The Mountain's Shadow (17 page)

The main entrance to the ballroom was down the steps that curved to the left of the front hall stairs. I had almost forgotten it existed, but when I was a child, my grandfather and I would go down there and have teatime—or he would have tea, and I would have milk and cookies. We’d sit in the middle of the big, dusty floor and look at the murals illuminated by the afternoon light. It made sense that his laboratory and whatever he left for me would be down there.

Gabriel had opened the heavy red velvet drapes, faded on the window side from years of sun exposure, and I caught my breath as I descended the stairs and saw the familiar floor. The butler’s footsteps marked a trail through the dust, as mine soon would. The marble had been cut and laid so as to mimic the pattern of light on the forest floor. Above me the domed ceiling with its chandelier that tinkled as I walked also displayed years of neglect, the paint and gold leaf from the night sky replete with stars starting to flake. Even so, it showed no evidence of moisture or mold. The walls of the ballroom by the stairs were covered in paintings of trees to give the impression of a forest. My grandfather had wanted to put new creatures in every year. He had done all the painting work himself and contracted the gold-leaf labor, and he had only made one addition. A black wolf peered at me from behind an oak tree, its golden eyes glowing in the afternoon light. It was so lifelike I caught my breath for a moment.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Gabriel’s voice made me jump even though I knew he was right behind me. “I found the room by following your grandfather’s footprints.”

“He never let it get this dusty. He’d always have someone from the village come in and clean it once a year.”

“It sounds like he was distracted for a bit.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. When he was on the hunt, especially for knowledge, there was no turning him back.”

“What of your grandmother?”

“Died before I was born.”

“Ah.”

The door to the supposed storeroom was by the wolf, its handle concealed as a tree knot. The only time the outline of the door itself would be visible was now, in the late afternoon, as the sun shone directly into the room. By candlelight or chandelier it would blend into the forest painting. I turned the handle, my heartbeat loud in my ears.

The storeroom was lined with metal shelves like one would find in a lab, but no table stood in the middle. It was illuminated by a single bulb on a chain. The shelves were lined with a few boxes, but mostly with objects I fondly remembered from my childhood, toys and cups and even some of the old kitchen equipment like the cast-iron skillets he had taught me to make cornbread in. The boxes held old letters from me to my grandfather from during my school years. I would write to him and give him news about me and Andrew since my brother didn’t like to write as much as I did. Something tickled at the back of my brain, but I decided not to chase it and just let it lie dormant until I could tease it out with intuition.

In spite of the dustiness of the ballroom, this room seemed less dirty. Even the old toys showed no evidence of the dust and dinginess that should have accumulated over the course of twenty or so years. My grandfather must have moved them down here recently.

“Find anything?” This time Gabriel’s voice seemed an intrusion.

“Lots of things, but I’m not sure you’d find it interesting. Old toys and stuff, mostly. Did you take anything else out?”

“Only a cat statuette I thought would look charming on the kitchen windowsill.”

“A cat statuette? What did it look like?”

“It was a little angel cat with your name on it. I was going to show it to you this evening.”

A little angel cat? I didn’t remember one, but my grandfather had pointed my way to important volumes upstairs with statuettes like it. “Do you remember where it was?”

“I believe it was on the pile of boxes in the back, on top of the box with letters.”

Indeed, the back wall held only one set of shelves, the rest of it file boxes piled high. An angel cat. I had found the four terrestrial elements, but to balance them, one needed the fifth element of spirit.

“I think whatever I’m doing down here will bore you, Gabriel. Why don’t you go upstairs and continue doing what you were doing? And maybe Lonna would like some tea or coffee.”

“Yes, Madam.” I heard resentment in his tone, but this was something I wanted to handle alone. I opened the storeroom door all the way back on its hinges to let the light in the little room. Indeed, the back wall held a door set into the wall so closely that again, it required the sun to see it. I moved the boxes away from it, careful to keep them together in case they, too, held clues to this path my grandfather wanted me to follow. I also had to feel around for the handle to the door—the metal type that needed to be pulled out, then turned—but it moved easily and silently once I found it, and the heavy door opened back and into the laboratory I had only dreamed of.

The room took up the entire rest of the first floor of the house. It had formerly been the entertaining kitchen with two sinks, a long wooden prep table with marble top, and marble counters along all the walls. The basic equipment was still there, but now every surface was littered with different paraphernalia. I could only guess at the purpose of some of it. Row after row of long wooden test-tube racks with various substances, burners, and even a large piece of equipment that looked like something from a genetics lab crowded the room. I knew my grandfather had been very intelligent and had almost unlimited financial resources, but this was beyond anything I had ever expected to find at Wolfsbane Manor.

I searched for notes to see if he had written what he'd done, as most scientists would. Nothing. The directions must be in that pile of boxes in the storeroom. I looked around the lab one more time and promised I would be back. My fingers itched to play with the fancy toys all around me. But before I played, or even cleaned, I needed to know what he had done. The question was, where were his notes?

I returned to the storeroom and sifted through the boxes that had been directly in front of the door. I opened one to find letters in childish handwriting, the ones I remembered sending to my grandfather. Instead of being organized by date, they were tied in little bundles with ribbon. I put that box aside and moved on to the next one.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw more pediatric charts. A note in scrawled handwriting lay across the top of them:
“Charles, this was all I could get. The H. rep and the head nurse are getting suspicious. H.J.”

