1 Death Pays the Rose Rent (9 page)

He stood, grabbed me under the armpits, and hoisted me to a standing position. “You’d better take my arm. I promised Miss Effie you wouldn’t get hurt.”

He made an elaborate production out of escorting me across the cellar. Each time we came to an overhead pipe or a low beam, he would hold his hand over my head and make sure I bent over low enough to avoid getting clobbered. Then, before we took another step, he would shine the light directly in front of me so I could see if there were any obstacles in my way. I went along with the game, clinging like a Victorian heroine to his muscular biceps, and enjoying

the cinnamony smell of his aftershave. It suited his country-style masculinity.

We finally reached the archway, and he shone the light inside. I saw a small room, carved out of solid rock.

“See any ghosts?” he asked.

“Should I?”

“If there really are such things as ghosts, this is where they’d be. During the Civil War, this place was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Escaped slaves were hidden in this room until it was safe to move them. In the meantime, the entrance to the room would be boarded up and hidden by putting heavy shelves full of canned goods in front of it. To a casual observer, there was no sign of a room at all.”

“Where do the ghosts come in?”

“In the summer of 1864, fifteen people were hiding in there, mostly women and children. As usual, they had been given food and water for a few days, and the entrance was sealed from the outside. Unfortunately, General Early’s Confederate cavalry chose that day to appear. They surrounded the town and demanded five hundred thousand dollars in greenbacks or one hundred thousand dollars in gold, or they would burn the town down. The poor people of Lickin Creek did what they could to scrape up the ransom. They knew that the town of Chambersburg, across the mountains to the east, had been burned to the ground just a few weeks earlier when the residents refused to pay up.

“The Rebs took what money the people had, then began to break into the homes looking for anything of value to steal. Frightened for their lives, most of the villagers fled to the country. Some hid in the hills, while others barricaded themselves in Silverthorne Castle.

“Sadly, for the unfortunates in this basement, the owner of this home was one of those who left town. It was several weeks before the occupying army left and the villagers returned home. All fifteen of the escaped slaves were found dead, starved to death in this little room.”

I felt a cold whisper of air on my neck and shuddered. “What a horrible story!”

“It always seems to be the innocent who suffer the most during war. The real tragedy was that they could have escaped easily, if they’d known about the tunnels.”

He stepped into the room and knelt on the floor. “Hidden a couple of inches under the dirt on the floor was the trapdoor that leads down into the caves. Those poor people died just inches away from freedom.”

He brushed away some dirt and exposed the wood planks of the trapdoor. He lifted it and laid it to one side. “Ready to explore?” he asked with that endearing, crooked grin on his face.

I leaned forward and peered down into the black hole. All I could see was the top of a wooden ladder, which disappeared into the darkness below. There seemed to be no bottom.

“Is that ladder safe?” I asked.

“It was the last time I used it—about fifteen years

ago. Probably been chewed on a bit by termites since then.”

I wasn’t about to let him scare me. “I’m ready,” I told him.

He handed me the flashlight, then started down, tentatively testing each rung with a foot before putting his whole weight on one. I pointed the flashlight at him, but he finally descended so far that I couldn’t see him anymore.

“Come on,” he yelled. “It’s safe.”

I stuck the flashlight in the waistband of my pants, which left me in total blackness. I was completely disoriented, but I managed to climb down, one rung at a time.

It was unbearably still. I felt alone, terribly alone. I didn’t even know if I was anywhere near the bottom.

“Garnet?” I called out.

No answer.

“Garnet! Where the hell are you?”

Silence.

“Garnet. Please answer me,” I begged, almost in tears.

His voice, almost in my ear, said cheerfully, “Okay, you’ve made it,” and his strong arms lifted me off the ladder and set me down on the blessed firmness of the cave floor.

“Why didn’t you say something?” I demanded an-grily.

“Wouldn’t have dreamed of it. You seem to like your independence so,” he teased.

“There’s a time and a place for—”

“Give me the flashlight,” he cut me off, grinning!

I thrust it at him, and he immediately headed down the tunnel. I followed close behind, looking around at what I could see in the dim glow of the flashlight. Near the foot of the ladder were some wooden shelves—someone’s old food-storage area. The tunnel was so narrow that two people couldn’t walk side by side, and so low that Garnet had to bend over to keep from bumping his head. Water trickled over the rough stone walls to land in puddles beneath our feet. As we walked, we were continually moving downward into the earth.

“I love it down here,” Garnet said. “Always reminds me of one of my favorite books when I was a kid, Five Boys in a Cave.”

“Why, that was one of my favorites, too. I’ve never even met anyone else who’s heard of it.”

“Town librarian recommended it to me, right after I read Tom Sawyer,.”

