Home Repair is Homicide 13 - Crawlspace (15 page)

Jake considered yet another cup of spiked tea but rejected the idea. She had things to do, people to see.

She just didn’t know what or who. “Listen, Bella, I really appreciate—”

“And,” Bella went on imperturbably, finishing the cabinets, giving them an assessing look, and moving along to the front of the refrigerator, which of course was already spotless, “I do realize you probably feel you have to stay here, to answer it yourself.”

The telephone, she meant. “But I know something interesting about it.”

She put her sprayer down. The kitchen now smelled sweetly of vinegar-and-whatever, like a well-dressed salad.

“It has call forwarding. Which I think means you can jigger it to send—”

It occurred to Jake suddenly what Bella was getting at; she jumped up. Sam had mentioned it once, also, but she’d never felt the effort was worth it.

Fooling around with electronic gadgets just wasn’t among her interests. Until now. “Calls from one telephone to another,” she finished for Bella. “So, if somebody called on that one—”

She pointed at the instrument in the telephone alcove, whose number was in the book and could be dialed by anyone. By unknown death-threat callers, for instance.

Or by Randy Dodd. “The signal would be forwarded to—”

“Your cell phone,” agreed Bella. Whose number hardly anyone knew. But Sam did. “If you did it right, I think so.”

So if Sam or Randy Dodd should try to call here … or Chip Hahn, she thought excitedly. Anyone who currently was missing. Even Wade …

“I want to see that tunnel,” said Bella.

“But …” Jake began. In answer, Bella pointed at the bottom right-hand drawer under the kitchen cabinets.

“I want to,” Bella repeated flatly. “And I’m going to.”

In the drawer, along with a few other books that Bella kept there for her exclusive use—a DeLorme atlas, a first aid book, and a book of home remedies that could be made out of common household ingredients—were stored the instructions for every electronic device in the house.

Despite her initial doubts, minutes later Jake had the phone’s call-forwarding ability enabled; it was surprisingly easy. Next she called Ellie, to ask her to call back. “To test this thing,” she explained.

It worked. “And Jake?” Ellie added after dialing the house phone and being answered on Jake’s cell. “Your dad’s over here. He wanted me to tell you so.”

“He is? But I thought—”

Jake looked around. In the hall, Bella was already putting on her
coat and hat. She pulled Jake’s jacket off its hook, held it out, and stood there waiting not very patiently.

“And he says he’s going to stay here with Lee,” Ellie went on, “to take care of her while I’m out. Which is fine with me, but I don’t understand—”

Jake caught on suddenly. “I do. He and Bella must’ve talked this all over.”

Because while Jake was stripping paint off old doorknobs and bringing Bella up to date on all that had happened so far, Bella had twice interrupted her for trips outdoors, where Jake’s dad had returned and been patiently picking bits of insulation material from the lawn and garden surfaces.

And during those visits, Jake guessed, the newlyweds must’ve figured a few things out. Such as what Bella wanted to do—was in fact hell-bent on doing, actually—as soon as she’d learned about a secret tunnel in the cellar beneath her old friend Anne Dodd’s house.

Anne, who’d been murdered in her own kitchen.

Jake carried the phone to the front door, where Bella waited. “Meet us in front of the Dodd House in five minutes,” she told Ellie.

Sam
, she thought.
Sam, I don’t know how what we’re going to do might help you, or even if it will, but—

It occurred to Jake fleetingly that this whole enterprise was way out of character for Bella, whose desire for adventure ordinarily equaled her desire to get anthrax.

But right now, Bella seemed both confident and determined. Touching one of the gold hoop earrings she wore as if it were a good luck charm, she hurried ahead of Jake down the front walk in the late-afternoon gloom, then called back over her shoulder.

“Ask Ellie to bring along another flashlight,” she said. “I don’t know if the power’s on over there.”

Her tone turned grim as the shadows seemed to swallow her up; full darkness came unbelievably early in downeast Maine in autumn.
Bella’s flashlight snapped on, its beam wavering ahead of her on the sidewalk.

“It might be dark down in that cellar,” she said.

