by A J Rivers
“This place is horrible,” Ava mutters, looking around the dry, neglected front yard of the abandoned farmhouse.
“Savor it now,” I tell her. “You’ll see worse in your career.”
The description Ashley gave of her escape from the house had us trekking through the woods and across an overgrown field I envisioned having grown crops for family who’d lived here. As I do any time I see an empty house that looks hastily deserted, I wonder what happened. What those last few moments were like before the door closed for the last time and the place was left to sit alone.
“There are tire impressions over here,” Dean notes from the side of the house. “They’re recent.”
“Can you tell what kind of vehicle?” I ask.
“Not with any real specificity, but by the width and the depth, I’d say a truck,” he says.
I nod, looking around. “Fits the atmosphere. People wouldn’t be surprised to see a truck in a place like this. It would just look as if someone had decided to revitalize the house.”
“Emma,” Xavier calls from somewhere out of sight. “What constitutes breaking and entering when it comes to an abandoned house that has potentially recently been occupied? Do squatters’ rights come into play?”
“Xavier, where are you?” Dean calls.
“Back here,” he says.
We hurry to the back of the house and find him precariously balanced in front of an old-fashioned cellar door. He’s holding his arms out to his sides as if trying to keep himself upright. One leg has cracked through the door and is on the cellar steps below up to his knee.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Well,” he starts, looking down at the door, “I seem to be in a legally ambiguous situation. I wanted to look in that window up there, so I was going to climb onto the door. However, its structural integrity leaves a lot to be desired, and so it seems my foot has both broken and entered. But the vast majority of me is still on the outside, so I’m not sure of the precedent here.”
Dean takes him by the wrist and helps him pull his leg out of the splintered wood.
“I think you’re probably good,” he says.
“Good,” Xavier nods. “We’ll fix the door later.”
Dean pats him on the back, but I don’t hear his agreement to the plan. Not that I doubt for a second there’s a strong possibility of tools and lumber in his future.
“Why did you want to look in that window?” I ask, stepping back to get a better perspective of the window positioned above the cellar door.
“The curtain is different,” he explains.
“They’re all old white lace,” Dean says.
“All white lace, but that one isn’t as old. It was replaced a lot more recently than the others. Look at the edges that are together in the middle,” Xavier points.
“They aren’t yellow,” I say after a few seconds.
“The lace yellows after coming in contact with the oils on human skin. That particular place on the curtain would be touched repeatedly when opening the curtains. But that curtain doesn’t have any discoloration. It wasn’t touched as much as the others.”
“Come on,” I say. “I want to go inside.”
“I’d suggest the cellar door, but with the exception of my foot hole, it’s chained,” Xavier says.
“That’s alright,” I tell him. “We’ll go through the front.”
There hasn’t been any sign of anyone in or around the house since we got there, but I still want to be prepared. I take my gun out of its holster and hold it down in front of me as I climb the steps onto the sagging, white-painted wood porch.
“Look,” Dean says, nodding at the wood. “Are those drops of blood?”
The small reddish-brown circles stand out against the paint. There isn’t an exact pattern to them, but they seem to lead from the door down to the steps.
“That’s what they look like.”
“Ashley’s blood?” Ava asks.
“She had some injuries when she went into the hospital, but none of them would have dripped like this. This looks like blood sliding off something and landing on the porch.”
The front door is closed and I ensure my grip on my gun before approaching. The knob turns easily in my hand, and I push the door open into the still, quiet house. That means nothing. Silence right now doesn’t mean there’s no one inside. I step in cautiously, followed closely by Dean. Ava follows, each of the three of us with our hands at our weapons. Once we determine the room is clear, we wave Xavier in behind us.
“The floor,” I say. “Do you see the discoloration?”
“Someone tried to clean something up,” Dean says.
“It’s a drag pattern,” Ava observes. “Look at the edges. The center has a swirl pattern where someone tried to clean it using a circular motion.” She gestures with one hand, simulating cleaning the floor. “But the edges still have streaks. Whoever was cleaning this didn’t have enough time to get it done. Or they realized it was too difficult and gave up. Either way, the edges are intact and show a continuous sweep. There’s no sign of anything passing back through the path. Something was dragged through here.”
“Ashley is too small to have dragged a grown man,” Dean notes.
“Then maybe it wasn’t Ashley,” I say. “Let’s find out where the trail starts.”
We follow the blood through the entryway of the house and to the dining room. A large wooden table takes up the majority of the center of the floor. There are chairs positioned around it as if a meal could be served at any moment. The only disruption is the chair at the head of the table. It’s pushed aside and toppled onto the floor; as if someone shoved it out of the way.
Streaks of blood on its legs tell me something horrific happened to the person sitting in that chair.
“What did she tell you about getting out of the house?” I ask Ava.
“She said Wolf had left for a little while. He did that occasionally, but usually, she was locked up when he did. That time, he didn’t lock the door. She thought it was a trick and didn’t go anywhere at first, but then she got up the nerve to try and realized he wasn’t there. So she ran,” Ava says.