“The same thing happened to me. Those two books are one reason why I’m so fascinated by caves. I read everything I can find—” I was so busy talking that I didn’t realize Garnet had stopped walking, and I bumped smack into his broad back.

“Watch it, kid,” he said, not unpleasantly. “Remember the fat kid in Five Boys in a Cave?”

“The one who got killed. I always wished that hadn’t happened.”

“It happens a lot to inexperienced spelunkers. Look here. There’s been a cave-in.” He took a step to one side and held my arm to keep me from moving forward. Just ahead of us was a gaping hole in the ground.

He pitched a pebble, and after a dozen or more seconds we heard it hit bottom. If he hadn’t been proceeding cautiously, we could both have plunged to our deaths.

There was just enough room to skirt the hole if we pressed our backs up tight against the tunnel wall. I felt a wave of vertigo as I looked into the pit and would have lost my balance if Garnet hadn’t held my hand tightly, giving me the support I needed to move safely.

We proceeded without further adventure until we reached a sort of intersection, where tunnels branched off to our left and right as well as continuing straight ahead. Garnet pointed with the light to the right.

“That tunnel leads to Silverthorne. There’s the secret mark Michael and I made to help us find our way.”

The mark was an arrow scratched on the rock with an S under it. A grayish green mold had grown in the crevices, and I would never have noticed it if Garnet hadn’t pointed it out.

“How long does it take to walk from here to Silverthorne?” I asked as I tried to see into the dark passageway.

“About ten minutes, if you know where you’re going. Faster than you can drive through that damn traffic mess above us.”

“Amazing,” I said. “Where’s the body you told me about?”

“It’s in a large cave near the castle. I’m not sure I could find it anymore. At least, not without my maps.”

The flashlight flickered; batteries were getting low.

“We’d better get back while we can,” he told me.

I didn’t need convincing.

The way back was tedious, in part because it was all uphill, and because it was over familiar ground. Thankfully, transversing the pit wasn’t as frightening as it had been the first time, and we made it safely back to that tragic basement room before the flashlight died.

Outside, in the sunlight, it was hard to believe that less than an hour had passed since we went into the building. The narrow town house looked cheerfully normal in the light of day, but I knew I would never be able to look at it without thinking of those poor people starving to death in the darkness below. Garnet was right. This house met all the prerequisites for being haunted.

“Can I walk you back to your car?” he asked pleasantly as he glanced at his watch.

“No thanks. I’m going to stop in at the library and pick up a book for Miss Thorne. Thanks for the tour. I really appreciate it.”

I reached out to shake his hand, but after he took my hand in his, he wouldn’t let go.

“I’d like to show you my maps, sometime,” he said.

At least it wasn’t etchings. “I’d like to see them.”

“How about over dinner, tomorrow?”

“Fine.”

“Til pick you up around six. Dinner’s served early around here.”

He let go of my hand, reluctantly I thought, grinned crookedly, and left.

I watched him until he turned down a side street. Tomorrow’s dinner date just might be interesting!

Back at the library, Maggie was bursting with curiosity. Had we gone into the caves? Did I think the house was haunted? Would I write a book about it? Could she have an autographed copy? Didn’t I think the police chief was sexy?

“Yes,” I answered to all her many questions.

I took the book for Miss Thorne and was just getting ready to leave when Maggie stopped me.

“Tori, remember when you asked Garnet why he chose to be a policeman, instead of making more money in private law practice?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“His father was the police chief here for more than thirty years. He was shot by a kid on drugs, during a 7-Eleven holdup. Garnet had finished law school and was working for a big Philadelphia firm. When his father was killed, he quit his job and came back home. He was appointed to replace his father and has done a damn good job ever since. Just thought you ought to know, before you go asking him any more embarrassing questions.”

CHAPTER 8 

Alice-Ann was bent over a picture frame with a gold crayon in her hand when I entered her basement workshop. When she saw me, she laughed at my filthy hair and clothes.

“Good grief, Tori. You look like something that just crawled out from under a rock.”

“That’s pretty close to what did happen,” I said, and proceeded to tell her of my underground adventures with the handsome policeman.

“You are absolutely amazing,” she said admiringly. “One day in town and you’ve already hooked up with our town’s most eligible bachelor.”

“It wasn’t a big deal, Alice-Ann. He just showed me a section of the caves.”

“When are you going to see him again?”

“Tomorrow. We’re having dinner.”

Her lips twitched into a mischievous grin. I
adroitly changed the subject. “Whatever made you
switch from library work to repairing picture frames?”

“Okay, Tori. No more questions about your policeman. Richard insisted I quit my job at the library after Mark was born. I got bored and decided to look for appropriate frames for all his old family pictures. Found plenty at yard sales and flea markets, but they were almost always damaged. So like any sensible librarian, I got a book and taught myself how to repair them. When friends saw what I had done, they started bringing me their frames to fix. Before I knew what had happened, I was in business.”

