Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  "Maybe. Still …"

  "You'd best be careful."

  "Huh?"

  "I bet you ain't even got a fire extinguisher."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "All them thoughts spinning 'round in your head like that — friction's likely to catch your hair on fire."

  Bailey couldn't even manage a grin.

  "I ain't the one's got the 'sight' — you do. But a body don't have to be psychic to know what's on your mind."

  "And that is …?"

  "You want to go talk to Melody McCallum."

  Actually, she hadn't gotten that far yet. The hurricane that'd just blown through her mind, rattling all the doors and windows in her soul, had left her disoriented, with only one clear thought: it'd all been for nothing.

  But T.J. was right. She had to talk to Melody McCallum. She'd never be able to make sense of all this until she did.

  T.J. set down his coffee cup and got to his feet. "Let's do this."

  "Go see Melody? Now? Why now?"

  "Why not now? Needs to be sometime today 'cause you ain't gonna sleep a wink tonight until you talk to that woman."

  "Just show up on her doorstep? Hi, you don't know me, but I painted a portrait of you and then tracked you down. So naturally I came right over. Shouldn't we … call first?"

  "You got her phone number?"

  She shook her head.

  "I ain't bothering Brice to get it." He turned toward the back door and motioned for Sparky to follow. "Go chase some more butterflies. We'll be home directly."

  Sparky didn't move. He sat looking at T.J.

  T.J. had already pushed open the screen door before he realized Sparky hadn't moved.

  "Sparky?"

  Arf!

  A solitary bark. T.J.'d told Bailey the sound was like "aloha" — had lots of meanings. It could mean help me, my ball's under the chair. Or pet me immediately. Or it's cold, can I get in the bed with you?

  Or … something's wrong, but I don't know what.

  "Sparky, come!"

  Instead of bounding to T.J.'s side, the dog lowered his head and walked slowly across the kitchen floor and out the back door.

  Bailey looked at T.J.

  "What was that about?"

  "It's supposed to rain later today. Guess he knows a storm's comin'."

  Bailey could tell T.J. didn't really think that's what was bothering the dog.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Bailey had heard about but had never actually seen the historic old homes in Shadow Rock, had been promising herself she'd spend two or three days just being a tourist to get the lay of the land in the fairytale town filled with "lake cottages" built by the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Fords and the uber rich Whoever-Elses they hung out with. A handful of the cottages were still privately owned, a few had been transformed into hotels or rooming houses, but most were museums, still filled with all the finery they'd had back in the day, with guided tours to show how the other half had lived. It was the tourist-trade draw of those mansions, along with the pristine, crystal-clear lake that had brought the rich icons to build in Kavanaugh County in the first place, that kept the lights on for a good-sized hunk of the town's residents.

  The huge house where Bailey lived, the Watford House, was a historic home with an impressive history, but it was a servant's shack compared to the lake cottages. The grandeur of The Cedars was on par with all the others, though it had been transformed into a high-end rooming house half a century ago. T.J. and Dobbs, and probably most of the other residents of Shadow Rock, assumed it still was. Until the private investigator dug out the information, they didn't know that Melody McCallum wasn't a boarder. She owned the place, courtesy of the fortune she had inherited from the husband she'd been married to for less than a month before he was killed. She must have paid a king's ransom for The Cedars, and then kept the sale private because … yeah, because …? The most reasonable explanation was that she didn't want to flaunt her wealth, didn't want the whole world to know that a first-grade teacher owned one of the most historic mansions in the whole county. But somehow that didn't ring true, felt a little hollow, didn't quite fit.

  This Melody McCallum was a strange duck.

  Like the other mansions scattered across the town, The Cedars was not visible from the street. All the old homes rested on acreage surrounded by big trees, fences and tall impenetrable hedges, protective landscaping which prevented gawkers. Bailey didn't know if the original owners had made the barriers for themselves or the town had erected them later when the place was populated with normal people. After all, the Rockefellers could likely be trusted not to break into the Carnegies’ to steal a silver tea service, a Faberge egg or a Ming vase.

  There was an ornate gate at the entrance of the winding driveway that led to The Cedars and a guardhouse done in the same architecture as the house beyond. No one occupied the guard house now and the gate stood open.

  The winding driveway brought the house into view after several twists and turns. The Cedars might not be the biggest or the fanciest home in Shadow Rock, but it was definitely one of the most unique and Bailey couldn't help gasping at the sight of it, painted against the forbidding sky of a coming storm.

  T.J. looked across at her and grinned.

  The house had three floors with a wide veranda stretching, as far as Bailey could see, all the way around the ground floor. A portico roof offered a place out of the elements to disembark from your chauffeured limousine at the front door. At one end of the ground floor was a glassed-in circular room — a "conservatory" with a wide garden stretching out from it that featured flowers in every imaginable shape and color. But the house's most interesting feature was on the opposite end from the conservatory. Fully half the house on that end rose up in a turret, a circular structure like a castle. The turret stretched up above the roof of the third floor with a balcony all the way around it and tall windows, featuring a pointed roof that made it appear a lighthouse had been ripped off some rocky seashore in New England and attached to that end of the house.

