Chase Baker and the Lincoln Curse: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 4)

by Vincent Zandri

  “Down the stairs,” he repeats. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  He shines the light onto the opening. It illuminates both the staircase and the brick wall. Inhaling a breath, I step down onto the first tread. The board squeaks and strains, but seems strong enough. Taking it slowly, I descend all six stairs, the thick spider webs breaking against my face, until I face the brick wall.

  Balkis follows, that LED smartphone light shining on the wall the entire time.

  Pulse picks up speed.

  Maybe the dress is inside the closet after all. But then, I can’t rid myself of the persistent twenty thousand dollar question: Why hadn’t the Girvin’s thought to break through the floor and the wall in the search of the dress?

  It’s a question I once again pose to Balkis.

  He douses the LED light. “The Girvins were spooked by this brick wall and what it might hide.”

  “In all the decades they lived here, they’re curiosity didn’t override the spookiness? Not even once?” I ask.

  “It was a question of being careful of what you wish for.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Girvins never really wanted to find Clara’s dress, Mr. Baker. They spoke a good game about finding what, in essence, might be one of the most prized Lincoln relics ever to be discovered. But to them, finding the dress would be like opening a Pandora’s Box.”

  The curse…

  “Why didn’t you just sneak into the house, make an effort to find the wall, and break it down yourself? You didn’t need me to find it.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I thought of that a hundred times. But searching the house for the wall wouldn’t be easy. The Girvins were permanent fixtures of the place and Mrs. Girvin always locked both the closet and her room whenever she wasn’t inside them. It would be impossible to break in without their knowing. And now that I know the brick wall wasn’t located in the closet at all, but under the floor, surely they would have tried to stop me.”

  “They’re old and infirmed…Or, were old and infirmed anyway. You could have walked right past them and headed upstairs and they might not have known.”

  He shakes his head.

  “The old man, Mr. Girvin, he’s more with it than you think. He would have shot me on the spot if I went anywhere near Clara’s bedroom. He’s not only a gun owner, but he often carried a pistol on his person even while in the house. Sometimes he carried a rifle too. They were that fearful of the modern world outside their home. A world they viewed with paranoia. And as the years passed, they came to be even more terrified of the dress. If I were to expose it to them, they would be haunted for all their days, just like Clara and Henry before them.”

  That’s when it dawns on me. Balkis is also afraid of the curse. Which is precisely why he’s making me do the dirty work by digging it up…so to speak.

  “Turns out the Girvin’s days were numbered anyway,” I say, knowing I probably shouldn’t have.

  Balkis/Booth once more shifts his thumb so that it rests on the nasty digit.

  “As much as you’d like to believe Dr. Balkis killed the Girvins, you couldn’t be more wrong, Mr. Baker.”

  “I get the message, Mr. Booth,” I add.

  “Mr. Baker, tear down that wall.”

  Screw the Lincoln Curse and the horse it rode in on…

  Raising the mash hammer, I strike at the brick.

  15

  The brick crumbles.

  A small hole appears.

  “More, Baker,” Balkis/Booth says, his voice trembling with excitement. “Break more of it down.”

  He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I’m an explorer after all. A sandhog. Even with a bomb wrapped around my belly, I need to see what’s behind the wall as much as he does.

  I pound more of it out. Almost immediately a cool, stale, moldy odor slaps our faces.

  “The light,” I say. “I think I see it. I think I see the dress, Booth.”

  “It’s true,” he says. “It was here all the time. I just needed the Girvins out of the way.”

  With a trembling hand, he turns his LED light back on, shines it inside.

  “God almighty it’s true,” he repeats, now apparently unconcerned with the curse. “Where is it?”

  “Closer,” I insist. “Move in closer with the light. It’s right there, glowing as if the ghost of Clara is still wearing it. It’s the most beautiful apparition I’ve ever seen.”

  He holds the light inside the opening, his eyes peeled onto the empty space. That’s when I crack the son of a bitch over the head with the mash hammer.

  16

  He goes down hard, the smartphone landing inside the broken wall. Rather, not landing on a floor, but falling down what sounds to me like a series of iron steps.

  I pat him down, find he’s unarmed. Reaching around back, I unbuckle the bomb belt, set it to the side. I dig into my pocket, find my Swiss Army knife, open the blade. Gently, I slit the translucent plastic on the first piece of C-4. Taking a sniff of the material, I recognize the smell easily enough. Part sweet, part sour. You’re everyday construction putty.

  The C-4 belt was a fake.

  Go figure…

  Balkis is not only nutty, he’s psychopathic phony. I head up the steps to Clara’s water basin and discover there’s still water inside it.

  I carry it back to Balkis, stand at the edge of the square opening and pour it over his mustached face.

  He comes to in a fit of spitting and coughing.

  “What has thou done to me?” he says.

  “Cut the shit, you crazy bastard,” I say. “The show’s over which means you can stop talking like somebody you’re not. This ain’t no reenactment.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m smarter than you is what happened. You’re lucky the police aren’t dragging your psychotic ass to prison right this second…Ball-Kiss.”

