I was out of the car as quickly as a nine-months-pregnant woman can move. Out of the car and up the stairs to the porch, and to that open door.
“Mrs. Jenkins!”
The TV was still on in the parlor, droning softly, but there was no sign of Mrs. J. She wasn’t on the sofa where I’d left her. The blanket I had spread over her before I left, was tossed on the floor. Most likely she had just woken up and pushed it off, as there were no other signs of a struggle. The sofa pillows were still tucked in the corners of the sofa, and everything was in its proper place, including the TV remote.
I used it to turn off the TV. Blessed silence ensued. I opened my mouth again. “Mrs. Jenkins!”
This time there was a noise. Or at least I thought I heard something. From farther inside the house. Kitchen, maybe?
I left the parlor and hurried down the hallway.
The dining room was empty. I took the time to stick my head in.
So was the library, where we had found Brenda Puckett’s butchered body once before. Nobody was dead in front of the fireplace this time.
I continued into the kitchen.
Everything looked normal there, too. With one exception. The door next to the refrigerator gaped open, into the blackness of the basement. A cold draft emanated from down there.
I walked over to it. “Mrs. Jenkins?”
My voice sort of disappeared, like it was swallowed up by the blackness. But I distinctly heard a noise, something like a scraping, from downstairs.
Hell. I mean... heck. I guess there was nothing for it but to go down.
I hit the light switch beside the door. The rickety wood staircase descending into the jaws of hell winked into view. I took a deep breath and started down.
Slowly. With one hand clutching the railing. The stairs are steep and shallow, and I was front heavy. “Mrs. Jenkins? Are you down here?”
I could count on one hand the times I’d been down in this basement since I moved in with Rafe. It’s disgusting. A hard dirt floor, a little wet in places, with half dirt, half brick walls that end in a four or five foot ledge. At the far end of the ledge, here and there, there are small, dirty windows. Dirty, because we can’t reach them to clean them. Basically, we’re talking about a hole in the ground under the house. I know there are spiders. I’m sure there are other types of bugs. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was worse than that.
The place gives me the creeps. I never go down here unless I absolutely have to.
And no sooner had I made my way off the staircase onto the dirt floor, than I heard a rush of feet upstairs. The door slammed. The key turned. And the next second, the basement plunged into stygian blackness.
“No!”
I don’t like the dark. We’ve already established that I didn’t like the basement. I certainly didn’t want to be locked in it while who knows who did who knows what upstairs.
Had Mrs. Jenkins shut me in the basement? Or had someone else still been in the house?
For the first few seconds after the door slammed and the lights went out, everything was pitch black. I couldn’t see anything. My eyes were open, but everything around me was dark.
I could hear, though. The pounding of my heartbeat in my ears was so loud it drowned out pretty much anything else, but I did hear the pounding of feet overhead. Running, in the direction of the front door, unless I was mistaken.
Yep, a second later, the door slammed. Hard enough that the house shook. Something—hopefully just old dust—fell from the ceiling onto my head.
So that answered that question. Someone else had been in the house. Those footsteps had been both too heavy and too fast to belong to Mrs. Jenkins.
So where was she?
If I went up to the top of the stairs and started yelling, would she hear me and come open the door?
I guess this might be a good time to mention that I’d left my handbag with my phone outside in the car. If Mrs. Jenkins wasn’t around, or didn’t hear me, I’d have to sit down here, in the company of the spiders and beetles, until Rafe came home from work. Which could take some time. He doesn’t exactly keep regular business hours. And with José and Clayton staking out Doctor Fesmire’s home and business, Rafe might decide to check in with them before he came home. I could be down here until eight o’clock.
I put my head back and opened my mouth. “Mrs. Jenkins!”
The basement was still dark, although my eyes were becoming more used to it. Pale gray light filtered in through the dirty windows in the foundation.
They were minuscule. A-foot-and-a-half square, maybe. I wouldn’t have been able to fit through one even before I got pregnant. And in my current condition, I wouldn’t be able to make my way up to one anyway. But the light helped a little bit. While I couldn’t quite see my hand in front of my face down here in the middle of the basement, I could see the outline of the windows, and I knew there was daylight somewhere.
I opened my mouth again. “Mrs. Jenkins! Can you hear me?”
She hadn’t responded the first time I yelled, so chances were she couldn’t hear me. But I had to do something. And yelling was all I had left.
“Mrs. Jenkins!”
And then came what was almost the worst part of the whole thing. While I stood there, in the dark in the middle of the basement, I heard a sound. The kind of sound you associate with ghost stories and old houses like this one.
A creak. A long, drawn-out creak, as from the opening of a door where the hinges hadn’t been oiled in a hundred years.
Followed by the sound of fabric brushing dirt. Like the edge of a long skirt touching the ground.
