I instantly flashed on the testimony of a woman in a divorce action that had come before me. She and her husband shared a home computer and she had discovered the whole e-mail correspondence between him and his mistress. He had tucked it away at the bottom of their tax records, figuring she would never bother to look there.
Unfortunately for him, printing out a copy of one’s joint tax return is one of the first things a wife is advised to do when her marriage is coming apart. Divorce attorneys know that cheating husbands may lie to their wives, but that they seldom tell significant lies to the IRS.
The pictures puzzled me. From what was said earlier, I didn’t think any of the Morrow House treasures had been photographed, yet here were the digital prints for four of them. I looked closer and realized that these had been saved from the Internet. One bore the name of an unfamiliar town in Tennessee and read “ca. 1853. Missing since 2003.” Another was labeled “Faison House, Roanoke, Virginia. Disappeared May 1999.”
The printer finished with Cal’s records and went silent.
I closed the file on Jonna’s computer, lifted the sheets from the printer tray, and after discarding the superfluous blank pages, leaned back in her chair to contemplate the significance of what I was seeing. Unless I was very mistaken, this was why Jonna had been so willing to work overtime on the inventory when the house was usually closed and she could search the Internet unobserved.
This must also be why she was killed.
Was it blackmail? Did she say, “Give me five thousand and I’ll let you steal back the things you gave, so that you can return them to their rightful owners?”
Dwight was so sure of her honesty, but if this wasn’t evidence of blackmail, why hadn’t she taken these pictures straight to the board?
Or was I misreading the situation? Had she kept quiet out of compassion? Because she recognized someone whose needy pride was so similar to her own? Another case of—
My eyes were focused on the pictures, yet I was abruptly aware of a faint sound in the hall and my pe-ripheral vision registered a movement that had been so fleeting, I could almost think I’d imagined it.
“Betty?” I called. “Dwight?”
Cold air swirled through the room and sent chill bumps down my spine. I slid the pictures under Cal’s records and laid them down beside the computer, then walked over to the doorway. “Hello? Somebody there?
“Hello?” I called again.
No answer.
An outside light was on, but Betty had turned off the main lights before she left and I didn’t know where that switch was either. I moved cautiously out into the shadowy hall and found the source of my chill bumps. She hadn’t closed the front door properly, and it was the icy air blowing in around the crack that had creeped me out.
I shut it firmly and started back to the office, jeering at myself for letting the house unnerve me.
That’s when I noticed that the end closet door was also slightly ajar. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe it wasn’t Betty who had left the door unlatched. Had someone been hiding in the closet, thinking that everyone had left and that it was now safe to sneak out and escape? The thief that had stolen the guns and the jewelry from the safe? Jonna’s killer?
Holding my breath, I opened the door wider and peered in. All was dark, and yet, despite the darkness, there was something odd here. For a moment, I couldn’t think what it was until it hit me that the closet was now deeper than it had seemed when Betty first showed it to me. I needed better light, though. Where were the damn switches? I re-27 membered moving a flashlight in one of the drawers of Jonna’s desk and I quickly retrieved it, then played the light over the interior of the closet, past the stacked chairs, and into an empty space behind them that had definitely not been there before. There was just enough room between the stacks for me to slide through. The whole back panel had been pushed aside, and when I stuck the flashlight inside, I was dumbfounded to see that steep, narrow steps had been sandwiched between the back-to-back closets, steps that were only wide enough for one person.
One short person. If I went up, I’d have to stoop.
Not that I had any intention of going up. Not without someone to watch my back. I’m no gothic heroine to go flitting around a castle’s ominous dark turrets in a wispy nightgown.
Besides, I’d left all my wispy nightgowns at home.
As I turned to go find my phone and call Dwight, I heard the one thing that could make me forget common sense—somewhere a child began to cry.
I flashed the light up the steps that seemed to dead-end at a blank wall.
“Cal? Is that you?”
Crouching, I hurried up the steps, which were nothing more than sloped boards with horizontal strips of wood to offer a foothold. When I got to the top, there was a turn and a proper set of narrow steps. The ceiling here was tall enough to walk upright and I realized that they paralleled the staircase I’d walked up earlier with Betty.
Indeed, these steps seemed to be part of the original treads with only a thin wall between them. Part of my mind was having an
WINTER’S CHILD
why those other stairs had struck me as less spacious than expected. The rest was focused on the heartbroken sobs of the child up above me.
At the top of this flight, a shallow landing made a sharp turn to the left and ended about four feet away. There, the flashlight revealed a simple latch, and when I lifted it and pushed, the panel slid smoothly to one side with no squeaks or scrapes and I was in a space that measured roughly five by fifteen feet. A battery-powered lantern cast a dim glow over the secret room. Painted on the walls in lurid colors was a vision of the peaceable king-dom, where black lions lay down with snow-white lambs in green pastures and a black Jesus shepherded them all.