  “You don’t have to mock, Baker,” he says, his voice returning to its normal contemporary whine, his face deflated if not defeated.

  He sits up, shakes his head. “Where’s my damned phone? I’ve already lost two this year alone.”

  “You’ll see what happened to your phone in just a second.”

  Stepping over to Clara’s bed lamp, I grab a box of wood matches from beside the old kerosene fixture and light it up. I carry it over to the hole in the floor, careful to step over Balkis’ crumpled, chubby body. Making the steps back down to the brick wall, I hold the lamp inside the opening. I become witness to the reason the professor’s smartphone seemed to bounce down a series of steps. Hidden behind the wall is not Clara’s dress, but a spiral staircase.

  17

  Balkis manages to pick himself up.

  “My Lord, a staircase,” he says, stating the obvious. “But where does it lead?”

  “That’s the question isn’t it, asshole?”

  “Please don’t call me that, Baker,” he says. “Besides…” His thought trails off.

  “Besides what?”

  “You’re not about to call the police or beat me up or anything else.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because you want to see where that staircase leads as much as I do.”

  Crazy’s got a point…

  “Okay, Professor,” I say, the lit kerosene lamp in hand. “But tell you what. You try anymore stunts, I will knock your teeth down your throat and feed your eyeballs to the neighborhood dogs. Do I make myself clear?”

  Bending at the knees, I pick up the mash hammer. Then, I hand Balkis the lamp.

  “You take the lead.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Funny,” I say. “Now walk.”

  He just stands there.

  I hold up the mash hammer like I’m going to hit him over the head with it again.

  “Okay, okay,” he says, raising the kerosene lamp so that it’s at chest height, its dim light reflecting off of the old lath and plaster walls.

  He begins descending the circ
ular staircase one step at a time. I follow, taking each step carefully as though at any moment the old rusted iron treads might snap in two. Judging by the way the old staircase creaks, trembles, and cries out from the strain, that’s not a far-out assumption.

  The fetid odor grows more intense with each step downward. Stale combined with a sweetness that’s not entirely unfamiliar. The air is cooler, too, which makes me believe we’re heading down into an area that is more subterranean than the basement where I was locked up earlier.

  When Balkis reaches the bottom, his shadow stretches out across a hard dirt floor that leads into a narrow room.

  “Sweet baby Jesus in heaven,” he says, as I negotiate the last step and lock my eyes on the dim, kerosene lamp-lit interior of the room and the two bodies it contains.

  “Yes,” I say, the mash hammer dropping out of my hand, “if heaven only knew.”

  18

  They are lying on the floor which is covered with a rug that, over the decades, has mostly decayed and rotted from ground moisture. The woman and man are lying on their side, facing one another as if they’ve just laid down in their queen-sized Serta for the night. Their bodies have been reduced to skeletons, but their clothing has somehow been spared the ravages of time, as if the underground tomb and the thick rug beneath them, has managed to protect them from the elements.

  Set on the floor in between them is a pistol. What I recognize as a Model 1858 Remington Army issue six-shooter. Despite the layer of dust that shrouds it, the pistol looks in good enough shape to shoot.

  Balkis bends at the knees, picks up his smartphone, pockets it. He then takes a couple of steps forward, illuminating their figures in lamplight.

  “Clara and Henry,” he whispers, as if speaking aloud will somehow wake them up.

  I approach them, stopping only when I come to their feet. Her’s covered in high-heeled, lace-up shoes. His covered in leather riding boots.

  “So the murder/suicide theory is true after all,” I say. “But he didn’t shoot her with Booth’s Derringer and he didn’t stab himself in the gut. He shot her first, then shot himself, down here in this dungeon.”

  “How can you tell?” Balkis says.

  “You see where the pistol rests on the floor, less than an inch from that nickel-sized hole in Henry’s forehead, his finger still on the trigger. He shot her in the heart and then himself in the head, using his left hand. Looks like his hand fell along with the gun and has remained in place ever since.”

  We both gaze upon the bodies in the ghostly golden lamplight. Although dead and decayed, there still seems to be a love between them. A love and emotion that remains palpable after all these years. That sweetness I smelled at the top of the staircase wasn’t just the familiar scent of death…it was also one of love. A love that still somehow exists between Clara and Henry. A love that was almost destroyed by the blood and the ghost of a man who was assassinated for something he believed in and who spilled his sad life all over Clara’s white dress. A love that is completely missing in the legendary accounts that attest to Henry having killed Clara over suspicion, paranoia, and anger.

  Clara’s dress…

  With Balkis holding up the lamp, I make a three-hundred-sixty-degree examination of the room on the balls of my feet.

  “The dress isn’t here,” I say, almost under my breath.

  Balkis sidesteps to the stone wall, begins patting it with his free hand.

  “Perhaps it’s hidden in some secret chamber or compartment.”

  I shake my head.

  “My gut tells me it’s not here. That it was once here. But it’s not here anymore. Because it wouldn’t be hidden from view. Henry and Clara would no longer have any reason to keep it hidden. If it was the prime source of their obsession, it would be set out as plainly as their bodies.”

