The Walker in Shadows (18 page)

The mustache quivered.

"You refer, ma'am, to the War Between the States?"

Josef, who was behind the irate Confederate, turned to stare. His mouth curved into a grin. Pat resisted the impulse to shake a fist at him.

"Yes," she said meekly.

"Two of the rooms of this h'yere house, ma'am, are filled with volumes on that subject. Mah more rare and expensive volumes repose behind glass on shelves in the regions above stairs. May Ah ask what partic'lar aspect of that epic struggle interests you?"

Josef had abandoned all pretense of interest in his book. Pat felt sure that without his malicious enjoyment of her discomfiture she would never have been able to reply.

" Maryland," she said. "The Poolesville area in particular."

"Not much goin' on there," said the relic of the Old South. "Unless it's Captain 'Lige White…"

"The Turnbulls," Pat said. "And the Bateses. I live in the old Bates house."

The white mustache vibrated, and a spark of interest lit the faded blue eyes.

"Most interesting ma'am. If you-all will wait a moment, till Ah deal with this gentleman…"

With lordly condescension he accepted a ten-dollar bill from a waiting customer and retreated into the back regions, presumably to get change. The buyer, a middle-aged man wearing a sports shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, grinned at Pat and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Don't let Bill get to you, lady. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut. It's all an act. He-"

He broke off as Bill returned with a few limp dollar bills. With a last, amused wink at Pat, he departed with his book.

"Now, then," said Bill. "What was it you were sayin', ma'am?"

The mystique, alas, was gone; the accent was palpably false.

"I said, 'I live in the old Bates house,' " Pat said.

"And I," said Josef, advancing, "have purchased the Turnbull house. We are interested in the history of the families."

"Nat'chrally." Bill stroked his mustache and eyed them speculatively. "But o' course you wouldn't hope to find any personal memoirs or reminiscences, now would you? That would be too great a stroke of luck."

"Well," Josef began.

"Aha." Bill leaned forward. "And what would you-all say if Ah told you that Ah happen to possess one o' the few remainin' copies of Miss Mary Jane Turnbull's memoirs? Privately printed in Richmond after war"-he pronounced it "wo-ah"-"in an edition of only two hundred copies, excellent condition, pages uncut…"

"Mary Jane?" Pat turned to Josef. "Peter's older sister? Do you suppose-"

Josef jabbed her in the ribs; she took the hint, and stopped speaking. She had sounded far too eager. Bill's blue eyes had taken on the gleam of a good businessman encountering a prospective buyer.

"We might be interested," Josef said. "Could we have a look at the book, please?"

"Certainly, mah dear sir." Bill trotted off. The memoirs were obviously one of his choicer volumes, kept under glass in the chambers above.

"How much is this book worth to us?" Josef asked softly.

"Why-a few dollars, I suppose."

"It won't be a few dollars. I know this routine; it always means large sums of money. Let me handle it, will you? You are obviously lousy at bargaining."

When Bill returned he carried the book balanced on both hands. It lacked only a silver salver. Its appearance did not justify Bill's tender care. Bound in faded green cloth, the gilt-lettered title equally faded, it was not an imposing object.

Pat's intention of skimming through the pages was frustrated from the start by the fact that there were no separate pages, only the thick bundles of the uncut fascicles. Opening the book at random, she came upon the following paragraph:

The more we learn of the victory last Sunday the greater it seems to be. They say the Yankee dead lay upon the field like a blue blanket. The arrogant ladies and gentlemen of Washington had anticipated triumph; coming in carriages to view the annihilation of our hopes, they carried picnic baskets and bottles of French champagne, all of which they were forced to abandon in their precipitate flight when their army was overwhelmed. Hurrah! We expect momentarily to hear of the arrival of our men in the enemy capital.

"Wednesday, July 24, 1861." Pat read the date aloud.

" Bull Run," said Josef, who had been reading over her shoulder. "First Manassas, as the Confederates called it. They might indeed have taken Washington then, if they had pressed on."

"It's all so impersonal," Pat complained. "Nothing about the family."