The hairs on the back of my neck and my arms stood up, and I don’t like to admit how close I came to losing control of my bladder. If there’d been anywhere to run, I’d have run. But I couldn’t see the staircase. And the last thing I wanted, was to fall and maybe hurt the baby.
So I gritted my teeth and stayed where I was as the sound of dragging footsteps filled the air.
The only thing missing was the clanking of chains.
Something brushed my arm, and almost sent me into a heart attack. My blood was rushing so hard in my ears it was a miracle I could hear anything else at all.
And then I jumped when something clawlike clamped around my forearm.
“Baby!” a voice said.
It was familiar. I knew it. It’s a testament to how freaked out I was that it took me several seconds to recognize Mrs. Jenkins.
“Oh, my God!” I wrapped my arms around her. She was warm and alive. “Oh, my God. You’re here.” I wasn’t alone.
And there were no ghosts.
And whoever had been here hadn’t found Mrs. Jenkins and taken her.
Everything was OK.
Well, except for the fact that we were still locked in the basement while my purse and my phone were on the front seat of my car—if they were even there anymore—and we had no way to call Rafe, or anyone else, for help.
But we were alive and well and together and as long as I didn’t go into labor, we’d survive.
Even so, I clung to Mrs. Jenkins for a lot longer than necessary. It was nice not to be alone in the dark. Eventually, though, she twitched away from me. She’d never been all that touchy-feely, really.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The bad man came,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
“What bad man? Do you know him?”
“He hurt Julia,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
Julia Poole’s killer had been here?
Whoever it was must have realized that Mrs. Jenkins had survived her trip into the Cumberland River, then.
Actually, he’d probably realized that sooner than this. It would have been on the news if she hadn’t. But now he’d figured out where she was. And had come to take care of the problem. He’d left her alive Saturday night, probably hoping the cold water would take care of the job for him, and now that it hadn’t, he had to get rid of her before she could spill the beans on him.
Except... what made him think she hadn’t already told someone everything she knew? Anyone sane would.
“C’mon, baby,” Mrs. Jenkins said, and derailed my train of thought.
Come on? Where?
But when she took my arm and pulled me away from the bottom of the staircase, I went with her. I couldn’t see where I was going—her night vision must be a lot better than mine; I knew Rafe’s was, so maybe he had inherited it from his grandmother—but I stumbled along beside her. Until she stopped.
“Wait.”
That I could do. And did.
Mrs. Jenkins let go of my arm and disappeared. I heard some shuffling, and a squeak, and some more noises I couldn’t exactly place. And then her voice, disembodied and sort of hollow, somewhere in the vicinity of my knees.
“C’mon, baby.”
“Come on where?”
“In the tunnel,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
Tunnel? There was a tunnel?
I’d lived here for almost a year, and I’d never seen a tunnel. I’d be willing to bet everything I owned that Rafe hadn’t, either. If he’d known there was a way into the house through the basement, that way would be nailed shut before you could blink.
Although Mrs. Jenkins had lived here for donkey’s years before either Rafe or I had set eyes on the place, so if she said there was a tunnel, most likely there was one. And most likely it was close to the ground.
I reached out and braced one hand against the cold dirt. Slowly, I squatted. It wasn’t easy, but I made it. “Mrs. J?”
“Here, baby.”
Her voice came from in front of me. I reached out and felt around.
Yes, there it was. The outline of an opening in the dirt wall. How could we have missed this?
The answer presented itself the next second, when my hand encountered wood. A post or pillar, crumbly and old.
The entrance to the tunnel was under the stairs. The stairs that were held up by wooden beams and planks. Some of which must swing in and out to cover and uncover this hole in the ground.
The tunnel emitted a sort of a cold breeze, even colder than the basement air already was. I could hear Mrs. Jenkins scrabbling in front of me.
“Am I going to fit?”
She didn’t answer. I’m not sure whether it was because she didn’t hear me, or because she didn’t know the answer.
“Dear God, please let me fit.”
He didn’t make any promises, either. I swallowed my fear and pushed inside the dank hole.
I won’t bore you with an inch by inch description of the trip through the ground. It was uncomfortable, and felt like it took hours. I had a couple of smallish panic attacks when I thought about the tunnel collapsing on top of us, and Rafe never realizing what happened. I had to force myself to think about something else. The air got worse the further in we went, and then I started worrying about passing out, and about brain damage. To me and to the baby. Mrs. Jenkins would be stuck ahead of me, and wouldn’t be able to get around me to get back, and also wouldn’t be able to move my much larger body.
I had to force myself onward from that thought, too.
And then there was the size of the tunnel. Small. The dirt roof brushed my head, and the sides brushed my shoulders. It was easy for Mrs. J. She was small. I wasn’t.
Moving along on my hands and knees hurt. My hands and knees as well as my back, which had to carry the weight of the baby.