  He turns to me, his face glowing in the yellow-gold kerosene light.

  “Henry Riggs Rathbone, Jr.,” Balkis says.

  “He must have removed the dress after finding his parents dead. That must be when he bricked up the closet so that no one would ever find them, or the dress that drove them to their graves. When he buried his parents, their coffins were empty…and empty they remain.”

  Balkis’ face goes south. “So he did burn the dress after all.”

  Me, stealing a moment not to think necessarily, but to listen to my intuition. My gut. In my head, I see a younger version of the old, almost crippled man standing with the young Girvins outside the house. A man of maybe nineteen or twenty on his hands and knees, bricking up the closet opening and nailing down the floorboards so that no one would ever know of the subterranean room and the cursed human remains it contained.

  “I don’t think so, Professor Balkis,” I say, after a time. “In fact, I know so.”

  “How do you know?”

  I punch my own stomach.

  “I can feel it right here. Feel the dress’s presence. You see, like the Girvins who lived here after the Rathbones, I think it’s possible old Henry Junior was afraid of what might happen should he attempt to destroy the dress. Afraid that he, too, might be haunted by the curse for the rest of his days.”

  “Why do you think he bricked his parents up instead of giving them a proper burial?”

  I shake my head. “It must have had something to do with the curse. Disturb the dead, and disturb the curse.”

  “But what happened to the damn dress? The source of the curse.”

  “It’s possible Clara and Henry had the dress with them when they died. Maybe after discovering his parent’s bodies, a very spooked Henry grabbed hold of the dress and decided to do something else with it. Like get it out of the house for a change.”

  “So, where can the dress be then? Is it possible the Girvin’s finally located it inside some old box and took off with it?”

  “You tell me?” I say.

  He shakes his head, purses his lips.

  “I think not,” he says. “Even if they had stumbled upon it somehow, they were far too afraid of its powers to even go near it.”

  I turn back to the bodies. My eyes lock on their skull faces staring eternally into one another. At their fetal positions, at their love for one another even in the face of violent death.

  “Some things you just can’t fight while you’re alive. Some things you need to take with you to the afterlife in order to protect it. And to protect others from it.”

  “What on God’s earth are you talking about, Baker?”

  Me, turning back to Balkis.

  “I can bet you a full year’s salary, Professor, that if we manage to find the Rathbone cemetery plots, we also find the Lincoln dress. We’ll start with Henry Junior’s grave first.”

  19

  We head back up the spiral staircase and exit the secret subterranean space through the hole in the floor. Once back inside Clara’s old bedroom, Balkis returns the lamp to the bed stand, blows it out.

  “You’re the historian, Balkis,” I say. “Where’s Junior buried?”

  He smiles. “I’ve already told you. Less than a mile away in the Albany Rural Cemetery. Have you wheels, Mr. Baker?”

  “My rental truck’s parked down the road.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  I hold out my hand, press it flat against the professor’s bulging sternum.

  “You know, Balkis,” I say, “I’m not that easy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I get that we’re after the same thing now, albeit for different reasons. You want that dress so you can communicate with Lincoln’s ghost or some such nonsense. Plus you want it for fortune and glory. I want to uncover it so that it can be proudly displayed in its rightful place. The Smithsonian. Or something like it. You see, Balkis, that dress isn’t yours or mine or even the Girvins, be they dead or alive. It belongs to the people of the United States of America and for which it stands and all that jazz.”

  “Oh, I agree,” he says, placing his right hand over his he
art like he’s about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But his act is a lie, and he knows that I know it. “I just want to see the dress finally revealed after all these years.”

  “Good,” I say. “Because otherwise, I’m gonna have to tie you up and leave you here until this thing is finished.”

  “Please don’t even think that way, Mr. Baker. You need me to assist you in the delicate task of exhuming Henry Junior, which I assume must be accomplished illegally. At the very least, you need a second set of eyes. Don’t you agree?”

  Mofo’s got a point. I’ll give him that. When Detective Miller handed me this job of finding the Girvins, he more than likely did not expect me to start looking for the dress instead, not to mention engage in something super illegal like grave robbing. But then, he didn’t exactly warn me against it either.

  “Okay,” I say. “But how do I know I can trust you? You’ve already knocked me over the head once, and tried to blow me up. Then there’s the matter of the missing Girvins.”

  He grows a grin. It tells me he’s already thought up a witty retort.

  “Well, the bomb was a fake, and you have also knocked me out. Or knocked Booth out, anyway. We’re even. And as for the Girvins, I already told you, I had nothing to do with their slipping off the radar.”

  Stealing a moment to think.

  “Tell you what,” I say. “Give me your phone.”

  His eyes open wide. “Why?”

  “Give me your phone and your wallet while you’re at it.”

  “And what, pray tell, difference does it make if I hand over these things to you?”

  “Insurance,” I say. “Simple as that. You try anything with me and I’ll make sure your personals get deep-sixed somewhere where you can’t get them back. Like Detective Miller’s inbox for instance.”

  He laughs.

  “Not for nothing, Mr. Baker,” he says. “But you’re unarmed and I’m quite a bit bigger than you.”