enough to nose around up there?”
“Try and stop me.”
She fished a master key from her coat pocket and tossed it to him. “You’d better take this, too,” she said, handing him her heavy black Mag-Lite flashlight. “Bang it on the floor if you need me. I’ll come running.”
He got up out of his chair and started for the stairs. “Should we establish any kind of code? Say, three knocks means trouble, two knocks means-”
“Just smack the damned floor, will you?” she growled at him. “Hold on, there’s something else I want to tell you.”
“What is it?”
She came toward him, her eyes shiny and huge, and hugged him tightly. “When I saw you coming upstairs just now, looking the way you did, all of the air went right out of my body. I thought I was going to die. I know we can’t be explained, and I don’t care. I only care about how I feel.”
“Back at you, slats,” he said, kissing her softly, then not so softly.
Then she gave him a firm shove and up the stairs he went, clutching the Mag-Lite like a billy club. When he reached the top of the stairs, he encountered locked double doors that closed off the third-floor corridor entirely. Mitch used the master key and went in, closing the door behind him.
The third floor was very much like the second. Twenty-four rooms. More photos of famous guests of yesteryear lining the walls. More floral carpeting. That same steel door to the staff stairs halfway down the hall, a “Fire Exit” sign mounted over it. The only obvious difference that struck Mitch was that there was no door out to the observation deck at the end of the hall. Just a window. The air was exceedingly still up there. Freezing cold, too. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five degrees. The room doors had all been left wide open, casting shafts of weak winter light out into the hall. Mitch stood still for a long moment, listening. He could hear his heart pounding, blood rushing in his ears. He could hear nothing else.
He began to search, the carpeted floorboards creaking under his feet. He started in the first room on his left, room twenty-five, which was directly above the room where Norma lay dead. He found a bed that had no linens on it. Just a bare mattress. He found a bathroom that had no towels, no soap, no sterilized water glasses. The bathroom door was thrown open wide and held in place with a wastebasket. So was the closet door. Something to do with ventilation, Mitch guessed. When he shone his light around in the closet, he found only empty hangers. He went across to room 26, and found it to be virtually identical.
From the third-floor windows Mitch could make out Big Sister’s lighthouse standing tall and proud down at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Mammoth tree trunks and chunks of ice were flowing out into Long Island Sound-the very stuff that he would find washed up on Big Sister’s slender beach when he made it back there. If he ever made it back there. It seemed as if his life out on Big Sister had been a million years ago. It seemed as if he’d always been here at Astrid’s Castle and he always would be here. Time had stopped. Life had stopped.
But Soave hadn’t steered Des wrong-the snow really did seem to be letting up.
As he moved on to the next empty room, Mitch thought he sensed movement behind him in the corridor. But when he turned around, there was no one and nothing. Just the deserted hallway. He was spooked, that was all. It couldn’t be anything else-anything like, say, Astrid’s spirit wafting through the air. Not a chance. No way. Mitch steadied himself, breathing in and out, and continued his search. He found more open doors, more bare mattresses, more nothing. There was no evidence that anyone was hiding up here. He was sure of this.
Until he went in room 31, that is. And once again sensed movement, heard movement-and then Mitch saw something out of the corner of his eye and he whirled and an immense pure white Maine coon cat leaped off of the dresser right into his arms, where it began to dig its front paws into Mitch’s chest and purr and purr, just as friendly as can be.
“Well, hello there,” Mitch said, standing there stroking it while he waited for his resting pulse rate to dip back down below 185. It was a beautiful cat with startlingly bright blue eyes and the longest, softest fur Mitch had ever felt. A she, by the look of things. “What are you doing up here all by yourself, girl? You must be the lone-somest pussy cat around.” He put her back down on the dresser. Or tried to. She immediately jumped right back into his arms, scrambling up on top of his shoulder now, with her front paws thrown over onto his back.
Together, they moved deeper into the room. The mattress in here was bare, just as in the other rooms. But there was more than one bed in room 31. On the floor next to the bathroom doorway Mitch found a cat bed lined with blankets and chock-full of rubber mousy toys. The bathroom did not smell particularly fresh-the litter box in there needed emptying. Kibble and water dishes were positioned on a rubber bath mat. There were plastic storage tubs of kibble and kitty litter, a litter scoop.
There were also two hand towels on the towel rack. Both towels were damp, Mitch discovered. Somebody had been up here recently. Somebody had used these towels.
He moved back out into the bedroom with the cat in his arms and his wheels spinning. So this explained the footsteps that he and Carly had heard in the night. Someone must have been up here feeding this cat, which was living up here on the unheated third floor all alone because… well, why was she living up here all alone?
She was starting to wriggle around in his arms, so he put her down. She promptly began rubbing up against his leg and yowling at him.
“Well, you’re quite the little talker, aren’t you?”
In response, she darted toward the open closet and went inside. Mitch followed her, shining his flashlight around in there. Nothing. Just another empty closet. And yet the cat kept circling around and around in there, eager with anticipation.
“What is it, girl?”
She let out another yowl and began sharpening her claws on the carpet, her excitement mounting. The carpet in the closet was not the same as in the bedroom. It was newer and cheaper, made of some kind of synthetic material. Something that hadn’t been installed particularly well. Sections of it lifted away from the floor as the cat’s claws grabbed hold and pulled.
In fact, the far corner over against the wall hadn’t even been tacked down at all.
Mitch knelt there with the flashlight for a closer look. Strips of one-inch wooden molding were tacked in where the floor met the walls, anchoring the carpet in place. Or at least in theory. In reality, Mitch discovered that the molding strips were tacked to the wall but not to the floor-because the carpet slid right out from under them.
The big white cat was all over him now, most anxious to get into whatever he was getting into.
Mitch turned back enough of the carpet to expose a three-foot-square section of old, unpolished wooden flooring. Here he found a trapdoor with a recessed thumblatch. The trapdoor was about twenty-four inches square and reminded him very much of the one that was in the floor of his sleeping loft at home. His was there for ventilation. Why was this one here?
He grabbed on to the thumblatch and slowly lifted the trapdoor open, revealing utter darkness down below. He pointed his flashlight down there. He was looking into the closet of the room directly below this one. Its door was closed. Whose closet was it? He couldn’t tell. He could make out a couple of jackets hanging there, but from this angle he couldn’t determine if they belonged to a man or a woman. Briefly, he tried to count out where room 31 was in relation to the occupants of the second-floor rooms, but that just made his head start to throb again. So he flicked off the light and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
Tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth, Mitch gripped the edge of the floor with both hands and dropped down through the open trapdoor, hanging there in mid-air by his fingers, his legs waving wildly. Now all he had to do was let go. Which had sure looked a lot easier when Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat did it in The Crimson Pirate. Those two had landed with nimble, effortless grace. Just as that damned show-off of a cat proceeded to do while Mitch continued to hang there and hang there, wondering what in the hell he had been thinking. Then he said his silent “Geronimo!” and let go, touching down with a colossal, well-padded thud.
At the sound of him crashing to the closet floor the door immediately flew open, flooding the closet with natural light. Someone stood silhouetted there in the doorway, hands on hips.
Mitch scrambled to his feet and dusted himself off. Checked to see if his head had started to bleed again. It hadn’t. Then he smiled and said, “Hey, Spence, how’s it going?”
