by Penny Drake
More shuffling noises sounded overhead. Definitely footsteps. We both froze and a little thrill of fear trilled through me.
“Do you think they heard us?” Zack whispered.
I considered. “You shouted for help, but all this junk muffles noise. Hard to say.”
“I think the stairs are over this way. Come on!”
Zack drew a second flashlight, a smaller one, from his belt and tiptoed back into the forest of boxes. I followed, keeping an eye out for tripwires, loose boards, suspicious rugs, anything that looked like it might turn injurious or deadly. Something metallic rattled in the distance.
“He’s on the pan stairs,” I said. “Come on!”
We tried to hurry, but in the end fell back to going slowly, for safety. Zack swept his flashlight beam across the floor in front of him and I played my beam over the head-level spaces in front of us. The passageway within the boxes twisted and turned, forcing us to make detours. In the distance, I would see the staircase, then some boxes would obscure it, forcing us to detour. A few minutes later, the stairs would show up again, always in the wrong place. It was like chasing a fairy ring. There seemed to be no way to get to the damned staircase. Any moment I expected another trap, something to crush us or drop us or skewer us. I was sweating and my stomach muscles were stretched tight as a drum. My legs were getting sore from maintaining constant readiness to jump.
After several more twists and turns, Zack halted. I almost bumped into him from behind.
“What?” I demanded. “What is it?”
“We’ve been here before,” he said, playing his beam around.
All I saw were blank walls of aging boxes. “How do you know?” I asked.
“Look.” He shined his light on a cardboard wall at shoulder level. Thick dust coated the surface except for a long swipe, freshly made. “I’ve been marking our trail.”
I spun around. The narrow passage behind me was a crack through unmoving mountains. And then it hit me. “Oh my God,” I said in awe. “It’s a maze. Uncle Lawrence built a fucking maze!”
“Jesus,” Zack breathed. He craned his neck to look upward. “I don’t know whether to admire the old guy or shoot him.”
“He’s dead, so there’s no point in either one,” I pointed out tensely. “But yeah, I know what you mean. We were caught in a trap and didn’t even realize it.”
“How do we find our way out?” Zack asked. “I don’t suppose you have a ball of string in your Batbelt.”
“Not today,” I said, trying to stay calm. “We do have options.” Boxes and crates seemed to lean inward, as if they wanted to devour the feeble light of my flashlight beam. The thin passageways were just wide enough for one person, but hovering dust and hot air made them feel narrower by the second.
“Options such as?” Zack whispered.
“We can follow one wall,” I said. “That will get you out of most mazes. We could try to climb over the top. Or we could try to dismantle the maze by pulling the boxes down.”
“Veto the last idea,” Zack said. “No place to put the boxes we pull down. And the climbing one’s risky. Lots of dangerous stuff you can put in a box. Why do you think no one wants to hit one on the highway?”
I nodded. “Let’s follow the right wall, then.”
“Hold on.” Zack wrote his initials in the dust on one wall with a finger. “Okay.”
We followed the right wall. The air grew hotter and sweat made my shirt stick to my back. After several minutes, Zack stopped again. His flashlight beam picked out the initials ZA on the cardboard wall.
“We’re right back where we started from,” he said hoarsely.
I took a swig of warm water from my bottle. “Left wall, then.”
The world narrowed to the dusty brown blur at the end of my flashlight beam. The staircase flitted in and out of view, but I ignored it. I just wanted to find the way out. The heat and dust made me think of the cistern Zack had almost fallen into. Death by drowning in cool, delicious water was starting to sound pretty good.
“Dammit,” Zack breathed.
I grimaced. Ahead of him, his flashlight picked out the initials ZA again. Panic burst inside me, and I was seized with the desire to claw my way up to the top of the boxes, not caring what might be in them—or under them. My breath came faster and my heart pounded.
Zack put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t,” he said in a surprisingly soothing voice. “We’ll be okay. We have our cell phones and can call for help if we really have to.”
Relief flooded me. How could I have forgotten? I snatched my cell off my belt and checked the display.
