Jim Rubart Trilogy

by James L. Rubart

  "I know it. I need to believe it." Ann patted her knees once. "Shall we go?"

  "I'll go in alone. You should stay on lookout—"

  "We already decided to do this together; don't go back on me now."

  "Ann, there's something I need to tell you first. We might be into something more dangerous than I thought. There's a guy who's been watching me."

  "Sunglasses, baseball hat, looks Native American?"

  "He's stalked you too?"

  "Well, I wouldn't say stalked exactly, but yes."

  "We need to be more careful than the elves."

  "Agreed."

  Cameron slowly squeezed his door handle, opened his door, and slid out. He pulled out his pack from the backseat, looked at Ann, and raised his eyebrows, as if to say one more time, "Are you sure?"

  Ann nodded, got out—her pack in hand—and darted across the rough asphalt street, Cameron close behind. They sliced through the alley between The Sail & Compass and the Three Peaks Hotel around to the back of the building.

  "I'm an idiot," Cameron said as they knelt next to the back door.

  "Why?"

  "I didn't remember to bring a glass cutter. We're going to have to break a window."

  Ann scrunched up her face. "Are you teasing me?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "We talked about not having to worry about bringing tools to break in."

  "We did?" Great. Another missing song from his brain's CD.

  "We did. Watch." Ann pulled out an eight-piece lock-pick set from her pack and grinned at Cameron. After a quick study of the lock in the doorknob, she chose two picks and leaned in, her ear millimeters away from the lock.

  She closed her eyes and seemed to be talking to herself. In less than thirty seconds the door was open. Ann bowed her head and extended her palm in invitation for Cameron to enter the building first.

  "Another unknown skill of the resourceful Ann Banister."

  "From when I was a teenager. Before I met Jessie and Jesus. Don't ask."

  Neither spoke till they'd stepped inside and shut the back door behind them.

  "Not to be paranoid, but let's lock that."

  "Done," Ann said as she locked the door. "I need you to explain a mystery to me if you don't mind. If the book is genuine, why would Taylor hide the book in the heart of town where someone is more likely to go down to the basement and find it? Why not hide it in the basement of his home? Or in a cave out in the middle of nowhere? Or bury the thing in the ground?"

  "Two reasons. The first is Poe."

  "What?"

  "Edgar Allan. 'The Purloined Letter.' The best place to hide something is—"

  "Right out in the open," Ann finished. "I wouldn't call the basement out in the open."

  "All I'm saying is you wouldn't expect him to hide it on his own property right in the center of Three Peaks."

  "And the second reason?"

  "The same reason we're here in the middle of the night. With this place filled all day long, seven days a week, it would be a little tough for someone to explain why they were headed to the basement, especially if it's locked, which I'm guessing it is."

  Cameron moved through the restaurant's kitchen and looked for a door leading to the basement. "Taylor owns the building and The Sail & Compass?"

  Ann stared at him, concern etched into her face. "No."

  "But he started it, didn't he? The restaurant?"

  Ann nodded. "Yes."

  "I'm supposed to know this, aren't I?"

  "Yes." She hugged him and whispered, "It's going to be okay. We're going to find the book and you're going to be healed."

  A few moments later they found the stairs to the basement and Cameron started down them. The restaurant's dim night lights illuminated enough of the pine stairwell for Cameron to see his way down, but not much more. Two thirds of the way down he stepped on a stair that screeched like a catfight.

  He glanced back at Ann. "I think you might want to avoid that step."

  "Good call, H."

  The quote from the K2 movie. Cameron smiled. He remembered.

  At the bottom of the stairs was another door, this one with a double lock. "I'll take this as confirmation we're on the right track."

  After Ann did her lock magic, they stepped through the door and snapped on their flashlights.

  They stood in a large room filled with dusty cobwebs hanging from rough-hewn dark wooden beams. A light brown carpet, which might have been white once, covered the floor.

  "It's a museum; no one's been down here in years," Cameron said.

  "Museum is right."

  Along the far wall was a series of shelves piled with an extensive assortment of Native American artifacts: arrowheads, clothing, tools, bows, cooking pots, animal skins, and numerous photos.

  While Cameron studied the collection, Ann made a clean sweep of the room. "We need to go down to the next level. But I don't know how."

  "You didn't find a door?"

  "Not an obvious one."

  "Let's start a little light stomping." Cameron started in a corner of the room, stomped the wood floor with the heel of his boot, scooted a few feet forward, and stomped the floor again. Ann did the same at the opposite corner of the room. They both coughed from the small tornado of dust they kicked up.

  A little over half the room had been covered when Ann said, "I found it." She took a silver-handled Swiss Army knife out of her pack, knelt on the carpet, and sliced a perfect square in four quick strokes and peeled it back.

  "Let's go a little deeper, aye?"

  "Aye, captain."

  Cameron bent down and pulled on the trap door. It didn't budge. Not even a quarter-inch. He yanked it again. Nothing. After grabbing a screwdriver from his pack and wedging it into the microscopic slit between the door and the floorboards, he put his full weight on the handle of the screwdriver.

