Cam - 04 - Nightwalkers

by P. T. Deutermann

  Some water would have been nice. Some Scotch would have been better. Some frantic tapping on the door from the other side would have been best.

  I woke up and checked my watch: seven thirty in the morning, not that it was morning down in the tunnel. My watch light looked like a tiny night-light in that blackness. The shepherds stirred but didn't get up. They were completely blind in that darkness.

  I pulled out my cell phone and opened it. It still had battery, light on the screen, and, of course, absolutely no signal. Tony should have been over here by now, so the fact that he wasn't led me to believe my ghost had either attacked him or somehow diverted him. I turned the phone off to conserve its battery and then used the flashlight to explore the tunnel. It hadn't changed much over the night: earthen floor, brick walls, curved, arched brick ceiling, which dusted my face with old mortar each time I looked up. The ladder at the far end was about ten feet high, and the ceiling was maybe seven feet from the floor. Had they dug a long trench, built the walls and arched ceiling, and then just backfilled it?

  When I went back to the door I tried to move it again. It budged, but not much. I stubbed my foot on the iron locking bar. Four feet across, three inches wide, a half inch thick, forged iron, and weighing about twenty pounds. I thumped the door with it and made a suitably loud noise. Maybe I could batter the door down with the bar, except that the door was made of two courses of oak boards running cross-grain with one another and reinforced with iron strapping material. Then I remembered the smokehouse trapdoor, and the fact that I could move it just a little.

  "C'mon, muttskis," I said. "Let's try the world's simplest tool."

  I climbed the ladder, leaving the flashlight, on white beam now, on the floor pointed up. The dogs looked up expectantly, tails wagging in encouragement. I positioned the edge of the bar up against the crack, spread my legs on the ladder, and pressed my upper back against the boards. Then I heaved upward with all my strength. The trapdoor moved maybe a millimeter.

  I relaxed, did some deep breathing, and this time repositioned the bar into one corner of the trapdoor. I'd tried to lift the whole thing the first time. Maybe I could lift one corner. All I needed was a half inch in which to wedge that iron bar.

  One more deep breath, and push. The rung of the ladder on which I was standing cracked and then broke, nearly dumping me off the ladder and down onto that hard earth floor. I dropped the iron bar trying to stay on the damned ladder and only narrowly avoided beaning one of the dogs. Fortunately the next lower rung held, but I was now too low on the ladder to get much pushing leverage.

  I went back down and retrieved the bar. The shepherds were giving me reproachful looks for throwing heavy objects at them. Back up I went, and this time to the next rung up from the new gap on the ladder. This had me bent way over, but it was the best I could do. I positioned the bar into one corner and then, using my legs this time, tried to stand up.

  The hatch moved and the bar slid into the resulting crack, just barely. I heard that familiar cracking noise, so I took the strain off before I broke another rung. I relaxed with my head up against the rough bottom of the trapdoor and did some more deep breathing. There was no fulcrum on which I could use the bar as a lever, but I felt the tiniest wisp of air coming through that crack. Progress.

  I went back down the ladder and did some back-straightening exercises. I had a feeling I was going to hurt in a little while. The dogs were looking at me with their good-job, now-what expression. Good question.

  I turned off the flashlight and turned on my cell phone. When the screen lit up, I went back up the ladder, put the phone up against the crack, and, lo and behold, there was a single bar of signal. The bar was probably acting as an antenna. I dialed 911 and hit send. A badly garbled voice answered me, and the call went dead the moment I spoke. Then I remembered what a deaf paralegal had taught me: You can text to 911 if for some reason you can't talk.

  I crouched on the ladder and thumbed in a message. Then I redialed and sent the text. Fifteen seconds later message received appeared on the screen.

  I exhaled in relief and went back down the ladder. Now it was just a waiting game.