NO SERVICE, it read. So much for roaming.
Insane laughter bubbled up, and I swallowed it down. “All the junk must be blocking the signal.”
“Okay, okay.” Zack checked his own phone, with the same result, and passed a hand over his face. “Maybe we should split up. We’ll cover more ground.”
“What do you think this is, an episode of Scooby Doo?” I snarled. “That’s the stupidest idea yet.”
“I don’t hear you coming up with anything,” he shot back.
“Right. Okay. Think,” I said, keeping the panic away by sheer force of will. “There’s a way in, so there must be a way out. We must have missed a passage somewhere, a narrow one or one that’s in shadow. Let’s go to the left again, but slower.”
We did, forcing ourselves to stay at a slow, careful pace. I was in the lead this time. Dusty cardboard brushed against my shoulders and gloom pressed in all around me. The path wound crookedly through the piles. Left, left, left, straight ahead. The sound of Zack’s breathing stayed right behind me. Stay with the left wall, always the left wall. It felt as if we’d been in this maze of dead trees forever.
And then I saw it—a narrow path between two stacks. It was just wide enough to pass through sideways. I pointed it out to Zack.
“Did we come in through that?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”
“Let’s check,” Zack said.
He slid sideways into the opening and vanished, as if it had swallowed him alive. I swallowed hard and followed. Blackness closed around me, eating at my flashlight beam. The boxes pressed against my nose and my shoulder blades. I gritted my teeth and kept going.
And then we were in open space. I faced forward again and barked my shin on a pile of magazines. A staircase, piled waist-high with more reading material, rose ahead of us. Relief washed over me, and I felt as if I had stepped into a cool, shady meadow instead of a gloomy, dust-laden foyer. I unhooked my water bottle and took a long drink. Dust washed out of my throat.
“Man,” Zack said. “What a trip.”
I held up a hand and listened. Nothing. Which didn’t say much.
“Come on,” I said, and pulled Zack by the hand toward the stairs.
Another narrow trail led among the magazine piles and we climbed carefully, checking for trapped steps along the way. All the constant checking was making me tense. People aren’t meant to be on high alert every moment, and I was getting tired of concentrating all the time. It was easy to get distracted.
Dusty magazine covers criss-crossed with rotting twine kept shouting for my attention. The McCarthy hearings made the cover of Life. John F. Kennedy’s picture graced Time. National Geographic visited Africa yet again. Highlights promised kids and their parents “fun with a purpose.” The Fonz lifted both thumbs on TV Guide. Halfway up the stairs I realized I was still holding Zack’s hand. He hadn’t said a word about it. It made me feel better, being able to touch another person in this weird and hostile environment, but I pulled away anyway. He didn’t comment.
At the top of the stairs we had the choice of traversing a short balcony and entering the second-floor hallway or continuing on upward to the third floor. Pots, pans, and lids still made a knee-deep iron waterfall on the steps. I swept them with my flashlight. The path Ms. Hawk and Zack had cleared was still there, mostly.
“Our housebreaker didn’t go all the way up,�
�� Zack murmured. “If he had climbed over those pans or cleared a path, we’d have heard a lot more clanking.”
“You’re thinking just what I am,” I whispered back, “which scares me more than I can say.”
I shined my light down the hallway. Another forest of boxes with a single narrow path looked back at me. I was getting so tired of staring at stupid boxes. The guy we’d chased last time had tipped over several of them, and they were still there, clogging part of the way with mangled cardboard and twisted clothes. It looked like a pile of dead scarecrows.
If we hadn’t been hearing things, and if there was an intruder in the house, and if he hadn’t come back down the main stairs while we were bumbling around below, our visitor had to be on the second floor.
“That’s a lot of ifs,” Zack muttered when I voiced this line of thought.
“We have to start somewhere,” I pointed out. “May as well be here.”
