eighteen

Nichelle Robinson lowered herself into the chair beside the desk and her husband went over to stand next to her. He squeezed her shoulder and they turned to face Death and Randy.

“We didn’t kill August Jones,” she said, voice level. “We don’t have his phone.”

“I know you don’t have it,” Death said. “And I know you don’t know where it is. But it’s here.”

The rain was beginning to ease up now and they could hear a car approaching along the road and up the driveway. Death went over and opened the door a crack, watching a Rives County Sheriff’s Department cruiser roll up and stop beside his Jeep.

Orly Jackson got out, wearing a neon yellow slicker over his uniform. Death held the door open for him and waited while the officer ran up and dashed in dripping.

He pulled off his raincoat and dropped it over the door into Sugar’s abandoned stall.

“You said you found August Jones’ cell phone?”

“We haven’t found it yet,” Death said, “but I’m sure it’s here and I know how it got here.”

“So help me God, Bogart, if you’ve dragged me out here in the rain on another wild goose chase I’m going to kick your ass.”

“I’ll pretend like that scares me later.”

“Tell us why you think it’s here,” Kurt demanded.

Sugar, still saddled in the common area, shook his head, rattling his bridle, and clomped over to stand beside Death. Death leaned against the nearest stall and scratched the horse’s nose absently while he spoke.

“August Jones was stabbed outside the crypt, then dragged inside and left for dead. If he really had been dead, that would have been an excellent place to hide his body. No one was likely to go in there again for years, if ever. And even if someone could smell August’s body decomposing, there was another fresh corpse there that was supposed to be there. They’d most likely just think it was a case of poor embalming and avoid the area until the smell went away.”

“Okay,” Jackson said, nodding along.

“So I’ve been wondering, why take his cell phone? If it really does have a recording of the murder, the killer would need to get rid of it. They already had it somewhere where it was never likely to be found. All they had to do was take the battery out so it couldn’t be tracked.”

“Maybe they wanted to destroy it?” Nichelle offered.

“But they didn’t destroy it. They didn’t even take the battery out. Because it was still turned on and working when the police tried to GPS it.”

“So what’s your stupid theory this time?” Jackson asked.

Death spared him a brief look. “I don’t think the killer did take it out of the crypt.”

“But it wasn’t there!”

“I know. But the killer wasn’t the only one in that crypt between the time August Jones crawled out of it and we found it again.”

“Jack Harriman?” Jackson asked.

“Who?” Kurt demanded.

“Jack Harriman,” Death explained. “He was the drunk who broke in and stole the uniform off of O’Hearne’s body. He and O’Hearne were rival Civil War enthusiasts. O’Hearne had bought an authentic Confederate cavalry uniform at one of the Keystones’ auctions, years ago, and decided to be buried in it. Harriman found out about it somehow. Apparently he wanted it for himself, and maybe he objected to a museum piece being used for grave clothes. Anyway, he made a deal with the funeral director to leave the crypt open.”

“Right,” Nichelle said. “I read that in the paper. He told them something about slipping a picture of an old sweetheart into the coffin or something.”

“Yeah, that. Well, the night after Zahra’s funeral, while Tony Dozier was driving around searching western Missouri for an allied military installation and August Jones was dying in his back seat, Jack Harriman took the license plates off his motorcycle and drove down here to steal the clothes off a dead body.”

“It was stormy that night, like it is tonight.”

“Not quite as bad a storm,” Kurt Robinson said, “but stormy, yeah.”

“Right. And Harriman was riding a motorcycle. There was no bridge over the ravine on the driveway up to the Hadleigh House yet. He must have ridden up the Vengeance Trail, past the point where he was going to die before morning.”

Nichelle shivered. “Creepy.”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t he just ride right up to the cemetery?” Randy asked. “It’s not like anyone was apt to pay him any attention.”