“So, why are you holding a kid’s crayon in your hand?”

“I’m using this gold crayon to make some quick, inexpensive repairs on this antique frame. Here, let me show you.”

A beautiful gold frame lay on the workbench. Several small chips had broken off, leaving ugly white gaps in the gold leaf.

“After I clean the frame with this soft camel-hair brush, I just melt a little of the crayon wax onto the part where the gold has broken off. As the wax cools, I press a design into it to match the rest of the frame. The gold crayons are exactly the shade of burnished gold you find on old frames.”

She worked swiftly and expertly as she spoke, and in only a few minutes the frame looked as good as new. The touch-up job was only noticeable if you looked hard for it.

“Now I’ll wash it gently, using a soft brush and soapy water, and it will be a perfectly usable frame again. The worst thing people do to an old frame like this is paint it with gold paint, which is flat and brassy looking and covers all the lovely patina that the frame

has acquired over the years. When they’re finished, they have a frame that could have come from K Mart.”

She showed me an example, and I saw what she meant.

“I’m going to strip off all this glitzy paint and refinish this one with real gold leaf. It’ll be expensive, but the owner wanted the very best for her granny’s portrait. I’m never going to get rich doing this, but I do get tons of pleasure out of restoring things to their original beauty.”

She studied the frame she had just finished with a critical eye and discovered another small chip. She melted the rest of the crayon, dropped some wax onto the frame, and deftly worked the design with a tool that looked like something my dentist would use. Without looking up, she asked me to fetch her another crayon. “They’re in a green box on the metal shelves back there,” she said, jerking her head toward the back wall of the basement.

I hobbled over, my foot still sore from the fall I took earlier in the day, and found the box. Just as I picked it up, I saw something that got me so excited I dropped the box, spilling crayons every which way.

“Oh, no! I’m sorry. I’ll pick them up. Really I will. But look! Behind the shelves. You can see the outline of an archway. It’s been boarded over, but I’ll bet you a nickel it’s an entrance to the big cave I read about.”

I gave the shelves a little jerk and was able to move the structure several inches away from the wall. Alice-Ann ran over to help me, and together we pulled it out several feet.

“I’m right. It’s definitely a boarded-up doorway. See how it’s set into the brick arch—just like the one I saw earlier today.” I gave the wood a sharp kick with my good foot and made a small hole in it. It was crumbly with dry rot. “Okay to open it up?”

“Sure. I wonder where I left my hammer?” Alice-Ann studied the Peg-Board where her tools hung. “Oh, well, we can use these.”

We attacked the rotten wood with a crowbar and a heavy-duty screwdriver. It took only a few minutes to pull it all out, and we entered a tiny room, not much bigger than a closet, where we stared down into a very deep, very dark pit. A wooden ladder leaned against the edge of the hole.

I was tempted to climb right down into it, but remembering the rotten condition of the door made me reluctant to test the ladder.

“Leave it for now,” Alice-Ann suggested. “We’ll need to borrow a sturdy metal ladder and find a good flashlight.”

I was eager to start exploring but had to agree that what she said made sense. We picked up the crayons, then went upstairs.

Alice-Ann disappeared into the kitchen, and I went to my room, where I stripped off my filthy clothes and soaked my aching body for an hour in the tub.

I floated peacefully, almost asleep, and was startled when Alice-Ann knocked on the door. “Wine’s poured,” she called to me. “Come on down.”

I reluctantly hoisted myself out of the tub and returned to my room where I dressed in white linen

slacks and a white silk blouse. Appropriate attire, I hoped, for a seance.

I made sure the cats were okay and replenished their Tasty Tabby Treats and water, then went to the living room, where Alice-Ann was sitting in the wing chair, sipping from a glass of white wine. A glass for me sat on top of the washstand. She didn’t seem to notice me come in, so I carried my wine over to where she sat, knelt on the floor in front of her, and place my hand on her knee.

“Wanna talk?” Many times over the years one of us had asked this of the other. Sometimes, it brought no response. That was okay. More often it led to a soul-searching discussion. Most important, it was a reminder that there was someone nearby who really cared.

“You first,” she said. “Tell me why you and Steve broke up.”

I hadn’t expected this. I tried to explain briefly how successful he was, how I had felt the need to see myself as his equal before we got married, and how he hadn’t been willing to wait any longer.

“What are you afraid of, Tori?” she asked when I ran down.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. It’s been the same pattern ever since I met you. You claim to be looking for that ‘special someone,’ but every time a man begins to get interested, you run like a wounded weasel.”

“Wounded weasel! What kind of simile is that?”

“An alliterative one—not bad, hmm? But you’re stalling. After all these years, I still don’t know why you avoid commitment the way you do.”

