Hammond finally admitted.
'Now we'll have a more thorough look.'
Hammond nodded to the two gatekeepers. He stepped through the hole into a dark pantry. Thomas followed, then Leslie. Each picked up a heavy-duty battery lantern on entering. Leslie drew her service pistol and carried it in her other hand. Looking for her father? Thomas wondered.
Thomas, like Leslie and Hammond, had the sense of having stepped through a corridor into another decade. Out of the seventies, into the nineteen thirties. The wallpaper, once elegant and colorful, was now faded and yellowed. Heavy, solid furniture was in each room, and the kitchen appliances were relics of the Depression. Sagging drapes, often threadbare near the floor, shut out light from the windows, and the carpets were worn where Victoria Sandler had made her daily paths.
An ornate art-deco clock, capped with a cupid with bow and arrow, was stopped on a table. A mirror was thick with dust. The entire house smelled of both mildew and time. The interior of the mansion wore the years with a morbid pallor.
'Anything in particular you want to start with?' Hammond asked.
'Ground floor,' said Thomas.
'Then the basement' Hammond nodded. The main floor was the first floor fully above street level, he explained. The ground floor, the one they were on, was almost completely below sidewalk level. Beneath was a basement.
'Why the basement first?' Hammond asked as an afterthought.
'I'm sure that's where she kept the skeletons' said Thomas, sober faced then somehow managing a laugh. Hammond looked displeased, a don't-joke-at-a-time-like-this expression. Daniels couldn't be sure, but he thought Leslie, who was standing so close that their arms were against each other, shuddered.
Together the three explored a ground floor library. When Hammond expressed desire to glance through the second of the five floors, they separated. Leslie went with Thomas, both holding lanterns, she alertly holding the pistol. One never knew, though Thomas thought the armaments vaguely melodramatic.
'Where's the door to the basement Thomas asked.
She led him. He followed closely, realizing that she'd been there before, at least briefly and probably with Hammond.
Thomas pointed the lantern down the narrow stairs. The first step creaked and almost seemed to sag beneath his weight. He pressed gingerly with one foot, then the next.
The light shone ahead of him, a dusty maze of shadows and cobwebs. It occurred to him that Victoria Sandler might never have been down here any more often than she'd been in her bathtub.
Which was to say, seldom in the last twenty years.
Followed by Leslie, he reached the bottom of the steps. He flashed the light around and saw nothing move, except for the shadows dancing under the beams of their two wavering lanterns.
They stepped forward, walking among the faded, forgotten belongings of two generations of Sandlers. They stepped through a large cluttered room, perhaps thirty feet by forty feet, crowded with dust-laden white sheets over unused or retired furniture. A walking space,. such that it was, was along the wall, a wall lined with old portraits from nineteenth-century Germany. The forgotten progenitors of the Sandler clan.
Then from across the room a noise and two red eyes.
Thomas felt his heart leap and whirled with the lantern.
'Leslie!' he blurted quickly.
But she'd already turned and the pistol was upraised. Two red glimmering eyes reflected back at them. A large rat sat on top of an old steamer trunk, the latter bearing stamps from voyages in the 1920s.
Brazen and defiant as any Sandler, the rat ignored the intruders into his domain. A second or two later he leaped to the floor and disappeared. Thomas began watching his own feet and ankles as he walked.
'You're jumpy,' she said.
'This isn't my ordinary sort of legal work,' he explained.
She flashed her light on ahead to a passageweay.
'What's that?' she asked aloud. The passage led to a separate room, one apparently clear of storage.
'Furnace room?' he guessed.
'The furnace room is behind the stairs,' she said.
They neared the open doorway. He felt her hand on his shoulder.
'I'll go first if you wish,' she said, motioning with the pistol as if to indicate why. He shook his head. He expected nothing living past the doorway. Nor would he admit fear or hesitation.
'I'll go,' he said.
He stepped through the passageway, followed quickly by Leslie.
They found themselves in a mausoleum. There were plaques on the wall, marking births and deaths.
He screwed his face into a perplexed scowl.
'What in hell is this?' he asked breathlessly.
She was more calm. There was a small altar before the plaques on the wall, complete with candles and the dusty remains of flowers which had faded and died innumerable years earlier. They both had the sense of having stepped into some bizarre medieval sacristy, a holy shrine of a small and perverse order. In a way, the sense was a proper one.
'There are names on the plaques,' he said.
At once they stepped forward, examining the names. Each name was the same-only the dates differed on the small tarnished gold plaques.
ANDREW, read the first gold plaque, corroded with age, but still legible. 1932-1939.
And the next, ANDY 1939-1946.
And the next and the next, all the same, at various intervals until the last in 1975.
'The dogs,' said Thomas.
'It's where she interred the dogs' ' Leslie shook her head incredulously The room was a canine mausoleum, complete with a small bronze statue of a poodle on the opposite side from the altar.
'Incredible said Thomas.
'A crazy old woman. A fortune and all the time in the world. And this is what she does with it' He pondered the darkest recesses and warpings of the human mind.
This was Victoria Sandler's other family. Her Andys. It was cold in the room. The lanterns moved from moment to moment and threw changing, disproportionate shadows on the walls. At one point Leslie's lantern shone directly upon the statue of the poodle and a giant shadow of the dog rose in stark black against a side wall. For a moment they could almost feel the presence of Victoria Sandler, of the mind of the recently deceased woman who had consecrated this most sacred part of her world.
The man's voice came suddenly from behind them, loud, casual, and totally unexpected.
'Find anything?' it asked solemnly.
They almost felt their insides explode as they whirled in their tracks, both brandishing their lanterns and Leslie raising her gun to fire.
A third lantern shone back into their eyes, blinding them.
'Sorry,' said the man, filling much of the doorway.
'Did I surprise you?'
He lowered the lantern. It was Hammond.
Leslie and Thomas drew deep breaths, neither completely willing to admit that Hammond, approaching without being heard, had set their nerves on edge.
Leslie eased her pistol downward, scared that she might actually have fired. The weapon had been trained accurately on the center of Hammond's chest. And her jittery finger had been squeezing.
People had been accidentally, killed for less.
Leslie conversed with Hammond, explaining what they'd found.
But Thomas's attention was transfixed by what he'd seen quite accidentally in the shadows on the other side of the altar room. He might never have noticed it had he not had reason to whirl suddenly and shine the lamp the wrong way.
But there was a long convex section of the concrete floor. A section maybe nine feet by four feet, and
