Spirit (27 page)

I tried to put a lie to it all. It was the only way I could cope. I had to deny it. All of it.

“You don’t know that,” I said. “There could be a hundred reasons for this steamer trunk to be buried here.”

Sam gave me an incredulous look. “Name one.”

When I didn’t answer, he made a few more scrapings with the tip of the shovel. Then he cast it aside and dropped to his knees. He cleared the rest of the dirt from the top of the trunk with his hands, scraping around the edges with his fingers, seeking for the edge of the lid, trying to find the latch. It was a large trunk. Almost four feet long. Broad and deep. There was a handle on one end, but on the other end the handle was missing, rotted away in the dirt, perhaps.

“Jason,” Sam breathed, getting my attention. He had found the latch. It was broken. Bent. He rattled it in his fingers and the latch clicked open.

Sam looked up at me hovering over him. He was trembling. We both were. His face was filthy. Tears had swept clean streaks along his cheeks. His eyes were red.

“It isn’t locked,” he said. “The latch is broken. The trunk isn’t locked.”

With trembling hands, he reached out to lift the lid.

And a voice behind us said, “Well, locked or unlocked, he wasn’t going anywhere, now was he?”

S
AM
AND
I whirled around. I stood so fast after leaning over the steamer trunk that my vision darkened, and I teetered for a moment, almost losing my balance. Sam grabbed me and kept me from toppling over. My hand clenched in Sam’s, we stepped through the ragged doorway, leaving the shadows behind. We squinted against the glare of the fluorescent lights burning over the basement proper and sought the source of the voice.

Jack’s voice.

He stood at the base of the stairs leading down from the backyard. He had that same cocky expression on his face I was used to seeing. But there was another element to the expression now. A fiercer element. He looked like a caged lion who has finally grown tired of his restraints and has readied himself to fight back by biting off the keeper’s head. It took me less than a second to realize that this new and ferocious Jack was probably the real thing. The pompous, snide persona I was used to seeing was just a watered down version of what Jack could really become if he set his mind to it.

Evil, after all, isn’t always evil. It is only evil when it chooses to be.

It appeared to me as if Jack had finally chosen.

He eyed Sam up and down, took in the hole in the brick wall behind us, then centered his attention on me. “You just couldn’t leave things well enough alone, could you, Rosemary? You had to snoop and pry and dig around. No pun intended. You also knocked a hole in the wall I built. Do you know how much trouble it was to lay those bricks? As if that isn’t bad enough, we had to cut our vacation short because of you two nosy fucks. Hopped the first flight out of Providence and here we are. Ready to kick some ass.”

“So you’re the bad man,” I said. “I wondered who Timmy was referring to.”

Jack sneered. “That little brat. What does he have to do with anything?”

Sam stepped forward. He was trembling again, but this time it wasn’t from exhaustion. It wasn’t from fear either. It was from rage. “Timmy has everything to do with it. Unless I’m mistaken, that’s his father lying in there dead, stuffed in that steamer trunk like an old memento. His father and my brother. That’s where he died, isn’t it?”

Jack snarled. “Why do you think I built the wall? Can’t leave forensic evidence—blood stains and stuff—lying around for just anybody to find. Best to cover it up. So I did. And it stayed covered up until you morons came along.”

Sam’s voice was a cold fury. “So you did kill him. You did kill my brother.”

Jack’s face twisted into a vicious smile. He merely stared back. First at Sam, then at me. “Actually, no,” he quietly stated.

“Liar!” Sam spat.

Sam made a move beside me, and I reached out and clutched his arm, not sure what he was about to do.

Apparently, Jack wasn’t sure what Sam was capable of either. He pulled a revolver from behind his back and leveled it at Sam’s chest. It was a big revolver. I mean a
really
big revolver. A .357 Magnum. I knew, because I dated a cop once who liked to play with his guns. Don’t ask.

