The Homecoming (47 page)

Great way to spend a Friday night
, he thought, but he went in anyway. It was his intention to see if anything remained of an office or a registry, or a reception area, and his best bet was the main floor hallway. The stairs
were marble, worn smooth by time, and he was surprised that no one had bothered to strip the place for its fixtures.

He reached the main floor landing. It was like walking onto the deck of the
Titanic
after a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean. There was a huge central hallway with a checkered tile floor. The ceiling was lined with decorative tin tiles and a large chandelier, rusted and ruined, dominated the air space. Reed put his light up into the darkness and saw a kind of central atrium that went all the way up to a stained-glass roof.

The atrium was lined with tall galleries on all four sides, supported by carved wooden pillars. There were four levels of galleries. They receded into the gloomy dark far above.

The comparison with the
Titanic
—or at least pictures he had seen of its ballroom—was sharper than ever.

There was a brown ruin to his right—what was left of a large oak counter, behind which stood a wall of pigeonholes for either keys or mail. Clearly the reception desk, as if Candleford House was a place where you checked in for a spa weekend. He walked over to it, his boots crunching on broken glass and years of plaster dust.

The desk was barren, just a rotted-out pile of dead wood. The wall of pigeonholes was empty. There were no ruined ledgers lying around, no paper of any kind at all. There was a door to the right of the reception desk, with faded gold letters on it.
PRIVATE
. Reed honored that sign by booting the door open.

The heavy wooden door boomed backwards and he put a light into the room. There was nothing in it, just an overhead dome light hanging from a chain, and rotted floorboards peeling up. Not finished flooring either. Just the rough planks of a subfloor. There was a row of windows along the back wall, and through their shattered glass he could see the lot, the chain-link fence, and down the street the blue glow of the 7-Eleven.

If there had ever been anything in this room, it was taken out long ago. The same was probably true of every other room in the place.

What the hell had Leah Searle seen here that got her killed? There was
nothing
here.

The place was an empty shell.

It held nothing but the smell of rot and plaster dust and mold. He wasn’t even getting the stink of rats or mice, and he had seen no roaches. No pigeon shit on the floors, no bats fluttering around the upper floors. “No rats no cats no wolverines,” as the song went.

Which was, come to think of it, damned odd.

Patrol cops spend a lot of time in ruined buildings, rousting homeless people, chasing felons, looking for lost pets. Reed had been in hundreds of them, and every last one of them was teeming with vermin of every stripe. They usually reeked of ammonia from bat droppings and there was always the murmuring ruffle of pigeons in the rafters.

Candleford House was empty.

And
silent
.

Reed couldn’t hear traffic noises from outside, and that carnival a few blocks back was putting out enough bad music to drive dogs crazy for miles around. But inside here? Not a sound. It was like the place was holding its breath. When he moved across the floor even the crunching sound of his boots on the debris was muffled and dull.

It struck Reed then that Candleford House wasn’t empty at all. It was packed full of
silence
, a thick fog of deafening silence.

For the first time since he’d stepped inside this place, Reed felt his chest and neck get tight, and the skin on his back grew hot in some places and cold in others. He knew this feeling. This was fear.

Of what?
he thought.

Of
nothing
, came the answer, out of an ancient place deep down in his limbic system.

Nothing is in Candleford House.

Nothing is in this hallway with you.

Nothing is standing behind you.

Reed pivoted, bringing his Beretta out, running the light around the main floor, and then shining it up into the dark shadows of the upper galleries.

He saw … nothing.

He shook himself, forced his body to relax.

This was crazy. If
nothing
was what spooked Leah Searle, then this whole exercise was absurd.

He decided he’d give the place a quick look, all four floors, room by room, do it right, and then he’d get out.

He found the first staircase, tested it with his weight, and then went up it carefully, keeping his weight on the sides of each riser, not trusting the centers at all.

He reached the first gallery. Each side had four large bedrooms, with gaping windows, and all sixteen rooms were empty. It took another hour to search all four floors, and his expectations were completely fulfilled. Nothing was in every room.

Nothing filled the central atrium. Nothing was in the dining room, nothing was in the long-deserted spaces that might have been hospital wards. Nothing was in the tiny windowless rooms on the top floor, the ones with the heavy doors with the small iron-barred windows in them. Reed checked each and every one of them. At the end of the fourth-floor gallery, past a row of what could only be called cells, he saw an open door.

He followed the cone of his flashlight through the door and found himself in what must have been, at one time, a very nice room.

It still had its oak flooring. Four tall windows, each with its glass intact, let in a pale glow that had to be coming from the rising moon.

Reed went to the window, looked out, and saw Division Street far below, through the screen of live oak branches. It was still deserted, as was the entire block, but the forceful silence that seemed to choke off all the sound in the rest of the house wasn’t as strong here.

Faintly, across the tops of the forest that Gracie lived in, he heard the shouts of laughing kids, and the wheezy music from the merry-go-round. Even the air in here was sweeter and fresher.

He turned around and looked at the room. It wasn’t large, but the shreds of an Oriental carpet in the middle of the room carried an appealing pattern of white flowers and green vines that reminded him of the painted doorway at the end of the upper hallway in Dad’s—no, Kate’s—house.

There were marks on the carpet, deep indentations that could have been made by furniture. They were spaced in a way that suggested a bed rather than a couch. A large lamp, green tin, in a cone shape, the kind of lamp you saw in old factories and brand-new loft condos, hung from a chain in a way that would have lit up the middle of the bed. The room had an arched roof and the walls were capped with ornate crown molding.

Except for that ugly damn lamp, the effect of the room, even now, was sort of appealing, and it stood in stark contrast to the Victorian-prison feel of the rest of Candleford House.