“The same reason he removed the license plates,” Death said. “He was paranoid. He was also drunk and getting drunker by the minute. He had a six pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey. He hid his bike in the old slave quarters behind Hadleigh House and hiked from there, down here through your woods and out the other side to the cemetery. When he got inside the crypt, he finished off his beer and liquor, got the uniform off the body in the coffin, and stripped down and put it on himself.”

“Gah!” Nichelle shuddered. “That’s disgusting.”

“Well, he had to be really drunk by then. He left his wallet and keys and everything in the pocket of the clothes he’d been wearing, but I’m guessing that he found August Jones’ cell phone lying in the crypt and stuck that in his pocket just out of habit. Pick up cell phone. Stick it in your pocket.”

“Oooooh!” Jackson said.

“Then he locked the gate behind himself and headed back for his bike, much drunker than he’d been when he arrived. On his way back, he stumbled across the stable and decided that, since he was dressed as a cavalry officer, he should go for a ride. The storm likely already had the horses on edge, and the stench of formaldehyde and body liquor would have put them in a full-blown panic. But they were shut in their stalls, so he was able to get on Sugar’s back just the same, get the gate open, and ride away. How he managed to get as far as he did, drunk and bareback, I can’t imagine.”

“I can explain that,” Jackson said. “Harriman came from Kentucky. He’d worked around horses his whole life. He was even a jockey for a while back in his twenties, though he never won any big races or anything like that.”

“That makes a lot more sense then.” Death nodded. “So, he gets on horseback and makes his way back up the hill, missing the shed where he hid his motorcycle. He got back on the Vengeance Trail, passed out, fell off, and died there.”

“But by then, he didn’t have the phone anymore.”

“No. Because it fell out of his pocket here, in the barn, when he was trying to mount an uncooperative horse, and the horse kicked it back under the manger and against the wall.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure. It was the moving beer can that tipped me off, though I only figured it out this afternoon. I had my phone, set on vibrate, in my desk drawer, and there was an empty soda can on my desk. The phone rang and the vibrations made the can slide across the desk. I remembered seeing the empty beer can do that when it was on that shelf, and that’s when I realized what must have happened. August Jones’ phone was set to vibrate. Someone was trying to call the phone, and the vibrations were travelling up the wall and making the beer can move.”

“You didn’t look yet?” Jackson demanded.

“We were waiting for you, because you’re the police and we wouldn’t like to be accused of tampering with evidence.”

“That’s uncharacteristically levelheaded of you.”

“Also, the floor’s dirty.”

“Yeah, that’s more like it.”

Orly Jackson unhooked his flashlight from his belt, went into the empty stall, and lay down on the floor so he could look under the manger. There was only about two inches of clearance.

“See anything?”

He had his cheek pressed into the dirt and his left eye closed so he could see into the deep, narrow recess. “Yeah, there’s something back there, I think. You know, I should probably leave it there and call the city police to come retrieve it.”

“You know if you do they’ll be jerks about it,” Death said. “They’ll announce to the press that they’ve found the missing cell phone and they won’t even let you listen to it until it’s been presented in court and everything’s all over.”

The deputy cursed and climbed back to his feet. “Hang on a minute. I’ve got to go to my car for my camera and gloves and an evidence bag.”

“Why didn’t you bring them in with you?”

“I thought you were just yanking my chain again.”

_____

Wren was still wearing her LED headband, but she didn’t want to take the time to turn it on just there, with only a single door between her and a dangerous man. With the thought of barricades foremost in her mind, she crossed the hall and entered the smoking room.

It was a small, cozy room, furnished with deep armchairs and footrests and old-fashioned ashtray stands. There were Tiffany lamps and an antique gramophone, a small fireplace (too small to hide in) behind an iron grate, and a small, plain door in the back wall that led to the pantry off the kitchen.

The room still smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and pipe tobacco. Wren felt her way across it, staying as silent as she could. She hadn’t done any work in here yet, and the scattering of furniture was unfamiliar to her. She bumped into dusty, upholstered beasts of armchairs crouching in the shadows and barked her shin on a low table. Across the hall, back in the game room, the intruder was throwing things around and muttering to himself.

