by Steven James
The only way to stop these blurs is to figure out what’s going on.
And the only way to do that is to eliminate Mr. McKinney as a suspect.
This might be their only chance to do that.
They approached the house and Daniel slipped the padlock out of the hasp.
He flipped the doors open and started down the steps into Mr. McKinney’s basement.
CHAPTER
FIFTY
The cellar air was musty and damp and smelled faintly of rotten fruit.
Kyle tipped the doors shut behind them.
A thin slit of sunlight managed to leak through the space between the doors. That, along with two small grimy windows on opposite sides of the cellar, gave them enough light to see.
They descended the stairs.
The concrete blocks forming the walls were crumbling in places, leaving bare dirt poking through and sliding into small mounds on the floor.
An old wooden shelf holding jars of preserves and pickled fruit lined one wall.
A thick layer of dust had settled across them, and they must have been sitting there for a really long time, because the metal screw tops on most of them were rusted or covered with some kind of corrosion.
A water heater sat at the far end of the cellar, a workbench beside it. Above the bench, there was a pegboard holding an array of hand tools: screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, and so on. Some of them appeared old-fashioned, maybe decades old.
“That window is just off to the side,” Kyle noted.
“Yeah.”
They walked over to look at the pool.
Yes, the fence was visible, but seeing someone dive in the pool? That might have been a stretch.
Half-finished woodworking projects lay strewn across the workbench. A pile of sawdust nearly a foot high had formed beneath a vise that was attached to the bench and must have been used to hold the boards Mr. McKinney cut through with the handsaw he’d stowed nearby.
Scattered throughout the cellar were pieces of discarded furniture, cardboard boxes stacked in piles five or six feet high, shelves with dusty books covered in mildew.
A small potbellied stove squatted near the wall closest to the stairs.
Daniel recognized caving equipment—ropes, knee pads, a helmet, headlamps, a first-aid kit—on one of the shelves. Two tackle boxes and a few fishing rods lay beside it.
He listened carefully for any movement above him in the house, but heard nothing. However, he did hear one thing in the cellar: a faint scratching sound near the shelf containing the preserves.
When he took a step closer to investigate, a rat scurried out, skittered along the wall, and disappeared into a jagged hole in a concrete block.
Then all was silent.
Daniel wasn’t about to go through all the boxes piled on the floor, but he did walk the perimeter of the basement to search the shelves for disturbed dust or any items that might be there that shouldn’t have been—specifically grim mementos a killer might keep, like a girl’s clothing or jewelry. He found nothing.
Go upstairs. See if there are any clues about his schedule.
No!
Yes. You’re already in his house. What’s the difference? You’re here. Take advantage of it. Learn what you can.
Maybe he was ready to go up there.
Maybe he wasn’t.
In either case, he wanted to make sure no one had arrived or was on their way in.
The window they’d already checked out was located at the back of the house. The other one was across the basement, high on the wall. It would make sense that he should be able to get a view of the front yard and the driveway if he could just get up close enough to see out of it.
Daniel positioned a wooden crate beneath the narrow, filthy window and stepped onto it.
He brushed away some of the cobwebs that laced his side of the glass and peered outside.
Though he couldn’t see much, he was able to make out the empty gravel driveway.
“Let’s take a quick look upstairs and then get out of here,” he said.
“Right on.”
Daniel replaced the crate where it’d been and they crossed the cellar to the wooden steps that ascended to the main part of the house.
Then he and his friend started up toward the lip of light that eased beneath the door at the top of the stairs.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-ONE
Even though Daniel was confident the place was empty, he took it slowly and made as little sound as possible, just a natural response from being in someone else’s home like this.
The sixth step from the bottom creaked as he put pressure on it.
When he reached the top step, he felt a flicker of uneasiness as he turned the knob and pressed the door open.
The kitchen.
Dishes in the sink, a table with four chairs, cupboards that were all closed. The lights were off, but the window above the sink let in the afternoon sunlight.
The refrigerator door had an array of magnets posting a shopping list and a variety of photos, to-do lists, comic strips, and reminders.
In the brief span of a moment, he counted twenty-eight magnets holding up nineteen objects.
He checked for any to-do list items that mentioned fishing on the day Emily disappeared, but found none.
The stove had a frying pan on one of its burners, a kettle on another.
They closed the door to the basement. Daniel didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. He tried the door near the refrigerator and found that it opened to the empty garage.
Kyle scrutinized the pictures and notes on the fridge.
“See anything?” Daniel asked.
“Nothing incriminating. Not yet.”
The living room looked typical as well. All was quiet. All normal.
A clock on the wall ticked away the seconds. It was one of those sounds that someone living in the house would probably get used to, but to Daniel it seemed magnified a hundredfold.
