Last Puzzle & Testament

by Parnell Hall

  They replaced the drawer and hurried off to find the kitchen.

  “Keep your flashlight down,” Cora counseled as they descended the stairs. “In case anyone’s driving by.”

  “We’d see the headlights,” Sherry told her.

  “Even so,” Cora said.

  Downstairs, they went through a living room that was a medley of styles, including a marble fireplace, a modern convertible couch, a love seat, an ottoman, and Queen Anne chairs. Next, a formal dining room where a massive oak table seated twelve, and the walls were lined with antique breakfronts and serving stands. Sherry and CoSherry ara detoured around the table and pushed through a pair of swinging doors into the kitchen.

  The Hurley kitchen was extensive for a private house. On one wall were two stoves, one with six burners, the other topped by metal grills. Another wall held a floor-to-ceiling refrigerator and a walk-in freezer. Still another held sinks and an industrial dishwasher, the type racks of dishes were fed through on a conveyor belt. On the fourth wall were shelves of pots and pans, and a door to a separate pantry lined with provisions.

  The center of the kitchen was dominated by a huge butcherblock table, nearly as large as the table in the dining room. Knives and kitchen utensils hung neatly around the perimeter from racks.

  “Well,” Sherry said. “Where do we begin?”

  Cora shone her light around, considered. “Under the table,” she decided. “I would expect writing on the bottom of the table, just like on the bottom of the drawer.”

  Examining the bottom of the table was slightly complicated by the fact that it had a lower shelf, which was crammed with pots and pans. Still, Sherry and Cora managed to squeeze in and shine their lights enough to see that there was nothing written there.

  “Next theory?” Sherry said, disappointed.

  “Same theory, different location,” Cora told her. “I’d still look for writing underneath. How about that counter leading from the sink to the dishwasher?”

  There was nothing there. But there was underneath the counter leading out of the dishwasher. The message, once again, was in Magic Marker:

  #2.

  How low can you go

  To find your clues?

  Here’s an offer

  You can’t re-fuse

  “How low can you go,” Sherry muttered. “Would that mean the basement?”

  “Sure sounds like it,” Cora replied. “But what’s this offer you can’t refuse?”

  “It’s hyphenated,” Sherry said.

  “What?”

  “Refuse is hyphenated. Re hyphen fuse. That’s got to be significant.”

  “Fuse box!” Cora exclaimed. “I bet there’s a fuse box in the basement.”

  “I bet you’re right,” Sherry said. “You think we can find it in the dark?”

  “We will if we have to,” Cora answered. “If there’s no basement windows, we can turn on the lights. So where’s the basement door?”

  It was in the back hallway off the pantry. Sherry nudged the door open, exposing the stairway leading down. There was a light switch on the wall near the top.

  “Shall we risk it?” Sherry asked.

  “You stay here,” Cora said decisively. “I’ll go down, see if there’s windows. If not, we’ll switch the light on.”

  Cora crept down the stairs while Sherry waited by the light switch. Cora reached the bottom and moved off, leaving the stairs dark. Sherry aimed her flashlight down the stairwell. The beam didn’t reach the bottom. She played the light around the stairs, fingered the switch. The shadows in the basement were impenetrable.

  Sherry waited impatiently as the seconds ticked by. Told herself she was stupid for being nervous. Even so, it was taking too long. A few more seconds and she’d either switch the lights on, or go downstairs and—

  “Sherry!” Cora hissed from the shadows below. “It’s okay. Turn ’em on.”

  Sherry threw the light switch. Nothing happened.

  “It’s all right, turn ’em on,” Cora said.

  “I did,” Sherry said.

  “Then they’re not working,” Cora told her. “I guess we’d better find the fuse box. Come on.”

  Sherry joined Cora at the bottom of the stairs.

