Chapter 2 THE LETTER BENEATH THE STAIRS

The room they gave her was on the east side of the house, a high-ceilinged bedroom with a four-poster bed, a wardrobe of dark mahogany, and a window overlooking the courtyard. Someone had made up the bed with fresh sheets. A tray waited on the bedside table: pounded yam, egusi soup thick with ponmo, a glass of chilled zobo.

“The kitchen keeps food ready for visitors,” Mama Ronke said.

“Visitors?” Adesewa asked. “The Chief has been dead four days. Who was expecting visitors?”

“Eat, my daughter.”

Adesewa ate because she was hungry, and because the soup was extraordinary, and because refusing food in a Yoruba home was a small act of war she was not yet ready to declare. When she had finished, Barrister Okonkwo’s sealed envelope was waiting in her laptop bag, exactly where she had packed it.

He had given it to her in Lagos with a warning. Do not open this until you are inside the house.

She had thought it dramatic. Now, with rain hammering the windows and the portrait of the scratched-out woman fresh in her mind, she broke the wax seal and unfolded the pages.

The handwriting was an old man’s, spidery and slanted, written with a fountain pen that had skipped.

My dear Adesewa,

If you are reading this, then I am dead, and whatever the police have told you, I did not fall.

I am sorry to begin so brutally. I have lost the right to gentleness. I have also lost the luxury of time. Everything I own is now yours, and everything I fear is now yours as well.

I will not explain in a letter. Letters are read by the wrong people. But you must obey three instructions until you understand why they exist.

NEVER SLEEP IN THE WEST WING.

NEVER OPEN THE ROOM BENEATH THE STAIRS.

AND NEVER TRUST ANYONE WHO CALLS YOU THE LAST AGBODEMU.

You will hear that this house is cursed. It is not. Understand this above all else. Nothing in this house has ever been done by anything except human hands. That is the whole horror of it.

Trust the one who asks you for nothing.

Akinwale.

She read it three times. Then she took out her notebook, a habit from her accounting degree, and wrote, in neat columns: Facts. Questions. Things I can test.

Under Facts she wrote: He says he was murdered.

Under Things I can test: Everything.

She was still writing when a sharp knock rattled the door.

“Come in.”

The man who entered was in his late thirties, short, broad-shouldered, in an expensive navy agbada that fit like a threat. His smile arrived a full second after his eyes did.

“So,” he said. “The little heiress from Lagos.”

“Adesewa,” she said. “And you are?”

“Folarin Agbodemu. Chief Akinwale’s nephew.” He came in uninvited and surveyed the room as if pricing it. “I was the one who found him, you know. At the foot of those stairs, with his neck at an angle no neck should take. I called the police myself. I have also been running this family’s affairs for fifteen years, quietly, while the old man sat in his study writing letters to ghosts.”

“Then I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Are you?” He picked up the zobo glass and turned it in the light. “You never met him.”

“No.”

“Nor your parents’ families, apparently. Funny how that works.” He set the glass down too hard. “Let me save you some trouble, cousin. This house is old. It is expensive to keep. The roof leaks, the generator eats diesel like a goat, and the land titles are tangled in forty years of disputes. You will find it impossible. I’m prepared to buy you out. Cash. Today. Fifty million naira, and you go home to Lagos with a story to tell.”

Adesewa had never held fifty million naira in her imagination, let alone her hands. Her pulse jumped.

“That’s a lot of money,” she said evenly.

“It is a generous offer.”

“For a house you say is a burden.” She tilted her head. “Why would you pay so much for a ruin?”

His smile slipped. Just for an instant, she saw something sharper under it.

“Because I am a family man,” he said, “and I do not like strangers in family property.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Think quickly.” He stopped at the door. “And, cousin? Mama Ronke will tell you the west wing is haunted. Do not listen. She says it to keep young people from asking questions. The west wing is simply unsafe. The floors are rotten.”

“Thank you,” Adesewa said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

When he had gone, she sat very still. Folarin had mentioned the west wing without being asked. Chief Akinwale’s letter had warned her about the same place. One man called it haunted, one called it unsafe, one warned her not to sleep there, and not one of them had said what was actually inside.

She turned back to her notebook. Folarin knows about the letter, she wrote, and underlined it twice. Or he knows what’s in the west wing.

A soft tap sounded at the door.

Kola stood in the corridor holding a flashlight and a thermos. “Tea,” he said. “Mama Ronke says you don’t like coffee. She remembers you.”

Adesewa froze. “She remembers me?”

His face went blank in the way of someone realising a mistake. “She remembers that everybody from Lagos hates the coffee here.”

It was a smooth recovery. Too smooth. She accepted the tea.

“Kola. The room beneath the stairs. Where is it?”

For the first time, his composure cracked. “Who told you about that?”

“Nobody. I read it on a sign.” She watched him. “There is a room beneath the stairs, then.”

“There’s a storage cupboard under the main staircase. It’s been locked for years.”

“Locked by whom?”

“By the Chief.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” He met her eyes, and she believed him, and that unsettled her more than a lie would have. “I never asked. I don’t think I wanted to know.”

She nodded slowly. “And the west wing?”

“Closed since before I came here. Mama Ronke won’t cross the corridor after dark.”

“Because of ghosts.”

“Because of habit.” He picked his words with care. “She says that the first time she went in after sunset, something frightened her, and since then she refuses. I’ve never seen anything there but dust.”

“What did she see?”

“A woman’s voice,” Kola said quietly. “Calling a name.”

The room seemed to grow colder.

“Whose name?” Adesewa asked, though she already knew.

“Sewa-baby.”

Her mouth went dry. Nobody on earth called her Sewa-baby. It was the pet name her mother had used, her aunt had told her, the one her mother used when singing her to sleep. Nobody else living had ever known it.

“That,” she said, steady as a steel rod, “is not funny.”

“I’m not joking, Miss Agbodemu.”

“Who told her that name?”

“Nobody told her. She heard it. Eleven years ago, in the dark. And I can see by your face that you know it.”

Adesewa stood up. The tea trembled in her hand. “There is a rational explanation for this.”

“I hope so,” said Kola. “I would very much like to hear it.”

“Pipes. Echoes. A recording. A person.” She counted them off. “People do not hear voices from dead mothers. They hear voices from living people.”

“Then you believe someone is in the west wing.”

“I believe,” Adesewa said, “that I’m going to find out.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he almost smiled. “You really are your mother’s daughter.”

The sentence landed between them like a dropped plate.

“You knew my mother,” she whispered.

Kola’s expression closed like a door. “I only mean,” he said, “that you have the same stubbornness. Mama Ronke says so.”

He bowed his head, set the thermos on the table, and left.

Adesewa waited until his footsteps faded. Then she picked up her notebook and wrote one more line, pressing so hard that the pen tore the page.

Everyone in this house is lying. The question is which lies are protecting me.

Outside, thunder cracked across the sky. Somewhere far down the dark corridor, a door closed softly.