Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers (9 page)

The trapdoor was still down and latched. I didn't remember bringing it back up, and nor had Carol.

No
way
, I thought. I went over and tugged at the handle of the door; it did not move. The latch held. So no one who could have been hiding in that basement could have moved the candlestick.

"C'mon, you guys," I said. "We're going exploring."

We went through the house, starting with another quick look down in the basement and then through every floor right up to the attic, which was accessed through a ceiling hatch at the back of the upstairs main hall. I'd found an antique wooden ladder stored in the hall closet, which allowed me to get up into the attic.

There was nothing up there but cold air, lots of spiderwebs, and a great look at the original construction timbers, which were, for the most part, more whole trees that had been squared off where needed and then fit into a roof truss structure with wooden dowels. There were no lights in the attic, but some light came in through air vents at the eaves, and it was fully floored. There were no chained trunks of hidden treasure, no wardrobes full of antique clothes, and absolutely no place for anyone to hide. The inside walls of the massive brick chimneys were exposed on four sides, and the mortar actually looked to be in pretty good shape. There were no water stains on the floor, so the roof was intact as well.

I climbed back down the ladder to where the shepherds were waiting and reset the hatch cover as I came down. We explored each of the main rooms, the few remaining armoires upstairs, and even the single bathroom grafted onto the drawing room downstairs. I'd taken some
time going through the reception room on the main floor, which the old lady had converted to her bedroom in her declining days. As was customary in nineteenth-century homes, freestanding wardrobes and armoires were used in place of closets. There was a smallish canopied bed, two armoires, a ratty-looking oriental rug, and some chairs and tables.

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

I listened once again for rattling chains, low moans in the walls, or other ghostly noises, but mostly what I heard was the sound of two shepherds panting.

Someone had moved the frigging candlestick. Someone had been in the house when Carol and I had gone out to her car. That same someone had done his or her poltergeist thing and still managed to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, before I came back in and started looking around in earnest. The shepherds were relaxed, which told me that said someone wasn't here anymore. Ergo, no point in us sitting here waiting for something to happen.

We went back outside and walked around to the back of the house, which faced generally northwest. Here the bricks were in less good shape, and I could discern a definite starboard list on the back wall chimney structure. There was a set of stone steps leading up from the semisubmerged kitchen area, but they were covered in a thin film of moss and didn't bear signs of recent use. The backyard was actually a pebbled driveway area, surrounded by some ancient outbuildings. I reconsidered my mystery. There was one way it could have been done.

Someone hidden in the basement walls could have heard us go upstairs and then out the front door, grabbed the candlestick, come out into this back drive area through some secret passage, gone down those steps into the kitchen, replaced the candlestick, and then beat feet back outside to a hidey-hole before I got back inside. I had not looked outside once I started my tour, and I also had gone back down
into the basement. If my mystery guest had heard me down there, he could have had time to get out of the secret passage and simply depart the premises.

So: Secret passage, where are you? It had to have something to do with that one set of shelves down there that had the solid wooden back. I decided to look through the old outbuildings to see if I could find any indications of foot traffic.

Thirty minutes later I'd discovered nothing useful. One building was indeed a smokehouse, a second looked like it had been a blacksmith shop of some kind, and the third was a long, low springhouse, complete with a pool of icy water laced with watercress. All of the buildings were made of the same handmade, oversized brick as the main house. All the fittings were wrought iron and looked original. A tiny brook headed downhill from the springhouse, but nothing else moved on the grounds except for an occasional and now respectfully distant squirrel.

Still and all, I thought, that had to be how it was done, excluding the duty ghostly spirit. Some kind of subterranean access had to be behind that set of shelves. The real question was why someone was screwing around in the first place. Was I supposed to be scared off? I decided to wait for further exploration until I had a crew here working, and then we'd disassemble that wooden shelf structure, with a backhoe if necessary, and find out where the secrets lay. In the meantime, I might still have a real ghost to deal with, back in Summerfield, if the demise of his hired killer failed to deter him. On that dismal possibility, I needed to get going on my move to the country. That meant a second visit to the stone cottage, and then a U-Haul operation.

By Tuesday of the following week, I was all moved in and now a semipermanent resident of Rockwell County. Cubby Johnson, the Lees' outside man, helped me move my stuff into the cottage and get
my new digs up and running. Cubby was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, and, except for a stint in the army, he had never really left Rockwell County. He and his wife, Patience, had worked for the Lees for most of their lives. He was a powerfully built black man, five-eight, with a fringe of graying hair around an otherwise bald pate, a round, intelligent face, and the handshake of a blacksmith. He had a low, mellifluous voice, and I assumed he was as curious about me as I was about the Lee family. It became clear during our first real meeting that we were going to observe a tacit agreement to let further details of our respective backgrounds unfold in the due course of time so as to maintain southern civility. It was also clear that he felt a certain responsibility to protect the Lees in their eccentricities in return for what had become absolute, lifetime job security for him and his wife. I let it be known that I was cool with the Lees' lifestyle, having seen far stranger things than Hester and Valeria Lee in my law enforcement career.

Cubby told me Ms. Hester was ailing, which meant that Ms. Valeria was attending, so I didn't see either of them in the course of moving in. Carol Pollard brought by a proposed restoration plan, and we agreed to get the thing going as soon as I closed the real estate transaction. David Oatley had hinted that closing could happen the following week if I was willing to forgo the due diligence. He'd shown me the four stone boundary markers, which looked like they'd been there since Washington was a surveyor. Being a stranger to these parts, however, I elected to go through the paper drill just to be sure.