  “There’s no windows that I can see,” Cora reported. “It’s hard to tell, because there’s lots of partitions. There’s a stairs up to the back lawn—you know the kind I mean—concrete steps up to a flat door that would pull up from the outside—but that’s not going to let any light out, besides it’s in the back. I found the furnace and the water tank. I haven’t found the fuse box, but it can’t be far.”

  “Okay. Then we can trace the electricity from it.”

  “That’s what I like about you. Always thinking. Come on.”

  Cora led the way through the dingy basement, keeping the flashlight down to illuminate the debris scattered on the concrete floor.

  Sherry followed with her flashlight up, trying to spot the spiderwebs, which seemed to be everywhere. Most of them were old, but many were new and occupied, and some of the spiders seemed aggressively large. Sherry’s flesh began to crawl. She shuddered, hurried along after her aunt.

  “Watch out for that rake,” Cora warned.

  Sherry stopped, shone her light down, saw that she had nearly tripped over a pile of garden tools. She detoured around it, checking carefully for overhanging webs, then followed Cora’s bobbing flashlight to the other side of the cellar.

  “Okay, here we are,” Cora announced. “Here’s the water heater.” She played her flashlight over it. “There. Isn’t that an electric cable coming out of the top?”

  “There’s two of them,” Sherry said, shining her light. “One in each direction. Either could lead to the fuse box.”

  “Wanna split up?”

  “Not particularly. But it would be faster.”

  “All right. You go right, I’ll go left.”

  Sherry shone the light, followed the shiny silver electrical conduit along the wall. It was difficult, because every now and then she’d hit a partition she’d have to go out around, and pick up the conduit on the other side. Fortunately, it ran fairly straight, only occasionally detouring around a column, beam, girder, or whatever they called structural supports in an old house—Sherry had majored in linguistics, not architecture.

  At one point the cable swooped upward, ran along the ceiling, which made tracking it harder. Running it must have been harder too, and Sherry couldn’t help wondering why the electrician had bothered. Still, she followed it diligently, while keeping an anxious eye out for arachnids.

  She lost it in the corner. The corner was particularly dark and inaccessible, with two partitions thrown up, in Sherry’s estimation, solely for the purpose of frustrating her. She couldn’t really get in between them without squeezing into a rather uninviting space, with rubble on the floor, cobwebs on the ceiling, and a stack of old lumber piled upward against the wall. Her only real hope was to pick it up on the other side. Only the conduit didn’t come out of the other side. On the far side of the second partition there were no cables at all. No electrical work of any kind.

  Sherry shone the light, sized up the situation. Decided either the conduit had taken a turn in the corner and was now running away from the wall along the ceiling, or else this corner was where the power ran upstairs to the rest of the house.

  She took a step backward, played the light along the ceiling.

  Heard a noise.

  She snapped off the light, stood very still.

  “Got it!” Cora Felton muttered triumphantly.

  Sherry felt silly. She and Cora had circled the whole basement, and wound up right next to each other.

  “Where are you?” Sherry called.

  “Right here. Can’t you see me?”

  “Can you see me?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you expect me to see you?”

  “There must be another wall here. Come out around.”

  “You foun
d the fuse box?”

  “Yeah, but I can’t reach it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s near the ceiling.”

  “The fuse box is near the ceiling?”

  Cora didn’t reply.

  Sherry picked her way toward the center of the cellar, detoured around a storage area of some sort, and immediately saw Cora Felton’s flashlight. It was trained on a fuse box on the wall near the ceiling just out of reach.

  “Wonderful,” Sherry said. “There’s no box or step stool?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Then how do they change the fuses?”

  “I would imagine they’re circuit breakers.”

  “That’s not the point. How do they get up there?”

  “They stand on something. Emma Hurley probably removed it after she left the clue.”

  “Assuming she left it here.”

  “Or assuming someone left it here for her. I bet whoever left the clue took the step stool away just to make it harder for us.”

  “As if it wasn’t hard enough,” Sherry said. “Okay, I’ll find something.”

