Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (8 page)

Carol gave me a second key to the gates, along with my first bill--for the gates. I drove over to town and found a local bank so I could open a checking account for operations here in Rockwell County. Then I drove out to Glory's End. The two halves of the black wrought-iron gates fit perfectly on the hinge pins. The complete gate set was sixteen feet wide and about eight feet high in the middle. The padlock keys worked just fine, but I noted that the gates themselves didn't offer much actual security, as anyone could simply drive onto the edge of the open field on either side to get around them. I made a note to hire a backhoe to come out and make that harder. Leaving one half of the gate open, I drove up to the main house and turned the shepherds loose.

Nothing had changed, as best I could tell. A gentle spring breeze was stirring the trees around the house. I could see signs of bulbs sprouting in the garden beds among all the weeds. The view from the porches was very nice: rolling fields, dense greenery down in the river bottoms, and a few thousand trees beginning to swell their tops with a green haze. I heard a vehicle coming up the gravel drive. It turned out to be Sheriff Hodge Walker, rolling in his personal cruiser.

"Saw the gates open, thought I might find you here," he said, getting out of his vehicle. The shepherds greeted him, and he stopped to pet each one. "Heard you resolved your ghost problem the other night."

"After a fashion," I said. "I nailed a shooter, and the weapon was the same one that fired the warning round, but so far we can't tie him to an employer." I told him about the parole officer's little playacting with Billie Ray.

"I'll pulse the Manceford County system, see if we can find out what kind of ride your ghost is drivin' these days," he said. "Get that data up in our patrol division computers. One of my deputies sees your ghost, we'll get you some warning."

"I'd certainly appreciate that," I said. "I don't think he knows about this place, but there's no telling, these days. A deed gets recorded, and a Web search can find it."

"Maybe not quite yet, not in this county," he said with a grin. I remembered the old man down at the courthouse.

We chatted for a few minutes. I gave him my cell phone number and told him I'd be staying across the road in the stone cottage as soon as they got a lease drawn up. He took it all aboard, wished me luck with the restoration project, and left. I went inside the house to look around some more.

Some old houses are spooky by nature. This one wasn't. I think there were simply too many tall windows to give any self-respecting real ghost any privacy. I liked the way the floors had become a little wavy here and there, and I tried to visualize what it would look like with new paint and furnishings. I reminded myself to get all that weird wallpaper off the ceilings. The subground floor was a little more gloomy but smelled pleasantly of a hundred-plus years of fireplace smoke and old wood.

I noticed that the floorboards on the lowest level did not feel as solid as I would have expected. Was there a basement? I went looking, and the shepherds followed me from room to room, sniffing everything. The main kitchen was on this half-underground floor. It was dominated by a huge, nineteenth-century-style walk-in stone fireplace built against the rear wall. Based on the layer of ashes in the grate, it was still operational. The floor was made of random-width pine boards, burnished to a mahogany color by years of use and kitchen spills. The fireplace stuck out into the kitchen a good five feet from back to hearth. It was flanked by pantries on either side. I found what I was looking for in the right-hand pantry--a trapdoor, which I assumed led down into a basement. What surprised me was the bits of fresh mud on the floor and the fact that the crack around the trapdoor was clear of any dust and debris. Someone had been down there, and
recently, too. I wondered if it had been Ms. Valeria, on that day when I encountered her in the house.

I pulled up the trapdoor and latched it back against the empty shelves. A set of surprisingly wide wooden steps led down into complete darkness. I looked for a light switch, but there wasn't one. I searched around the kitchen for a flashlight, but the drawers were mostly empty except for some ancient cooking utensils. There was a single, well-used candle in a lead-colored holder in one corner, but no matches that I could find. Glory's End had electricity and relatively modern indoor plumbing, at least in the upstairs floors, but if Valeria had come over here to go into the basement, it was much more likely that she would have matches in her pocket, because candles were a way of life across the way. I fingered the wax at the base of the candle holder to see if it was freshly melted. It told me exactly nothing. The shepherds were looking at me as if to ask,
We about through? We saw squirrels out there.

I went back upstairs and out the front door to get a flashlight from my Suburban. I turned the mutts loose to go chase squirrels and went back inside. When I got back downstairs to the kitchen, the candleholder was no longer there.

I stopped and looked around the room. I'd picked it up, felt the wax melted onto the base, and then put it back on the counter. Now it wasn't there.

Oka-a-a-y.

Was someone else in the house? The shepherds would have noticed another human lurking about. I looked around again. I hadn't been gone two minutes, but there was no getting around it--the damned candlestick was gone.

I went over to the trapdoor, which was still upright, the way I'd left it. I pointed the flashlight down the steps, looking for tracks in the dust, but there weren't any, possibly because there wasn't any dust. That, too, was a bit strange. The steps were made of rough-cut planks,
smoothed and even hollowed out slightly in the center by generations of foot traffic. I went down the steps, wondering if I should go back out and get my SIG.

The basement was large, with almost ten-foot ceilings, a hard-packed dirt floor, and heavy, mortared stone foundation walls. It smelled of dust, mildew, and old dirt in equal proportions. There was an expansive but unfortunately empty wine rack down one wall and floor-to-ceiling bare shelves on all the others. There was no plumbing or wiring in evidence, which made sense since the next floor up was itself partially underground. The basement seemed to match the footprint of the main house, and as I swung my light around, I saw what looked like an open grave in the floor, except that it was only three feet deep. I tried to think of what they might have used that for. The shelves would have contained provisions, perhaps, and possibly weapons. There were meat hooks hanging from some of the joists above, which might have accounted for the unusual height. The temperature was cool, and the place seemed to be perfectly dry. The shelves were empty except for a single item: my AWOL candleholder.