Jack seemed to enjoy the way Sam and I stared at the gun in his hand. “Oh, I stopped by the house on the way here in case I needed a little firepower to back me up. Like it?”

Suddenly, I was as furious as Sam. “How dare you bring that thing into my house! There’s a child here, you stupid fuck!”

Jack simpered. “Where is he? Upstairs in bed?” Jack pointed the gun at the ceiling. “Now where would that be exactly? This thing will punch a bullet through two floors and a roof and still keep on going. I’d hate for the kid to get in the way of an errant bullet, wouldn’t you?” He lowered the gun back to me this time. “So back off. Both of you. Step back through that hole in the wall you made. I want to see what you’ve done.”

“No,” I said. The last thing I intended to do was leave myself and Sam at this jerkoff’s mercy behind that brick wall where he had already stashed one body. “Where’s Sally? What have you done with her?”

At that, Jack barked a cold laugh. “What have
I
done with
her?
That’s a good one. I’m afraid you don’t know your sister very well. Who do you think masterminded this whole thing? Who do you think led poor Paul down here into this basement and had him turn away just long enough to—”

“Shut up,”
Sally hissed. And there she was, standing at the top of the other staircase. The one leading into the house. She must have kept a front door key from when she owned the home before.

Jack clapped his mouth shut, but there was a nasty sneer on his face that frightened me even more than the gun. He looked like a man who didn’t have too many viable options left. And that scared the hell out of me.

Sally turned to us, ignoring Jack for the moment. She too was staring at the hole in the brick wall behind Sam and me. “I told Jack you wouldn’t be dumb enough to dig around looking for Paul’s body, but I guess I was wrong. I thought when I sold you the house, Jason, I could keep an eye on it. Stop anything happening if you started snooping around. Anything… embarrassing.”

That was too much for Sam. “Embarrassing!” he screamed. “You murdered my brother! Don’t you understand what you’ve done? You murdered an innocent man! A
good
man! The father of your child, for Christ’s sake! What is
wrong
with you people?”

Sally slowly descended the stairs as Jack continued to hold the .357 Magnum on us. There was a sad smile on Sally’s face. “In point of fact, Sam, I didn’t kill your brother at all. It was all an accident. You see, I was stupid enough to begin an affair with Jack. We’ve worked together for years, you know. Paul found out about it and confronted us. He called Jack over on the pretense of inviting him to dinner, and he told us everything he knew. Things got out of hand. They fought, Jack and Paul. And while they were fighting, they tumbled down the stairs. It was an accident. A horrible accident. Paul… broke his neck. He died right here at the foot of these stairs. He died in my arms.”

The house gave a gentle lurch above our heads. Ceiling beams groaned. I saw Sally grab the handrail on the stairs. Neither she nor Jack seemed particularly surprised.

“I see he’s still here,” she said. “Still jiggling the woodwork, trying to scare us.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You knew Paul was haunting this house, and you didn’t tell me?”

Sally really laughed at that. “With everything else I had to keep from you, dear brother, that seemed like a minor consideration, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Sally,” I said, “let me call the police. We can get this straightened out. If Paul’s death was accidental—”

The next voice we heard stunned us all. It was Timmy speaking through the baby monitor under Sally’s feet. “It’s all a lie. Daddy didn’t fall. They hit him. They hit him with that metal thing you found. The crowbar. They hit him with the crowbar. They hit his face. You saw the tooth. You know it’s true. They killed Daddy on purpose. Daddy didn’t even have time to cry out. They killed Daddy before Daddy even knew what was going to happen.”

Sally leaned over the handrail and spotted the baby monitor perched on a box below. Then she turned and stared toward the top of the stairs. She looked back to me. “Where is he? I’m taking him home. He’s obviously irrational. Like I warned you, Jason, you’ll never see my son again. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“You’re not touching him,” Sam said. “Neither one of you.”

And at that, Jack cocked the gun. The metallic ratcheting sound froze us all in place.

Sally spat like a cat. “Put that thing away!”