"An invaluable record, suh and ma'am." Bill saw a prospective customer losing interest, and increased the pressure. "There is considerable information there, as you will discover when you cut the pages. Naturally Ah would not do so until the book is sold. It is in mint condition and therefore much more valuable uncut."

Josef closed the book.

"How much?" he asked.

"You didn't buy it?" Mark's voice rose to a squeal of outrage.

"For two hundred and fifty dollars?" Pat imitated his tone. Yet she felt defensive, and that angered her. "You act as if we had all the money in the world," she exclaimed. "From what we could see the book didn't have any personal material; it was written for publication, after all, so it must have been edited-"

"All right, I'm sorry," Mark muttered. He ran his fingers through his hair.

"I bought these," Pat said, proffering them like a propitiatory offering to an outraged deity. "This ragged little pamphlet cost me fifteen bucks. I mean, really, Mark-"

"I said I was sorry." Mark took the stack of books, like Jehovah accepting a less-than-perfect lamb. He tossed most of them aside with contempt, but the sight of the expensive pamphlet made his face brighten. "Hey, this looks good. ' Montgomery County Families of Distinction, and the War Between the States.' Maybe it mentions the Turnbulls."

"It does," Josef said. "We wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Your friend Peter…"

Mark wasn't listening. He had subsided onto the floor, cross-legged, his head bent over the little book. Kathy knelt beside him, her fair hair brushing his shoulder.

"Here it is," he said. " 'The Extinction of an old and honored family…' The old man was killed in 1863. In a cavalry skirmish, 'somewhere in Maryland.' His body was returned to his grieving family and interred with military honors in… Hey. Did you know you had a family graveyard, Mr. Friedrichs?"

"Forget it," Josef said promptly. "You are not going to excavate my backyard."

"Would you object if I just looked around for tombstones or-"

"Yes."

"Oh. Well, okay. The old man isn't the problem, anyway. It's Peter we… Oh, wow. Here it is. He was killed too."

Pat felt the same shock she would have felt at the news of the death of a personal acquaintance. In spite of Mark's conviction that Peter Turnbull was an arrogant, unpleasant young man who had become an even more unpleasant ghost, she found his death, at nineteen, tragic and disturbing.

Josef's reaction was less sentimental.

"So he did die violently in battle," he said. "Mark, how do you know these things, before we find written evidence? Are you holding out on us?"

Mark pretended not to hear the question. Perhaps it was not all pretense; he appeared to be genuinely puzzled as he read on.

"One of his men saw him fall. He was shot… It doesn't say where. But he fell over his horse's neck, and there was a lot of blood, and… That's it. The trooper who saw it was wounded too, he lost track of what was going on. He-the trooper-was picked up when reinforcements arrived and drove the Federal troops away." Mark stared raptly at the ceiling. "I wonder if his bones are still lying there, in the underbrush near White's Ferry…"

Pat let out an exclamation of disgust, but Kathy obviously found the idea more romantic than repulsive.

"Maybe that's what he wants," she suggested. "Burial in sanctified ground, with the rites of the church."

"You've been reading too many horror stories," her father said disagreeably. "I refuse to dig up half of Montgomery County looking for the remains of Peter Turnbull."

Rain pattered against the window. Pat reached up to turn on a lamp. It was already dark outside. An involuntary shiver ran through her. What would happen at one o'clock? Was Mark really determined to go through with the insane plan they had formulated earlier? She didn't want to ask. She was afraid of the answer.

"Food, anyone?" she asked.

"I made spaghetti sauce," Mark answered, his eyes still fixed on outer space, his expression remote.

"It smells as if it were burning," Josef said maliciously.

With an exclamation of distress Kathy leaped to her feet and ran out.

"What about a drink?" Josef asked.

Pat bit her lip. She had been about to suggest that this was no time for alcohol. But Josef's habits were none of her business. She revised her comment.

"What about some wine? I think there is some Chianti downstairs, in the wine bin-"

Mark snapped to attention.

"Wait, Mom, don't go down there. I mean-I'll get the wine. I mean-"

"I knew you were up to something," Pat said wearily. "What did you do this afternoon, Mark?"

Mark tried to look innocent.

