The Body in the Wardrobe (23 page)

While Sophie was doing this, Faith called Tom. She'd checked in with him when she'd arrived but thought she should let him know what was happening. He had been as worried as she was.

“Everything all right at home?” Sophie asked when Faith had finished talking.

“Yes. Amy was selected for one of the leads in the class play.
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Nice to know the classics aren't being ignored.”

Sophie smiled. “Can you imagine what Oscar Wilde would have had to say about a bunch of middle schoolers uttering his lines?”

“And very funny they will be.”

Faith pulled her chair back next to Sophie's and looked at the computer screen. “Tom thinks you should talk to the police.”

“I've thought the same thing on and off.” Sophie sighed. “But I think they would say what the family has been saying. Also, Will used to return on Fridays, which is only today. They'd think it was too soon to classify him as missing. Randy and Carlene get back tomorrow. If I haven't heard from Will, I'll call Randy—and Anson, too. Gloria must have told him I was upset, and I'm surprised he hasn't called.”

“He must agree with her—and Will has behaved pretty footloose in the past. But,” Faith added hastily, “not once he met and married you.”

A few hours later they decided to call it a day.

“Are you sure you don't mind sleeping in this room?” Sophie asked, opening the door to the room with the wardrobe.

“I wouldn't sleep anywhere else! Who knows, maybe the vibe will give me an idea of where Will could be. And besides, it's beautiful. Love the bed. Tom and I plus the kids could all fit in.”

“It's an oversize king, and Gloria had the head and footboards copied from one at Winterthur.”

“I wish I could get her to redo the parsonage—although given the Vestry it would be a
Design on a Dime
project.” Faith laughed

“Good night. Wonderful that you're here.” Sophie gave Faith a hug. “I'm just down the hall. Come get me if you need anything.”

After Sophie left, closing the door behind her, Faith stood in front of the wardrobe. Faith was a believer in “cosmic coincidences,” and the string of events that had begun with Will's reaction to Sophie's dress the night of the welcome party had been followed closely by Sophie's discovery of the disappearing corpse. The alarming anonymous letter. Getting locked in a box room on Christmas Eve. Her experience at Aurora's grave, and Will's disappearance. Coincidences? Faith didn't think so. Links.

The wardrobe didn't match any of the rest of the room's furnishings. It lacked elegance and seemed to have been a purely utilitarian piece. The drawer at the bottom had simple knobs straight from the cheap section of whatever hardware store had originally supplied them. Faith went over and tried to pull the drawer open. It stuck, and then she realized it wasn't a drawer at all, just a fake to finish off the piece that now didn't look all that old to her.

Faith opened the door and pushed the few things she'd hung up to one side. The interior was large enough for a good-size person, dead or alive. She stepped in and on impulse tapped on the back. It didn't open up into Narnia. It was very solid. She started to back out and stumbled over the boots she'd been wearing on the trip down,
falling hard on one knee. The slight pain was overshadowed by what she'd noticed. There had definitely been a hollow sound. She moved completely out of the wardrobe and kneeled in front of it, first leaning in to examine where she'd hit. Then, using the heel of a shoe, she tapped.
Tap, tap.
She moved the heel, tapping across the floor of the wardrobe. The center sounded different, less solid. She stood up and got the penlight she always carried in her purse. When she shone it on that area she could make out lines—lines so faint as to appear almost invisible to the naked eye.

It was a trapdoor.

“Sophie, wake up!”

“I'm not sleeping. Come in.”

The door opened and Faith said, “No, you come with me. I know how they got the body out so fast! Do you have a good flashlight?”

She did. After her experience she had gone and bought the equivalent of a handheld klieg light, which she kept by her bed.

Back in the front bedroom under the strong light it was easy to see the outline of the trapdoor.

“We'll have to find a way to pry it open,” Faith said. “I felt around for a release—a catch—but it's completely smooth. Maybe there's a crowbar with the tools in the backyard.”

Sophie trained the beam over the floor of the wardrobe. Faith had moved everything out.

