She started forward to look at the writing on one of the labels when there was a low rumbling noise. She stopped cold, fear spiking through her. Where was it coming from? Where? All the nightmares from the night before tore through her. Sam's wordsâ“haunted house.” Shadows, the damned basement was filled with shadows and damp and rot.
She whipped around at the crash not thirty feet away from her, in the far corner of the basement. She watched as the wall heaved and groaned and spewed brick outward onto the basement floor, leaving a jagged black hole.
She stood there a moment longer, staring at the hole in the wall. She was surprised. The house was very old, sturdy. Why, suddenly, would this happen? The storms over the years must have gradually weakened this particular wall and now, finally, the one last night was the final blow. Perhaps all the damp contributed, as well.
She walked to the corner, dodging crates and a huge steamer trunk that looked to be from the 1920s. The light didn't reach quite that far. She raised her candle high and looked into the black hole.
And screamed.
SEVEN
That black gash in the basement wall had vomited out a skeleton mixed with shards of cement, whole and broken bricks, and thick dust that flew through the air to settle slowly, thickly, on the basement floor.
The skeleton's outstretched hand nearly touched her foot. She dropped the candle and jumped back, wrapping her arms around herself. She stared at that thing not more than three feet from her. A dead person, long dead. Itâno, it wasn't an it, it was a woman and she couldn't hurt anybody. Not now.
White jeans and a skimpy pink tank top covered the bones, many of which would have been flung all over the basement floor were it not for the once-tight jeans holding them together. One sneaker was hanging off her left foot, the white sock damp and moldy. The left arm was still attached, but barely. The head had broken off and rolled about six inches from the neck.
Becca stood there, staring down at that thing, knowing that at one time, whoever she was, she'd breathed and laughed and wondered what the future would bring. She was young, Becca realized. Who was she? What was she doing inside a wall in Jacob Marley's basement?
Someone had put her there, on purpose, to hide her forever. And now she was just shattered bones, some of them covered with moldy white jeans and a pink tank top.
Slowly Becca walked back upstairs, covered with dust, her heart still pounding. In her mind's eye the skeleton's skull was still vivid, would probably remain terrifyingly vivid for the rest of her life. Those eye sockets were so empty. Becca knew she had no choice. She phoned the sheriff's office on West Hemlock and asked to speak with the sheriff.
“This is Mrs. Ella,” came a voice that was deep as a man's, and harshâa smoker's voice. “Tell me who you are and what you want and I'll tell you whether or not you need Edgar.”
Becca stared at the phone. It certainly wasn't New York City.
She cleared her throat. “Actually, my name is Becca Powell and I moved into Jacob Marley's house about a week ago.”
“I know all about you, Miss Powell. I saw you at the Pollyanna with Tyler McBride. What'd you do with little Sam while you two were gallivanting around, enjoying yourselves at one of Riptide's finest restaurants?”
Becca laughed, she couldn't help herself, but it soon dissolved into a hiccup. She felt tears pool in her eyes. This was crazy. Still, she said only, “We left him with Mrs. Ryan. He's very fond of her.”
“Well, that's all right, then. Rachel and Annâshe's the dead Mrs. McBrideâwell, they were best friends, now weren't they? And Sam dearly loves Rachel, and she him, thank God, since his mama is dead, now isn't she?”
“I thought that Ann McBride disappeared, that she just walked away from her family and from Riptide.”
“So he says, but nobody believes that. What do you want, Miss Powell? Be alert now, and concise, no more going off on tangents or feeding me gossip. This is an official office of the law.”
“There's a skeleton in my basement.”
For the first time in this very strange conversation, Mrs. Ella was silent, but not for long. “This skeleton you're telling me is in your basement, how did it get there?”
“It fell out of the wall in the middle of a whole lot of rubble when the wall collapsed a while ago, probably weakened by the big storm last night.”
“I believe I will transfer you to Edgar now. That's Sheriff Gaffney to you. He's been very busy, a lot of storm damage, you know, a lot of people demanding his time, but a skeleton can't be put off until tomorrow, now can it?”
“You're right about that,” Becca said, and had an insane desire to laugh her head off. She wiped the tears out of her eyes. She realized she was shaking. It was the oddest thing.
A man came on the line and said, “Ella tells me you've got a skeleton in the basement. This don't happen every day. Are you sure it's a skeleton?”
“Yes, quite sure, although, to be honest, I've never seen one before, at least lying at my feet on the basement floor.”
“I'll be right there, then. You stay put, ma'am.”
Becca was staring down at the phone when Mrs. Ella came back. “Edgar said I was to keep talking to you, not let you go all hysterical. Edgar tends to get tetchy around women who are crying and wailing and carrying on. I'm surprised you fell apart on him, given the way you were talking to me about this and that.”
“I appreciate that, Mrs. Ella. I'm not really hysterical, at least not yet, but how could the sheriff have possibly known that I was wavering on the edge? I never said a word to him.”
“Edgar just knows these things,” Mrs. Ella said comfortably. “He's very intuitive, now isn't he? That's why I'll keep talking to you until he gets there, Miss Powell. I'm to help you keep your wits together.”
Becca didn't mind a bit. For the next ten minutes, she heard how Ann McBride disappeared between one day and the next, no explanation at all, just as Tyler had told her. She learned that Tyler wasn't Sam's father but his stepfather. Sam's real father had just up and disappeared from one day to the next, too. Odd, now wasn't it, the both of them, just up and out of here? Of course, Sam's father had been a rotter, whining and bitching about how hard life was, and he didn't want to stay here, so his leaving made some sense, now didn't it? But not Ann's, no, she couldn't have just up and left, not without Sam.
Then Mrs. Ella began with all her pets, and there were a bunch of them since she was sixty-five years old. Finally, Becca heard a car pull up.