  A second later the door popped open and a whoosh of stale air filled the room.

  "Why do I feel like we're about to lower ourselves into our own crypt?" Ann said.

  Cameron flopped the trapdoor over onto the carpet, shone his flashlight down into the opening, and peered in. The concrete floor below was at least twenty feet down. "No stair, no ladder. Get ready to climb."

  "This is a pretty remote location for a wine cellar," Ann said.

  "It would be nicely aged by now. I think it's been a while since someone took a stroll in the bowels of The Sail & Compass."

  Ann tied her ropes to one of the thick wooden beams so they could repel into the darkness. Two minutes later Cameron dropped through the opening, flashlight clamped securely in his mouth.

  "The water's fine, come on down," he called out twenty seconds later.

  After Ann reached him, Cameron did a slow scan of the room with his light. It was small and square, maybe six-feet across and eight-feet wide. He expected it to be damp, but other than smelling a bit musty, the room was dry. Long tapestries of mountain scenes hung high on three of the four walls, running all the way to the floor. The rest was empty.

  "There." Ann pointed to a narrow black opening in the uncovered wall to the left, not more than twelve-inches wide and five-feet high.

  Cameron bent down and shone his flashlight into it. "I hope your claustrophobia insurance is paid up."

  Ann massaged her temple and he realized she didn't find it funny. "Sorry."

  "Let's do this." Ann slapped her hips with her palms.

  Cameron turned sideways and slid into the opening, with Ann close behind. He shone his light on the wall inches from his face, illuminating jagged cracks in the concrete that ran from floor to the ceiling.

  "How much farther?" Ann asked after a few seconds.

  "It can't be much more."
/>   "You don't see the end yet?"

  "Sorry, it curves slightly up ahead. You doing okay?"

  Ann didn't answer, and for the next ten seconds the only sound was their feet scuffling along the narrow passageway.

  What were they doing? Breaking the law like this was insane. All for a book that logic said wouldn't be down here or anywhere else.

  But Cameron had left logic land fifteen days ago.

  Moments later they stepped into a room the same size as the one on the other side of the tunnel.

  "Feel better?" Cameron asked.

  "Much." Ann shuddered and licked her lips. "If the book is here, how would he have gotten it through that passageway?"

  "Maybe Stone built the tunnel after he got the book down here." Cameron did a slow spin on his heel as he shone his light on the walls from left to right. There was one door, directly in front of them. He stepped up to it, stretched out his hand, and slid his palm down its wooden surface till it came to rest on the brass knob.

  "Here we go. Ready?" His heart pounded like a jackhammer. Could this be it?

  "Are you sure you want to open that door?"

  "I just realized . . ."

  "I know. When you open it, you'll either be overwhelmed or devastated."

  Cameron nodded. "Exactly."

  There was no point in waiting. He curled his fingers around the doorknob, let its coolness seep into his damp palm, and pushed. It didn't budge. A little harder and it creaked open.

  He stepped through and shone his flashlight around the room. It was large, maybe twenty by twenty feet. The room was thick with the smell of old musty papers. In one corner stood a small lamp that looked like it was made in the 1930s. A broken stool lay in the middle of the room. Two old oak desks rested next to the stool.

  Nothing else was in the room.

  Cameron leaned up against the wall and slid down to the floor like sap oozing down a pine tree. Why did Stone do it? Why the clues? Why would he put this whole charade together only to have the end of the puzzle result in nothing?

  Cameron slammed his fist into the wall behind him.

  He'd believed in the book because he had to believe; in his dad's and Jessie's God, in sometime beyond this life. If he didn't, what kind of future was left for him?

  He'd had to believe he could answer his dad's final request, find his memories of Jessie, and be cured of this insidious disease.

  Cameron glanced around the room. So what would he do now? He banished the question from his mind. "Are you going to say I told you so?"

  "I'm sorry." Ann sat beside him.

  "At least I know, and it won't haunt me the rest of my life, wondering what I might have found."

  They sat in silence for three or four minutes. Then Ann patted his leg. "Are you ready to go, or do you want to sit here a little longer? I doubt we're in any danger of being caught if we haven't been already, but still, I wouldn't want to be found down here."

  "You're right; we should go."

  But Cameron didn't want to go. He wanted to stay and watch God's Book of Days magically appear before his eyes. He wanted to remember every moment he'd spent with Jessie and relive days with his dad—to bathe in the glory moments they'd had together.

  He wanted to remember the important things Jessie had told him before she died that pounded at the back of his mind but refused to take shape any longer.

  He needed to remember them. They were tied into the things going on in Three Peaks right now. Things somehow he knew he needed to know but couldn't dredge up no matter how hard he willed himself to do so.

  Suddenly Ann stood. "I can't believe I almost missed it."

  "Missed what?"

  "I don't know what I was thinking." She paced and pressed her fingers against her temples. "Yes, yes, of course." She closed her eyes. "I can see it."

  "Talk to me."

  She whirled to face him. "This is the outer room, not the inner."

  "I'm not following."

