by Penny Drake
“Why is she Batgirl instead of Batwoman, anyway?” I asked as we descended the stone steps.
“It’s not like she’s nine years old.”
“Not going there,” Zack said. He put the bag into his backpack, zipped it shut, and left it on the stairs. “My main rule of life: never ruin good doughnuts with a discussion of social theory.”
“That’s your main rule of life?”
“It’s gotten me this far. Where’s Ms. Hawk? I brought coffee for three.”
I smiled at that. I don’t know anyone who refers to my boss by her first name, including me. Calling her “Diana” would be like calling the Queen of England “Liz.” Something about her makes people fall into formal mode, even when she isn’t present. I think most people don’t even notice they do it.
“She’s working on something else today,” I said. “She didn’t say what.”
“Figures.” Zack snorted. “Leave the dirty work to the peons.”
Anger flared. “Hey! Ms. Hawk doesn’t shirk anything. If she says she has to work on something else, she has to work on something else.”
“Okay, okay.” He put his hands up defensively. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Yeah, sure.” I opened the basement door and peered into the darkness beyond. Familiar smells of mold, mildew, and dust assailed me. Yay. Zack looked over my shoulder. I could feel the warmth from his body and smelled freshly shaven skin. My earlier anger mixed with newer, more fun feelings, which made me mad all over again.
“You first,” I said.
“What? Why me?”
“Because I need someone to test for traps and cockroaches,” I told him maliciously.
Grumbling, Zack led the way through the cardboard labyrinth, and a few minutes later we were on the stairs heading for the kitchen. Zack stopped at the top.
“Uh oh,” he said.
“What? What’s wrong?” I demanded.
“The kitchen’s a mess.”
I rolled my eyes. “No kidding. That’s why we’re here.”
“No, I mean, it’s a mess. A new one. Someone else has been in the house.”
Chapter Six
I pushed past Zack to see what he meant and let out a low whistle. The kitchen had been pulled apart. The neat stacks of Styrofoam trays were scattered all around the room. Cupboard doors hung askew, their papers and dishes pulled down to the floor. The pantry stood open, and the clocks inside had been yanked off the shelves and shattered. Broken bits of wood and dented metal looked accusingly back at me. For some reason, that particular piece of vandalism made me both angry and sad. The clocks had just been lying there, counting to themselves in the dark, bothering no one, and someone had smashed them down.
“I don’t suppose you and Ms. Hawk came back last night and did this?” Zack said.
I whirled on him. “What do you take us for? Vandals who’d victimize an old man’s house?”
“Touchy, touchy.” Zack took a digital camera from his belt and took several photos of the wreckage. “You were going to ask me the same question, admit it.”
I was, but sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it. I was also wondering if there was a connection between the scratches on the basement lock from yesterday and our mystery intruder, the one who started the pan avalanche. “Let’s see what else they’ve done. Maybe whoever it was set off another trap.”
We moved into the dining room. A huge gouge had been taken out of the mountain of mail on the table and the room was now ankle-deep in old paper. Someone had flung the books all around the sitting room, pulling entire sets of volumes from the shelves. Even the stack of bibles had been reduced to rubble. Zack and I were forced to climb over slippery, shifting piles. Dust hung thick in the air, and we both sneezed.
“Someone else definitely wants whatever is in here,” I said when we reached the leaf collection. The intruder had pulled several notebooks from their shelves and ripped them open. Wax-encased leaves lay scattered all over the floor in a preserved parody of autumn. “Who the hell could it be?”
“Belinda, for one,” Zack replied. He set the iron back upright, a futile gesture amid the chaos around him. “She wants the will, but maybe she didn’t want anyone—including you—to find the other thing, whatever it is.”
“She can’t even come in here,” I reminded him. “Asthma.”
“Maybe she’s faking that.”
“That would make no sense,” I said, sniffling. Dust caked in my throat. “If she didn’t want us to find anything, all she’d have to do is thank us for our help to date, wave good-bye, and we’re done.”