  Thirty minutes later I heard someone banging on the wooden door from the basement side. I yelled back and then waited for them to do something on the other side that involved cutting metal. Finally the door pushed open in my direction and light blazed in the doorway from two powerful flashlights. As fresh air flooded in, I realized that our air supply in the tunnel had not been as good as I thought it was. The dogs went through while I was still getting my wits together.

  Two deputies welcomed us into the basement and showed me the chain arrangement that had been used to keep the door from moving. They said Sheriff Walker was on his way over. I told them I was okay and did not need EMS. While one deputy canceled the EMS dispatch, the other asked what had happened. I told him I'd debrief to the sheriff and then asked if they could check on my associate over at the Lees' stone cottage.

  Sheriff Walker showed up fifteen minutes later, and we met on the front porch.

  "At least we know he's still in the area," he said, coming up the steps.

  "And he still has the initiative," I replied, and then told him what had happened last night. We went inside to see the little speakers, but, of course, they were all gone. The second deputy came back about then and reported that Tony was not at the cottage, nor was his vehicle. The old dog in the house appeared to be fine.

  I tried his cell phone. He answered.

  "Where are you?" I asked.

  "I'm almost to Charlotte," he replied.

  "Charlotte?"

  "You told me to go to Charlotte, first thing this morning, meet with some guy who oversees kennel clubs in the city, and get him to identify people who know the Doberman scene down there."

  "Fascinating," I said and then told him where I'd been all night. I asked him how he received those instructions.

  "Text," he said. "On my cell phone--from your cell phone."

  "Turn around," I said. "That's all bogus. I never sent any text messages."

  "Well, okay," he said, "but I talked to that guy in Charlotte. He's real, and he says he knows the Doberman scene. I'm almost there--what could it hurt?"

  I asked him to hold on and asked the sheriff what he thought. "Why not?" he said. "We pulsed the city cops down there, but the biker world doesn't talk to cops. The dog show people might."

  "Sheriff says proceed," I told Tony. "Then we have to figure out how this guy got into our comms."

  "Ask Pardee," he said. "He's the data-dink."

  The sheriff said they'd been tracing back on their victim and had developed a small list of known associates, but so far, no leads on a lone ranger who'd wanted two dogs. He asked about our efforts to recon the plantation.

  "Interrupted," I said. "We thought we were homing in on that old coal mine tunnel until the two Dobes came down the hill and put us at general quarters."

  "How convenient," he said.

  "Yeah, wasn't it. Let's take a walk."

  When we got out under the big trees, I told him that I thought this guy still had the house under audio surveillance, and maybe even our vehicles and the cottage. "He anticipates our every move, and he's able to deflect us at will."

  "Which means he didn't run after popping the dog trainer," Walker said. "He's in the area, so he's got a base."

  "That's what we were looking for, something like that old mine, or a deserted building out there in my seven hundred acres of weeds and trees."

  "Maybe we should try aerial," he said.

  "We did that. Took pictures, even. Pardee put together a composite, and we've been over it with a magnifying glass. Nada."

  "And yet . . ."

  "Yeah. I've been trying to put together a picture of my ghost. He has technical ability and access to tech toys. This whole thing's about his wife and something I supposedly did, but he won't tell me what it is. That's all he'll say. Maybe we need a profiler."


  The sheriff snorted. "Might as well read the horoscope in the newspaper," he said. "Those pogues all trained up at Delphi." He assumed the pose of a mystic. "Your perpetrator," he intoned, "will be a male, somewhere between twenty and sixty, with two arms and two legs, capable of extreme violence and yet also able to plan in detail. He'll prefer rifles to pistols, he likes or at least respects dogs, I'm getting black dogs in particular . . ."

  "Okay, okay, I get the point--but maybe we could profile the tech toys?"

  He nodded. "That's more like it. His surveillance tags, his ability to send text messages from a clone phone, a flashbang, that sort of stuff might narrow it down."

  "Do you have assets?"

