Down the Rabbit Hole (24 page)

“Acting's for losers anyway,” said Ty. “Besides, you're okay at soccer.”

N
O
I
IN TEAM
, but two I's in Ingrid. Or two eyes. Two eyes in Ingrid, but she still couldn't see. She lay in bed, weird, useless thoughts zipping through her mind. And always questions: If Philip Prescott, already a murderer once, had indeed returned and killed Katie, where was he? What had happened to the body of David Vardack? Why had Philip been so sure that the body would never be found? And why had Vincent wanted to get better acquainted if he'd already made up his mind? Why Chloe? And even Mrs. Breen ahead of her, with those big fat tears and total inability to memorize lines.

The house was quiet, the moonlight shining on Mister Happy. Sleep would have been bliss, but not the kind of stormy sleep that awaited Ingrid. Every time she got close, her wormy boat started going under. After a while, she climbed over Nigel, got out of bed, and went to her computer.

She Googled Philip Prescott and again got only the one relevant hit. She tried David Vardack, got that one link to a movie lover's blog. Her fingers lay on the keys, tapping lightly, not making anything appear on the screen. Then they pressed a little harder and typed in Vincent Dunn.

Three hits. The first took her to whitehorseplay.org, which sounded like one of those sites she wasn't supposed to go to but turned out to be the Web page for the Whitehorse Community Theater. Their upcoming production was
The Glass Menagerie
, Vincent Dunn directing.

The second link was a year-old review of a
Death of a Salesman
production in the
Whitehorse Weekly News
. Vincent's name appeared in the middle: “…and the very talented Vincent Dunn, longtime stalwart in local theater circles, gave a riveting performance as Biff.” Biff—the role Vincent mentioned when he was telling Jill about his stage fright—but
not a word in this review about him stepping in at the last minute. Was it the same Vincent Dunn?

She tried the third link, also to the
Whitehorse Weekly News
, but this time ten years old. It was a short column called Arctic Artmakers, with single-paragraph write-ups of a sculptor, a poet, two candle makers, and Vincent, down at the bottom.

Soft-spoken. Had to be the same Vincent Dunn. But where was this Whitehorse place? Ingrid Googled that too. Turned out to be in the Yukon, part of Canada. She went to maps.com. Hey. A part of Canada, all right, the part right next to Alaska. In that farewell letter to
The Echo
, the one full of lies, Philip Prescott had written about maybe going to Alaska. Meaning? Ingrid didn't know, felt confused. A neat solution to everything would be if Vincent Dunn resembled Philip Prescott, but he didn't—too
tall, too thin, too dark, things thirty years going by wouldn't change. But was it possible they knew each other? Two guys into the theater, stuck in some frozen God-knows-where? And if they did, so what? Ingrid had no answers, but while all this thinking was going on, she was also getting dressed. She had to know.

 

Not a sound. That was very important. Ingrid crept downstairs, put on her red jacket, plus her pompom ski hat and wool gloves. She went into the kitchen, opened the door to the garage, went inside. Her bike leaned against the back wall, moonlight gleaming on the handle-bars. Ingrid wheeled it out the side door, hopped on, and pedaled away.

She knew the town now, had been paying attention whenever Mom or Dad drove her someplace. No traffic, like all of Echo Falls lay in a deep sleep. Maple Lane to Avondale, Avondale to Bridge, Bridge to—

A car was coming the other way. Ingrid pulled to the side trying to get in the shadows, out of the headlight glare. The car sped by, the sign on its roof lit up:
TAXI
. Ingrid pedaled on. Bridge to the other side of the river, then right on Upper Falls Road.

The moon hung high overhead now, at the very top of the sky, and so bright. The coldest night of the year so far: Ingrid could see her breath, and frost coated the ground, the first frost, shining in the moonlight like the whole world was turning silver, beautiful and scary at the same time. And she was already scared, big-time. She took a deep breath and kept pedaling.

Upper Falls wound through some trees, climbed a hill. Ingrid heard that
shhhh
sound of the falls, somewhere to her right. She rounded a bend, and there at the top of the hill stood Prescott Hall, huge and dark, darker than the sky, except for moonlight sparkling on all those windowpanes.