“True. Aw, no!” Zack leaned down and fished a book out of the chaos at his feet. “This is terrible! How could anyone do this?”
“What?” I scrambled closer. “What is it?”
“It’s The Secret of the Old Mill,” he said, holding up a tattered book. Pages hung half-torn from the binding. “Hardy Boys.”
I shined my flashlight on the cover. Frank and Joe Hardy peered through a limned crack in the floor of an old building. Cobwebby gears and gear shafts loomed behind them. “Wow. I haven’t thought about these books in years.”
“This was the first one I read,” Zack said, trying to put the pages back in. He looked like a little boy trying to fix a broken toy, for all that he was over thirty. “My mom bought a copy at a garage sale, and I spent a big part of the summer at the library reading my way through the rest of the series.”
“I did the same thing.” I laughed. Then I sneezed. The dust was thick as Los Angeles smog. “I always thought Frank and Joe were so grown up, you know? Nancy Drew, too. They could drive, they had girlfriends and boyfriends. But now—look at the cover. They’re just kids.”
“When you’re nine, sixteen and seventeen seem so grown up,” Zack agreed. “Hell, Nancy’s boyfriend was in college. Nowadays they’d haul out the tar and feathers if a college freshman dated a high school junior.”
“You read Nancy Drew too?”
“Sure. Why not? The stories were fun. Besides, if girls can read about boy detectives, why can’t boys read about girl detectives? You’re the one who brought up the whole Batman/Batgirl thing.”
I laughed. “Point.” I peered down at the book he was holding. The cover looked like it had been chewed by a dog. “You know, I always thought it would be cool if the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew teamed up. But they never did.”
“Not true.” Zack sneezed into the crook of his elbow. “Some publisher restarted both series with new plots and updated characters and crossovers and all that. The new Hardys have teamed with the new Nancy lots of times. I’ve seen them at the bookstore.”
“Really?” I hadn’t heard about this. Nancy Drew was one of my childhood heroes. Not only did she solve mysteries and save her friends from kidnappers, she had a way cool dad. Nancy’s dad didn’t drink, unlike some dads I could mention.
“Sure. I haven’t read any of the new ones, but they look interesting. We could go down to the bookstore this evening and check them out, if you want.”
I cocked my head, giving the idea serious consideration. That might be kind of fun, paging through one of the few happy pieces of my childhood with Zack at my elbow. We could—
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you asking me on a date?”
“Heaven forbid,” Zack said. He gave a dusty cough and slid the book into his back pocket. “I don’t think the old man would mind if I kept this.”
I sneezed hard, then sneezed again. “God, it’s worse than yesterday. I should have brought dust masks, or…or…” I trailed off as my stomach went cold.
Zack cocked his head. “Or what?”
“The dust,” I said. “It’s still hanging in the air. If someone had come in last night, it would have settled by now.”
It took Zack a moment to catch on to what I meant. He blinked, then his eyes widened. “So this—” Zack gestured at the mess, “—is new. As in ‘ten minutes ago’ new.”
“Yeah.”
&n
bsp; We both stopped talking and listened. I didn’t hear a thing at first. Then I thought I caught a faint creaking deeper in the house. Footsteps, or the house settling? Zack and I exchanged glances.
“Do you have a gun?” he murmured.
My hand went to my belt. Shit. I had been in such a hurry to beat Zack here that I had not only forgotten my morning coffee, I had forgotten that my pistol—a Glock nine—was currently locked in a wall safe at Hawk Enterprises, along with some highly-illegal stun guns. Yes, it’s true—Michigan law lets you conceal a cannon that can blow a hole through an engine block but balks at allowing you to own a non-lethal stun gun.
“I don’t have my gun,” I admitted.
“Why the hell not?” Zack asked.
“What was I going to shoot, rabid dust bunnies?” I hissed, going on the offensive.
“We chased that guy yesterday. Didn’t it occur to you he might come back? Maybe he did all the trashing.”
I was starting to get pissed at him. Forgetting my weapon was a rookie mistake and that was bad enough. I didn’t need Zack rubbing my face in it.