What really troubled Reed about the lamp was its positioning. It was directly over the middle of the carpet and if he was right about those marks having been made by a bed, then it would have put all its harsh factory light down on the bed in a way that would have been pretty useless for anyone who wanted to use it to read by. Instead, it would have lit up the middle of the bed like a spotlight.

Or the person lying in the middle of the bed.

Which struck Reed as not only odd, but damn creepy, as if the idea of
the room was for a person to be able to stand at the end of the bed and watch someone lying on the bed, under the harsh glare of the hanging light.

He looked up from the carpet and put the light of the flash around the walls. They were covered in flowered wallpaper, faded and peeling, but pretty, in a fussy, old-fashioned way. There was a lighter spot, a square shape, where a picture must have been hanging, and placed pretty low, for a picture, only about halfway up the wall.

Rather than step on the carpet, which he was unwilling to do, though he had no idea why, Reed came around the edges of it and stood looking at the lighter square in the wallpaper.

There was no nail or hook in the space. Now that he was close, he could see that the wallpaper inside the square didn’t match the pattern around the edges. It was the same paper, but the piece in the square had been cut from a different part of the wallpaper and patched in.

Why?

Reed tapped the center of the square.

It gave off a hollow-sounding thump and the square shifted a bit. Reed looked around the edges and saw seams. This board had been cut to size and put in this square to cover … what?

A window?

He tapped around the edges of the board.

It rattled and the bottom left corner popped out a bit.

Reed got the blade of the bolt cutter and pried at the corner. The entire square popped free, and he was looking into a dark space.

He put the light into the square and saw a small closet-like space, windowless, about five by three. In the middle of the space was a large padded chair covered in moth-eaten velvet cloth, at one time purple. There was a table beside the chair, with an ashtray and something that looked like it might have been a tobacco box. The chair was placed so that anyone sitting in the chair could see directly through the opening. There was no getting around this one. The meaning of it was unmistakable.

A rape room, that’s what this pretty sitting room was set up for.

And a rape room with a closet and a window where someone else could watch the rape take place.

He looked back into the closet space and saw the vague outline of a wooden panel door that had been cut into the back of the closet. So the person watching the rape, or the torture, or whatever it was, could come and go without being seen.

Reed stepped back, and then kicked out at the wall under the open square. It cracked and bent.

He booted it again, and again.

The wall cracked wide open. He kicked the opening into shards and splinters, stepped into the closet, shoved the chair aside, and slammed his boot heel against the door in the paneling.

The door was just a piece of shaved spruce. It flew back on rusty hinges, and he was looking at a large high-ceilinged room with a wall of leaded-glass windows running along one side.

The light of the moon was pouring into the room. There was a massive four-poster bed in the middle of the room, bare wood now, the mattress and bedsprings long gone. It was covered with dust but it was still intact. It was set in the middle of a Persian carpet, the rug white with dust and slowly rotting into pieces from the damp.

There was nothing else in the room except a tallboy dresser on the wall opposite the windows, all its drawers pulled open, as if it had been ransacked by a thief in a hurry.

Reed walked over to it and put a light into the top drawer. It had been lined with newspaper, now yellow and cracked and peeling. He pulled at one sheet and it came up.

It was a page of ads for farm tools, straight razors, curling irons, suspenders, hair oil, dentures, all of them in faded sepia. There was a dateline in the upper left corner.

September 23, 1930

He pulled the drawer out, turned it over. Nothing. The next. Nothing. And more nothing.

But on the underside of the bottom drawer a maker’s mark was branded into the wood:

There was a small square of yellowed paper glued to the drawer bottom, just below the maker’s brand. It was a typed form, the letters faded but legible:

Reed held the light on the drawer for a while, and then he set the drawer on the floor.

Was this what Leah Searle had found? If she had, there was obviously an easier way to get into this room than kicking down two walls. But it was proof that Abel Teague had been … what?

Living in Candleford House, or at least staying in this room whenever he was in Gracie, until at least 1930? Clara Mercer had been forcibly remanded to Candleford House on June 14, 1924.

Because of the fire in the Niceville archives in 1935, no one knew who had signed that order. The documents had been destroyed. Was Leah Searle closing in on a copy? If so, what would it prove?

Well, for one thing it might prove that Abel Teague arranged to have Clara Mercer taken away from the Ruelles and brought here to Candleford House as a captive toy for his amusement. Which, after everything he had done to her already, was a refinement of sadistic cruelty almost too bloody awful to contemplate. It meant that Clara Mercer had spent seven years locked away in Candleford House, enduring unspeakable abuse at the hands of the same man who ruined her young life all those years before. The paper lining might mean that Teague was still living here, or at least coming here on a regular basis, when Clara got pregnant. Clara went into Crater Sink in 1931.

Was it possible that Abel Teague left here shortly afterwards, and in such a hurry that he forgot to take a family heirloom, a Christmas gift from his father, and left it to rot in this room?

It certainly would explain why Glynis Ruelle would have carried a hatred for Abel Teague that would have seared her soul black for the rest of her years. But Glynis Ruelle died in 1939.

And all of this was ancient history now.

Why would Miles care enough about any of it to murder Leah Searle and his own wife? And then take his head off with an antique Purdy? The fact that Miles Teague had an evil relative wasn’t news to anyone in
Niceville. The bitter memory of London Teague’s crimes was the reason the golf and country club in Niceville was named after Anora Mercer.

Whose signature was on that order of committal? And why was Abel Teague occupying the nicest room in Candleford House? Was Candleford House being run for Abel’s personal amusement?