Read Online Celeste Bradley - [The Liar's Club 02] by The Impostor - Free Book Online

pleasure, Clara made her way up the final narrow set of stairs to the attic. She fished the key from her pocket and unlocked the door. As far as she knew, no one had missed this key in the year and a half that she had been making this trip, likely because no one in the sedentary Trapp household wanted to climb one more stair than was necessary.
    The attic was even darker than the hall, but Clara didn’t light her candle. By now, she knew every trunk and box by heart, and could whisk her way through the long narrow attic without a single stumble.
    At the far end, she stopped before a bare plank wall—all that separated her attic from that of the adjoining house. She tapped her knuckles softly on it three times, then stepped back.
    Before her, one of the widest planks shifted to the side, swinging on its last remaining nail. A small hand holding the stub of a candle came through, and Clara blinked at the sudden radiance as she took the holder and set it on a nearby trunk. Rose wasn’t nearly as comfortable in the dark as she was.
    Then a small head covered in a large cap emerged, and the rest of a slender young chambermaid slipped sideways through the narrow hole.
    “Hello, Miss Clara!”
    “Hello, Rose,” Clara replied warmly. “I’ve brought your payment. And this time, there’s lemon seed cake.”
    The girl’s thin face lighted at the mention of the sweets, but she politely waited for Clara to sit down and begin spreading the contents of the basket before she sat herself.
    When Clara had first met the next-door housemaid, she had been putting the last of Bentley’s things awayin the attic after his death. The sound of muffled crying had been very startling, especially as she had been shedding a tear or two of her own at the time.
    At first, she thought Beatrice had come upstairs to help her after all. Then she’d realized that the quiet, secretive sobs were coming from the wrong direction, not to mention they in no way resembled Bea’s theatrical wails.
    She had followed the sound to the far wall of the attic, where she had remembered that the Trapps’ house was one in a terrace of connecting houses around the rather exclusive Smythe Square.
    She’d never heard a sound from the houses on either side before, but the walls between were thick stone and quite impenetrable. For some reason, this wall had been left unfinished and planked over instead.
    The sound of weeping was growing more desperate, but eerily no louder. Her heart moved by the sad sound, Clara knelt beside the wall and knocked softly.
    “Hello? Are you ill? Is there anything I can do for you?”
    The sobs cut off immediately, and there was only silence from the other side of the wall, but somehow Clara knew that the weeper was listening. She sat down on the floor with her back to the wall, unwilling to leave someone alone in such pain.
    “I’ve been crying myself,” she said to the wall, leaning her cheek against the rough wood. “I know being sad is harder when you’re by yourself.”
    She heard nothing for a long moment, then came a mighty sniffle. Encouraged, Clara continued. “I’m sad because someone has passed away.”
    There came another sniffle, then a small voice. “Who?”
    “My husband. He is—was a soldier, fighting on the Peninsula.”
    “Napoleon got ‘im?”
    Clara shook her head ruefully. “No. No heroic finish for Bentley. He slipped in the mud and broke his neck on the way to the latrine.”
    There was a long moment of silence. Then Clara heard a muffled snicker. It was a terrible moment to laugh, Clara knew that, but she couldn’t help a giggle of her own. Then her pent-up sense of the ridiculous took over and she laughed with the stranger on the other side of the wall until more tears tracked her cheeks.
    When her helpless half-tearful giggles finally died down, Clara wiped her eyes, trying to feel bad but truthfully feeling a good bit better.
    “Did you love him?”
    Clara didn’t reply right away, because she