“I don't think that will be necessary. See this dot? It looks like a wormhole in the wood, but it's placed exactly in the center of the line. I'm sure something screws in to pull it up.” She rocked back on her heels and her eyes instantly zoomed in on the drawer knobs. She unscrewed one easily, muttering, “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.”

It fit in just as easily, and she pulled the door open. “Bingo.”

Faith looked over Sophie's shoulder. There was a folded-up wooden ladder like the kind used to access an attic or crawl space. Beyond their light, it was pitch-dark.

“All right,” Faith said. “I'm going to change and go down. You stay here.”

“As if,” Sophie said firmly. “We'll both change, and I think there's another flashlight in the kitchen. Bring your phone. It may work. This could just be space that was created when they renovated years ago.”

“And maybe not,” Faith said.

Sophie dressed quickly, grabbed the other flashlight, and took two bottles of water. She wasn't sure why, but it seemed like a good idea.

Upstairs the ladder unfolded without a sound. The hinges had been oiled. It was a long way down and ended in a flat concrete-floored narrow passageway, barely tall enough for them to stand up. Soon they found themselves making a sharp turn.

“This doesn't feel old. The concrete is smooth, no cracks,” Faith said.

“We must be under the garden by now. I wasn't crazy! The body was being removed while I was calling the police.”

“I think we'd better be quiet,” Faith said. She gasped aloud, however, when they came to the end of the recent work and the narrow underground structure gave way to a much larger brick-enclosed one that had to have been constructed many, many years ago.

“You go back, Sophie. One of us should stay in the house. If I'm not there in, say, an hour, call the police.”

“No,
you
go back. It's my husband.”

They both kept going.

“This must lead to the river,” Sophie said softly in Faith's ear. “Yellow fever victims, rum, or other uses.”

The floor was wet in spots, and every once in a while Sophie felt something crunch underfoot and gave a shudder. Eventually they came to another turn, and then two more.

“Shhh!” Listening hard, Sophie stopped—so abruptly Faith bumped into her.

“I hear something, turn off your light!” Sophie hissed.

They stood absolutely still. The sound was human and the human was moaning.

“It's Will!” Sophie shouted. “I know it is! That's exactly what he sounded like when he was sick! Will! Will! Where are you?” She'd found him, but he was obviously hurt. Joy fought fear for the emotional upper hand.

They moved forward, following the sound, using only Faith's tiny flashlight.

“Slow down. He may not be alone—and if people
are
with him, they heard you,” Faith said softly. They went a few more steps and Sophie felt Faith's hand on her arm. “You need to go back and call the police. This is too dangerous.”

“
You
go. I'm not leaving Will.”

They kept going.

After the next turn, the volume of his moans indicated that Will was close by. They couldn't hear any other voices. Sophie turned on her big flashlight. “Will! Darling! Where are you?”

“Oh God, Sophie! Are you really here? I'm at the bottom of some kind of cistern. Be careful!”

Faith turned her larger light on, too, and soon they saw Will's prison. He was alone—and unreachable at the bottom of a deep shaft.

“My ankle is broken and it hurts like hell, but I'm okay otherwise,” he called up.

“But what happened? And where have you been all this time? Surely not here?” Sophie sobbed as she spoke. She needed to go back and get help, but she found herself rooted to the spot. She didn't want to leave him. Will started speaking before she could ask Faith to go without her.

The story was not a pretty one.

He had gone back to his room to pack, intending to leave Atlanta Tuesday night. “I was about to call Patrick Smith to cancel dinner and set a time to meet in Savannah when there was a knock.
A female voice said it was the maid with clean towels. I wanted to tell her I was leaving and she could get the room ready for the next person, so I opened the door.

“There
were
towels, and the one thrown over my head was soaked with chloroform. I recognized the smell as I was blacking out. I think I was in some sort of truck, and then the next thing I knew I was here. They must have broken my ankle to keep me from trying to climb out, although without any light or a ladder I'm not sure I would have been able to.

