Avery, Xander, and Jameson break through the brick wall sealing Toby Hawthorne’s old wing. Avery wonders whether Tobias Hawthorne deliberately left the barrier easy to remove, as if waiting for someone to question Toby’s disappearance and find what had been hidden.

Inside, Avery finds a preserved suite with mirrored halls, a library, sitting room, study, large bedroom, closet, and bathroom. The rooms appear untouched since Toby supposedly died twenty years earlier. As the group searches, Jameson uncovers a hidden compartment in an armoire filled with travel-sized liquor bottles, while Xander finds secret stashes of pills and powder beneath the bed.

The wing proves full of concealed spaces: hollow books, trick drawers, a false closet back, and a passage behind the two-way hallway mirrors. In the library, Avery discovers a fixed clock that opens to reveal a homemade cipher disk, suggesting Toby was raised in Tobias Hawthorne’s world of puzzles and coded games.

Xander notices Jameson has gone silent and catches Jameson replacing a loose marble floor tile. Under the tile is an empty metal compartment engraved with lines from William Blake’s poem A Poison Tree, about hidden anger growing into lethal vengeance. Avery connects the poem’s theme of suppressed wrath with the contraband, the Hawthorne Island fire, and the possibility that Toby had been angry about something he never voiced.

Before Avery can draw conclusions, Mr. Laughlin appears at the broken entrance. Distressed and angry, the groundskeeper orders the teenagers out of Toby’s sealed wing, cutting short their investigation.