present.
He opened the center pair of knotty-pine doors. The unused hinges squeaked. He shone the light into the cabinet and panned it across empty shelves.
“Four latches hold the back wall in place,” he told her.
His father had concealed the latches behind clever strips of flip-up molding. Spencer found all four: one to the left at the back of the bottom shelf, one to the right; one to the left at the back of the second-highest shelf, one to the right.
Behind him, Rocky padded into the file room, claws ticking on the polished-pine floor.
Ellie said, “That’s right, pooch, you stay with us.”
After handing the flashlight to Ellie, Spencer pushed on the shelves. The guts of the cabinet rolled backward into darkness. Small wheels creaked along old metal tracks.
He stepped over the base frame of the unit, into the space that had been vacated by the shelves. Standing inside the cupboard, he pushed the back wall all the way into the hidden vestibule beyond.
His palms were damp. He blotted them on his jeans.
Retrieving the flashlight from Ellie, he went into the six-foot-square room behind the cupboard. A chain dangled from the bare bulb in the ceiling socket. He tugged on it and was rewarded with light as sulfurous as he remembered it from that night.
Concrete floor. Concrete-block walls. As in his dreams.
After Ellie shut the knotty-pine doors, closing herself in the cabinet, she and Rocky followed him into the cramped room beyond.
“That night, I stood out there in the file room, looking in through the back of the cupboard, toward this yellow light, and I wanted to run away so badly. I thought I
“It’s a yellow bug light,” she said, “like you use outdoors during the summer.” She seemed to find that curious.
“Sure. To keep mosquitoes away. They never work that well. And I don’t know why he used it here, instead of an ordinary bulb.”
“Well, maybe it was the only one handy at the time.”
“No. Never. Not him. He must have felt there was something more aesthetic about the yellow light, more suited to his purpose. He lived a carefully considered life. Everything he did was done with the aesthetics well worked out in his mind. From the clothes he wore to the way he prepared a sandwich. That’s one thing that makes what he did under this place so horrible…the long and careful consideration.”
He realized that he was tracing his scar with the fingertips of his right hand while holding the flashlight in his left. He lowered his hand to the SIG 9mm pistol that was still jammed under his belt, against his belly, but he didn’t draw it.
“How could your mother not know about this place?” Ellie asked, gazing up and around at the vestibule.
“He owned the ranch before they were married. Remodeled the barn before she saw it. This used to be part of the area that became the file room. He added those pine cabinets out there himself, to close off this space, after the contractors left, so they wouldn’t know he’d concealed the access to the basement. Last of all, he brought in a guy to lay pine floors through the rest of the place.”
The Micro Uzi was equipped with a carrying strap. Ellie slung it over her shoulder, apparently so she could hug herself with both arms. “He was planning what he did planning it before he even married your mother, before you were born?”
Her disgust was as heavy as the chill in the air. Spencer only hoped that she was able to absorb all the revelations that lay ahead without letting her repulsion transfer in any degree from the father to the son. He desperately prayed that he would remain clean in her eyes, untainted.
In his own eyes he regarded himself with disgust every time he saw even an innocent aspect of his father in himself. Sometimes, meeting his reflection in a mirror, Spencer would remember his father’s equally dark eyes, and he would look away, shuddering and sick to his stomach.
He said, “Maybe he didn’t know exactly why he wanted a secret place then. I hope that’s true. I hope he married my mother and conceived me with her before he’d ever had any desires like…like those he satisfied here. However, I suspect he knew why he needed the rooms below. He just wasn’t ready to use them. Like when he was struck by an idea for a painting, sometimes he’d think about it for years before the work began.”
She looked yellow in the glow of the bug light, but he sensed that she was as pale as bleached bone. She stared at the closed door that led from the vestibule to the basement stairs. Nodding at it, she said, “He considered that, down there, to be part of his work?”
“Nobody knows for sure. That’s what he seemed to imply. But he might have been playing games with the cops, the psychiatrists, just having his fun. He was an extremely intelligent man. He was able to manipulate people so easily. He enjoyed doing that. Who knows what was going through his mind…really?”
“But when did he start this…this work?”
“Five years after they married. When I was only four years old. And it was another four years before she discovered it…and had to die. The police figured it out by identifying the…remains of the earliest victims.”
Rocky had slipped around them to the basement entrance. He was sniffing pensively and unhappily along the narrow crack between the door and the threshold.
“Sometimes,” Spencer said, “in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, I think of how he held me on his lap, wrestled with me on the floor when I was five or six, smoothed my hair….” His voice choked with emotion. He took a deep breath and forced himself to continue, for he had come here to continue to the end, to be finished with it at last. “Touching me…with those hands, those hands, after those same hands had…under the barn…doing those terrible things.”
“Oh,” Ellie said softly, as if stricken by a small stab of pain.
Spencer hoped that what he saw in her eyes was an understanding of what he’d carried with him all these years and a compassion for him — not a deepening of her revulsion.
He said, “Makes me sick…that my own father ever touched me. Worse…I think about how he might have left a fresh corpse down in the darkness, a dead woman, how he might have come out of his catacombs with the scent of her blood still in his memory, up from that place and into the house…upstairs into my mother’s bed…into her arms…touching her….”
“Oh, my God,” Ellie said.
She closed her eyes as though she couldn’t bear to look at him.
He knew he was part of the horror, even if he had been innocent. He was so inextricably associated with the monstrous brutality of his father that others couldn’t know his name and look at him without seeing, in their mind’s eye, young Michael himself standing in the corruption of the slaughterhouse. Through the chambers of his heart, despair and blood were pumped in equal measure.
Then she opened her eyes. Tears glimmered in her lashes. She put her hand to his scar, touching him as tenderly as he had ever been touched. With five words she made clear to him that in her eyes he was free of all stain: “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”
Even if he were to live one hundred years, Spencer knew he could never love her more than he loved her then. Her caring touch, at that moment of all moments, was the greatest act of kindness that he had ever known.
He only wished that he was as sure of his utter innocence as Ellie was. He must recapture the missing moments of memory that he had come there again to find. But he prayed to God and to his own lost mother for mercy, because he was afraid he would discover that he was, in all ways, the son of his father.
Ellie had given him the strength for whatever waited ahead. Before that courage could fade, he turned to the basement door.
Rocky looked up at him and whimpered. He reached down, stroked the dog’s head.
The door was streaked with more grime than it had been when last he’d seen it. Paint had peeled off in places.
“It was closed, but it was different from this,” he said, going back to that far July. “Someone must have
