David here, with a Saturday morning update. Peter is sent to the little town of Auboine for supplies, and brings back "an account, of which the following is the substance:-- It belonged, together with a large part of the adjacent forest, to a nobleman, who now resided with his family on a remote estate. He inherited it, in right of his wife, from his father-in-law, who had caused the more modern apartments to be erected, and had resided in them some part of every year, for the purpose of shooting and hunting. It was reported, that some person was, soon after it came to the present possessor, brought secretly to the abbey and confined in these apartments; who, or what he was, had never been conjectured, and what became of him nobody knew."

And now let me jump ahead to La Motte's discovery of a trap-door in the floorboards of an upstairs closet. It opens onto a steep and trembling staircase which carries him down to a passageway ending in a grated cell. "Upon the ground within it, stood a large chest, which he went forward to examine, and, lifting the lid, he saw THE REMAINS OF A HUMAN SKELETON!!!" La Motte's unerring conclusion: "[T]he object before him seemed to confirm the report that some person had formerly been murdered in the abbey."

The concealment of this discovery is the first of many evasions La Motte will practice on the other members of his household in the forest. Avoiding detection is something of an obsession with him, whether the central obsession or the by-product of other, deeper-lying obsessions still unknown to us. It's his search for a surer hiding place within the abbey that uncovers the skeleton. Adeline's going to come across it, too. Won't the palpitations ensue then!