The shooting investigation had faded to black, which often happened when the perpetrator got himself killed, thereby solving the major mystery. The sheriff's office had not been able to pin anything on Billie Ray, although he remained the logical suspect. The parole office forced him into a minimum wage job and then made him report what he did with his money, such as it was. The woman he was living with was a supposedly reformed crack queen, who, in the opinion of the detectives, was barely able to get herself from one end of
their mobile home to the other. All of which left me with the lingering suspicion that my ghost problem might not be over.

In order to stay as far off the grid as possible in my new lodgings, I did not set up a landline telephone. I left the electricity and propane accounts with the Lees. I told the local post office in Summerfield to send all mail to my office as I was going to be in Europe for the next year. It was admittedly thin cover, but it might fool an ex-con for a while. I contacted a local Summerfield Realtor and made arrangements to rent my house, but not until after I'd closed on Glory's End. In the meantime, I needed to get some more folks on my side in Rockwell County.

Carol brought the first contractor out to Glory's End that Tuesday afternoon. He was the electrical guy, and he gave me a tour of the house's electrical system, such as it was. The wiring was from the 1950s and was the fabric-covered copper variety. There were only eight fuses for the whole house, and four of those had copper pennies underneath blown fuses. The only thing that had saved the house from a fire was that the old lady hadn't used much more than a few lights, an electric hot plate, and the furnace fan.

"So," I said. "A complete rewire?"

He nodded. "That's the safe way to go," he said. "This stuff hasn't met code for forty years, and the woodwork through which it's routed has zero moisture content. Plus, if you're going to live here, you're probably going to put a much bigger electrical load on the system."

He explained that he would disconnect the old wiring but leave much of it in place in order to avoid damaging the plaster and run all new, modern, meaning grounded, conductors. In some cases he could use the old wiring to fish the new cable up through walls and floors. "The good news is that there aren't any fire-stops in these walls," he said. "The bad news . . ."

He agreed to leave the current system operational until he was
ready to proceed with the rip-out and the new installation. He then set about surveying the system so he could work up a bid, while Carol and I talked about the first few major steps to a renovation. As casually as I could, I asked her about the possibility of an underground passage in or around the house.

"Well, I guess it's possible," she said, "but what purpose would it serve? You've seen the covered walkways back to the service buildings, and it wasn't the plantation owners who would have to go out in the snow to fetch the firewood."

"The war, maybe? A place to hide themselves or their valuables if the Yankee hordes arrived?"

She nodded but pointed out that the Yanks had not come through this part of the South until the very end and that, beyond the house itself, the countryside was so impoverished by then that there'd been nothing much to hide or protect.

"The legislature and the governor were forever calling the citizens to arms and to fight to the last man and child," she said, "but the few remaining fighting men who'd survived to 1865 were with General Lee at Appomattox. It wasn't like Georgia when Sherman went through."

She was curious why I was asking, so I decided to tell her about the light-footed candlestick and my convoluted theory about how someone could have done it, if there was a passage.

"Great!" she exclaimed, happily. "A mystery, and maybe even a ghost."

"And that's good news--why?"

"Because every old southern mansion needs a ghost or two," she said. "It's traditional."

"Um . . ."

"Oh, you don't have to believe it," she said, "but if I tell that story in town, it'll simply make the place more interesting in everyone's eyes. Plus, the stranger now has a challenge on his hands beyond fixing up the house. Cool."

"You have to tell it, don't you?"

She laughed. "Absolutely," she said. "It'll be the first of many stories, Mr. Richter, and, as I told you, this is a--"

"Very small town," I finished for her. "Got that. If it's a human and not hoodoo, though, my cop instincts are not amused."

"Because of that shooting business over in Summerfield?"

I stared at her. She sighed. Sheriff Walker. It was a very damn small town.

"Yes, actually. Did you by chance hear how the second shooting came out?"

Her face sobered quickly. "Yes, we heard that, too. Seems only right. Some deranged guy fired a rifle into my house, I'd probably light him up if I could."

"Light him up?" That was a term I did not expect from a lady librarian.

"Okay," she said. "Truth in lending. I was a cop in Raleigh for eight years. I told you, I went away but didn't like it?"

I was really surprised. "Why did you leave?" I asked. "The police, I mean. If you want to tell me, of course."

"Seeing as you're a retired lawman," she said, "I think I can share. I was a little slow on the draw one time, and another officer was killed. I ended up taking out the perp, but not before yet another officer got winged, and me, too. It all washed up pretty well in the formal investigation, but I knew I'd screwed up. The blue wall started looking at me differently, and that was that."

"I know just what you mean," I said, remembering my own experiences after the cat dancers case. This probably explained the slight limp I'd noticed when I was checking out those lovely legs.

"You'll have to tell me that story sometime," she said, "but as to a secret passage and someone messing around, it's probably some local teenagers checking out the new guy."

"What, no ghosts?"

"Trust me, Mr. Richter. By six tonight you will definitely have a
ghost out here. Now let's go see what Tim found out about the wiring."

She was wrong about that. I went into town around five to get some groceries and ran into David Oatley in the Food Lion. He stopped me in the cereal aisle and wanted to make sure that the presence of a ghost would not affect the sale of the property. He seemed sincerely worried about it, so I told him that the wailing and howling from the old well didn't bother me much, and as long as it didn't come across the backyard with that big-ass flaming torch and the dead baby again, I'd go through with the deal. I watched his eyes go round.
See what you think of that one, Carol Pollard
, I thought. As it turned out, what she thought of it was that it would be harder to get certain contractors onto the project.