Bill Hopkins - Judge Rosswell Carew 02 - River Mourn (20 page)

Mrs. Bolzoni absented herself into the kitchen. Rosswell and
Ollie huddled in the parlor at a table under the three-tiered chandelier,
consulting the plan Ollie had gotten from the assessor’s office. The
old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs cast a bright, colorless light into the
room.

Ollie rapped his knuckles on the table. “Any ghosts
here?”

“Mrs. Bolzoni tells everyone the place is haunted.
Guests who stay in the attic have to pay more than folks on the ground floor
because, she says, the ghosts up there are far superior to the lower level
ghosts.”

“Sounds reasonable to me.” Ollie reached into his
pocket. “I got something better than we had last time. These are little but
strong.” He displayed two black flashlights. “Ultra-bright LEDs. About three
thousand candles in each of them. Good for five hours. Lithium battery. We won’t
go blind into a dark place this time.”

“Thanks.” Rosswell shoved one of the flashlights in
his pocket, then traced a path on the paper. “There’s a passageway right behind
that bookcase.”

Rosswell knocked on the wood at the back of the
bookcase. He reckoned it measured about twelve feet high, eight wide, and
stretched from floor to ceiling. Nine shelves held a lot of stuff, mostly
books, knick-knacks, souvenirs, and other unidentifiable stuff.

A hollow sound resounded when Ollie again tapped the
back of the bookcase in a different place. “There! Something’s not back there.”
He rapped once more. “What’s missing is a solid wall. The plan is right so far.”

Rosswell checked the parlor door. “Locked. Mrs.
Bolzoni won’t bother us.” He also tapped different places. “Do you think we can
open it and snoop around a bit?”

Ollie ran his hands over the edges of the bookcase. “It’s
got piano hinges floor to ceiling, not two or three dinky hinges like you’d
find on a regular door.”

“If you can see the hinges, that doesn’t make for a
secret passageway.”

“The assessor told you and I told you. They’re not a
secret.”

Rosswell needed to make his point. “Still, shouldn’t
the hinges be invisible to the naked eye? At least for aesthetic reasons.”

“This thing was built God knows when. Why did the
builder let the hinges show? I don’t know. I gave up guessing motives in 1998.”

“What happened in 1998?”

“I stopped wondering why people did things.”

Why do I let Ollie trap me in his silly word games?

“They’re hefty.” Rosswell glided his fingers along the
exposed hinges. “Pure brass is my guess.”

“Piano hinges are a good thing.”

“You say that like there’s a bad thing.”

Ollie folded his arms across his chest, then lifted
one hand to his mouth. He hemmed and hawed, muttered and stewed.

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

Ollie examined a couple of the hundred or so books and
inspected a few doodads in the bookcase. “If we open that and it tilts toward
us, we could have a pile of books and those thingamawhackies falling on us. We’d
be crushed like ants at a picnic.”

“I wonder when it was opened last?” Rosswell caressed
the grain of the wood. “Oak. Heavy as the purse of a bad nun with a good run at
a casino.”

“That’s another thing. Mrs. Bolzoni may not know about
the passageway. Or if she does, she’s too scared to open it.” Ollie’s breath
hitched, like a sob. “So am I.”

Rosswell chanted in a
sing-song
voice, “Fraidy cat, fraidy cat, ate so much, your head’s too
fat.”

“Yeah, funny, real funny.” Ollie inspected the bookcase
again, more slowly this time. “The hinges are clean, but dry. I think we can
swing it open without making a big squeak or pulling the whole library down on
us. Mrs. Bolzoni won’t hear a thing.”

“WD-40.” Rosswell flew out the door, jumped into the truck,
and raced back with a spray can of the lubricating oil in a few seconds. He
plunked it in Ollie’s grasp.

Ollie removed the cap from the can. “Got everything now?
It’s really handy when you break into places fully prepared.”

“No worries. I’m totally organized.” Rosswell grabbed
the can from Ollie, shook it fiercely a few times, then thrust it back. Ollie
spritzed the hinges.

After several minutes of pulling, pressing, and
poking, Ollie discovered the spot that, when pushed the right way, swung the
bookcase open. Rosswell leaned against it as it eased into the parlor, the
bottom clearing the floor by an inch.

Rosswell said, “Coming open, slowly but surely.”

“If we see any bodies in there, I’ll drag Gustave down
here myself.”