“He wasn’t here?” I ask. “She didn’t have to struggle to get out?”
“No. She said she just left.”
“Then where did the injuries come from?” Dean asks.
“They could have happened earlier in the day. Or the day before,” Ava suggests.
I nod. “They could have. That would have pushed her toward the edge and made her willing to take the risk. But if she left without any struggle, when the man wasn’t even here, who was sitting in this chair? And who left that drag mark across the floor?”
We continue through the house, comparing Ashley’s statements with what we see. The other rooms of the house look fairly undisturbed. There are a few personal belongings and some furniture. Some look as if they were left behind when the original family decided to leave. Others are newer. It’s obvious someone was using this house on a fairly consistent basis, but only for a short term.
“What about the room with the new curtain?” Dean asks. “The one Xavier noticed.”
We climb the steps and I pause at the landing, looking up and down the hallway to take count of the rooms and note which have closed doors. Those are the ones that represent the biggest threat. Only two of the doors are closed. We move to the first one, just to our left.
Opening the door reveals nothing but an old, dusty bed. It looks frail enough to collapse if touched. The smell in the room makes my throat itch. No one has been in here for a long time.
The next rooms are open and have the same partially-used feeling as the rest of the house. Finally, we get to the second closed door. By the positioning of it, I’m confident this is the room with the newer curtain. I don’t know what I expect to find on the other side of the door.
I push the door open and we step inside. An eerie feeling comes over me when I see the single piece of furniture. A vanity pushed
up against one wall, the mirror shattered. Everything else about the room is clean to the point of being unsettling. A sharp contrast to the dusty, pent-up stench of the other closed room: this one has the lingering scent of bleach.
I walk up to the vanity and look down at it without touching it.
“No dust. No fingerprints,” I murmur. I look at the mirror. It’s broken, but the pieces of glass have for the most part stayed in place. “Something hit the mirror pretty hard. This is the impact point. There appears to be a little bit of blood around the edges of a couple of these shards. We need to call a forensic team and have them take the pieces apart. There might be more under the glass.”
I notice Dean crouched down beside the vanity, and walk over to see what he’s examining.
“Blood?” he asks, pointing to a small red pool soaked into the wooden floor. “It seems strange someone would go to this extent to clean up a room, only to leave blood on the floor.”
Ava comes over and kneels down to take a closer look. “That’s not blood.” She touches her fingertips to it and looks back up at me. “I think it’s nail polish. It looks as though someone might have tried to get some of it up, but it had already dried.”
“What the hell happened here?” Dean asks.
“Call the police. Get the team out here. While we wait, I want to see the cellar,” I order.
Dean takes out his phone and starts the call while I head down the stairs. I put my gun away, confident no one else is in the house with us. I go to the kitchen and find the door I’m assuming goes to the cellar. There’s a heavy slide lock across it, but despite its aged and worn look, it moves easily when I slide it open. It’s obviously been used frequently.
I can hear Dean talking to the police on the floor above me as I start down the stairs. It’s incredibly dark beneath me, and I reach into my pocket for my phone. Before I can get it out, a beam of light appears over my shoulder. Glancing back, I see Ava standing on the step above me.
“Thanks,” I say.
She nods and I get my phone the rest of the way out, turning on the flashlight function so I can add more illumination to the space. There’s a heavy, musty smell down here. I can imagine there’s a section where the floor is still dirt. It’s very likely that if we did much exploring, we would find long-forgotten baskets of root vegetables shriveled and putrefied in a corner somewhere.
I get to the bottom of the steps and shine the light around. It picks up crates and wood shelving units stacked with dusty glass jars and canned goods from generations past. Some old tools take up one wall, while discarded lumber and scrap metal hulks in another corner.
“The police are on their way,” Dean announces, coming to the top of the steps. “Is there anything down there?”
“I’m not,” Xavier replies. “I am distinctly not down there.”
“It’s just a cellar,” I say. “Looks as if no one has been in it in a long time.” Dean starts down the steps and I continue my slow turn to take in everything around me. “Wait.”
Something isn’t right.
“What’s wrong?” Dean asks.
I look around again, and Ava follows the path of my beam with hers so we can see more of the space at once.”
“This room,” I say. “There’s something off about it. The dimensions don’t seem right. It shouldn’t be this shallow.” Something clicks in my mind. “Ava, turn off your light.”
Her beam goes out and I turn off mine.
“Holy shit, that’s dark,” Dean mutters.
“Xavier, close the door up there,” I call up. “You can be on that side of it.”
“Thank you.”
The door closes, fully extinguishing all light.
“No,” I say. “That’s dark.”
“Emma, why are we standing in the dark?” Dean asks.
“The outside cellar door,” Ava says after a few seconds.
“Exactly,” I nod. “It’s sunny out there. Xavier stomped right through that door, which means there should be sunlight coming in. But there isn’t. Where’s the door?”