THE FRONT STEPS OF THE DODD HOUSE ON WASHINGTON
Street might as well have had a sign on them:
Get Your Broken Ankle Here!
Half the risers leaned one way, half sagged the other, and the rest of the place was no better. Cracked siding, poorly installed and now with vines growing into it, a broken window covered with a sheet of cardboard, rucked-up shingles …

Everything in Eastport looked better in summer, of course. But in the few short weeks since Anne Dodd had been murdered, her once-pristine home had begun looking as if it wanted to fall right into the grave with her. Jake took another step up and felt her right foot crunch suddenly through the step riser.

Her right leg followed. Bending her other knee swiftly to avoid toppling over, she sank to an upright crouch while the leg extended straight down through the splinter-edged hole her weight had put in the rotted plank.

One of the splinters had gone through her pants leg. “Ouch,” she said, but this didn’t begin to cover her predicament. She was in up to her thigh, and her femoral artery suddenly felt as if it had a neon arrow pointing to it, flashing
Poke Me
.

Cautiously, she straightened her left leg, with Bella at one side and Ellie at the other, helping her to rise. “Careful. That splinter is … Oof.”

As the flesh on the inside of her right thigh slid upward, the splinter in it slid out, still attached to the porch step by sharp, woody fibers. By the glow of Bella’s flashlight, red blood painted the splinter’s thin, wicked tip.

But not a lot of it, and she’d had a recent tetanus shot after a nail-gun incident, the less said about which, the better.

So, she let herself be hauled on until she was out of the hole, and once Bella and Ellie were convinced that Jake was really none the worse for wear—or not too much worse than usual, anyway—they confronted the house again.

“How do we get in there?” Ellie asked. Early evening had thickened to night very quickly as usual, and around them a light mist was falling.

The street shone like wet licorice in the lights of the few cars passing by only a few feet away; the houses on this part of the street were all built right up close to the sidewalk. A block distant, the centuries-old bell atop the Seaman’s Church slowly struck five.

“I don’t know,” Jake began, then stopped as Bella marched up the remaining rickety steps with the calm bravery of a sherpa confronting Everest. When she got to the top, she produced a key chain, thrust the key on it into the front-door lock, and—

Viola
, as Sam would’ve said. “Anne gave me this,” Bella answered Jake’s surprised look. “When she married Roger, I tried giving it back to her. But she said to keep it because you never knew, someday I might need it.”

Bella looked downhill toward the granite-block post office building, and beyond that the row of brick storefronts on Water Street. In the farthest one—past two art galleries, a souvenir store already closed for the winter, and the Moose Island general store—was Roger’s bar, the Artful Dodger.

But they couldn’t see it from here. “I guess she was right,” said Bella, turning the key.

As far as Jake knew, Bella hadn’t been in the house since then. But if the skinny woman in the knitted wool hat and navy peacoat felt nervous about entering now, she gave no sign of it.

Jake followed her in, with Ellie behind. She hadn’t been in many houses older than her own, but she saw right away that this one was special, even through the uniform layer of grime that seemed swiftly to have settled in it.

The hot water radiators had never been repainted, retaining the thin gold-colored finish they’d gotten at the factory, now aged to a rich bronze. Etching as thick as frosting whitened the fragile glass globes on the gaslights, whose fixtures remained intact.

The same well-to-do family had lived in this house for over a century, and it showed. People had loved it and taken care of it. But now the house smelled of dust and animals; the cardboard on that broken window wasn’t enough.

Ahead, a hardwood-floored hall leading to the rear of the house was already festooned with cobwebs; in Eastport, autumn was spider season.

“Wow,” Jake breathed into the stillness.

To the left, the dining room was decorated with olive green satin curtains at the windows; the antique furniture in there was gray with dust. A living room, littered with dirty dishes and
TV Guides
, was on the right.

Jake recalled that Roger had tried staying here for a while, before giving up in—what, grief? Guilt? Whichever, he hadn’t bothered cleaning up after himself when he left.

Bella led them to the cellar stairs, averting her eyes as they passed by the kitchen, where Anne’s body had been found. “Watch out,” she cautioned as they went down the steps.

But the warning didn’t prepare Jake for the mouse that ran over her foot, squeaking. “Gah,” she said, and then “Oh!” as a large gray cat streaked past with a banshee yowl.