Rosswell held up a hand, signaling Ollie to pause. “I’m
never telling
Gustave another thing. He’s
bad.”

“Agreed.”

Rosswell nodded and they bent to the task.

Before the doorway into the lightless corridor fully
opened, a thick book sneaked from a shelf and tumbled onto Rosswell’s left
foot. The spine of the heavy volume caught him across the toes. A slight yet
distinct crack sounded. Rosswell fell backward on his butt.

“Ouch, damn!” Rosswell curled into a fetal position. “That
fracking book broke my big toe. Hurts like a mother giving birth to triplets.”
Whining because the fetal position made his foot hurt more, he unwound, working
himself into a squatting position. Afraid of losing his balance if he moved too
fast, he scooted over to the tome,
Moby-Dick
. When he stood, a quote
from the story hurried from his brain to his mouth. “ ‘The rushing Pequod,
freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging
into the blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her
monomaniac commander’s soul.’ ”

“Off to the hospital, Captain Ahab.”

“I’m not that hurt.” Rosswell sucked in a deep breath.
“If I can recall quotes, then my brain’s stronger than my pain.”

“Here’s some science to squash that positive thinking.”

“Give it to me.”

“You can’t walk with a broken toe.”

Rosswell leaned to one side. “Watch me.” Out of his
pocket flew the green bottle full of pills. He selected a painkiller, chewed
and swallowed it. “I’m good. Now get the duct tape out of my truck.”

Ollie hurried to the truck and back.

With the tape, Rosswell bound his big toe to its
neighbor and stood. “It’s only cracked. That will hold me for awhile.”

A pall of dust whooshed from the passageway when the
bookcase fully opened. Rosswell sneezed and wondered if the last people who
lurked in there had lived before the Civil War. The passageway, built with
narrow grooved boards running vertically, stood gloomy and silent, waiting for
someone’s visit. Rosswell compared the taste of the dust freed from the
passageway to the swirling motes of stuff in the bedroom at his grandmother’s
house where he stayed when he was a child. When he opened the window those many
years ago, the wind swept across cornfields, bringing grains of dirt and pollen
gusting in. To a kid, the air in the bedroom had tasted like the Sahara, only grittier.
His child’s eyes felt full of sand, especially after he’d fallen asleep at the
window, waiting for his mother to reappear, as he knew she would. Rosswell’s
grandmother—God (if there was one) rest her soul—had told him only that his
mother was “called away on business.” Grandmother never spoke of his father at
all. He’d never reappeared.

Now, Ollie saluted the inky darkness of the secret
heart of the house. “Onward, monomaniac commander. Let us plunge into the
blackness of darkness.”

Rosswell sneezed. “The white whale ate Ahab.”

Ollie grimaced. “I hope we meet no whales, white or
otherwise, in there.” Rosswell stepped across the threshold into the passageway.
Ollie followed. “This thing runs through the middle of the house.”

“If it ran along an outside wall, it wouldn’t have
windows. The neighbors would gossip about a house that had no windows.”

Ollie pouted. “I knew that.”

They flicked on the flashlights and plunged further into
the darkness, now lit by two beams of LED blue-white rays. The darkness,
equivalent to the bottom of a sunless cave, swallowed the light.

Rosswell stopped and fell against the wall when he
heard the noises—low-toned vibrations that punched his gut. The sounds made him
shiver. Prickles, running up and down his arms, made his neck hairs rise
straight up. Soft at first, the noises increased in intensity.

Barely above a whisper, Rosswell said, “Ollie.”
Rosswell placed his fingertips to the wall where the noises emanated. “This
place sounds haunted, like everyone says. Mrs. Bolzoni will raise the rates for
the entertainment value.”

They pressed their ears to the wall. Moaning, sounding
to Rosswell like it was human, grew louder, then softer. The noise recalled the
eerie sounds Rosswell had heard deep in the desert during the war. The tuneless
moaning happened at different times of day or night. Quite mysterious. No one
had ever been able to explain the source of those murmurings in the Middle
East.

Ollie spoke close to Rosswell’s ear. “Something is
suffering, sounds like to me. Doesn’t sound human.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“I didn’t say it was a ghost. Something not human.”

Rosswell listened closer until he recognized the sound
after a few seconds. “Oh. Wait. Never mind. Some of Mrs. Bolzoni’s guests. Afternoon
delight.”

“Sounds industrious.” Rosswell could hear the
embarrassment in Ollie’s voice. “They’ll be tired.”