“Someone—I can't see who—comes to check every once in a while and lowers some food and water. I could tell from the lights they shone when they came that I'm in one of the tunnels—from the damp smell, probably near the river. No one has come recently, so the plan now may be to leave me here to rot. I don't know why they didn't kill me right away.”

“But why grab you at all?” Sophie shrieked. Faith put a cautionary arm out, and Sophie lowered her voice. “We found you because there's a ladder in the wardrobe leading down from the bedroom in the house, and I
did
find a body and—”

“Hush, darlin'. I know all that now. The whole thing is complicated. But right this minute I want you to leave fast. Later you can tell me what Faith is doing in Savannah. Hi, Faith.”

“Hi, and we'll get you out of here soon,” said Faith. “It won't take long to retrace our steps and call the police.”

“No, I have to be here,” Will said firmly. “I'll tell you exactly what to do. If I don't stay put a while longer some major crimes, including murder, will stay hidden.”

Although their phones weren't getting a signal, Faith had power and was able to take down what Will dictated. Sophie tossed her phone to Will. If he was moved, he could be tracked. She tossed the bottles of water as well and considered tossing herself before good sense prevailed.

As they turned to go, Sophie said, “I can't understand why
Gloria didn't know about the tunnel under the house. The contractors must have seen it.”

“The contractors are part of the mob,” Will said wearily, “and Gloria, too.”

Although Faith wasn't on the scene when the sting took place—and the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, plus the Savannah police and Georgia State Police all lay in wait at various locations throughout the state, including the pit in which Will had been left—she and Sophie were getting a full description from Will.

Gloria's house was now a crime scene, so the three of them were in the library at the Monterey Square house. Sophie had described it to Faith, but it was even lovelier than she'd imagined. The library was cozier than the formal parlors, and the hot toddy she was sipping was adding to the warmth. Will had been treated and released at the hospital, having suffered no ill effects except for the ankle, now in a cast. He'd demanded a shower before they put it on.

Will and Sophie were sitting very close together on a large leather couch across from Faith with his foot on an ottoman. It was late, but no one had wanted to go to bed.

“I was in denial,” Will said. “The job I was hired for seemed straightforward. Typical ‘follow the money.' But the money kept coming back to Savannah. I was chasing leads all over the place, even out to Pin Point and a source there.”

Faith looked at Sophie, who was blushing. She'd told Faith about tailing Will at Christmas. The blush confirmed that Sophie hadn't told Will.

“When I left after New Year's I knew I was close to a legitimate business that had been laundering money for a major arms smuggler. The shock was that it was Gloria's business and
fake clients that Randy had created at the firm. I decided that I had to come home and confront them. I was positive Dad didn't know, but there was a tiny doubt. In any case, they were family. I owed it to them to ask them to explain. Instead, they blew the whistle to their associates, and I was a dead man.”

Faith saw Sophie flinch and jumped in. “You must be relieved to know for sure your father was as ignorant of what was going on as everyone else.”

Will nodded. “It was just Gloria and Randy. I knew my stepbrother had skirted a little close to the law when he was a teenager, but it never occurred to me that he would be engaging in criminal activity of this magnitude as an adult. Yet all the trails were leading to his mother and him—her very successful business for years and then, more recently, some of his activities at Maxwell and Maxwell.”

He reached for his wife's hand. “I'm sorry, sweetheart, as I have said about a thousand times tonight, but yes, the body in the wardrobe
was
very real and intended as a warning to Gloria and Randy. The mob didn't know someone else was living there—they thought the place was empty, as it conveniently had been for a long time, enabling them to make, shall we say, ‘modifications.' They got rid of the evidence fast, and we may never know how many others.”

Sophie grimaced. “To be generous, I think his mother, Lady Macbeth, or whatever the equivalent is here, pressured Randy into it.” She'd been fond of him.

Will's face looked stern. “You
are
too generous. It sickens me to think what the two did. And more will no doubt be coming out. They've turned on each other, and Randy has already said it was his mother who arranged Miss Sophronia's hit-and-run after she discovered the shadow clients and some of his dealings at the firm.”