Zack had no answer to this, so we moved forward. Now that we weren’t chasing someone down it, I took more time to check out the hallway. The corridor was wide, with a vaulted ceiling. Occasional cracks in the stacks showed that a waist-high molding of dark wood ran the length of the walls above a hardwood floor. In its heyday, it must have been breathtaking. Today, however, the wide way was clogged with box after box, crate after crate, all the way to the ceiling. Only a narrow path allowed us to squeak through.
I sniffed the air. Rot. The medical examiner and the firefighters had removed the bodies, but the smell hadn’t entirely gone away. It would take some serious cleaning to get rid of it, and that didn’t seem a too-likely event.
Zack and I made our way down the path. As upstairs, several doors faced the corridor. Some were partially or completely blocked by boxes, others were readily accessible. Each time we passed a reachable door, Zack tried the knob. All of them were locked. One had an old stop sign hanging on it. Taped below this was a hand-lettered card, the letters faded with time. I paused and gave it the full beam of my flashlight. In firm, teenage script, it said:
BEEBO’S PLACE
STAY OUT!!!
“Beebo?” Zack said, reading over my shoulder.
“Sounds like a pet bear,” I said, and tried the heavy, old-fashioned knob. Locked. “I wonder if we can find any keys around.”
Zack laughed at that, the sound hushed by the boxes surrounding us. “Find? In this place we’d be lucky to find our own…elbows.”
“You were going to say ‘asses’ and then changed your mind,” I said with a grin.
“I can’t help it if I’m a proper gentleman,” he sniffed. “Even to a clearly improper lady.”
When I turned to give a response, my flashlight beam shined down the hallway and picked out a ghostly face in the gloom. I froze in surprise. The face turned and disappeared.
“Hey!” I shouted, and vaulted after it. Boxes slapped my shoulders. “Wait!”
Ahead of me, light flooded part of the hallway as a door slammed open, then shut. I leaped over some dead clothes and lunged for it. No boxes stood in the way. I twisted the knob, expecting it to be locked. It turned easily, however. I flung the door open and found myself momentarily blinded. The room beyond was brightly lit. Blind and exposed, I flung myself back into the dark hallway, but this only catapulted me hard into Zack, who had rushed up behind me. We went down in a heap. I couldn’t move, couldn’t maneuver. An odd thump sounded inside the room, and for a horrible moment I thought it was a gunshot. My skin prickled, expecting to feel a tearing pain. None came. I finally managed to roll away from Zack and get to my feet in a fighting stance.
Nothing. No attack, no sign of an intruder. Just an open door spilling sunlight and dust motes into the hallway. The bright yellow light felt unnatural after all the gloom. Cautiously, I peered into the room beyond.
“What is it?” Zack asked, getting to his feet behind me. “What’s in there?”
I couldn’t make it out at first. Jumbled shapes, round ones, swooping ones, wires and frames. A split-second passed and I realized I was looking at bicycle parts. Spoked wheels hung from the walls and made rusty piles on the floor. Clumps of bike frames, their colors muted by rust and dust, made weird sculptures all over the floor. Several bikes hung upside-down from the ceiling, their ancient tires hanging in rotted strings. A tool bench ran across the back of the room, and it was piled with more bicycle parts and even a few ancient tools. A large window at the back was actually uncurtained, and it let in hot August sunlight. I scanned the room—once a large bedroom, I guessed—for the intruder. No sign. What the hell?
“What happened?” Zack demanded. “What did you see?”
“A face,” I said, though now I was starting to wonder if I’d somehow imagined it. “In my flashlight beam. Only for a second. Then it disappeared and I heard this door slam.”
“I saw the light,” Zack said. “There must be someone in here. Hello?”
No response. We fanned out and checked the room. It looked like a bicycle butcher shop. The Wright brothers would have been horrified. I saw no sign of a human being, however.
“Shit,” I said.
“Not exactly ladylike,” Zack said. “All those curse words.”
“Fucking A,” I agreed. “Now what do—”
“Here,” Zack interrupted. “Over here.”
