Buried Secrets: A Riveting Mystery (A Jacqueline Frye Mystery Book 2) by Alexandria Clarke

Author:Alexandria Clarke [Clarke, Alexandria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

10

Blackness pressed against my eyes as my toes slipped over the edge of the first step. I gasped and backed up, pressing my spine against the wall behind me. The bricks shifted, threatening to give way. I willed myself to take a deep breath and calm down. Never before had I been claustrophobic, but I had also never been trapped in a hidden stairwell at the very top of an old building.

Once I managed to get a hold of reason, I wormed my phone out of my pocket and turned on the light. It was a good thing I hadn’t tried to navigate the staircase blindly. The LED illuminated a set of deep steps, so deep that they disappeared into the darkness. Each one was coated in a layer of slime and mildew. With extreme caution, I lowered myself along.

The passageway had no windows and no doors. I kept one hand on the damp wall, to steady myself and to feel for discrepancies in the architecture. No other entrances gave themselves away, not until my ankles began to ache from the pressure of moving downward.

The stairway ended so abruptly that I almost ran into the brick wall. For one brief, heart-stopping second, I couldn’t find the door. Then I noticed a narrow groove etched into the wall. I fit my fingers into it, pushed and pulled, but the door didn’t budge. My heart rate quickened.

Panicking, I jiggled the door in every direction and discovered it slid open to the left. I practically fell out of the hidden passageway and into a vending room. In my haste to get out, I bumped my shoulder against the ice machine. When I slid the secret door shut, it clicked into place. It couldn’t be opened from the outside.

In the hotel hallway, sweating and shaking, I made my way to the elevator. The passageway had spit me out on the twenty-fifth floor. I’d walked down twelve flights of stairs. My legs shook like Jell-O.

As I rode the elevator to my room on the fourteenth floor, I pulled up the blueprints I’d studied in the museum downstairs. Squinting past the glare, I zoomed in on the penthouse details.

The secret passageway was not marked on the drawings.

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