Forty-Seven
“How often did he make you go to that house?” I ask Ashley.
I expect her to look uncomfortable. Instead, she’s almost stoic.
“We’d only been going there for a few months. We’d go for a couple of days at a time and then he’d bring me back to the first house.”
“Where is the other house?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I was allowed to be in the car if we were going short distances, but when we were going to the second house, he kept me in the back of the truck.”
“In the bed of a pickup truck?” I ask.
She nods.
“If she was in the bed of a pickup truck, how did no one see her?” Misty asks. “I pass trucks all the time on the road, and I can see when there’s something in the bed.”
“Do you ever notice those big locked boxes that are supposed to hold tools?” Ashley asks.
“Yes,” Misty says.
“His didn’t hold tools.”
Misty stands, shaking her head. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe this.”
“The investigators found the passage between the upstairs bedroom and the walled-off section of the cellar behind the vanity. The wall was new, but that’s a feature of the house that had to be designed into it,” I say. “The structure and the stairs were built into it.”
Ashley nods. “Wolf told me it had always been used to hide and transport people.”
“So, he was familiar enough with the house to know about a hidden passage. He had to have known the family who owned it. That’s helpful. Did you only ever use that passage?”
“If I was at that house, I was in that room or in the cellar. I got ready upstairs, then went down the steps into the cellar. They didn’t let me go to the other parts of the house because they didn’t want me to get near the doors or windows I could get out of,” she explains.
“There’s a window in that room, though,” I say, all while silently noting that Ashley did indeed use ‘they’ instead of just ‘he’.
“I couldn’t get to it because of the bars.”
“There weren’t any bars.”
She looks confused. “Yes, there were. There was a cage of metal bars blocking the window. I couldn’t even open the curtains.”
“A cage of bars? Attached to the window frame?”
“The walls on either side.”
I get out my phone and call the detective in charge of the investigation still ongoing at the farmhouse.
“I need someone to go up to that room and put me on video,” I say.
I wait a few seconds as they transport the phone up the steps, then a shaky video image appears. It’s blurry and I can’t tell what I’m looking at for a few seconds before it stabilizes.
“Hello, Agent Griffin,” the officer says, waving at me.
I wave back. “Hello. Could you turn me so I can see the wall beside the window frame?”
“The wall?” he asks.
“Yes. Within a few inches of the side of the window.” At first, the wall doesn’t show any signs of anything unusual. Then I notice the slightest hint of a depression. “A few inches from the bottom there is a dip in the wall. Can you touch it?”
“Right here?” he asks, running his fingers over the paint.
“Yes. Does it feel different from the rest of the wall?”
“The texture’s different. It feels like a hole that’s been covered up.”
“Can you go to the top of the window, the same distance out, and see if there’s another one?”
“There is,” he confirms.
“Alright. Thank you very much. Let me know if you find anything else.”
I hang up and tuck my phone away.
“Someone removed the bars and sealed over the holes where the cage was attached to the wall,” I tell Misty and Ashley. “They were trying to cover up what happened there.”
“But why would they
leave the broken mirror?” Misty asks.
“A broken mirror in an old house is innocuous enough. The fact that there was no sign of fingerprints isn’t. Someone removed them on purpose.”
“He didn’t want anyone to know I was there,” Ashley says.
“He? Wolf?” I ask.
She nods. “I had an appointment the day I left.”
She says it so casually, as though she’s talking about getting her hair done, but I know full well that’s not what she means.
“An appointment?” Misty asks in a hushed, almost painful tone.
“Yes,” Ashley says. “A regular. I don’t know his name, before you even ask. I called him J. He liked having pictures and would come up with themes. Wolf would dress me up. There were props.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Misty says, curling away from her daughter, just the thought enough to make her sick. “I don’t want it in my mind.”
“Unfortunately, Ashley doesn’t have a choice about whether it’s in her mind or not. And the more we know, the better we’re going to be able to figure this out,” I say. “What can you tell me about J? His age? Ethnicity? Tall or short?”
I listen as Ashley describes him, jotting on my notepad.
“What else?” I ask. “What else can you tell me about him?”
“He was one of the ones I didn’t mind as much,” Ashley says.
“You didn’t mind?” Misty gasps. Her reaction falls somewhere between horrified and disgusted.
Ashley’s eyes slide over to her mother. She looks at her for a brief second, trying to figure out what the woman is thinking.
“It was my reality. It wasn’t something I chose. It was chosen for me. What I could choose was how I dealt with it. Either I spent every second of my life hating it and being horrified by what was happening to me, or I could try to find some kind of good in it. Anything to keep me going for another day, just for the off chance that one of those days would come with the opportunity to get out. I didn’t say I liked it. I didn’t say it was fun for me. But he wasn’t the worst,” Ashley says.
I’m struck by her calm control as she’s talking about what she went through. There’s a blunt quality to it, but also something almost ethereal. As if she’s pulled herself out of it and is talking about it as if it were something she’d only heard about.