Ingrid rode through the gates, up the long drive, into the parking lot. Vincent's car was parked near the door. He was director now, had a key, would be sleeping backstage, overcoming his stage fright. Did he look like the stage fright type? Not to her.

She laid her bike against the stone steps, climbed them to the front door, tried it. Locked, of course. She glanced around. Maybe by circling the Hall, she might find a—

What was that? Something came gliding out of the night; not something but a cat, that big cat,
bobcat size. It crossed the lowest stone step, tail high, and ran alongside the left-hand wing of the Hall. Then it disappeared, in a flash, as though swallowed up by the brick wall.

Ingrid went down the stairs, walked through the empty flower beds beside the left-hand wing, following the cat's path. Something about that cat was bothering her, but she couldn't think what. At the spot where the cat had disappeared, she knelt and examined the wall. Not all brick: down at ground level was a small square made of wood. She pushed and it gave. A flap. One of those cat flaps, or whatever they were called, so cats could come and go as they pleased. This one was big enough for a real big cat, maybe even big enough for a girl Ingrid's size. She tried it—yes, just big enough. She wriggled through to the other side: down the rabbit hole.

Ingrid stood up. Moonlight came through tall leaded windows. She was in a big room, empty except for a billiard table in the center and delicate spiderwebs glinting here and there. A faint sound came from far away, like scraping, maybe. Moving toward it, she stepped into a spiderweb right away, getting it all over her face. She felt the spider itself on her cheek, brushed it away with a little cry,
couldn't help herself. The next second it got very quiet; silent, in fact, no scraping sound.

Ingrid crossed the room, running her fingers over the billiard table on her way—dust an inch thick. On the other side stood a heavy wooden door with metal studs in it, open a foot or so. She stepped into a corridor, dark and windowless. Which way? She was in the closed-off part of the Hall, unfamiliar territory.

Something brushed her leg, something soft and strong at the same time, also intelligent: the cat's tail. It moved off, like a flowing shadow, down the corridor to her right. The feeling of cat tail brushing her leg: When had she felt that before? It dawned on her, and with that dawning came what had been bothering her about this big cat: Katie Kovac had had a bobcat-size cat too, a cat that had brushed against Ingrid this very same way in the purple-and-gold parlor at 341 Packer Street. Ingrid even remembered wondering what had happened to it. Couldn't be dumber if she tried. And don't leave out that bag of kitty litter in Vincent's car. Griddie the dunce. She followed the flowing cat shadow down the unlit corridor, somewhere in the closed-off part of Prescott Hall.

Ingrid followed. The cat led. Katie Kovac's cat, and Ingrid got the feeling it really was leading, not going too fast, staying in sight: along the corridor, then up one of those circular staircases, like climbing in a shaft of total darkness. But there was light at the top, dazzling moonlight, flooding in through a glass ceiling. She was in an enormous room with a grand piano and music stands at one end, cobwebs everywhere. The cat's paws left shallow depressions in the dust on the parquet floor.

An easy trail to follow. Ingrid followed it down a grand white marble staircase, like from some palace. The cat lay curled up on the bottom step, eyes closed.

Ingrid looked around. To her right a wide hall led into darkness. Straight ahead two tall glass doors opened onto a terrace; a stone planter, big enough to hold a small tree, had fallen on the terrace and cracked in two. To her left lay a narrow corridor, also dark, but at the very end glowed something faint and blue. Ingrid went left, leaving the sleeping cat behind.

Ingrid walked down the dark corridor, her feet silent on the wooden floor. She heard the scraping sound again, louder now, coming from somewhere
below. Several doors opened off the corridor, ignored by Ingrid. She moved toward that blue light.

End of the corridor, door partly open. Ingrid peeked around the edge. She saw a big square room—a library, for sure, with floor-to-ceiling shelves, all empty. No one there. In the center of the room—dark and windowless—stood three things: an iron bedstead she recognized from the props department; an open suitcase lying on the bed; a laptop computer, also open, sitting on the floor, the source of that blue glow. A movie was playing on the computer screen, some sort of Western, the voices of the characters too soft to drown out the scraping sound from below, louder now, and metallic.