I took a delaying sip of wine and thought of all the people who had passed through my life and then drifted off into an uncharted sea of memories. I said nothing.

Alice-Ann sighed. “You’re not going to talk, are you? Well, I don’t believe in holding back—here comes the sordid synopsis of the Alice-Ann and Richard soap opera. I know you heard us fighting last night, so there’s no point in my trying to hide anything from you. Our marriage was never ideal, but I always thought we could work things out. Twanya is only the last straw on the haystack of old girlfriends. I found out he’s had a whole procession of them, even back when we were first married.”

“Slimeball,” I murmured sympathetically.

“That’s not the worst thing, though, I’ve discovered he’s just as morally dissolute in his professional life as he is in our marriage. Even though I’m still officially an ‘outsider,’ I’ve made some pretty good friends here, and I’ve been told that he lies, cheats, and has even been suspected of stealing. Nobody wants to do business with him anymore.”

“Pond scum!”

“Last week, I was getting some of his suits ready to send to the cleaner, and I found a letter in one of his pockets. It was from a lawyer who said he’d looked over Richard’s financial situation and recommended that we file for bankruptcy.

“I called our bank and learned that Richard had taken out several large loans, using this house—the

family home he had inherited from his father—as collateral. He hasn’t made any payments on the loans in more than a year, and the bank is getting ready to foreclose on the property. When I confronted Richard, he admitted he’d borrowed the money and invested it all in an oil discovery firm in Mexico that turned out to be a scam. Even worse, he’d talked a lot of local people into giving him money to invest for them. Now some of them are saying there never was an oil firm-—that Richard stole the money. A lot of people lost everything, just like we have.”

“So that’s what the judge was referring to last night when he mentioned ‘Mexican oil.’ “

“Right. He lost a bundle, but not as much as some others.”

We drained our wineglasses. I got to my feet, refilled our glasses, and sat down again, this time on a chair. “Surely you can keep the house?” I said. “Isn’t there other property you can sell? How about that mill his great-great-something-or-other started up?”

“The land that used to belong to the family has been sold in bits and pieces by several generations of lousy MacKinstrie businessmen. This house and about three acres is all that’s left. And the mill closed years ago.

“The thing that really gets me, Tori, is that his ego won’t allow him to realize he’s become the town clown. He still thinks this town owes him something because he’s a descendant of the ‘founding father.’ He runs around bragging about this big deal and that big deal, just like this nonsense he told you of joining the Historical Society and becoming famous.”

She snorted. “He doesn’t have enough brains to read and understand a historical novel, much less do historical research. But, I guess I’m really the stupid one, to have fallen in love with him in the first place. Why couldn’t I see how shallow and superficial he was?”

“I wondered that at the time,” I muttered. But she didn’t seem to hear me.

“I suppose that’s why he’s had so many girlfriends. At first women are charmed by him, as I was. Then as they get to know him, they learn what he’s really like and dump him. Because he can’t admit to himself that he can’t hold a woman, he has deluded himself into believing he’s the Warren Beatty of Lickin Creek—love ‘em and leave ‘em.”

“Why haven’t you left him?”

“I wanted so badly to make a success of our marriage—I really did love him, you know. And then Marie came along, and I kept hoping things would improve. They didn’t, but I felt Mark needed his father. Now I realize I’ve been wrong. He’s a bright little boy, and he knows what’s going on. Oh, I don’t mean about the sex and other women, but the kids at school tease him about his father being a real jerk. I guess they hear their parents talking about Richard at home. I finally decided if I was going to keep one ounce of self-respect, I’d have to leave him. That’s why I’m going to ask him for a divorce, just as soon as he …”

“As soon as he comes home?” I finished for her.

She nodded.

“Where do you think he is?” I asked.

“Probably with Twanya, the Twat,” she said bitterly.

“I don’t think so. Garnet told me he’d had a call from her this morning. She was worried because Richard hadn’t shown up at the office this morning.”

“She’s lying.”

“Why are you so sure? Did you follow him to her place last night?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped, then got to her feet. “I’m going to see what we can have for dinner.”

I didn’t tell her I’d seen her leave in the VW last night. Perhaps, after all the humiliation she had already suffered, she just didn’t want to admit to one more indignity like following her husband. It didn’t seem important, and I couldn’t see any reason for causing her additional grief.

We drifted into the kitchen, where Alice-Ann started to prepare tuna fish sandwiches. I’d had tuna fish for every meal since I’d been here. Happily, it’s low in calories.

“How about fixing us some vegetable soup?” she suggested. “We can have it in mugs.”

I got a can of Campbell’s down from the cupboard. Canned soup was my specialty! Life support for the live-aloner. By the time it was heated and poured, Alice-Ann had the sandwiches ready.