The Tavernier Stones (41 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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“You’re the religious one,” he said. “You want to say something before we open it?”
John made the sign of the cross. “May God forgive me for what I am about to do.”
“Assuming,” David added, “that he has already forgiven you for busting into his house and hacking at it with garden tools.”
“I’d feel a world better if today weren’t Sunday.”
“It’s funny you should say that. Stonewall Jackson, a very religious man, fought most of his battles on Sundays.”
“And he, a cold-blooded killer! I feel so much better.”
David set the crowbar back down and cracked his knuckles. John rubbed the palms of his hands together. Sarah took a couple of steps backwards while the two men bent over and got a good grip on the corners of the lid.
“Three, two, one … go!”
They strained and grunted, and the lid came loose, making horrible screeching noises as it slid across the top of the sarcophagus. They shuffled a few steps away and dropped the sandstone slab on the floor. It crashed thunderously, breaking into several large pieces.
The trio froze, waiting for the echoes in the nave to fade. John imagined the noise reverberating through the rock bluff and being heard by everyone in the town below. After a few seconds that seemed like minutes, all was still again, and no response came from the world outside.
David removed his flashlight from his back pocket and directed its beam into the open sarcophagus. “Come have a look at this,” he said.
John and Sarah joined him and peered inside. The red light illuminated a worn stone staircase that wound deep into the rock. At the bottom of the staircase, at the limit of the flashlight’s beam, an arched entrance led into an open space. No door blocked the entrance, but the darkness beyond was even more forbidding.
“I never really believed it,” Sarah said, “until this moment.”
David took a deep breath, then stepped over the side of the sarcophagus. “It’s now or never.”
Sarah followed behind him, and John brought up the rear.
The walls of the access were rough hewn; whoever had cut them had made a modest attempt at an arch structure but had deviated wherever the rock became too resistant. As John descended behind the red glow of three flashlights, the temperature gradually dropped and goose pimples formed on his arms. He ducked to avoid spider webs, some clearly as old as the access itself. The air was dank and musty and had a stale odor consistent with three hundred years of little or no disturbance.
As they neared the bottom of the staircase, the walls became spotty with moisture. The sound of steady dripping emanated from somewhere far below.
Sarah reached behind herself and took John’s hand. He gripped it firmly.
“I hope,” David said over his shoulder, “that if God decides to punish you in the next hour or so, he waits until the rest of us get out of the way.”
 
Blumenfeld and Gebhardt had reached the tunnel gate and found it latched and locked. Blumenfeld looked up at the stained glass windows, now dark within their Gothic arches. All was quiet; there wasn’t so much as a breeze to disturb the calm. The stars shined so clearly, even the convection currents must have stood down for the night. No evidence existed that she and Gebhardt were following in the footsteps of others, which is why she concluded they were.
“Time to make yourself useful,” she told her partner.
Gebhardt knelt down before the gate, removed a tool wallet from his back pocket, and shined his flashlight on the lock. “
Scheiße!
” he said. “It’s been picked already.”
Blumenfeld’s heart raced; the game was on. But it was best, she decided, not to excite her young companion. “Take it easy,” she reassured him. “They have arrived, but they have not yet left. So far, everything is going according to script.”
“I hope you know the script,” Gebhardt said, “because the story looks a little open-ended to me.”
“Naturally. But from this point on, we really should speak only when necessary.”
They went silently into the tunnel, closing and relatching the gate behind them.
Blumenfeld knew the script. She had it memorized.
 
Farther down on the Kirchweg, Pfeffer was in bed but still awake, thinking about crimes, detective work, puzzles. He’d never really solved a great crime, certainly nothing that would get him into the history books. The Cellarius murder was a great crime. Pfeffer had broken most of the code. He was almost there. As he lay on the bed, he treated himself to the vision of tossing a shovel aside, swinging open a wooden chest, and plunging his fingers into the cold pile of sparkling jewels that constituted the lost Tavernier stones.
It wasn’t about the gemstones, he admonished himself; the only treasure to be sought and found was a solution to a famous crime. But what if the solver then kept the stones for himself? Would he be committing a crime as well?
He got out of bed, looked at himself in the mirror, and was startled by the camouflaged face looking back. Laughing out loud, he dampened a washcloth and wiped the makeup off. Then he flopped back down on the bed.
He checked his alarm clock for the twelfth time. Close your eyes, he told himself. Get some rest. Give it one more hour. Let whomever is destined to find the stones have an opportunity to find the stones. Then—
then
—determine who is destined to take them home.
 
