They had opened a small gate in the barbed wire fence at the edge of the road, just barely to the east of the former convent’s property line. Following a long, thin gravel driveway that meandered off into the forest, nearly onto Air Force Academy property, they wound before dipping back down and to the small bungalow.
The freshly-stained porch ran the entire front of the house, its redwood finish shielded from the falling snow by the long overhang, a steel weathervane with a rooster mounted in the center of the crest. Two windows peered down from above the eve like small, watchful eyes. The roof had been recently repaired, as evidenced by patches of shingle that were far lighter in color than the other darker, bowed shingles that were beginning to peel up. The screen door was folded back against the house, the spring from the recoil device snapped, hanging limply from the doorway.
Harry ascended the three steps up to the porch and glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Scott was still following. Producing a set of keys from within his pocket, he shoved one into the door and opened it wide, stepping into the dark house, leaving the door standing open.
Scott crept up the steps, the boards creaking beneath his weight as he crossed the porch and stepped into the house, closing the door behind. He was standing in the middle of the living room. There was a small coat rack with brass hooks mounted to the wall beside him. Ornately framed paintings of Colorado landscapes hung along the walls, the room sparsely furnished with the exception of the lone recliner in the center of the room and the television set on a small, wooden cart in the corner of the room. The floor was covered with long, rust-colored shag carpeting, the wear matting the knap in a V shape coming from the kitchen.
He heard Harry toss his keys onto the kitchen counter. The fridge door opened, bottles rattling against one another, and with a clink, he produced a brown bottle of root beer for each of them, removing the caps with an opener and stepping into the doorway.
With a nod, Scott took one of the bottles from Harry’s outstretched hand, following him into the kitchen. The newspaper was spread out across the table. A small plate littered with crumbs sat beside an empty glass, a small ring of orange juice in the bottom. There were only two chairs at the table, and one was buried beneath many days worth of newspapers.
The freshly-cleaned counters shined from the light that slipped through in arcs from behind the thin white shade that covered the window at the back of the kitchen, a door leading into the back yard in the corner of the room. There was a large trash can in the corner of the room, filled to brimming with what appeared to be nothing but root beer bottles and microwave dinners. The linoleum floor was waxed to a high shine, the white and blue pattern of squares faded from years of wear.
“Follow me,” Harry said, disappearing down the dark hallway to the left with a nod.
Passing the bathroom to the right, its brick-red shower curtain drawn shut, they reached the end of the hallway. In the room straight ahead he could see the foot of a bed, a blue bedspread folded neatly across the base. There was a wooden chest in the center of the floor, and the closet door at the back of the room stood ajar.
Ducking into the room to the right, Harry flipped the light switch and walked toward the back wall. Turning, Scott stood in the doorway for a moment, lingering as he stared into the room.
It was the complete opposite of the rest of the house. Everything else seemed to have an order to it and was nearly immaculate. This room however, was crammed full of everything possible. Newspaper clippings lined the walls, pressed into place with multicolored thumbtacks. They appeared to run chronologically from the left around the room to the right based on the slight yellowing of the newsprint. Stacks of boxes filled the room, all of them labeled by year, stacked in front of the closet so that there was absolutely no way of getting close enough to reach the knob on the door, let alone open it.
The oldest box that he could see was labeled “1966,” but was buried beneath a stack of others. The more frequently accessed appeared to be ’70 to ’74, and a couple from the eighties and nineties that sat open in the center of the floor.
Harry sat down in the armed chair at the heavy, solid oak desk at the back of the room. Stacks of manila folders rested to the left side of the desk, along with a computer; the printer balanced precariously atop the monitor. In the center, there was an ancient tape recorder and an old reel to reel 8mm projector.
The room reeked of age, like the scent that gusts from the inside of an old library book. The air was still as the boxes blocked access to the window; the curtains pinned behind the weight of the stacks.
Scott stared around the room, feeling as though he were in the basement archives of a newspaper, or the obsessive den of a psycho. He was suddenly quite uncomfortable.
“I think maybe I should just go,” he said, the weight of the morning’s events visible in his weary eyes.
“Please,” Harry said, swiveling to face him in the chair. “You have nothing to fear here. I can completely understand how overwhelming this must all seem. Believe me. I was in your shoes once.”
“I’m at a pivotal point with my business and I should really be actively overseeing things right now.”
“Just have a seat on one of those boxes over there, and give me half an hour. If, after that time, you feel you need to go, then more power to you. We part with no hard feelings. But I think… no, I know, that you need to see what I have here.”
His brow knitting itself tightly across his forehead, Scott shuffled into the room, closing the top of the box, and planted himself atop “1972”.
Harry grabbed a file from the desk behind him and opened it, pulling out the top page of the stack of papers within.
“Take a look at this,” he said, handing the page to Scott. “This is what first dragged me into this entire mess. It’s a summary from the State Department of Child Welfare of four children that ended up in the custody of a group of nuns at the convent just down the road from here. At the time, none of the names of the children were made available, just their ages and the condition in which they arrived. It was my job to do a physical inspection of their health and the living conditions.”
He pulled another piece of paper from the folder and handed it to Scott.
It was a photocopied page of an original newspaper article. There was a photo of what looked like a castle, the caption identifying it as the Cavenaugh Convent. He perused the article quite rapidly. The main details of the article that jumped from the page were that both the nuns who staffed the castle and the four children recently placed in their care had disappeared. While no foul play was suspected, the circumstances revolving around their disappearance were suspicious the article stated, but failed to elaborate. The last line caught his attention.
“The last person to have contact with the sisters was Dr. Harry Denton, a physician on staff with the Department of Child Welfare,” he read aloud.
“Right,” Harry said, intently leaning forward in his chair. “I saw three of these children lying slaughtered on a couch, grabbed the fourth and ran away with him. I got out of there just in time to see someone, something, slip into that little house. I can still hear the screams of those nuns when I lay in my bed at night.”
“So you think they’re dead?”
“I know they’re dead.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Of course.”
“And…”
“And I went out there with them the following morning just past dawn, and guess what we found?”
“What?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Harry said, leaning back and lacing his fingers in his lap. “Let me tell you something, when I was in that house, I remember as clear as day the blood of those children that puddled on the hardwood floor. The arcs of blood dripped down the walls and soaked into the couch where their bodies lay. And I tell you this… I could hear those nuns getting slaughtered, their screams gurgling to a sudden halt.”
“But when the police got there, they found nothing?”
“I couldn’t believe it. I led them through the front door of that house and pointed straight into the room, but nothing that I had told them about was there. The floor was dry as a bone and freshly lacquered. The furniture, which had been pushed up against the walls, sat neatly arranged in the center of the room without a single stain.”
“You keep talking about this house. I thought this was all up at the convent.”
“The Cavenaugh house.”
“That little boarded up shack?”