I stopped and stared. That candleholder. The one I'd left up in the kitchen when I went out to get a flashlight.

Curiouser and curiouser,
I thought.
This is about the point where the trapdoor goes bang up there at the top of the steps and I start to hear rattling chains and ghostly cackling.
Except nothing happened. No cold vapors, no violins. Just the candlestick sitting there on that shelf, the one that apparently had grown legs.

Obviously someone had been watching me in the kitchen and had moved the candlestick down here while I was outside. The dogs hadn't sensed anyone in the house, which implied that he'd been down here the whole time I'd been in on the lower floor. So he'd been listening or watching from the top of the stairs, heard me go out, went into the kitchen, grabbed the candlestick, and then--what?

All right. Now: why? He'd grabbed it and moved it down here. Logically, he'd wanted me to know that I wasn't alone in the house.
Then he had gone--where? Back upstairs? I didn't think so, unless he was really light on his feet, because I think I would have run into him, or at least heard him. There were back stairs from the lowerlevel kitchens up to the main, public rooms floor, but they changed direction twice before coming out in the central hallway above.

I decided to test all my theorizing. I went back up the stairs and lowered the trapdoor while standing on the steps. Instant black darkness, with a tiny crack of light around the door edges. I then knelt down on the topmost step, hunched over underneath the door, and scanned the wall between me and the kitchen, using the flashlight. Nothing.

I turned off the flashlight and looked again. There: a tiny, pencil-sized hole between two studs. I peered through it and could see most of the kitchen. That solved the watching problem. I pushed the trapdoor back open and latched it back. The tiny peephole was under the counter, visible only if you knew where to look.

If he hadn't gone back upstairs, then he was down in the basement somewhere. Since the basement was empty, there had to be another way out of the basement. I went back down the wooden stairs and began to walk along the four stone walls, probing with my hands and the flashlight, looking through the empty shelves for signs of a secret doorway. There seemed to be nothing but solid stone. I checked the pit, but it was just hard-packed dirt and still about three feet deep.

I went back out into the middle of the basement, swinging the light every which way, looking for anything different about the walls, or, for that matter, the ceiling and the dirt floor. The only thing I noticed was that one set of shelves, at right angles to a corner of the wine rack, had a wooden backing. All the rest of the shelves were open at the back, built right up against the bare stones. I went over to that set of shelves and got down on the ground. Sure enough, there was a quarter-inch space between the bottom shelf and the cementlike dirt.

I looked for a hidden latch or activating mechanism, but I couldn't find a thing. I pulled on the whole assembly. It seemed to be firmly
anchored. I also was wondering, if there was a hidden passage, where would it lead? The lower level of the house was already partially underground, maybe some four feet, which meant that this basement floor was about fifteen feet underground. I tried to visualize where the nearest outbuilding was at the back of the house. I thought it was the smokehouse, but I'd have to go out and see. Maybe I could find the way into the basement from its exit point.

"Anyone down there?" a woman's voice called from above. It sounded like Carol Pollard.

"Yeah, it's me, Cam Richter," I called. A moment later, a shapely pair of stockinged legs in a knee-length skirt came down the steps into the cone of my flashlight.

"What in the world are you doing down in this black hole?" she asked as she stepped onto the dirt floor.

"Just looking," I said, deciding to keep the mystery of the moving candlestick to myself for the moment. She joined me and blinked in the light from my Maglite.

"Checking out the woodwork?" she asked, indicating the hand-hewn floor joists above our heads. Then I realized they were whole tree trunks.

"Yes, and the general layout of the house. I didn't expect a basement with that lower floor halfway underground. Certainly not this deep, either."

"You're right," she said. "The whole point of the lower floor was 'coolth' in the hot summers. That's why the kitchens and the main dining room are down there. Look at that wine rack!"

"Missing one important commodity," I said.

"Can't have everything," she said with a bright smile. "I saw the front gates open and decided to come in to see who's here. Your shepherds are waiting at the front door, by the way."

We decided to go back upstairs into the daylight. I followed Carol up, exercising as much chivalry as I could with the Maglite. When I
dropped the trapdoor into the basement, I saw an external latch, which I discreetly slid into the locked position.

In the light of the kitchen I noticed that she seemed to be dressed for a party, with a lot more makeup than I'd seen before. She caught me checking her out.

"A retirement party for Judge Corey," she said. "He's a kindly old gentleman who's been very nice to the library in town. Oh, and I have a lease for you to sign in my briefcase outside. David Oatley asked me to get it to you."

"Great," I said. "Does that mean I can move in across the way?"

"I think so," she said as we went up the front stairs and then to the front door. There were two sets of shepherd ears silhouetted against the wavy glass of the door's side windows. We went outside, and I executed the lease agreement.

"I was thinking," she said. "When you get settled in next door, perhaps you'd like to take a ride around the property. I've got a husband-horse I could bring for you, and it really is a great way to see the whole property."

"A husband-horse?"

She laughed. "That's a horse-world term for a perfectly docile horse that even the nonriding husband can ride. You would be riding on, as opposed to actually riding."

"Got it," I said. "Sure, why not? What could go wrong?"

She laughed again, and I found myself warming to her sunny personality, among other attributes. "Not much, actually, not on Goober, anyway."

"Goober."

"You'll see," she said. "I'll call you."

After she left, I considered the possibility that the stop-by had been dual-purposed. Get the lease signed, and give me a look at Carol
when she cleaned up and invested in a little powder and paint. I also considered the possibility that the entire female universe might not actually revolve around me. God, I hoped that wasn't so.

I went back into the house with the mutts to pursue the matter of the light-footed candlestick. The first problem I encountered was that it was back on its table in the kitchen.