He was looking for his gun, of course. It wouldn’t be easy to find in the dark, but she supposed she’d best assume that he would. Hopefully, by the time he came out, he wouldn’t have any idea where she’d gone.

She was remembering a conversation between the Keystone twins the day they’d gotten the electricity turned on in the old house. “Whoever buys this old mausoleum,” Roy had said, “the first thing they need to do is get an electrician in here and get the place up to code.”

“Is it that bad?” Sam had asked. “Are we going to be safe working here?”

Roy had shrugged laconically. “Hasn’t burned down yet. Ah, it’ll probably be okay. I wouldn’t want to live here, though. This wiring is from the 1920s, and it’s all tied to the one fuse box in the kitchen. I got a box of spare fuses, by the way. I’m gonna put ’em in a drawer in there, in case we need one.”

If the lightning strike had caused a widespread outage, there was nothing Wren could do. But it was possible that it had simply blown a fuse, and if that was the case then replacing the fuse would turn the lights back on and allow her to plug in her phone and try, again, to call for help. For that matter, if it was a blown fuse, it was possible that the lights weren’t out in the entire house.

She found a lamp on a table by the window. It took her several precious seconds to find the switch in the dark and when she flicked it, nothing happened.

She eased through the small door into the tiny, dark pantry and took time to switch on her LED headlamp. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined three walls, leaving an upside down L-shaped path from the door into the smoking room to the door into the kitchen. Her light caught a bare bulb screwed into a ceramic receptacle in the ceiling with a chain dangling from it. She reached up and pulled the chain, but that light wasn’t working either. She headed for the kitchen door, then stopped and took a second look at the contents of the shelves.

Under a half-inch coating of gray dust, blue in the light from her lamp, lay old Tupperware canisters, moldy, mouse-eaten boxes of crackers and cereal, and several dozen Mason jars.

They were ubiquitous. Quart jars with rusting brass lids, filled with the sludge of someone’s prized tomatoes or a lump of rancid jelly. It seemed that any time she worked in an old house in the country, especially one that had sat vacant for any length of time, she’d find these reminders of the days when everyone canned their own food for the winter. Normally, they’d throw them out. The price they could get for the jars wasn’t worth the time it would take to empty them and scrub them clean.

Now, though, she put them to another purpose, pulling them off the shelves as she passed and laying them on their sides on the floor behind her, to trip up her pursuer if he came this way.

The door into the kitchen was fashioned from a single sheet of thin plywood, painted white and fastened with a thumb latch. She opened it carefully, worried about knocking something down and betraying her location, and emerged into the long, wide kitchen.

There was a switch in the wall to her right and she flicked it as she had the others, just in case, but there was no power here either.

She was at the back of the house now; the windows in the gravedigger’s room upstairs looked out over the kitchen roof. To her right and sitting at a ninety-degree angle to the wall she’d come out of, a second door identical to the pantry door sat at the top of two steps. It led to the landing of an enclosed back staircase that she had yet to explore. A long counter with a double-bowl stone sink in the middle of it ran along the back wall, to her left. The entire length of the counter was lined, underneath, with drawers and cabinet doors.

The wall above the counter was lined with windows. They showed the back garden, dark in between lightning flashes. Wren could see the yard light, high up on its pole, dark against the stormy sky. That might mean the damage was in the power lines and there was nothing she could do, but it also might mean that the lightning had been bright enough to fool the yard light into thinking it was daytime.

The only way to tell if she could fix it was to find the fuses and the fuse box and try.

She got a sturdy kitchen chair and braced it under the pantry door handle. It wouldn’t hold the door closed for long, but it might slow the intruder down if he tried to come through it.

She started on the left side and started pulling drawers out and opening cabinets. She didn’t bother to rifle through the contents. The box of fuses would be on top of anything else in a drawer, or sitting on the front edge of a shelf in a cabinet.