I skittered between a pile of Schwinns and a stack of wheels until I could stand near him. He was pointing at a clear section of floor. An iron ring lay flush with the wood, and I made out the shape of a trapdoor about two feet by three feet. The ring was free of dust. I remembered the odd slam I had taken for a gunshot.
“He went down there,” I said.
“No kidding.” Zack grabbed the ring and pulled. The door came up with a creak of protest, revealing a black space beneath. I shined my light downward. A ladder descended into darkness. Bizarre. I stepped toward it, but Zack grabbed my bicep. He had a strong grip.
“You’re not going down there.”
“The hell I’m not,” I snapped, trying to shake him off.
Zack didn’t let go. “Are you nuts? You’re going to climb down, feet-first, into an unknown black space to chase an assailant who may have a gun, in a house with more tricks and traps than Houdini’s basement. What if Uncle Lawrence sawed halfway through certain rungs? You’d break your neck. Not to mention expose yourself to a few dozen bullets.”
I started to protest, then stopped as one of Ms. Hawk’s main axioms popped into my head. Women can take risks just like men, she always said, but they don’t need to take stupid risks. Zack was right. Reluctantly I stepped away from the trap door.
“All right,” I said, surprised at how tightly my teeth were clenched. “What do we do now?”
Zack closed the trapdoor with the same thump I had heard earlier. “I think we have to let him go, though maybe you should tell the cops that someone’s been in here. And then we go back to looking for the will and whatever it was Uncle Lawrence wanted to show me. I just wish I knew what it was.”
“There’s definitely something important in this damned house,” I groused. “Someone’s going through a lot of trouble to find it.”
“Did you get a good look at the person’s face?”
I shook my head. “Couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. At least we know whoever it is hasn’t found what they’re looking for yet.”
“How do you know that?”
“They wouldn’t have stuck around.” I suddenly wanted more coffee and another doughnut. The morning had been long and the situation felt hopeless. The uncles had been piling up junk for decades, and it would take just as long to sort through it all. We didn’t even know what we were looking for, let alone where to find it in this mess. And then another of Ms. Hawk’s axioms came to mind: Your action is only as good as your information.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that I need to look somewhere else.”
Zack cocked his head. “Explain?”
“I need to know more about the uncles
,” I said. “Learning something about their backgrounds might give me a clue to what I’m looking for and maybe even where to find it. I should hit the library and the courthouse, see what I can learn.”
“You keep saying I,” Zack said. “Shouldn’t that be we? Nancy Drew and Frank Hardy—we can team up.”
“Confidentiality issues,” I said smoothly. “I might find something our client would want kept confidential, and you don’t work for Hawk Enterprises.” I headed for the door, expecting to hear a protest. When none came, I glanced back at him. Zack was standing by a stack of warped bike rims. We were both sweating in the hot, stuffy room. Zack’s blond hair had darkened and was curling into ringlets.
“What?” he said.
“No ‘Aw, come on’?” I said. “I’m surprised a big photographer like you gives up so easily.”
“You’ve clearly made up your mind,” he said airily. “Far be it from me to try and change it.”
My eyes narrowed. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing!” he protested. “Why are you always so suspicious of everything I do?”
“Because everything you do is suspicious.” Then it came to me. “You’re planning to stay here and search while I’m gone, aren’t you?”
“Nope.” He headed for the door himself. “Actually, I’m planning to go outside and have another doughnut.”
We threaded our way cautiously back through the house. We took the by-now-familiar route down the shoe stairs, through the messed-up kitchen, and out the basement. Outside, I inhaled fresh summer air, enjoying the total lack of dust. My skin was itchy beneath my clothes and I wondered if I was going to spend the entire case covered in the stuff. I read somewhere that most household dust is actually human skin cells shed by a house’s inhabitants. The thought that I was covered in a layer of someone else’s dead skin made me shudder.
Zack, meanwhile, retrieved his backpack from the stairs where he’d left it and pulled out the doughnut bag. I was expecting him to pointedly eat one without offering any to me, but he surprised me by waving the waxy sack in my direction.
“Want one?” he asked. “They’re still pretty fresh.”