Zimmerman watched the Marktplatz from his hotel room window. He was sure David Freeman would pass by. But the hour grew late, and David had not appeared.
Had he already found the lost Tavernier stones?
Were the stones somewhere other than the church?
Was David sitting in his own room, waiting for someone else to lead the way?
 
Meanwhile, David, Sarah, and John had arrived at the bottom of the stone staircase. David pointed his flashlight down a sinuous, descending corridor. The corridor angled northward, penetrating deep into the mountain. John wondered how deep—to Hell itself? He thought, It’s now or never, just as David had said. See it through to the finish or turn back and quit.
“We don’t need these any longer,” David said, removing the red cellophane cover from his flashlight lens. John and Sarah removed theirs as well, and the corridor was suddenly awash in white light. Minute quartz crystals sparkled as the flashlight beams glided across the walls.
David led the way, brushing ancient cobwebs aside with his flashlight, stopping periodically to shine the light directly ahead and study the path before him. The ceiling was so low, John found he had to walk bent over double and sometimes in a squat. Age-old mosses and lichens, entombed since the last torch was extinguished in the corridor, made splotchy patterns on the rock surfaces. He brushed at a patch with his fingers and it came away like fine dust. As the corridor leveled off, he varied his strides to avoid shallow, murky puddles. Directly in front of him, Sarah was duck-walking in a hunkered crouch, her free hand frequently pressed against the floor to keep her balance.
Were he and David leading her into danger? Would this path suddenly disappear into some kind of an abyss? Was it possible there were witches still down there, waiting for them? He felt a chill and realized a breeze was flowing against them. Somehow the mountain was channeling cool, moist air through its secret corridor. The air had to come from somewhere; somewhere ahead, there was another opening.
Eventually David’s flashlight revealed a large, open space about ten meters in front of him. As John neared it, he was able to rise up to his full height. When he stopped next to David and Sarah, he faced the entrances of three chambers that comprised a suite.
“It’s hard to tell,” David said, “but I think we’ve descended to street level, maybe even lower.”
The chamber that opened to the left of the corridor was filled with clay amphorae. The dust-covered pots jammed wooden shelves that spanned the walls from the floor to the ceiling. Spider webs sagging with age looped from handle to handle and enshrouded the bas-relief images decorating their bellies.
“That was no doubt the wine cellar,” David said.
Another chamber, larger than the first, lay to the right of the corridor. It contained simple furniture, suggesting it used to be a bedroom. The rotted wooden frame of a bed was recognizable in one corner, as were a nightstand, a high-backed chair, and a dressing table. On the dressing table sat a mirror whose glass had flowed so much over time that images reflected in it were severely distorted. What must have once been a rug made a large rectangular stain on the floor.
Behind the headboard of the bed, visible only because the wood of the headboard had decomposed, was a hole in the wall big enough for a person to crawl through. John shined his flashlight on the hole. The scratch marks around its circumference suggested it had been carved meticulously by hand with a stone, dull knife, or eating utensil.
“Someone was trying to escape,” David observed, “and hiding her efforts behind the bed.”
“Maybe one of Wyrich’s mistresses,” Sarah suggested.
“Or an unenthusiastic witch,” John said.
The third and main chamber was directly ahead. John took a deep breath and followed David through the entrance. Would they find treasure in there—or ghosts? He wasn’t sure which would unsettle him more.
As soon as David stepped out of the way, the first thing John noticed confirmed his worst fears. Sprawled on the floor, just inside the entrance, was a complete human skeleton. Its jaw had fallen slack in a macabre grin, and its eye sockets were staring vacantly at the ceiling.

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