Rosswell whispered, “We need to make less noise.”

Ollie nodded. Rosswell limped forward as gracefully
and quietly as he could. It was difficult for him not to bitch and moan over his
pain in the darkness.

The tunnel, about five feet wide, ran straight for
twenty feet until it ended in a brick wall. When they reached the wall,
Rosswell said, “There’s no tunnel going to another house here. Or, if there is,
it was sealed up long ago.”

“I like to call tunnels in a cave horizontal tubes.”

“Thank you, Mister Science.”

They shined the flashlights around, covering every
inch of the wooden walls to their left and right, and the brick wall in front
of them. At the same time, the flashlight beams crossed and landed on a large
picture frame, hung by wire and hook on the brick wall about six feet off the
floor. A drawing was visible behind the glass of the frame. Rosswell brushed at
the dust and spider webs.

Ollie whispered, “It’s a map of some kind.”

“Ink on paper. Not faded one bit.”

“It’s been in the
dark for a century or so. Ink doesn’t fade when the
sun doesn’t shine on
it. In addition, the temperature and humidity have been steady here for
decades. A study done in Brazil during the 1990’s—”

“Ollie, shut up.”

Ollie shut up.

Each of them grasping one side of the frame, they
lifted it from the hook, setting it on the floor. They kneeled in front of it,
hunched over it, and examined it. The flashlight beams revealed a professionally
drawn rendering, neatly lettered, and exquisitely detailed. Although the paper
may have been a tad browner than it was over a hundred years ago, Rosswell was
right. The ink appeared as fresh as the day it was drawn.

Rosswell said, “The map shows Nathaniel’s house.” He
brushed dust from the middle of the glass. “These lines here must represent
tunnels to these other two houses. I’ll bet my flashlight on that.” A basic
plan of all three houses displayed the location of the passageways in each
house and how they connected to each of the other houses. “And the cave is
right here.” His finger rested on the north side of Nathaniel’s house.

“Constructing two tunnels must’ve cost a lot of money.
It had to be dug by hand.”

Rosswell tapped the picture. “Slave hands built those
tunnels.”

“Who lives in those other two houses?”

“The assessor told me. None other than your two goofy
waitresses.”

“How could they afford houses like that?”

“You’re the research assistant. Add that to your list
of stuff to find out.”

Ollie hefted the framed map. “Let’s carry this to the truck.
We’ve got to sneak it by Mrs. Bolzoni. Then you know what’s next.”

Rosswell did a fist pump. “Time to commit more felonies.”

Rosswell squeezed the truck, the framed map sequestered behind
the seat, into a parking space on the courthouse square. “You make danged sure
that Mabel keeps Karyn and Jill hopping those tables as long as she can.”

“I’ll tell Mabel we need to burglarize their houses.”
Ollie made no move to leave the truck.

Rosswell hung his head. “This is a shakedown, isn’t
it?”

Ollie shrugged. “You know, a little honey for the pot.”

Rosswell fished out a hundred dollar bill and forked
it over to Ollie, whose hand stretched out with fingers wiggling. His hand didn’t
close over the money. Rosswell fished out another Federal Reserve portrait of
Benjamin Franklin and said, “That’s it. I’m busted flat till payday.”

“We both know you’re lying.” Ollie disappeared into
the restaurant, only to reappear in a flash. “Forgot to tell you. I’m not
putting anything on YouTube. What if Mary Donna’s relatives saw it?” He
disappeared into the restaurant again.

Rosswell, subdued by the club of conscience that Ollie
had whacked over his head, checked his cell phone. No messages from Tina. Or
anyone else. He plugged it into the charger, reviving the dead battery. He
likened the phone battery to his brain. Neither one was getting enough juice.
He thought about the upcoming foray into the belly of the beast and wondered
why bellies of beasts always had to be so small. And so dark. And so full of
critters.

“Why am I doing this?” he asked himself aloud, and
knew the answer immediately.
Because he longed for Nathaniel’s arrest
for the murder of the woman. The one he saw tossed off the ferry. If he couldn’t
prove Nathaniel killed the woman, maybe he could find Tina. He didn’t know
where else to look. This was his last plunge at Nathaniel. If he didn’t find Tina
at River Heights Villa, then he’d start looking somewhere else, but where? He
knew only that he’d better hurry. Death stalked him.

In the heat of the setting sun, Rosswell shivered,
wondering if the Grim Reaper’s search for him would be successful.