“What about you?” I countered. “Don’t you have a weapon?”
“I shoot pictures, not guns.”
Great. I listened again but heard only my own breathing. The still, dusty air was completely silent. “Maybe we should call the cops.”
“Sure. They just rushed right in all those other times they came out here.”
He had a point. The cops wouldn’t enter a dangerous, booby-trapped house unless someone’s life was in danger. I listened one more time. Dusty silence. The furniture and bookshelves loomed like lethargic ghosts. Zack put a hand on my shoulder just as I heard the faint creaking again.
“Hear it?”
“Yeah.” My mouth was dry, though from unease or Zack’s hand on my shoulder, I couldn’t say.
He dropped his hand. “Let’s go.”
It occurred to me that we could just leave the house entirely and wait outside for whoever it was to come out. But then I realized that Zack and I would never be able to cover the entire house, and the basement might not be the only exit. I also didn’t want to hear whatever jibe Zack came up with about women chickening out.
Zack and I threaded our way out of the sitting room and down a dark, cluttered hallway. We tried to move quietly, but it wasn’t easy in an unfamiliar environment. The floor groaned beneath our feet, our shoes scuffed against the grimy floor. I realized belatedly that the floorboards were actually covered in a carpet so old that it had rotted through to the wood beneath. The ever-present smells of mold and dust assaulted me, and my face hurt from holding back more sneezes. Every few yards, we stopped to listen for more creaks.
The hallway opened into an enormous space. I think it was a ballroom. Most of the floor was taken up by boxes and crates stacked head-high, though a few open areas cropped up like glades in a murky forest. Over the forest and to the right, just visible in the gloom, I could see the top of a massive oak door that I realized was probably the main entrance to the house. To the left lay the grand staircase, the one buried in bundles of magazines. I had seen it from the top, now I was seeing it from the bottom, though the lower half was obscured by the cardboard forest. A magnificent chandelier hung in the shadows of a two-story ceiling. I eyed it warily. I’d seen The Phantom of the Opera and resolved not to walk beneath the thing.
I found a set of light switches, but they didn’t work. The area was so dimly lit that Zack and I were forced to use our flashlights. I didn’t like it—flashlight beams would tell an intruder right where we were. I felt nervous and exposed, but it was either that or blunder around in the dark.
“Do you hear anything?” Zack murmured.
I listened. Quick heartbeat, raspy breathing, creak of boot leather. All the sounds belonged to me. I shook my head and told Zack to head for the stairs as best he could.
With me in the lead, we moved carefully through the open places between the boxes, trying to keep the staircase in view and not always succeeding. Piles of boxes, some squashed down like stunted trees, often got in the way. The pathway abruptly changed direction or split in two, forcing us to guess which way to go. Every few yards we stopped to listen but always heard nothing. Sweat dripped slowly down my face and I swiped at it with a grubby hand. Zack’s blond hair was dark with dust.
Abruptly we came on a large open area. I played the beam around ahead of us and saw a pile of corpses stacked to one side. I squeaked and jumped back, bumping against Zack hard enough for me to feel the muscles move under his clothes. A second later, I realized the corpses were nothing but rolled-up rugs.
“Don’t blame you,” Zack said, nudging me carefully forward with one hand at the small of my back. “Some of those Persian patterns are really horrific.”
“Shut up,” was the best I could come up with.
I let my light play over the rugs and saw they lay stacked against a wall. Next to them was the huge front door. I swore, realizing I had gotten completely turned around. We were nowhere near the staircase. The boxes loomed around us. One of the rugs lay unrolled in front of the door like a dusty carpet of leaves. Zack moved around me and headed for it.
“I wonder,” he began, “if we could unlock this thing from the—”
And then he was gone. I stared at the spot where he’d been standing, my flashlight beam showing empty space. I blinked, not understanding what I was looking at. One second Zack had been heading for the door, the next he was just…gone.
“Help!”
