Damn Him to Hell (27 page)

Andre emerged bearing a beribboned briefcase, the
kind I’d vaguely wished I’d had family to bestow on me. How did he
know
these things?

It was beautiful, supple, camel-colored leather with brass zippers and clasps and pockets for everything. And it was big enough for Milo and a laptop. Not that I had a laptop, but it would last long enough for me to acquire one. The tag said it had metal-reinforced security straps. My kind of bag. I hugged it. I actually hugged it.

I hated crying, but I was shaking from holding back the tears. Cora hung her corner of the banner on a nail and came over to squeeze my shoulders.

“You’re officially one of the family, hon,” she told me. “It’s all about us down here. Most of the time, it’s a bum job being us, but once in a while, we come through.”

I nodded, missing burly Bill and even Leibowitz.
Family
. Ugly and mean, sometimes, but we were there for each other. I did cry then. I’d finally found a real home.

“We’ll have to put her to work so she gets back to being mean,” Andre said with mock disgust. “We’re short a waitress at Chesty’s. Want to help?”

“Obnoxious bastard,” I muttered tearily, clinging to my beautiful briefcase and studying the office they’d been creating for me. They were putting me right in front, in the foyer. Insane.

But since I had no receptionist or partners, it made as much sense as anything. I could keep a protective eye on the houses across the street through the plate-glass windows.

“Does this place have tunnels, too?” I asked Andre while Frank broke out champagne—tonic water for Andre—and everyone crowded around with plastic glasses.

“You don’t want to know,” he said, snapping his fingers and demanding that we be served first.

“Oh yeah, I do. So either you show me, or I find them on my own,” I murmured as Leo carried over three glasses.

“Paddy wants you to meet him over at his mother’s estate,” Leo informed me, blithely ignoring the undercurrent between me and Andre. “You can’t have more than one of these if you’re driving.”

“Maybe we ought to move the party over there,” I suggested, really not wanting to confront a fiery Gloria if there was any chance her demonic spirit could explode gas lines.

My suggestion met with enthusiastic approval, although as it turned out, most of the party had to work and couldn’t go. So we drained the champagne bottles, popped balloons with pencils that Tim sharpened, moved furniture into a semi-official-looking arrangement, and then let Leo drive us to Towson in his old Ford SUV.

Us being me, Leo, Andre, and Frank, our Finder. If Gloria and the will were anywhere on the estate, we’d find them or they’d find us.

“Y
ou realize you’re wasting time searching this place, don’t you?” Andre said pessimistically as we drove up the private drive without being stopped by sinister guards. “She’s locked her papers up at Acme.”

“Is this one of your invaluable predictions?” I asked. “Should I be grateful you’re not swinging a bat to test my reflexes?”

“I’m just warning you not to raise your hopes.”

“You realize you’re returning to the scene of the crime?” I countered with a veiled warning of my own. Remembering Max’s admonition, I wasn’t certain it was wise for Andre to be here, but I’d come up with no way to persuade him otherwise when he was in
Master of the Universe mode. At least I’d been able to lock Milo in the apartment before we left.

Leo pulled up behind a silver Lincoln Town Car I didn’t recognize. Unless Paddy owned a car, I had to assume it was Max’s team.

“The place is probably full of booby traps.” Frank added his note of optimism. “You can’t tell me the rich don’t consort with the devil.”

“Our resident communist,” Andre said, climbing out the instant the Ford stopped. “Last time I looked, you weren’t exactly poor, Frank. Made any pacts with Satan lately?”

“Keep your nose out of my bank account, Legrande.” Frank slid out and stood beside him, gazing up at the enormous imitation Southern mansion. The crime scene tape that had been tied to the columns was tattered and broken now.

Frank was the kind of guy you’d blink and forget, really slight and kind of shadowy, which apparently gave him an advantage as a private investigator. “You’ll have to dismantle the place if she really hid the will,” he continued.