  "No, but the SBI does. Get your Mr. Bell to send us a laundry list of what you've come up against so far and I'll take it up with Raleigh."

  "And we will go back out into the back country here and see what we can dig up. Or at least I will, until Tony gets back."

  The sheriff looked up the hill toward the big house. "You sure he's not holed up in that thing? Some more secret passages, or a priest hole in the walls somewhere?"

  "I guess I could burn it down, see what scuttles out," I said.

  He laughed. "Try another search first, why don't you?"

  After the cops left, I called Carol and suggested she bring lunch over to the big house here at Glory's End. "You fly, I buy," I said.

  "Deal," she said.

  I thought she and I might take another look at the house with an eye toward finding possible hiding places and maybe even that second escape route. Even my ghost had mentioned it. She was an expert in old houses and might be able to see something that we'd missed.

  We sat up on the front porch to eat a somewhat elaborate picnic she'd acquired at the purple house restaurant. I was hungry after missing breakfast. The two shepherds had been banished to the steps, but they were begging shamelessly anyway. In their defense, Carol had failed to bring along any dog chow.

  She looked good and obviously felt good, and I was comfortable being with her. In contrast, my run-in with the nighttime version of Valeria Lee had been disconcerting, almost a little scary. Yes, I'd reacted, but there'd been that little voice warning me to check out her canine teeth, just in case.

  I told Carol about what had happened the night before and said that I needed to go through the house with a fine-toothed comb to see if I could find any more hidden places. She agreed to help, although she thought it was somewhat surreal for us to be sitting out there in the sunlight while my ghost might be crouching under the porch floorboards, listening to us. I said I could put a few rounds down through the floorboards if it would make her feel better. We pitched the scraps out onto the lawn for the shepherds and went inside to begin our search.

  We started in the attic and worked our way down. The rooms were still mostly empty, and all the walls seemed to match up with the walls in the adjacent room. We thumped the built-in bookcases in both drawing rooms to no avail. I did look under the front porch, but it was just bare earth and lots of spiders. We poked around the kitchen and checked the base of that giant fireplace. It had a single lintel stone, which must have weighed two tons. It was covered in blackened plaster. Carol asked about the water supply to the house. I showed her the pantry alcove where the pressure tank lived and pointed out the window to the backyard area where there was no wellhead.

  "That tank indicates a modern system," she said. "In the old days, the slaves would have carried water to the house from that springhouse."

  "The pump is usually in the ground, though, down in the well. I don't see a well."

  "Well, then, there has to be a connection between the water source and the house, maybe something to do with a cistern. Let's go look at the springhouse."

  We did, and when we got to it I noticed something I hadn't seen before. I'd always assumed the spring was lower in elevation than the main house, but when I lay down on the ground and tried a sight line, I could see that it was actually higher than the partially submerged level of the house.

  "Then this is the reservoir," she said. "They didn't need an outside cistern as long as this spring kept running."

  She examined the broken latticework where Tony had gone through to escape the Dobermans. The water below was visibly flowing. The end wall that faced the house even had some decorative brickwork, with a flat lion's head medallion right in the middle. The other end had a set of steps leading down into the water, which Carol told me was used for retrieving cooling milk, meat, and eggs, which would have been stored in metal containers in the fifty-degree water.

  "So somewhere back there is a pipe or other conduit that sends water back to the kitchen?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "And we care--why?"

  "Because there ought to be water storage in the house, something larger than that little pressure tank. I didn't see one or even a place for one."

  We went back to the house, down to the partially underground floor, and into the kitchen area again. I could just see the top of the springhouse from one of the windows, and it still looked like it was lower on the hill than where I was standing, even though now I knew it wasn't.

  Carol found it a few minutes later, after banging the handle of a screwdriver on the interior walls of the walk-in cabinets. An entire set of shelves was hinged and latched to the wall. When we unlatched it, it swung back to reveal a doorway, behind which was a set of stone steps leading down into darkness.

