“What happened to it being haunted?” Constance asked. “I thought I was the skeptic in this crowd?”
“You mean the skeptic who’s ‘seen stranger things’?” he quipped, tossing her comment from the night before back at her.
“Seeing isn’t necessarily believing,” she replied. “Not always, anyway.”
He fell silent for a moment, then huffed, “Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, what I said yesterday about the house being haunted… That was just talk. I don’t really buy into any of that supernatural crap.”
Constance thought back to some of the cases she’d worked in the past. She wasn’t going to admit it- especially now-but her skepticism was as much a hopeful optimism as anything else. Like he had just reminded her, she’d seen some pretty strange things, and there were a few she still had to take purely on faith.
Without realizing it, she muttered quietly to herself, “I guess you just never know…”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she answered, shaking her head. “Just thinking out loud.”
“Yeah. I’ve got a daughter does that. Makes me nuts.”
Constance nudged the conversation back to the particulars of the case. “Is there a back entrance to the house?”
“Yeah, right off the kitchen. Locked up tight. Never been any sign of forced entry.”
“Maybe the killer somehow has a key?”
“Locks have been changed four times. Three of ‘em I did myself. Finally just gave up. So, unless the killer is me…”
“Are you?” she asked.
He snorted. “Do you think I’d tell you if I was?”
“With you, Skip, I’m not so sure…” Constance wasn’t usually one for gallows humor, but Ben had rubbed off on her through the years, and sometimes it would leak out unexpectedly.
Skip turned and played the flashlight up just far enough to illuminate the smirk on her face. He snorted again. “I see that coffee is starting to kick in.”
“Sorry,” she apologized.
“Don’t be. It comes with the job.”
She returned to the subject at hand. “Any other ingress or egress?”
“Windows would be about it, but they’ve never been disturbed that we can tell,” he told her.
“The killer has to get in and out somehow.”
“Yeah, can’t argue there,” he grunted, playing the flashlight around in the darkness. A moment later he quipped, “When you figure it out, tell me, okay? Because this’n has me stumped.”
“With you that’s hard to imagine.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. There was no hubris in his voice, just sincere confusion at why he didn’t see the answer to this riddle the same way he saw everything else.
“Well, that’s why I’m here,” she replied.
“Yeah, well no offense, but you’re the fifth Fed to tell me that.”
“So…” Constance said, allowing the flat commentary to go without rebuttal. “As I understand it, the bodies are always found in the basement, correct?”
“Yeah, what’s left of them anyway,” Sheriff Carmichael replied, panning the flashlight to the right side of the archway. “Stairs are just over there.”
CHAPTER 15
Hollow echoes came a half-beat behind each footstep that fell upon the wooden plank treads of the basement staircase. The dull sounds resonated from the concrete walls below, each lonely thud fading away to make room for the next. The rhythmic noise was an audible indicator of the emptiness contained within the subterranean room.
Armed with a flashlight, Sheriff Carmichael had led the way for a change, with Special Agent Mandalay close behind. A small amount of the dim light from the still open front door was filtering into the stairwell behind her. The muted illumination wasn’t at all obvious while she kept her gaze forward as they descended. In fact, she didn’t even notice it until a gust of wind caught the loose screen door outside and knocked it hard against the side of the house, prompting her to stop midway down the steep staircase and glance back up over her shoulder. The basement doorway above her was filled with dull light, appearing as a dim, rectangular panel of gray floating in a black void. When she exhaled, the frosty cloud of her breath bloomed in its faint glow, briefly hovering before her like a translucent apparition, only to disappear in less than a blink.
With a quick shudder, she turned and continued downward, following the bobbing pool of brightness from the flashlight in Sheriff Carmichael’s hand. Her running shoes thumped a significantly lighter beat against the stairs than his harder-soled clomps. Constance heard him let out a heavy grunt, which was then followed by the sound of his shoes against concrete, as he arrived at the bottom and stepped down to the floor below.
“Watch yourself,” he told her, moving off to the side, but keeping the flashlight aimed at the last stair for her. “That one’s a bit to the high side.”
She heeded his warning and held onto the loose handrail as she stepped down from the last tread. He hadn’t been exaggerating. If anything, he’d been conservative in his assessment. The final step was akin to taking two at once. She felt his hand on her upper arm as she pitched forward, her foot searching for the floor. She appreciated the help.
“Thanks,” she said.
“It can be an unwelcome surprise if you don’t know it’s there,” he replied.
“Spoken from experience?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Once he was certain she was on even footing, Skip swung the flashlight around the large, squarish room to get his bearings.
By now, Constance’s eyes had mostly adjusted to the muted darkness. She could make out the coarse shapes of what little remained in the abandoned basement.
As she glanced around, she could see that there were small, glass block windows at the top edges of the walls, spaced at roughly even intervals. A small amount of the gray daylight was leaking through them, but not as much as one would expect. She had noticed the rusted upper lips of the galvanized window-wells protruding just above the ground when they first approached the house, but she had not looked down into them. Now that they were inside she could see that they must be filled with leaves and other debris. A by-product of Mother Nature combined with the past seven years of cyclical neglect visited upon the property.
From their position at the bottom of the stairs, to the left she spied the squat hulk of an antiquated furnace lurking in the darkness. It appeared as though a maintenance panel was missing, which left a contrasting rectangular hole on its front. In a peculiar sense, it looked much like a huge, gaping mouth at the bottom of an oblong face. Shadowy round metal ductwork branched out from the side of the unit, like fat arms extending upward until they disappeared into the rafters above. Once a source of heat, viewed at this angle it was now a cold, basement-dwelling monster, reaching for the upper floors in order to drag the unsuspecting into its hungry mouth.
Whether it was the exhaustion or something else entirely, Constance wasn’t sure, but for some reason this house had a bizarre way of becoming anthropomorphized visions in her brain. She shook her head and blinked as a gut response to the hallucination being produced by her uncharacteristically rampant imagination. But, was it just her imagination? The shiver along her spine made her wonder. If anything, it was just as bad now as it had been the previous evening, maybe even worse.
Sheriff Carmichael noticed the motion and brought the flashlight up in her direction. “You okay?”
She nodded and lied. “Just a cobweb, I think.”
“Yeah. Plenty of those down here, that’s for sure.”
He swung the flashlight back down and adjusted the beam on as wide as it would go and still be effective, then played it slowly around the basement to reveal those things that were still hiding in shadows. Just beyond the
