I admired them, unable to fathom why a girl who lived with a father like John and jewels this spectacular would ever consider running away, unless the man John wanted her to marry was a real monster.
With a grunt directed towards the bulky clothing, I knelt to reach the drawer at the bottom of the armoire. It was jammed, and for a moment, I wondered if it was just for show. With a hearty jerk, I dislodged it.
It was shallow and empty, except for a cell phone charm that read Happy Graduation! in one corner.
I stared at it. "What on earth?" I squeezed my eyes closed then opened them. The flashy, twenty-first century charm clashed with the world I was slowly adapting to.
Unease went through me. I plucked it up and saw it was connected by a thin wire to something beneath the bottom of the drawer. I pulled it, and the false bottom popped up.
"Three cell phones."
Just like the sheriff said. Three other girls sent to live with John, maybe even for the same reason I was there: to change history. I had wanted to write them off as posers after John's money, until Carter confirmed others might have preceded me. My faith in him was shaken once more, and I hesitated to touch the cells. The whispers were back but too faded for images to form.
There was something wrong about these phones, an instinct, a knowing, a flare of intuition that told me something bad happened to those who owned them.
None of them left. Sheriff Hansen had said.
Three phones. Three whispers at the well …
Both located on John's property.
No. The man on his deathbed had nothing to do with this. I couldn't even entertain the possibility.
Coldness filled my chest, freezing it. I cocked my head to the side, struggling to decipher what the empathic memories were attempting to convey. The only thing I saw was the same images from down the hallway: shadows, blood, voices, a fire. The energy or memories around the phones were too weak to show me anything.
I touched one phone. The cool metal beneath my fingertips made my dread grow stronger.
"Flip phone," I almost giggled, a little hysterically. The bulkiest cell phone was clearly from the late nineties, while another looked like it was closer to five years old. The third was newer, maybe two years old. The women they belonged to had been taken from different years but sent to this one.
I touched the start button at the bottom of the youngest phone, not expecting its screen to light up.