I shined my flashlight downward. Two pale hands clutched the side of a rectangular hole that had been sawed into the floor directly in front of the door. Comprehension flashed. The rug had been covering a hole. Zack had stepped on the rug and fallen straight through, though he had managed to catch the edge. Heart pounding in my throat, I dropped the flashlight and sprinted over to help. When I knelt by the hole, Zack’s pale face looked up at me. His legs swung uselessly below him, trying without success to find some kind of purchase.
“I can’t see what’s below me,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t think it’s good.”
I shot a fast glance downward. Blackness dark as a dragon’s throat filled the space below him. A tiny spot of light gleamed in the darkness. Zack had dropped his flashlight and it had fallen down the hole. Way, way down the hole. The basement floor wasn’t that far away, was it? I gave myself a mental shake—this wasn’t the time to figure it out. I grabbed Zack’s forearms and heaved.
Have you ever tried to haul someone who has thirty-odd pounds on you over the lip of a pit? Me, either. It was fucking hard. I felt the muscles in my arms and shoulders stiffen. Tendons stretched and joints popped. Zack’s feet couldn’t get purchase on anything, so he couldn’t help me. I pulled. His wrists came clear of the pit’s edge. I realized at that moment that I had his full life in my hands. If I let go, he would fall into hungry darkness. My hands were sweaty and I felt his skin cold on mine. My stomach had tightened up so bad I was afraid of losing all the coffee I’d drunk. I leaned back and pulled. Pain stretched over my shoulders, but I didn’t even think about letting go. Zack pulled with his own arms and shoulders, as if he were doing pull-ups. His forearms came up. One of them cleared the rim of the pit and Zack planted his elbow on the solid wood floor. Using his elbow as a bracing point, we got his other arm forward and his other elbow planted.
After that, it became much easier. The two of us were able to get Zack far enough out of the hole so he could roll onto solid flooring. We both lay there, panting like dogs. After a moment, I sat up and handed Zack my water bottle. He accepted it, though he had his own, and took a drink. Then he doused his hands. The palms were scratched. I winced in sympathetic pain at the angry red marks and took the tiny first aid kit from my belt.
“Why is it always me?” he complained. “Why am I the one who falls through the stairs or into a hole?”
“Maybe the house hates you,” I said.
“Don’t say that.” Zack
looked around with a shudder. “It already feels like this place is alive.”
“You’re being silly,” I scoffed, though a cold finger ran down my spine. “Let me see your palms.”
We were still sitting on the floor. I took one of his hands in my lap and examined it under the beam of my flashlight. His arm lay warm and heavy across my thigh. Zack sucked in a breath when I plucked out a splinter but he didn’t yelp. I rinsed his palm, spread antibiotic ointment on the scratches, then did the same for his other hand. I had to admit I felt a little guilty. The jokes I’d made about using him to test for traps sounded harsh, even mean, in retrospect. Zack wasn’t all bad. He could be funny when he wasn’t being a jerk. And any guy who could admit without a trace of embarrassment to reading Nancy Drew had to have something going for him.
“That should do it,” I said, putting the ointment back into its compartment.
Zack’s hand remained in mine, palm up, for another heartbeat. Then he withdrew it.
“Thanks,” he said. “For the medicine and the save.”
“Uh yeah,” I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “No problem. What the heck do you think is down there, anyway?”
I edged over to the hole and shined my flashlight downward. Zack scooted up next to me. A few fibers from the carpet clung to the rough edges. Below, Zack’s flashlight was nothing but a peep of light in the distance, a star that had fallen down a well. The light wavered a little bit. Weird.
“It’s almost as if the light is…underwater?” I said.
Zack snapped his fingers, then winced. Sore palms. “It’s a cistern,” he said. “I used to live in a house that had one like it. Rainwater drains from the gutters into a pit in the basement and you use it for drinking and washing. Or maybe it’s an old well. Lots of old houses had them.”
I pulled a penny from my pocket and dropped it. A faint splash followed, and the flashlight rippled again.
“Wonder how deep it is,” Zack said.
“Deep enough to drown in. Especially if you broke something while falling in. We need to keep being careful.”