The third and fourth boxes held more charts, these very old, including mine and my brother’s. There were also some other papers, yellowed and faded, that appeared to be birth and marriage certificates. I brought these up to the office first, then returned for the other two. I had no idea what the significance of any of it could be, only that my grandfather seemed to have been on the same track. Then there had been a fire, a mysterious disappearance, and now a likely murder. What were we so close to finding that we posed a threat to someone? What kind of threat could be so big it was worth killing for?

I shuddered as I remembered Louise, her last breaths, her warning about the black wolf. It was out there somewhere, and it may have snatched Lance Bowman after its escapades at the Manor. Another strand in the web, but I was no closer to finding the spider. And if I did find the spider, what would it do to me?

Chapter Eleven

I sat with the boxes in the study. Now I had five of them, one from my own destroyed laboratory and four from the storeroom downstairs. Television portrays research scientists with a certain glamour, as though the profession is all about sexy underwear under white lab coats, which are ready to come off at the end of a long day of making life-altering discoveries. In reality, there’s a lot of paper involved. That’s why most of us wear comfortable clothes and geeky glasses.

The door opened, and Lonna poked her head around.
 

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.” We looked at each other. I let her speak first.

“I don’t really know how to say this.”

“Okay.”

“This place is giving me nightmares. The first night I was fine, but I don’t know, I guess it’s all the talk of missing children and those awful screams in the woods.”

“Would you rather stay in town?”

She shivered. “No, because even though I’m not sleeping well here, I feel like I shouldn’t leave, like there’s something here I have to find.”

“A husband? Or someone else’s husband?”
 

“No, there’s something else.”

I could see the dark circles under her eyes, and a wisp of guilt curled from my stomach to my chest. “I’m sorry, that was out of turn.”

“I’m sorry too. I’ve been a bitch. It’s just that I came here to help you, and it seems you’re keeping me out of the loop.”

“Everything’s been happening really fast.”

“I understand. But would you please try to do better with including me?”

“I will if I can.”

She sat in one of the overstuffed leather armchairs by the reading table. “What’s all that stuff?”

“Things I found in the storeroom off the ballroom. I’m hoping they’ll give me some clue as to what my grandfather found and the direction his research was going in.”

“And the smoky one?”

“From the lab in Memphis. Somehow it got sent here. There must have been a mistake, but I’m keeping it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “What’s in it?”

“Medical records from kids with CLS. I’m looking to see if there’s something I missed. Hopefully there’s enough for my database to sift through.”

She came to stand by the computer and looked over my shoulder at my database. “Research through brute force, huh?”

“You got it, baby.”

“I was thinking about going to interview Louise’s family. They’ve lost a child and now a grandmother, so they may be more tied into this than anyone else. How about some research by charm and sympathy?”

“I could do that, but let’s wait ’til tomorrow. It’s already dinnertime, and I feel like I’m really, really close to figuring out something important.”

Lonna laughed. “I know that look. And that feeling. I’ll have Gabriel bring something in for you for dinner.”

“Thanks.” I squeezed her arm. “You’re a good friend.”

“You are too. Even if you’re a stubborn little thing.”

“You have no room to talk.”

But stubborn as I was, I couldn’t figure out what, exactly, I searched for in the data. Finally, a little after midnight, I gave up. The numbers and notations swam before my eyes, and I decided to go to sleep and let my brain work on the puzzle.

I woke to the sound of male voices in the front hallway. The clock said six-o-five, so I rolled out of bed and threw on my robe. Leo and Ron stood in the door, duffel bags in hand, both of them unshaven and with dark circles under their eyes. Gabriel physically blocked them from entering the house.

“What’s going on here?”

“Doctor Fisher. I didn’t intend for them to wake you.”

“That’s not what I asked, Gabriel.”

“We have a couple of strays here.” He pitched his voice low, almost a growl, all the amicability of the day before gone. “And they want to stay here. I knew if we fed them, they’d keep coming back.”

“At least be civilized and give them a cup of coffee, Gabriel, so we can find out what’s going on.”

He shot me a look but backed down and went through the den into the kitchen.

“Thanks, Joanie,” Ron said. “It’s been a rough night.”

“What happened?” I gestured for them to put their bags to the left of the door by the umbrella stand, not really a promise to let them stay, but a possibility.

Leo plopped down on the new sofa and ran his hands through his hair. “Well, we looked for clues in the woods between here and town, but we couldn’t find anything.”

“Why would you expect to find anything between here and there? What about the other side of the subdivision?”

“Because whatever’s happening seems to center around this place.” Leo looked up at me. “I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.”

He was right. I didn’t. “Fine. Then what did you do?”

“We hung out in town for a while and asked people if they’d seen anything unusual the night before last.”

“They hadn’t,” added Ron.

“So we went back to Peter’s place. Marguerite was in bed with the help of a sedative, and Peter sat in the drawing room with a glass of Scotch. He looked like hell, I’ll give him that.”

“I bet.”

Gabriel came in with three steaming mugs of coffee and set them down on the table with cream, sugar and spoons. “Would you like anything to eat?” He only addressed me.

“Do you have any muffins ready?”

“Baked them this morning.”

“Would you bring those out, please? And three, no, four plates.” I heard someone moving around on the second floor.

Lonna came down the stairs, beautiful as always in her morning dishevelment. When the guys saw her, their nostrils flared for a moment. Her womanly scent, perhaps? She had showered last night. They exchanged a look, but Leo shook his head.