  "I was in this place once years ago but I don't 'magine it's changed much since then. The historical society Nazis in Shadow Rock won't let a little kid build a street-side lemonade stand without their approval. And a permit from the zoning board. And an in-depth study by the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure their presence won't cause an uptick in migraines in indigenous June bugs."

  T.J. pointed to the turret/lighthouse as they drew nearer the house along the driveway lined with flower beds and tall poplar trees.

  "That right there is amazin' on the inside. The whole second floor is a single gigantic ballroom, and the turret forms one end of it, up through the third floor all the way to a ceiling that's the floor of that pointed cap thing on the top. The chandelier hanging down from that ceiling is … amazing. You'd have to ask the Historical Society Nazis to get the specifics. All I know is that it's the biggest chandelier I ever seen — has thousands and thousands of pieces of multicolored cut glass, dangling in seven graduated circles. Turn off all the lights 'cept that chandelier — more'n five hundred light bulbs, red ones, blue ones, green, all different colors shining through that cut glass casts sparkles like hundreds of thousands of little colored flames on everything, a kaleidoscope of color on the walls and floor — it's stunnin'."

  "Did you ever go to a ball there?"

  T.J. gave her a baleful look.

  "Right, like they'd invite the hired help to the party. But my mama and some of her friends cleaned the place and I seen it once as a kid, and later I come back as an adult. The walls of the ballroom have box seating like in a nineteenth-century opera house so the whole floor is open for dancing. Guests go up into them boxes, sit around tables under crisp white awnings, sippin' wine and eatin' … whatever uber rich folks ate for snacks a hundred years ago, probably wasn't Cheetos. And while you's munching your not-Cheetos, you can watch the dancers down below. Them balcony boxes is staggered at different heights, migh
t be two dozen of 'em, all with ornate spindle railings. Each one of 'em must be big enough to seat twenty, thirty people."

  "How do you get to the box-seat balconies?"

  "You gotta climb up circular staircases that wind up from the floor — enclosed, so on the dance floor level, there's all these ornate archways along the wall that led to the staircases. After I seen the movie, I realized them archways looked like Hobbit-hole doors. And the balconies are connected to each other by suspended walkways like beds on a string, so you can climb around from one to the next …" He stopped. "'less you's afraid of heights, of course. There's people — present company excluded, of course — who'd rather lick a truck stop toilet than clamber 'round on them balconies like a monkey — dangling twenty, thirty, fifty feet off the floor."

  "You're afraid of heights?"

  "I never said that!"

  "But you climbed up that tree in Turkey Neck Hollow when the explosion—"

  "I coulda climbed the back side of the Hoover Dam that day."

  They rounded the last curve and pulled up in front of the house and T.J. finished his description.

  "On the back wall of the ballroom — if a round room's got a back wall — is a winding staircase with switchbacks that crisscrosses it and opens up into that turret thing on the top. There's also a glassed-in elevator for those who want the view of the whole ballroom without the climb. At the top, there's steps on the outside of the turret that go down through the ceiling of the veranda into the back yard. And the whole back yard, shoot, must be big as a football field, is a hedge maze. I thought it was cool 'til I seen The Shining. You couldn't drag me in there now with a team of Clydesdales and the Budweiser beer wagon. Ever time I turned a corner I'd be s'pecting to meet Jack Nicholson with an ax."

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Dobbs had just opened the email from the private investigator when his phone rang. He was surprised to see the caller was Zankoski.

  "You get the report I sent?"

  "Like two seconds ago. I haven't had time to read it."

  "I put everything I turned up in the report. It's all there, even the parts that don't make sense. That's why I need to … explain …"

  "Okay."

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  "I'm listening."

  "You know I'm a retired police officer, right? I told you that part."

  "You did. And you came highly recommended by the police officers you listed as references."

  "You called the references? I didn't think anybody actually did that."

  "The lieutenant on the Milwaukee Metro Police Department said he'd hire you back in a heartbeat, but he figured you were making so much money as a private investigator he couldn't get into a bidding war. You haven't billed me yet, so I'm hoping he was wrong about that part."

  "He wasn't."

  "I can always refinance my house."

  "I'm calling you because … I went a little above and beyond on this case."

  "Angling for a bonus?"

  "No, just explaining that there's information in the report you didn't ask me to gather. I did it on my own."

  "Because …?"

  "Have you ever heard of a police officer's gut? You know what it means?"

  "Intuition."

  "Yeah, but more than that. When you've been a cop for fifteen, twenty … in my case twenty-five years, sometimes you get a feeling about things. Maybe more like a sixth sense than intuition. You see patterns maybe other people wouldn't see."

  "And your police officer's gut kicked in here."

  "When it's really strong, it's an itch that gets worse and worse. The only way to scratch it is to find out if you're right, or if it's just a swing-and-a-miss this time."

  "What's to be suspicious about looking for a little girl who was in a wreck and who, according to your text, grew up to be a first-grade teacher?"

  "Like I said, patterns. It's in the details of the report I sent to you. Might mean something, probably means nothing at all. Safe money's on nothing at all, but you get to decide what to do with it. Open the report to page two where the trail starts at Crenshaw County Hospital and let me walk you through it."