  "There's another room in this basement. A big room."

  "There's a slight problem with that." Cameron swung his flashlight around the room in a slow arc. "There's no door. No opening. No curtain for the wizard to emerge from behind."

  "There has to be."

  "There isn't."

  Ann pulled a folder from her backpack. "Take a look at this." She knelt down and spread a two-by-one-foot piece of paper on the floor. "Did I tell you I have a photographic memory?"

  Cameron hesitated. Did she? "I don't think so."

  "It doesn't always work for remembering conversations or places I've been or people I've met, but with photos and papers I've seen and things I've read, I retain 90 to 95 percent of what I see."

  "So?"

  "Look." She pointed to the paper she'd smoothed out on the dust-choked floor.

  "After we got kicked out of the courthouse, I sketched out the blueprints of this building." Ann tapped the paper. "This is where we are now. If I'm right, there has to be another room on the other side of that wall."

  "You didn't think to mention your photographic memory till now?"

  "Did we need it till now?"

  He leaned forward and shined his flashlight inches from Ann's paper. Her simple line drawing definitely showed a room on the opposite side of where they knelt.

  Moving slowly along the north wall, Ann rapped her knuckles against the wall every few feet. After Cameron figured out what she was doing, he started at the opposite wall and did the same.

  Boom!

  The hollow reverberation sounded like a cannon in the stillness of the chamber. He shined his flashlight on the spot. No door. He rapped the surface in front of him again.

  Boom!

  "I think you found it," Ann said.

  Cameron ran his fingers over the surface of the wall feeling for an edge. Nothing. Ann did the same on the other side, where the edge of the doorjamb would be if there was one. "He put Sheetrock right over where the door would be."

  A low whine filtered down from above them, almost too soft to register.

  Ann looked up. "Did you hear that?"

  "Sounds like a blender from two miles away." Cameron spun his flashlight around the ceiling. "Or three stories above us."

  "And?"

  "No idea, but it's pretty late for anyone to be whipping up a smoothie."

  They held their breath and listened. Nothing.

  "Let's get this done."

  He dug into his pack for his climbing ax as Ann did the same.

  The blender started again.

  "You want to keep digging and I'll go check out whatever is making that noise?" Cameron said.

  "Good plan."

  The noise stopped the moment he turned. They listened. Again nothing.

  "I'm going anyway."

  Ann nodded.

  He eased through the narrow hallway, stopping every few feet to listen. On his fifth stop the whine started again. Then stopped. He didn't hear it as he scrambled up the rope through the trapdoor into the first level of the basement, up the stairwell into the restaurant.

  The sound didn't start again till he stepped around the back corner of the building into the shadows in the alley in between. A streetlight strobed and the element inside whined. It sounded like their blender.

  How could that—?

  As he followed the pole down into the ground it made sense. The pole was probably directly above where they were, and the vibrations carried down into the basement.

  A car drove by and Cameron tried to push himself into the wall of Taylor's building as it passed. It didn't slow and didn't speed up. He stood in the shadows for a minute, watching the other shadows, watching for . . . nobody.

  There was nothing out here. Paranoid for no re
ason.

  Finally he shook his head, as if he could shake off the unsettled feeling flitting around his mind, and crept back into the restaurant, down the stairs, down into the second level of Taylor Stone's basement.

  The light from Ann's flashlight lit up the narrow passage as he shimmed through it and the luminescence drew him like a moth.

  "I see you're still among the living," Ann said as he pushed through the small opening at the end of the passageway and stepped into the room.

  "Just a streetlamp burning out, sending the whine down into the ground." Cameron coughed as the cloud of dust swirled around him. "Wow, nice progress."

  A pitch-black hole in the wall roughly six feet by two gaped next to Ann. "Not bad, huh?"

  "Not only that, but I couldn't hear you doing it from above, which means this vault is deep enough that we can relax a bit. Any noise we make down here won't be heard above."

  Adrenaline pumped through Cameron. This had to be it.

  He grinned at Ann and she returned it with one of her own. "You want to go first?" he said.

  "Not a chance."

  As Cameron stepped through the opening, he flicked off his flashlight and turned back toward Ann. "If it's real, we should see this at the same time."

  She followed his lead and shut off her flashlight before stepping through the opening.

  Silence surrounded them. If he didn't know Ann stood three feet from him, he could have felt like he was the only person alive on earth. Was this what death was like?

  "Are you ready?"

  "Yes."

  Their feet scuffed the floor as they shuffled forward a few feet.

  "Let's do this." Cameron snapped on his flashlight.

  A moment later Ann's flicked on and their lights filled the room. They stood in a large domed space with faded cedar paneling. The back wall was covered from floor to ceiling with shelves that held piles of parchments, each stack weighted down by familiar-looking rocks.

  Cameron pulled Susan Hillman's stone out of his pocket. It was smaller, but it was the same as the stones on top of the parchments. Blood pounded through his head and adrenaline pushed through his body.

  In the middle of the room a thick gray canvas covered a rectangular shape at least ten-feet long and five-feet wide.