  Sherry went back to what had appeared to be a partitioned-off storage area. Investigating, she found it to be exactly that. A makeshift Sheetrock door was unlocked, and swung back on squeaky hinges to reveal boxes, trunks, and suitcases. Sherry chose a trunk that was sturdy but empty and light enough for her to carry. She hefted it by the handle, lugged it back to her aunt.

  “I hope this is high enough,” Sherry said.

  “We could stand it on end.”

  “I don’t think so. I wouldn’t get on it, and I wouldn’t advise you to.”

  “All right. Let’s try it flat.”

  Standing on the trunk on tiptoe, Sherry was just able to reach the cover of the fuse box. She reached up, pushed it open to reveal a panel of circuit breakers.

  “There we go,” Cora said.

  On the back of the fuse box was:

  #3.

  My, oh my

  The attic’s high

  Where the light comes

  From the sky

  “Skylight,” Sherry said. “Would an attic have a skylight?”

  “Don’t be so literal,” Cora scolded. “I don’t know what the attic has, but that’s where we want to go.”

  “Just a moment …” Sherry said.

  She shone her flashlight over the fuse box. One of the circuit breakers was tripped. Sherry reached up, stretched her finger, pushed it over.

  The cellar lights came on, and proved to be bare bulbs screwed into ceiling sockets with dangling pull cords. Several of them were on, though not the one where Sherry and Cora were standing. Cora reached up, pulled the cord, turned theirs on, lighting up the alcove.

  “Well, that certainly would have helped,” Cora said. “Too bad the breaker was tripped.”

  “Yeah,” Sherry said dryly. “I suppose we can thank Emma Hurley for that.”

  “Oh, doubtless,” Cora agreed happily. “Any other breakers tripped? It would be a shame to run into the same thing in the attic.”

  “We probably can’t risk the lights there,” Sherry said.

  “Even so.”

  “No, the circuit breakers are all okay. Come on, let’s go.”

  With the lights on they had no trouble negotiating the basement floor, and in a minute they were climbing the stairs. At the top Cora threw the switch, plunging the basement into darkness.

  “Okay, let’s find the stairs to the attic.”

  “I don’t get it,” Sherry said, as they went up the circular front stairs.

  “Don’t get what?”

  “If the heirs were doing this, it would be a stampede. They’d all be finding the clues at the same time.”

  “That’s the purpose of the crossword puzzle,” Cora said. “It sends them off on a false scent. Only the smartest ones figure it out and come back.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “A lot of things.” Sherry stopped in the second-floor hallway, shone her light. “Okay, the staircase does not continue, and the stairs to the third floor are not readily apparent, so they must be down here.”

  Sherry set off down the hallway, with Cora trailing behind.

  “Wha">ȁt’s wrong with my idea?” Cora persisted.

  “Ah, here we are,” Sherry said. Her light illuminated a narrow staircase at the end of the hall. “The problem with your idea is if the crossword puzzle was just to throw the heirs off the scent, why four sections? One section is enough. If all she wants to do is send ’em away so the smart ones come back, why send ’em all over creation? Why go to the trouble of planting the other three quadrants, which couldn’t have been easy for a woman in her condition?”

  “Someone did it for her.”

  “Even so, why do it at all? Okay,” Sherry said, shining the light around the hallway. “This is not the attic, this is the third floor. Probably for servants. Now, unless the attic is an adjunct on one end, we’re looking for another set of stairs.”

  “Or a ladder,” Cora said.

  “True,” Sherry said. “Though this is not the type of house where you’d expect to find a pull-down ladder.”

  Sherry shone the light down the hallway, began pulling open doors. “You see my point,” she said. “If all she wants to do is get ’em out of here, why bother to plant the other puzzle pieces?”

  “Because Alan Alda’s in the third one.”

  “What?”

  “Alan Alda doesn’t show up until the third quadrant, and that’s the one that tells you it’s a fake.”