In the cellar, Jake stepped from the shaky staircase, whose support posts looked rotted and whose railing had apparently been put on with chewing gum. Ahead, Bella strode past the furnace, which chose that moment to go on with an explosive bang, its old machinery rattling and grinding.

“Oh, good.” Ellie’s laugh did not sound convincing. “We’ll be able to wash our hands in hot water.”

Jake thought that if the misfiring ignition device on that furnace didn’t get replaced soon, the availability of hot water would be the
least of anyone’s troubles. Eyeing it nervously, she sidled past the massive old oil burner; from the sound of it, the ancient flue was clogged with soot.

No wonder everything was so dirty upstairs … . “Over here,” called Bella, pulling off her wool hat.

Waving away more hanging cobwebs, they followed her into one gloomy, granite-block-walled corner of the old foundation. In it were a wooden desk, an antique wooden office chair on wheels, its leather seat long disintegrated to mouse-chewed shreds, and a row of wooden filing cabinets.

The small yellowing cards in the slots on the fronts of the filing cabinets were labeled in faded ink by an ornate hand. The oldest said
1893
.

“This must be the stuff out of old Mr. Lang’s office, from when he was running …”

The sardine can factory
, Jake would’ve finished. There were old, curled-up photographs on the desk, too, of shop-aproned men with heavy mustaches in front of primitive-looking machinery.

But then she saw it, half hidden behind one of the wooden file cabinets, which had been pulled away from the wall just far enough to reveal—

“A tunnel,” breathed Ellie, shining her flashlight at it. “So it’s true.”

“Seems like,” said Jake, eyeing the opening mistrustfully. It was a brick archway, five feet wide, maybe seven feet tall. In the light of Ellie’s flashlight, it gaped like a dark, open mouth.

“Roger was telling the truth about that much, anyway,” she went on. “Did Anne know about it?” she added to Bella.

But Bella just shook her head, tight-lipped. It struck Jake suddenly that Bella didn’t like being down here at all.

Nor did she appear to want Jake to notice this; Jake turned her attention back to the tunnel, and the huge piece of furniture half blocking it. Experimentally, she leaned on the thing. “You know, there must be a way to move this… .” she began.

Whereupon it did move; the cabinet was on wheels, and despite its weight it slid easily. Once she had rolled it farther away from the tunnel, they could see that a pair of old rails led into it, like train tracks but thinner and set more narrowly together.

At their near end a chunk of old railroad tie was secured to the cellar floor with two huge spikes. It was a stop block for the rail car, Jake realized. A pulley was bolted into the bricks above the arch.

For pulling the cart back up, she supposed. “They brought the finished cans down here from the factory that was at the rear of the house, back then,” she said, imagining it.

Nowadays, the factory building itself was only a memory. But there were photographs of it in Peavey Library, of long, shedlike sections built onto one another as the business grew.

“On a conveyor belt, maybe. Or on carts. The cans went on a car, probably, down to the wharf.”

There they would be filled with small, silvery fish. “They could bring the pallets of tin up here that way, too. The tin to make the cans with.”

The raw materials, as Roger Dodd had put it. Jake thought about the domestic life of the house going on upstairs, of the starched white curtains, cooks and scullery girls, and maids in caps, with all that industrial rumbling going on below and behind.

“Everything they needed came in here.”

Not the pleasantest sounds to live with, probably, but maybe they thought of the commotion as the sound of money pouring in. Still, why put the tunnel here at all?

“I suppose since they already had a cellar here,” she began doubtfully.

“Ledge,” said Bella, understanding Jake’s puzzlement. A wish for domestic peace was one thing they had always shared.

“This is the only place on the property where they could put a tunnel,” Bella went on. “The rest is granite ledge, like the whole island.
Anne wanted a garden, but you can’t dig six inches without hitting rock. Except right here.”

Here Jake could see far enough into the tunnel to note that its walls were of earth, braced with enormous timbers. And digging was cheaper than blasting, as well as less likely to damage the house.

Drawing back, Bella made an unhappy face. “Dark.”

“Over here,” called Ellie. Jake turned from the tunnel’s mouth toward another part of the basement.