  "Just what I want to do, after last night," I said. "Go down into another damned tunnel."

  I brought in both shepherds, put them on a down at the entrance, and told them to eat anyone who touched that swinging shelf. They lay down on the floor and watched attentively. After last night, they weren't coming with me no matter what I said.

  I still had my flashlight, and Carol came along with me. This tunnel was very narrow, so much so that my shoulders almost touched the walls. It was straight, with no doglegs, and I was pretty sure it pointed in the direction of the springhouse. The walls were stone, not brick, and the ceiling was made up of heavy planks sheathed in what looked like copper. The floor was pounded red clay, and it was wet. A plain steel pipe ran along one side of the floor. When we got to the other end, there were five stone steps leading up to a short metal door. When I shone the light on that door, we could see that the bottom one-third of the door was perspiring.

  "That moisture would indicate that the door opens into the spring," she said. "What good is this?"

  "Something for a real emergency," I said. "Or they had a way to dump the spring from in here." I looked up and saw a badly rusted lever high up on the right-hand wall alongside the stone steps. "Like that."

  I got down on one knee and shone the flashlight along the earthen floor. I could see our footprints, and what looked like other prints underneath ours. This was how my ghost had been getting in and out of the building, once we'd discovered the other tunnel.

  We walked back to the house end of the tunnel, where I discovered tiny bits of wire and a bent connecting clip beside the steps. The shepherds were watching us now from the top of the steps, but they still weren't coming down. The debris was further evidence of my stalker: He'd probably wired the speakers down here before setting them out in the house. I still could not find any internal water storage system for the house, but maybe one old lady living here didn't need that much water. We went up the steps and back out into the kitchen.

  "Okay," I said. "That's two tunnels. Suppose that's it?"

  "That's two more than I expected," she said. "The question is, how in the world did your ghost, as you call him, know about these?"

  "Excellent question," I said. "I think I'll ask Ms. Valeria Lee if she knows about any tunnels in this house."

  "Why her?"

  "She apparently had been taking care of the old lady who lived here, and she grew up here, according to her mother."

  "Okay, that makes sense."

  "I'll just pose the question about tunnels ca
sually," I said. "I want to watch her reaction."

  "Why?"

  "If she knows all about them, I learn nothing. If I sense that she's evading the question, then I'll have to assume a connection between my stalker and the crazy ladies across the road. It would sure as hell explain how this guy has been able to move around here so easily."

  "That doesn't track," she said. "I thought this whole thing started as a prison ghost, back in Summerfield."

  "I'm beginning to think that was all coincidental. Billie Ray kept denying that he had anything to do with any shootings, and even I thought it unlikely that he could acquire a rifle and set up a hit that quickly."

  "Then someone shot him."

  "Correct," I said. "So now I'm thinking more about the timing than the location. All this stuff started after I came out here and started making inquiries about land and then, specifically, Glory's End."

  "What about the you-killed-my-wife stuff?"

  "Beats me," I said. "One mystery at a time, I guess. Right now I'm going back out there to see if that coal mine's up there."

  Carol had to go meet another restoration client. Before leaving, she gave me a quick kiss. I turned it into a slower one and then brushed my hands across her bottom. She giggled but backed away. "Not in front of the shepherds," she said with a grin, and then she left.

  I called Pardee. He had acquired most of what he needed and asked if the electrician had set up power. I'd forgotten all about the electrician and said I'd have to look. Pardee said that he'd be out in the evening and that Tony had debriefed him on the events of last night. I told him about finding the second escape route and explained my theory about the Lees and a possible connection to the land. He had an interesting question: How had the Lees found out that I was going to buy the plantation? That was easy, I said, having already seen the county grapevine in action. It had to be Oatley or someone else in town, I said. He suggested I chase down that connection, see where it led. I told him that first I wanted to go find that coal mine, hopefully without distractions this time.