It was sort of like the rattle of the train that passed through town—he’d gotten so used to it that he didn’t even notice when it happened—unless someone actually pointed it out.
But if you were new to the area, you would hear it.
Tick.
He looked down the hallway, at the photos that lined the wall.
Tock.
Starting down the hall, he studied the pictures.
There was a wedding photo as well as one of Mrs. McKinney standing next to her husband on a mountainside. Beside it were two pictures of underground caverns. From the times Daniel had been in Wolf Cave with his dad, he recognized them as two of its main chambers. In one of the cave photos, the math teacher was with the school photographer. The final picture showed Mr. McKinney and Daniel’s offensive coordinator, Coach Jostens, beside a lake holding up a muskie that one of them must have caught.
So, they were friends.
Daniel hadn’t known that.
As he looked around, his heart seemed to find a new rhythm, pumping in sync with the clock on the wall.
Tick . . . Tock . . . Tick . . . Tock . . .
The doorway to the bathroom at the end of the hallway was partway open. The door beside it—
Tick.
Was probably the master bedroom—
Tock.
As he waited for Kyle, he swung through the master bedroom and looked around. When Kyle arrived, Daniel went into the room across the hall while his friend headed toward the bedroom closet.
In Mr. McKinney’s home office, Daniel found three shelves of books in a semicircle around a handmade wooden computer desk with an older-model laptop and a printer. A swiveling office chair faced it. A wastebasket half-full of crumpled papers sat beside it.
A dozen high school yearbooks were stacked on one of the shelves—the
last three from Beldon High. The others were from Roosevelt High and Coulee High, both schools in their conference. Mr. McKinney must have taught at Coulee first before spending one year at Roosevelt and then moving to Beldon. A photo of a math club with the emblem of a coiled snake and the name of the team “The Adders,” from the year he was at Roosevelt High sat on the desk.
A gun rack held a shotgun and two hunting rifles.
There were no calendars with clues about being at Lake Algonquin. After a brief internal debate, Daniel sorted through the balled-up papers in the wastebasket, but found nothing.
Unlike Emily Jackson’s bedroom, the office didn’t look overly neat.
Just normal.
Everything seemed utterly, remarkably normal.
“Hey,” Kyle called from the bedroom. “Come here. I found something.”
When Daniel joined his friend, he saw that the closet door was open and Kyle was kneeling on the floor beside a shoebox.
The lid was off.
The box was empty, but there were three cell phones on the carpet.
The pink casing on one of them and stickers and accessories on the other two made it clear that they were not the phones of a grown man.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-TWO
Daniel crouched beside his friend. “This is not good.”
“Yeah, why does a guy who doesn’t have any kids have three girls’ phones hidden in his closet?”
“In this case, I can only think of one reason.”
“Me too. We need to tell your dad.”
“Tell him what? That we broke into Mr. McKinney’s house and found three phones in his bedroom? How is that gonna fly? It’s not a crime to keep old phones in your house.”
“Depends on whose they are.”
Daniel realized the phones were on the floor. “Wait. Did you dump them out or did you touch them?”
Kyle bit his lip. “Dude, I wasn’t thinking. I just . . .” His tone became intense. “They’ll have my prints on ’em now, won’t they?”
“Maybe, yeah, I don’t know. Depends.” To put it mildly, it was not a good thing that Kyle had touched those phones. “Did you try turning them on to see whose they are?”
“No.”
Daniel tucked his hand beneath the corner of his shirt and used that so he wouldn’t have to actually touch any of the phones.
He depressed the “on” button on each of them and waited.
Either the batteries were dead or they’d been removed, because none of the phones booted up.
“Makes sense,” Kyle said. “I heard they can track phones, even if they’re turned off.”
Still avoiding touching them directly, Daniel laid the cell phones in the shoebox and processed everything.
Even though he and Kyle were in Mr. McKinney’s house, if the phones had Kyle’s prints on them, it could implicate him. Wiping the phones off might remove his prints, but it would also remove Mr. McKinney’s if they were there—which they probably were.
A lawyer could argue that Kyle put them here, that he planted them.
“Should I point out the elephant in the room?” Kyle said.
“There are three phones.”
“Which means three girls . . .”
“Yeah.” Daniel eyed the closet. “Was there anything else in there that—”
But before he could finish his thought, he heard the crunch of gravel outside from the driveway, and the simultaneous rattle of the garage door.
Mr. McKinney had come home.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-THREE
“We can get back out through the cellar,” Daniel said. “Let’s go.”
Kyle disappeared into the closet with the shoebox and when he reemerged they hustled down the hallway.
By the time they were halfway to the kitchen, the garage door was beginning to close.
No, no, no!
“Hurry,” Daniel whispered urgently
They rushed across the kitchen to the cellar door. Kyle swung it open. As they stepped through, a car door slammed in the garage.