That was my fear. Someone who lived with terrorists for bodyguards would undoubtedly exhibit a higher degree of paranoia than either Andre or I did. Even without Andre’s pessimism, I wasn’t holding out much hope for this search. But Paddy was the heir. He called the shots.

Inside, Max’s team was methodically working through desks and dressers, the normal places one might store a will or keys to a bank lockbox. If Gloria
had stupidly stored the will in a bank vault, we were screwed until probate court had time to send someone official to the bank to audit the contents. Which could be the twelfth of never. Only one of many hurdles we could face.

Actually, now that I gave it some thought, Gloria would probably have made it as difficult as possible for anyone to take over Acme, giving any evil jerk-wads over there time to cover up whatever they were doing. Andre was probably right, curse him.

I located Paddy in the pantry, where Andre and I had consulted after Gloria’s unexpected demise. I doubted he’d arrived with Max’s people, but I had no idea if he had a car of his own. None had been parked out front.

“Any inspiration here?” I asked, scanning boxes of granola and pasta.

“She used to have hidden doors, like at the plant. Those guys in the Lincoln, can we trust them?” He ran his fingers along the walls he could reach.

“Yeah, I think we can. You and Dane need to have a talk. You’ll find he’s changed since he almost died.” It seemed to me the contents of the shelves would fall off if the wall actually moved, but I jiggled shelves as if I knew what I was doing.

“He wanted to have me certified and locked up. No, thanks.”

“I bet it was your mother who suggested that. Gloria was the one who was certifiable. And you didn’t help give the right impression,” I reminded him. “Dane needed a father’s guidance. You gave him crazy.
It’s a wonder Dane didn’t think insanity ran in the family.”

“Just bad chemicals,” he said enigmatically.

“A new kind of drug?” I suggested, trying to pry real info out of inscrutable Paddy. It didn’t work. He started on the next wall.

I went back to the Dane argument. “Consider that months in a hospital may have leached the evil or the drugs or whatever out of him.” Still no response.

Fine. So I wasn’t a mediator. “Is there a basement to this place? I think evil lurks in darkness.” I gave up on the pantry, or reasoning with a formerly mad man. My thinking was that Gloria wouldn’t have trusted workmen to build her a hiding place unless she killed them afterward.

And yeah, I know I was condemning the woman without really knowing her, but she was already dead. I could mentally vilify her and work out a little anger and fear without endangering my eternal soul.

Paddy pointed out a door near the back entrance but didn’t seem interested in joining me. To each his own. I stopped at the camouflaged refrigerator and helped myself to an apple and a few grapes. The plentiful empty space inside the fridge didn’t encourage grazing. Gloria must not have entertained much. Or fed her staff.

After appropriating a hunk of expensive specialty Gorgonzola, I opened the basement door and searched for a light switch. Damp, musty air flowed upward. The fluorescent bulb that flickered on was pretty pathetic for a mansion. I supposed the house had been
built back in the dark ages when basements were for canned goods and root veggies and not of much interest otherwise. Living here all by herself, Gloria certainly hadn’t needed the extra square footage.

Checking for cobwebs and finding the passage surprisingly clear, I trotted down the cement steps, wishing I’d brought Milo with me. Despite the prosaic mops and brooms hanging on the walls, the air here was almost sulfurous, adding to the general creepiness. It didn’t look much like a place where a fashion model like Gloria would hang out.

I persevered, apparently in the belief that evil liked to lie low and hide in darkness and misery. Or in a place that stank like an oil well. Which had nothing to do with wills and a lot to do with my opinion of Gloria.

The stairs led to a small concrete bunker. One wall held an old wooden door. Like Alice, I couldn’t resist opening it. On the other side, it was more coal cellar than basement. I stepped onto the hard-packed earth and gazed blindly into the dark. Gravel had been ground into the dirt, but I was glad I’d donned athletic shoes for this search.

I groped around for a switch to illuminate the vast space I couldn’t see in just the stair light. Before I located what I sought, I heard a squeak and a flutter of wings, and something brushed my hair.