Jack eased the hammer down on the gun, but he still didn’t aim it at anything other than Sam and me. I wasn’t sure, but I thought his hand was starting to tremble from the weight of the thing. That wasn’t a promising development either.

Sam’s fingers were squeezing my arm so tightly he was cutting off the circulation. I eased myself away from his grip. His gaze kept sliding from Sally to Jack. Back and forth. I could sense him trying to formulate a plan.

I feared it would take greater minds than ours to come up with a solution to this mess.

Sally descended the last two steps of the staircase and passed within a foot of us as she moved to Jack’s side. She strode across the basement floor with such assurance, neither Sam nor I thought to grab her, use her as a shield, try to bargain for our safety with her own. Like fools, we simply let her go by.

She grabbed the gun from Jack before any of us knew what she was intending to do. Including Jack. He looked surprised to find himself suddenly unarmed.

“Go upstairs and get Timmy. He’s probably in bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Don’t bring him down here. Take him out to the car. I’ll join you in a minute.”

“What about these two?” Jack growled. “We can’t just let them go to the co—”

“Do what I said!” she snapped. “Go get the boy!”

Sam tensed at my side. We both did. I wasn’t about to let that creep lay his hands on Timmy.

“Don’t do it,” I warned as he walked past me.

He snickered, muttered a curse, and kept walking. Sam moved to intercept.

Sally stepped closer and aimed the gun at Sam. “Let him go,” she ordered. To Jack, she roared, “Do it! Go upstairs and get Timmy!”

Jack was at the top of the stairs, just reaching for the door, when Timmy’s voice came once again through the baby monitor under the stairs. “Mommy and Jack played a game on Daddy. They tricked him into coming down to the basement, and when he wasn’t looking, they hit him with the crowbar. Daddy didn’t fall down the stairs. They weren’t having dinner together. Mommy and Jack snuck up on him and beat him until he couldn’t move. He tried to fight back, but he didn’t have a chance. They beat him and left him to die all alone. And all the time he was dying, he only thought of me.
He only thought of me.
They buried him and told everyone he ran away. That’s what happened. That’s what really happened.”

“That’s a lie,”
Sally screamed to the ceiling. “It didn’t happen that way at all. It didn’t!”

Only then did it dawn on me that perhaps they weren’t really Timmy’s words we were hearing at all. I flashed back to Bugs Bunny speaking to us through the TV. Was Paul simply using Timmy as a conduit to speak to the living? Us. Was that why sometimes Timmy’s words seemed too mature for a four-year-old? Was Timmy actually still sound asleep in Sam’s old bedroom upstairs?

God, I certainly hoped so. The last thing I wanted was for him to hear any of this.

At that moment, it seemed our resident ghost decided to take a more proactive approach to the evening’s festivities.

Sally’s blonde hair suddenly flew out behind her as a surge of wind tore into her, almost knocking her off her feet. Dust from the basement floor billowed into her face. She turned away to protect her eyes, and the moment she did, Sam lunged for the gun.

Before he reached it, a horrific crash shattered the night around us, stopping Sam in his tracks and making me crouch away from the sound in stunned terror. We spun to see Jack pinwheeling at the top of the wooden stairs leading up to the service porch, trying to keep his balance as the steps crumbled beneath him. In one horrifying explosion of splinters and dust and lumber, the stairs gave way and crashed to the basement floor, carrying Jack with them. He landed atop the crowbar, which Sam had leaned against the railing at the base of the stairs. The crowbar pierced Jack’s leg like a metal spear.

Jack hit the floor screaming, the crowbar wedged crosswise through his thigh. His leg was covered with blood before the last timber fell around him. A moment later, a heavy support beam toppled over and struck Jack in the head, knocking him unconscious, which was a shame. I rather enjoyed hearing him scream.

From beneath the rubble, we heard the baby monitor crackle and squawk, obviously on its last legs, and amid the staticky electronic rumble, Timmy’s voice saying, “Oops,” and then a giggle.