She was three-quarters of the way down the counter when she found them sitting in the top drawer to the right of the sink. It was a box of twenty, in assorted sizes.

Roy wasn’t the first person to use this drawer to hold fuses, she saw when she picked up the box. There were maybe two dozen more lying loose in the bottom. The fuses, which served the same purpose that breakers serve in newer buildings, were heavy little disks, about as big around as a fifty-cent piece and maybe an inch and a half thick. They were made of ceramic and metal and glass and color-coded for amperage, with a little plug on the back like the base of a light bulb.

Wren’s right pocket bulged with her cell phone and charger. She filled her left pocket with old fuses and took the new box with her as she moved on. Roy had said the fuse box was here in the kitchen, but it could be anywhere.

She forced herself to stop and think. Where would she put the fuse box, if she were going to wire this house?

The intruder was still throwing things around in the dark distance. He sounded closer now, and she suspected he was tearing up the smoking room. If he came through the pantry, she’d hear him falling over her mason jars, but if he went back down the hall and approached the kitchen from that direction, she’d have set the booby trap for herself.

Originally, the kitchen would have been in a completely separate building. That way, if it caught fire, it wouldn’t burn the whole house down. And, too, on a less catastrophic note, the heat from baking wouldn’t warm up the house on a hot summer day. She didn’t know exactly when this room had been built, but the fact that it only shared one wall with the rest of the building meant that wall was the most likely place to locate the power junction.

That wall, opposite the back wall and its row of windows, held a custom cabinet built in under the slanting line of the stairwell, an antique gas stove from the nineteen thirties with a built-in water heater, the door into the dining room, and an ancient refrigerator.

She pulled open the cabinet doors in quick succession, noting cobweb-covered pots and pans and garish, flowered wallpaper on the back walls that didn’t match the rest of the room. In the topmost cabinet she could just glimpse something metallic fastened to the wall. Wren dragged a second chair over to stand on and pushed aside a teapot and a coffee percolator.

It was a round metal plate painted with a thick coat of yellowing white paint. The paint was flaking off now, allowing the metal to catch Wren’s light. Not the fuse box, then. At one time, there must have been a wood stove where the cabinet was. The plate was covering the hole where the stovepipe had been.

She almost overlooked the fuse box. It was above the stove, a bulging cover about the size of a small cake pan, hinged at the top and painted to blend into the cabbage rose wallpaper. She scooted the chair over and climbed up again, fitting her knee in between the burners and setting the box of spare fuses on the stovetop beside her.

None of the fuses looked blown. Normally the glass would be black and smoky. Most likely, either the problem was in the lines or one of the two cartridge fuses in the master cylinder was bad. She had no way to check those, and no spares in any case.

On the off chance that one of the fuses had blown without appearing to have blown, she began changing them as fast as she could, screwing out the old fuses and screwing new fuses in their place. She’d only gotten three changed when she heard the door from the smoking room to the pantry open and the sound of a body tripping and falling.

He was close enough now, with only the thin door between them, that she could hear him breathing heavily and cursing under his breath. His voice sounded familiar. She’d heard it before, she was sure of it, but at such a low volume, in the dark and the confusion, she couldn’t place it.

Bangs and thumps and crashes came from the pantry. It sounded like a maddened wild beast was trapped there. And then the room grew suddenly silent. The storm sounds had begun to abate, though lightning still played across the sky. It was a pensive silence, as if the whole world was waiting with bated breath.

Wren had a sense of vacancy, a feeling that he was no longer there, just the other side of the door. It was so strong that a little voice in her head urged her to pull the door open and see.

“Uh, yeah,” she said to herself. “Not that stupid, thanks.”

She listened, straining with every fiber of her being to hear every noise within the old house. If she hadn’t been so focused, she’d have missed it. It was just a faint thud, a slight scrape, as of a bumped chair sliding on hardwood before being caught.

It had come from the dining room.

The intruder—the armed intruder—had circled around. He was sneaking up on her from the dining room, and the path back through the pantry was a minefield of her own making.