  “Oh, yeah? What about the Woody Allen quote in the second quadrant? That tells you it’s a fake too.”

  Cora shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. You only know it’s Woody Allen because I told you. His name’s not in the clue or the answer. You can solve the puzzle just fine without knowing that. The tipoff is Alan Alda. That’s what sends ’em back.”

  “Big deal. If there’s no second quadrant, they’ll come back anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Cora said, “but they’ll come back grousing. Telling ’em the puzzle’s wrong makes ’em come back looking.”

  “It’s a theory. I’m not sure I like it.” Sherry pulled open a door. “Ah, here we go.”

  A narrow staircase led up into more darkness.

  “Light switch on the wall,” Cora told her. “You wanna risk it?”

  “Let me check it out first.”

  “I’ll do it,” Cora said.

  “You did the cellar. This one’s mine.”

  Sherry went up the narnt up throw stairs, darting her light ahead of her. At the top she emerged through a rectangular hole in the attic floor. Before stepping off the stairs, Sherry shone the light and discovered the floor was unfinished. Some of it was covered with planks and sheets of plywood, but at least half of it was just two-by-four studs holding the insulation and Sheetrock from the ceiling below.

  Negotiating the attic would be even trickier than the basement.

  Sherry waved the light around the walls, which were sharply pitched from the slant of the roof. The attic was very long, apparently running the length of the house, and relatively wide. Sherry’s flashlight couldn’t begin to reach into the recesses of it without her stepping on the boards, which she was reluctant to do. She scanned the walls for windows, saw none.

  The musty odor Sherry had noticed on entering the attic seemed stronger on not finding a window. Sherry shuddered. Told herself she was being foolish.

  She turned, called down to Cora, “It looks okay. Try the light.”

  Cora threw the switch.

  The lights blazed. Half a dozen naked bulbs hanging on cords running the length of the attic.

  The lights lit up what the flashlight had not revealed. The attic was clearly a storage area. Off to the sides, on planks and plywood sheets, were piles of boxes covered with drop cloths. An occasional item poked out or stood off to one side. A baby carriage.
A croquet set. A gramophone.

  “Well, look at that,” Cora said, pointing. “An old Victrola. I bet there’s a fortune here in antiques.”

  “You wanna stop and look?” Sherry said sarcastically.

  “Another time. Right now I wanna see where the light comes from the sky.”

  “You can’t see it from here. I think we’re going to have to negotiate walking on these boards.”

  “No problem,” Cora said.

  “Oh?”

  “Whoever planted the clues did it just fine.”

  Cora stepped out on the boards near the stairs. They creaked a little, but were steady underfoot. Cora set off down the attic.

  Sherry looked where her aunt had just walked. The boards were covered with dust, and Cora’s footprints left a trail across the attic. There was clearly nothing else that fresh. But was that a faint trail next to Cora’s prints? Sherry couldn’t tell. She grimaced, hurried after her aunt.

  Cora went by a pile of boxes, said, “Aha!”

  Sherry crept up beside her and looked.

  There was a gable in the wall of the attic with a window in it. Planks nailed across the two-by-fours formed a three-foot-wide path to the window.

  “Careful, don’t push me off,” Cora said as they made their way across.

  “As if I could even keep up,” Sherry grumbled.

  They reached the window. It was a small wood-framed, sliding window, with two panes on the bottom and two on the top.

  “Okay,” Cora said. “This has to be where the light meets the sky or whatever that was, so where’s the clue?”

  On top of the window was a small roller blind. Sherry reached up, jerked it down.

  There written on the blind was:

  #4.

  Where, oh, where

  Is the secret stair?

  You might

  Ask the knight

  Cora Felton grabbed Sherry’s arm.

  “Sherry! Look!”

  “I see.”

  “Secret stair!”

  “You’re squeezing my arm.”

  “Oh. Sorry. But we might ask the knight. That’s gotta be the guy in the foyer, doesn’t it?”

  “Guy?”