked up at him, her hazel eyes flashing with a sudden, fierce light that had survived twenty years of darkness. "I can run to Boston if I have to."
They reached the floor of the conservatory. The air here was wet and freezing, filled with the scent of dead ferns and rotting soil. High above, the glass roof groaned under the weight of the accumulation of ice.
Ethan pushed through a pair of rusted wrought-iron double doors, stepping out into the full force of the mountain blizzard. The wind hit them like a physical blow, driving needles of ice into their faces. Claire gasped as her bare, rag-bound feet hit six inches of fresh snow, but she didn't stop. She pressed her face into Ethan’s leather flight jacket, her small fingers digging into his sides with desperate strength.
Fifty yards away across the drifting snow sat Ethan’s Bell 407 helicopter, its dark fuselage dusted in white, the rotor blades tied down against the gale.
Suddenly, a bright searchlight snapped on from the roof of the main house, pinning Ethan and Claire in a harsh, blinding beam of white light.
"Mr. Hale!" Arthur’s voice boomed through an external loudspeaker system installed along the eaves of the estate. "The helicopter fuel line was drained twenty minutes after you arrived! You aren't flying off this mountain!"
Ethan swore under his breath, looking toward the dark treeline three hundred yards down the driveway.
"The gatehouse!" Claire cried out against the wind, pointing toward a small stone cottage near the lower iron gates. "My father kept the old Land Rover in the carriage house behind the gate! He... he locked it before he died!"
"Is it still there?" Ethan shouted over the roar of the wind.
"Vivian never went down there!" Claire screamed back, snow crusting on her eyelashes. "She was afraid of the lower grounds! She said my father’s ghost walked the drive!"
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"Then let's go see your father's car," Ethan said.
He grabbed her hand, locking his fingers through hers, and turned away from the helicopter, running straight into the blinding white fury of the forest.
