“’Bye, Eric,” Cherie called. “See you at the dance Friday night.”
Eric’s heart skipped a beat, but his gut knotted as he saw the expression Cherie’s words brought to Adam Mosler’s eyes. Then he decided he’d had enough of Adam Mosler. “I’ll be there,” he called back over his shoulder.
And Mosler walked right into him, bumping him hard with his chest, knocking him against a table, which tipped over onto a couple of chairs, then crashed to the floor.
The woman with the little boy looked up in alarm.
Wishing that he’d just kept his mouth shut and ducked past Mosler, Eric apologized to the woman and quickly picked up the fallen furniture.
Meanwhile, Adam Mosler regarded him with an evil sneer. “Oh, gee, excuse me all to hell,” he said, his tone emphasizing the sarcasm of his words.
Eric saw Kent Newell and Tad Sparks walking up outside, carrying plastic bags from the sporting goods store, and he knew it would be better to get past Mosler before Kent decided to get involved. “Apology accepted,” he muttered to Adam, and pushed the door open.
Too late. “Was that guy hassling you again?” Kent demanded. “I can kick his ass, you know. And I can do it right now.”
“No. Let’s just go.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Eric said. “Let’s just not get into anything now, okay?” Before Kent could argue, Eric relieved him of the pizza box and started toward the dinghy dock at the marina.
Kent glanced back at Adam Mosler once more, but then turned and followed Eric and Tad to the dock. Though part of him wanted to punch Adam Mosler’s lights out, another, far stronger, part of him wanted to get back into the secret room hidden in the carriage house at Pinecrest.
Already, Kent thought he could hear voices whispering to him.
Voices that wanted something.
But what?
Soon, he was sure, he would know.
All of them would know.
THE TINGLING SENSATION began to come over Kent even before he’d stepped through the door into the hidden room, and by the time he actually followed Eric and Tad over the threshold, every nerve in his body seemed to be vibrating with an energy he’d never felt before. He set the lantern on the desk, pumped it up, then carefully lit it with a wooden match from the box they’d found in the kitchen. As he adjusted the flow of fuel, the orange flame around the mantle disappeared as the mantle itself began to emit a blinding white light that banished the shadows from most of the room.
A few seconds later Tad set the second lantern on the old three-legged table, lit it, adjusted the flame, then straightened up as the new lantern washed away what few shadows were left. Yet even though the room was now flooded with bright light, its feeling hadn’t changed at all, and Tad shivered as a sense of anticipation flooded over him.
Something was about to happen.
He could
His eyes fixed on the ledger that still lay on the table, open to Hector Darby’s final entry, and as he gazed at the thick tome, Tad felt as if he could almost hear Darby’s voice whispering inside his head. “It feels so weird in here,” he breathed. “It’s like I’m on a roller coaster that’s almost at the top. Know how that feels?”
Kent Newell barely glanced at him, but Eric nodded. “Like you sort of wish you hadn’t gotten on in the first place, but you don’t really want to stop, either.”
“So what do we do?” Kent asked. “Where do we start?”
Eric’s eyes focused on the ledger. “Let’s see if we can match any of the stuff in the room to what he wrote in the book.” He rested his hand on the Formica surface of the broken table. “See if there’s anything in there about this thing.”
“How’m I supposed to know what I’m looking for?” Kent asked as he turned back the pages of the old ledger. “I can’t even figure out what half of these things mean, and even if I find a table, how’re we going to know it’s the right one?”
Eric moved around the table, then bent down to look at its underside. Taped to the inside of the table’s frame, he found a small tag. Pulling it loose, he stood up and held the tag so the light of one of the lanterns fell full on it. “It’s from Plainfield,” he said. “It’s got some numbers on it, but I don’t know what they mean.”
“Let me see,” Tad said. He peered closely at the tag, then: “It’s an auction tag. I’ve been to some with my mom. They put these tags on everything. The number just means which lot it was at the auction.”
“Well, here’s something from Plainfield,” Kent said, poring over the ledger. “But it still doesn’t make any sense.”
Eric and Tad moved toward Kent, flanking him on either side and peering over his shoulder at the entry in the ledger:
“Ten thousand dollars?” Tad said. “That can’t be for this. It’s gotta be for something else. Is that right?”
“Gotta be that table,” Eric said. “Same — what did you call it? — lot number? Thirty-six is what’s on the tag.”
Kent reread the line, following it along with his finger. “That’s nuts,” he said. “Old Darby must have been some kind of wacko.”
Eric went back to the scarred Formica table and ran his hands over its surface, feeling not only the cracks and chips, but something else as well.
A faint tingling feeling, the same feeling he got from the ledger when he first found it on the bookshelf. Almost like electricity flowing from the table into his fingers. He stood perfectly still, savoring the odd sensation until Tad’s voice broke through his reverie.
“What about this doctor’s bag?” Tad said, and Eric finally moved away from the table and started pulling the drawers of the old Victorian desk open one by one as Kent thumbed through the ledger.
“Here it is,” Kent said, pointing to a single line in the middle of one of the pages so Tad could read it as well.
“I don’t get it,” Tad said. He picked up the leather valise and shook it upside down.
Nothing came out.
“He wouldn’t have used something this expensive himself, would he?”
“He was a shrink,” Kent said. “They don’t even carry bags, do they? Besides, this one’s got to be at least a hundred years old. And it’s all beat up. What would make it worth that kind of money?”
“Wait a second,” Eric said from behind them. “What’s this?” He set a small bundle on the table. It was wrapped in layers of black oilcloth and tied with twine so rotten that it broke apart as he put the bundle down. “It was in the bottom drawer of the desk.”
“Open it up,” Kent said.
Eric looked up at him for a long moment, and Kent thought he saw a flicker of something in Eric’s eyes. Then, very slowly, Eric began to unroll the small bundle.
When he unfolded the last layer, a complete set of surgical instruments lay exposed, which, in contrast to the scuffed and battered bag on the table, lay shining and glinting in the lamplight as if they were brand new.
Kent picked up a scalpel, feeling its heft and balance. The curved blade flashed like a mirror in the light.
“Look at this old shot needle,” Tad said, picking up a metal hypodermic casing, still with the enormous slant-ended needle attached. He touched it to the end of his finger.
“Be careful with that,” Kent said.
“There’s all kinds of stuff here,” Eric said, picking up first a retractor, then a spreader. There was a whole