I went all girly and shrieked. Generally, I’m not afraid of rats or bats or I wouldn’t have been down there. But despite all my other paranoid premonitions, I hadn’t expected critters beneath a mansion, and this one startled the shit out of me.

I would have shut up faster, except a rush of more wings and weird squeaks flew past me, straight up to the house through the door I’d left open. So I kept shrieking and ducking while all hell swooped over my head.

“It’s a damned cave down here!” Leo shouted a million years later, his heavy boots racing downward through the cloud of flying vermin.

Ludicrously, he held an umbrella. My hero!

In their haste to escape, the bats flooded the stairwell, miraculously missing walls and ceiling and flowing like water into the kitchen.

“Not normal,” Paddy commented laconically once Leo and I returned to the kitchen. The room swirled with a black cloud of bats attempting to escape. We kept our backs to the walls and gazed around in awe. “Probably need to trap them.”

While I was being terrorized in the cellar, Andre, predictably, had produced both an automatic pistol and a coal shovel to take a battle stance in a cloud of creepies. I should have known he had been carrying concealed to Gloria’s booby trap. “A touch of PTSD, Andre?” I called. “Just a little overreaction?”

Squealing black uglies swooped all around him, swiping the kitchen ceiling and walls. Andre stood on the granite island, alternately swinging and shooting at the creatures like an old-time Western gunfighter. Except he’d probably have needed two guns for that.

He ignored me and knocked two bats out of the air with one shot. The man was good.

“Cellar might be safer,” I said wryly, dodging ricocheting bullets and bat bodies.

Someone had sensibly shut the door to the rest of the house. I noticed Max’s team wasn’t in here fighting flying vermin. Of course, neither was Frank.

“Open the windows!” Leo shouted. “Let them fly out.”

Seemed sensible to me, better than shooting the critters. But Paddy grabbed a lacy tablecloth from a drawer and stood blocking the back door, netting anything that came near him.

“Not normal,” he repeated. “Andre, drop the damned gun so the rest of us can trap them.”

One of Andre’s victims fell at my feet. Paddy was right. The creatures weren’t normal. This one had a face.

I shuddered and forced myself to study the oddly rounded eyes, snub nose, hairless cheeks, and tiny fangs. Contrary to my cowardly behavior, I knew a little something about bats. Occasionally, living in barns and abandoned structures with my tree-hugging mother could be very instructive. Bats are actually mammals. There are infinite varieties of bats. I didn’t remember any of them having red eyes and humanoid faces. This dead one had the same black-rat appearance Gloria had taken on after she’d met her just reward.

“Demon bats,” I muttered, not daring to say it aloud. Trapping them might be as dangerous as shooting them, I concluded. Creatures from hell were more my line of work than Paddy’s.

Which meant this was my problem, naturally. I was still debating this Saturn/Satan dichotomy, but good or bad, I couldn’t let a thousand miniature Hells Angels loose into the world. I just didn’t know if I could actually send a bat to Hades or if I would be punished or rewarded for trying.

But if they were demons . . . I should try. The image of demonic bats escaping into the world on my watch easily raised my blood pressure to that level of rage where I saw red and could curse anything. Fortunately, for a change, I hadn’t reached my usual state of incoherency.

“Saturn, damn these infernal creatures back to the hell from whence they came,” I intoned under my breath, legalizing my normal, furious curses for the sake of clarity and on the off chance I was wrong about their origins. And stupidly trusting that none of the people in the room came from hell.

Of course, I had utterly no idea if I was serving justice by frying bats in eternal fires, but if there was any chance these really were demons or imps from Hades or whatever, I wouldn’t let my friends be bitten by them. My posse might be a little oddball, but they were my friends. Demons were not.

The first victim of my curse fell and smacked Andre on the head.

“What the fuck?” He dodged and glared malevolently at the ceiling, firing off another round or two before realizing he was caught in a dead-bat downpour.