  "Okay."

  "Caitlyn Whitfield was taken there by ambulance from the site of the wreck that killed her parents. Catatonic, totally unresponsive. After that, she was transferred to Stonybrook Manor — primarily a mental hospital but with a few cases like her, the medical term is 'persistent vegetative state.' You see that part?"

  Dobbs scanned down through the report.

  "Yes, I'm on it."

  "About two months later, the girl was transferred out to the state hospital because Stonybrook was closed. It was closed because the family of a patient who died there raised such a stink about his death that the state inspectors descended on the place like flies on roadkill, found all kinds of violations of sanitation and other regulations, and shut the place down."

  "That's about what her aunt told us."

  "I could have blown by that, but I picked at the scab. Didn't take much digging. The place was shut down because of an unsolved murder. This is where it starts getting weird. A mental patient named Sherman Potter had been committed by the court, ordered him to remain until his eighteenth birthday. He displayed all manner of disturbing behavior as a boy and a teenager, a fetish for women's shoes, several episodes of flashing young girls and peeking in windows. What got him locked up was when he got caught at the high school in a closet where he had drilled a hole in the wall into the girl's locker room shower.

  "He was a big kid, six-two, fat — maybe two hundred seventy-five pounds, seventeen years old and set to be released in less than a month. They found his body lying on the floor of a room in a ward at the opposite end of the hospital from his room. Parents pitched a fit, inspectors showed up, bada boom, bada bing, the place is closed. They never did find a single clue in the murder case."

  "And this has what to do with Caitlyn Whitfield?"

  "The room where Sherman Potter's body was discovered was Caitlyn Whitfield's. The staff theorized he'd sneaked out of his ward and wandered the halls, found a pretty little girl who was incapacitated — maybe decided to try out some of his sick fantasies in the real world. Nobody knows. Potter's not around to explain what he was doing there or finger who killed him."

  "You said he weighed two hundred seventy-five pounds, right?"

  "And whoever did it killed him by crushing his neck, trachea was ruptured … more like pulverized."

  "Okay, go on."

  "So Caitlyn was transferred to the Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Hospital, where she was in the persistent vegetative state ward for more than a year. And during that time, a couple of odd things happened. No connection to her, of course, she was just lying there staring at the ceiling, hadn't responded to any outside stimuli since they pulled her out of that wrecked camper.

  “One incident involved an orderly who'd been accused of abusing Alzheimer’s patients, apparently had an ax to grind against old people. He was never caught dead to rights doing anything. But way more often than chance could explain, patients left in his care developed hearing problems — punctured eardrums, unexplained bruises, even cigarettes burns. He was found dead on the hospital portico after a three-story swan dive out a patient's window. There were two patients in the room at the time he went air sailing — an eighty-seven-year-old woman who had blood dripping out her ear … and Caitlyn Whitfield."

  "So somebody in that room — what? Pushed him?"

  "Must have — he went through the screen."

  "I thought you said neither of the people in the room was physically able to do a thing like that."

  Zankoski paused. "I did." He took a breath and added, "The guy had … injuries you don't get from falling out a window, too. It's in the report."

  He didn't elaborate and Dobbs didn't ask.

  "Another incident involved a fire. Some whack-job lit up a couch cushion in the craft room and that whole ward of the hospital h
ad to be evacuated because of the smoke. When they went to get Caitlyn, she wasn't in her room, and they went nuts looking for her, finally found her in the basement laundry room lying on her back on the concrete floor. They never found anybody who'd admit to moving her, but somebody did. By that time, her muscles had atrophied. She had physical therapy every day so she wasn't all twisted up, but it took months of rehab after she 'woke up' for her to get full use of her body again. Before that she couldn't even have sat up in bed on her own, let alone climbed out of it and — what? Crawled down three flights of stairs by herself?"

  "And you're sure—?"

  "I'm telling you what was in her file."

  Which meant Zankoski had seen Caitlyn's medical records. But Dobbs didn't go there. He reached into his pocket without thinking about it and drew out his watch, flicked open the catch, didn't bother to look at the watch face because it didn't keep time.

  "Foster care … it's usually survival of the fittest in those places. Kids who just met expected to relate to each other like siblings when their home lives didn't likely model warm fuzzy behavior. The house parents, the Bartleys — I talked to them on the phone after you left."

  Dobbs didn't question that, but Zankoski explained anyway.

  "Their names and address — that's all you requested but I talked to them anyway. Just … scratching that itch. They said that after Caitlyn got there, the boys treated the girls … with respect, said it was because all the kids loved her."

  "That's what they told us."

  "That's not the story I got when I talked to one of the kids. Just got off the phone with a young man named Tyrone Jefferson who told me he and the other boys were scared spitless, terrified all the time for years. Nobody believed them when they told, but if they so much as looked cross-eyed at one of the girls, they heard hissing and grating sounds in the middle of the night, found their toys destroyed — a metal dump truck so crushed you couldn't tell what it was, shoelaces tied together and the shoes left dangling from the highest limb of a tree nobody could have climbed."