By the time we reached the end of the tunnel—a narrow shaft going up—I was crying. Silently, but crying. Big, fat tears rolling down my face. I was afraid, I was tired, and I needed to pee. I wanted it to be over.
And then it was. I ran my head into two thin twigs, which turned out to be Mrs. Jenkins’s legs.
It took a second for the correlation to sink in. She was standing up. The tunnel had ended.
A second later, one of the legs moved. And then the other. She was climbing.
I moved forward, into the shaft, where I could get off my hands and knees and sit up. I didn’t dare stand, not quite yet, since I didn’t want to knock Mrs. Jenkins off whatever she was hanging onto, and I also didn’t want to hit my head on anything else. I had no idea how tall the shaft was, after all.
About fifteen feet, as it turned out. There was a screech up above, from yet another tortured soul, and then a square of light opened up. Into what looked like heaven. Blue sky. Pale sunlight.
I took my first deep breath since I’d entered the tunnel. It made me cough.
Over my head, Mrs. Jenkins scrambled out of the shaft and into the world. After a moment, her head appeared again. I couldn’t see her face, just the outline of it. Her hair was sticking out every which way, like a halo. The pins I had put in it this morning must have fallen out.
That was OK. I’d fix it later. And at the moment, she deserved the halo. She deserved a whole lot more, too.
“C’mon, baby.”
I got to my feet, wincing. My knees hurt. And the shaft looked narrow. Too narrow for me to fit.
But if I could stand in it down here, chances were I could fit up there. The narrowness must be an optical illusion. Just like the thought that it looked like there was a long way up. There couldn’t be. We’d started out at basement level. And I didn’t think we’d gone down, so we must still be at basement level. We were also—I assumed—somewhere in the backyard. It wasn’t likely that the tunnel extended onto someone else’s property, and while it felt like it had taken hours to get here, I didn’t think we’d traveled quite far enough for that, either.
The way out was lined with wood. Old wood. With a makeshift ladder running up one side. Just more wood—horizontal this time—nailed to the vertical boards lining the shaft.
I reached up, experimentally, and took hold of a plank. The surface was rough. I’d probably end up with splinters.
But since the alternative was to crawl back down the tunnel, into the dark basement, and to wait there until Mrs. Jenkins had made her way into the house to unlock the basement door—if she even remembered at that point what it was she was supposed to do—I decided that the splinters would be worth it. There was daylight and fresh air up above. And my house and my sofa and my fridge. And my husband, when he came home. And a shower and clean clothes.
Yes, the splinters would definitely be worth it. Hopefully the old wood was strong enough to hold my weight—and the baby’s—as I made my way up.
I started climbing. The old planks were scratchy under my hands, and they groaned under my feet. I could feel old nails give way when I put my weight on them, and as every foot got me closer to the top, I got more and more worried about something giving way and dropping me—dropping us—back to the bottom.
So I wrapped my fingers around the old planks, and ignored the splinters digging into my skin. I could whine about them later. The only thing that mattered now was holding on until I got to the top.
And then I was there. My head rose above the opening of the shaft, into blinding sunlight.
It was actually largely overcast, but after being in the dark so long, even that felt like blinding sun.
I blinked a couple of times while I oriented myself.
Yes, definitely still on the property. I was facing the back of the house. There was an expanse of dry grass and some brush and dead stalks of flowers between us, but there was no question I was still in the yard.
“The gazebo.”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded. She was standing next to me, toeing her hands. “C’mon, baby.”
I gathered myself for a final feat of strength, and crawled the last few feet up the ladder and out of the shaft, onto the floor of the gazebo. And just lay there for a minute, on my side, catching my breath.
Yes, we have a gazebo, too. Not as big as the one where Julia Poole breathed her last. That’s the kind of gazebo where you can put a string quartet or a small marching band and stand around and watch them play. Ours is more of a two-person gazebo, the kind of place where, in the old days, a gentleman would escort his beloved for the purpose of some privacy. To steal a kiss or to propose, say.
And for some reason, it had a secret tunnel from the basement. Or into it.
But now was not the time to worry about that. I could figure that part out later.
I pushed myself upright. Or half upright. To a sitting position. “We have to call Rafe.”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded.
“And Detective Grimaldi.”
After this, even Rafe had to agree. Someone was after Mrs. Jenkins. Surely that proved someone else had killed Julia Poole.
Of course, we’d always known that. But after this, surely even Grimaldi couldn’t think that Mrs. J had had anything to do with Julia’s murder.
I shook my head. Getting bogged down in surelies wasn’t going to help.
“Let’s go.” I got to my feet and stood for a second, finding my equilibrium. Everything seemed all right in the vicinity of the stomach. The baby didn’t appear to have taken any damage from the trip through the ground.
I grabbed Mrs. Jenkins’s arm—as much for support as to support her—and we staggered down the steps from the gazebo and across the dead lawn toward the front of the house.