"Now, Mom, what makes you think-"

"You're too clean," Pat said, inspecting his unspotted T-shirt and neatly creased jeans. "You changed your clothes before we got home. You wouldn't do that unless-"

"Ah, so that's your secret." Mark smiled at her, and her treacherous heart softened. "I'll know better after this."

Kathy came running back.

"It's all right," she announced cheerfully. "I turned it down and added some water. Was that all right, Mark?"

"Never mind the damned spaghetti sauce," Josef snapped. "What did you two do this afternoon? You've changed your clothes too, Kathy. What-"

Mark caught the implication and-to the surprise of his mother, who had thought him impervious to innuendos of that nature-turned bright red.

"It isn't what you think," he said angrily. "We got dirty, that's all. Cobwebs and mud and… We opened up the tunnel."

"Tunnel," Pat repeated blankly. "What tunnel?"

"The doorway Dad uncovered in the basement," Mark answered. His angry color had not subsided, and he avoided Josef's gaze. "He walled it up again, remember? The ceiling looked as if it were about to collapse, and you said it was dangerous, and-"

"That wasn't a tunnel, it was a room, a root cellar or-"

"It was a tunnel. The ceiling had fallen in, that's why we couldn't see how far it extended. Don't you get it, Mom? This house was a station on the Underground Railway. 'Freedom Hall,' Mr. Bates's abolitionist sympathies…"

"Show me," Josef said.

Pat never went into the cellar if she could help it. Unlike modern structures bearing the same name, or the more euphonious appellation of basement, the substructure of her house had never been designed for conversion into family rooms or game rooms. It was almost wholly subterranean, dank-smelling and dismal. The whitewashed stone walls had smears of green lichen, and water often oozed from the floor. Jerry had converted an old enclosed porch off the kitchen into a laundry room, so there was seldom any reason for Pat to go belowstairs. Though she was barely conscious of the fact, her dislike of the area was not based solely on its physical unattractiveness. Its unpleasant atmosphere went beyond damp and darkness.

Now, as she descended the wooden steps, she saw a gaping hole in the wall behind the furnace. The floor was littered with bits of mortar.

"What a mess!" she exclaimed angrily. "Mark, how could you?"

"I'll clean it up," Mark said. His voice sounded distant, muffled.

"What were you looking for?" Josef demanded, ducking to avoid braining himself on the pipes that traversed the low ceiling.

"I don't know. I just thought maybe…"

Pat started forward, picking her way delicately through the debris. A low, eerie moan made her stop and turn. She saw Jud squatting on the top step. His bulbous eyes were fixed on the dark hole in the wall. He looked perturbed. But then, Pat thought, he often did.

"He sat there and whined all the time we were working," Mark said, indicating the dog. "That must mean something."

"It means he doesn't like damp, cool places," Pat said. "He's always hated the cellar."

Yet as she approached the gap in the wall she was conscious of a chill that transcended the normal dampness of the place. Cool, wet air wafted out of the darkness, like a draft. But there could be no passage of air through the earth that filled the far end of the hole…

Mark had brought a flashlight. He switched it on and turned the beam into the darkness.

Brick walls, green with mold, framed a narrow rectangle barely two feet wide. The floor was of beaten earth, shiny with damp. The low ceiling was supported by planks now gray and cellular, like elongated wasps' nests: the evidence of industrious termite colonies. Beyond the gap in the wall the open space was barely six feet long. It ended in a sloping wall of dirt.

"I remember this," Pat said. "Jerry found it the first year we lived here. We assumed it was just another room. What makes you think it was a tunnel?"

"I'm afraid he's right," Josef said, before Mark could answer. "It's too narrow to have been a room. Given Mr. Bates's abolitionist sentiments…"

For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was the heavy panting of the dog, so magnified and distorted by the low ceiling that it seemed to come, not from the stairs behind, but out of the darkness of the collapsed tunnel. Pat's scalp prickled. Surely more than one pair of lungs were emitting that agonized breathing. She seemed to hear gasps, low moans of effort and distress… How many weary, frightened men and women had crawled through that dark space, laboring toward freedom?