Silently, Daniel closed the basement door behind him and they started down the stairs, walking as softly as they could.
He heard the door leading from the garage to the kitchen bang open. “Hello?” Mr. McKinney called into the empty house.
How does he know someone is here?
Somebody saw you come in and called him!
Daniel counted the steps. The sixth one from the bottom creaks!
Kyle was in front and Daniel laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder to stop him, but it was too late. He put pressure on the step and it made the same squeaking sound it’d made earlier when the two of them were going up the stairs.
Daniel’s heart nearly stopped beating.
He and Kyle froze.
Footsteps began to cross the kitchen.
“Go.” Daniel did his best to keep his voice low.
The boys scrambled down the rest of the stairs and shot across the basement. They raced up the steps that led outside.
“Is anybody down there?” Mr. McKinney said loudly.
Kyle pressed the cellar doors open, they exited, and Daniel was closing them behind him when he heard the kitchen door to the basement opening up.
Hoping that Mr. McKinney hadn’t seen any light slip down the cellar steps, they bolted across the yard to the woods and dove behind a couple large oak trees to catch their breath and make sure the coast was clear before moving on through the forest.
Breathe, breathe, breathe.
Daniel felt the chug of adrenaline, just like he did during games. His heart churned, thrummed in his chest.
You need to see if he’s coming.
No. Wait here. Don’t move—
But he might come across the lawn. You have to look. You have to find out if he’s following you.
Daniel finally decided he needed to check before moving any farther into the woods.
Slowly, he edged over to peer around the tree.
Mr. McKinney was standing near the cellar doors, staring directly toward him through the forest.
Daniel whipped back behind the tree.
No, no, no!
He saw you, he did, he saw you!
No, there are too many shadows here in the woods, he couldn’t have.
No, he did!
He looked in Kyle’s direction, then patted one hand against the air and put a finger to his lips with the other to signal for him to be still and not make a sound.
Daniel strained to listen for any movement coming his way and heard soft stirrings in the brush piles and leaves, but no sound of anyone running toward him across the lawn.
No one called out.
He sat there for what seemed like forever. Kyle waited too. Neither boy moved an inch.
Daniel didn’t want to peek at the house again, but he knew that before escaping through the woods they needed to make sure Mr. McKinney wasn’t still watching or on his way toward them. Taking a deep breath, he carefully tipped his gaze around the side of the tree.
This time the yard was empty.
Mr. McKinney had gone back into the house.
To call the police?
To get his shotgun?
“We need to get out of here,” Daniel told his friend, but Kyle was already moving and didn’t need any convincing.
They hurried through the woods, neither of them speaking, and emerged from the trees near their cars.
Looking back, Daniel confirmed that no one had followed them. No cars were on their way down the street. No police sirens cut through the afternoon.
“One of the neighbors must have seen us and called him,” Daniel said.
“That or he finished up early at school. It’s not far from here; maybe he got suspicious when I phoned
the school to talk about rescheduling.” Kyle thought about that. “I said I needed to do it for my son. What if Mr. McKinney only had girls scheduled for the rest of the day?”
“I don’t think that would be enough.”
“Whatever it was, he suspected something—he called out to see if anyone was in his house as soon as he entered.”
Daniel decided to bring up what he’d discovered. “When we were in there I saw a bunch of high school yearbooks on the shelf in his office. They were from a couple of different schools in our conference.”
He listed them off, the schools and the academic years of the yearbooks. “I say we go online, search to see if any other girls might have disappeared or drowned while Mr. McKinney was teaching at their schools.”
“Nice.”
“I know we don’t have a lot to go on, but maybe I should tell my dad, or at least we could call in an anonymous tip. I mean, if Mr. McKinney does think someone was in his house just now he might get rid of the phones.” Daniel could tell something was really bothering his friend. “What’s wrong?”
“You can’t call your dad.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not going to like this.”
“Like what?” He began to imagine the worst—that Kyle had left his car keys in the house or something like that—but he never would have imagined what Kyle did next.
His friend reached into his jacket pockets, produced the three phones from Mr. McKinney’s house, and laid them on the hood of his car.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FOUR
“You took the phones!” Daniel gasped.
“I wasn’t thinking. They had my prints on ’em. I freaked out.”
“Do you realize what you’ve done? You took evidence from a possible crime scene—not to mention now you have in your possession three phones that likely belonged to girls who might very well have been murdered.”
“Yeah.” His voice was soft and low. “Like I said, I freaked out.”
Kyle was eyeing the neighborhood. He saw a sedan turn onto their street and quickly hid the phones in his car. “If we show ’em to Ronnie he’ll be able to tell us if one is his sister’s. Her charger will still be at their house, don’t you think? We can plug her phone in, turn it on, see if there are any messages from people she might have been planning to meet at the lake.”