Ingrid moved into the room, real quiet, except for her heartbeat of course, probably audible for miles. She stood over the bed, looked into the suitcase. On top of some clothes, neatly folded, lay two things. The sight of them took her breath away; she really couldn't breathe for ten or twenty seconds.

The two things in the suitcase. One, the Prescott Players playbill for the
Dial M for Murder
production. Two, a DVD box—
The Accused Will Rise
, starring Jack Palance and Barbara Stanwyck. A sticker
on the box read
WALLY'S
99¢
VIDEO HEAVEN
.

Ingrid picked up the playbill, gazed at Katie Kovac's frightened face and the silhouette of the man who was frightening her. She opened it, found cast pictures. Another photo of Katie, smiling now, her hair loose, very pretty. David Vardack's photo was right below. And in the margin, written in ink: “Katie, it's been a treat. Hope to do this many many more times. Love, David.”

Scrape, scrape.

Ingrid stared for the first time at the face of David Vardack. A very handsome face, maybe even movie-star handsome, with big dark eyes, long dark wavy hair, good bones. Was it possible? He looked so young. She didn't know, couldn't tell, wasn't getting this at all.

The DVD box was empty. Ingrid turned to the laptop. A beautiful woman with spitfire eyes slammed a door in a man's face. Barbara Stanwyck and Jack Palance: She knew from the picture on the box. Then came one of those fades and Jack Palance was peering down a well. He sees another man—David Vardack—down at the bottom of the well, treading water in dusky light. Jack Palance smiles a nasty smile—a little over the top in Ingrid's view;
she registered that, despite everything. Then the camera closes in on David Vardack. He says something. Ingrid bent closer so she could hear.

David Vardack spoke his line: “I'll be in your dreams every night for the rest of your life.”

That voice. Ingrid knew. For absolute sure. David Vardack and Vincent Dunn were one and the same. Barbara Stanwyck had never spooned honey into tea in a movie. Vincent had seen her doing it for real, on the set or in a restaurant. He'd made a mistake, an absolute giveaway. She'd been so dumb.

Jack Palance laughed an evil laugh but looked a bit worried. He covered the well with a piece of sheet metal.

Ingrid had a sudden thought, a really amazing one, maybe the kind Sherlock Holmes would have had, if he'd lived to see laptop computers. She clicked online. That bar came up at the top, the one with Favorites in it. Click on Favorites. Vincent Dunn had only one: prescott-revival.org, the site all about the renovation project, the site she'd scanned in the visuals for. Ingrid checked History. He'd been to prescottrevival.org dozens of times, going back for months. Why?

A vibration came through the floorboards, like a
far-off trembling. Scrape, scrape.

Ingrid rose. There were two doors in the library, the one she'd come in through and a second at the other end. That was the one she took. She was so close to knowing everything.

The second door led to a wooden staircase, going down, a fancy, carpeted staircase with dark banisters and an oval window in the wall. The moon was still out there, a little lower now.

At the bottom of the stairs she came to a closed door. She opened it, slow and soundless. Right away the scraping got louder. More stairs, crude now, the wood rough and unfinished; but dust free and cobweb free, she found as she started down into darkness. She came to a landing, made a U-turn, descended another flight, then one more, each step careful, silent. She said to herself:
Don't take any chances.

A light glowed at the bottom, not blue this time, but yellow. Something thumped. A man grunted. Ingrid kept going, down to the last step.

She was in a basement or subbasement, lit by one of those workmen's lights, the kind with a caged bulb, hanging over a chair. The chair stood at the edge of a deep pit in the brick floor. At the other
side of the pit rose a mound of bricks and earth. And in the pit, stripped to the waist, sweat dripping off his face, was Vincent Dunn. He was turned sideways to her, digging with a long wood-handled spade, his chest and arms, dirt smeared and sweaty, much stronger-looking than she would have thought.

Vincent dug up a spadeful of earth, tossed it on the pile, then another and another, working fast. Five or six spadefuls later, the blade clanged on something hard. Vincent grunted again. He bent down, out of Ingrid's sight, then rose with something in his hands. A typewriter, covered with dirt. He opened a heavy-duty green plastic garbage bag folded by the mound of bricks and earth and stuck the typewriter inside.