“The sheriff just arrived, Mrs. Ella. I promise I won't fall apart.” She hung up the phone before Mrs. Ella could give her own mother's tried-and-true recipe for stretched nerves. And she wouldn't fall apart, either, because by Mrs. Ella's fifth dog, a terrier named Butch, there were no more tears in her eyes and the bubbling, liquid laughter was long dried up.
Sheriff Gaffney had seen the Powell girl around town, but he hadn't met her. She looked harmless enough, he thought, remembering how she was squeezing a cantaloupe in the produce department at Food Fort when he first saw her. She was pretty enough, but right then, she was as white as his shirtfront last night before he'd eaten spaghetti. She'd opened the front door of the old Marley place and stood there staring at him.
“I'm the law,” he said, and took his sheriff's hat off. There was something odd about her, something that wasn't quite right, and it wasn't her too-pale face. Well, finding a skeleton could put a person off in a whole lot of ways. He wished she'd stop gaping at him like she didn't have a brain or, God forbid, was hysterical. He was afraid she would burst into tears and he was ready to do about anything to prevent that. He threw back his shoulders and stuck out a huge hand. “Sheriff Gaffney, ma'am. What's this about a skeleton in your basement?”
“It's a woman, Sheriff.”
He shook her hand, pleased and relieved that now she appeared reasonably under control and her lower lip wasn't trembling. Her eyes looked perfectly dry to him, from what he could tell through her glasses. “Show me this skeleton who you believe with your untrained eye is a woman, ma'am,” he said, “and we'll see if you're guessing right.”
I'm in never-never land,
Becca thought as she showed Sheriff Gaffney down to Jacob Marley's basement.
She walked behind him. He was nearing sixty years old, and was a walking heart attack. He was a good thirty pounds overweight, the buttons of his sheriff shirt gaping over his belly. The wide black leather belt tight beneath his belly carried a gun holster and a billy club, and nearly disappeared in the front because his stomach was so big. He had a circle of gray hair around his head and very light gray eyes. She nearly ran into him when he suddenly stopped on the bottom step, stood there, and sniffed.
“That's good, Ms. Powell. No smell. Gotta be old.”
She nearly gagged.
She kept back when he went down on his knees to examine the bones.
“I thought it was a woman, maybe even a girl, since she's wearing a pink tank top.”
“A good deduction, ma'am. Yep, the remains look pretty old, or maybe not. I read that a dead person can become a skeleton in as little as two weeks or it can take as long as ten years depending on where the body's put. It's a shame that it wasn't airtight, you know, a vacuum back behind that wall. If it had been, then maybe something would have been left of her. But critters can get in most places and they were looking at a whole bunch of really good meals with her. Lookee here, the person who put her down here hit her on the head.” He looked up at her, expecting her to see what he'd found. Becca forced herself to look at the skull that had snapped, probably during the upheaval, and rolled away from the neck.
Sheriff Gaffney picked up the skull and slowly turned it in his hands. “Look at this. Someone bashed her but good, not in the back of the head but in the front. Now, that's mean, really vicious. Yep, violent, real violent. Whoever did this was mad as hell, hit her as hard as he could, right in the face. I wonder who she was, poor thing. First thing is to see if any of our own young people went missing a while ago. Thing is, I've been here nearly all my life and I don't remember a single kid disappearing. But I'll ask around. Folk don't forget that. Well, we'll find out soon enough. I think she was probably a runaway. Old Jacob didn't like strangersâmale, female, it didn't matter. Probably found her poking around in the garage or maybe even trying to break in, and he didn't ask any questions, just whacked her head. Actually, he didn't like people who weren't strangers, either.”
“You said the blow looks violent, and it's in the front. Why would Jacob Marley be enraged if she was a runaway, or a local kid, hanging around his property?”
“I don't know. Maybe she back-mouthed him. Old Jacob hated back talk.”
“The white jeans are Calvin Klein, Sheriff.”
“You're saying this is a guy now?”
“No, that's the designer. The jeans are expensive. I don't think they'd go real well on a runaway.”
“You know, ma'am, many runaways are middle-class,” Sheriff Gaffney said, and heaved himself to his feet. “Strange how most folk don't know that. Very few of 'em are poor, you know. Yep, the storm must have knocked something loose,” he said, bending over to examine the wall closely. “Looks like old Jacob stuffed her in there pretty good. Not such a good job with the concrete and bricks, though. It shouldn't have collapsed like that, nothing else in here did.”
“Old Jacob was a homicidal maniac?”
“Eh?” He spun around. “Oh, no, Ms. Powell. He simply didn't like nobody hanging around his place. He was a real loner, once Miranda up and died on him.”
“Who was Miranda? His wife?”
“Oh, no. She was his golden retriever. He buried his wife so long ago I can't even remember her. Yep, she lived to be thirteen, keeled over one day.”
“His wife was only thirteen?”
“No, his golden retriever, Miranda. She just up and died. Old Jacob was never the same after that. Losing someone you love, so I hear, can be real hard on a man. My Maude promised me a long time ago that she'd outlive me, so I'd never have to know what it's like.”
Becca followed the sheriff back up the basement stairs. She looked back once at the ghastly pile of white bones wearing Calvin Klein jeans and a sexy pink tank top. Poor girl. She thought of the Edgar Allan Poe tale
The Cask of Amontillado
and prayed that this girl had been dead before she was stuffed in that wall.
Sheriff Gaffney had laid the skull on top of the skeleton's chest.
An hour and a half later, Tyler stood next to her, off to the side of the front porch. Dr. Baines, shorter than Becca, whiplash thin, big glasses, came out nearly at a run, followed by two young men in white coats carrying the skeleton carefully on a gurney.
“I never thought Mr. Marley could murder anyone,” Dr. Baines said, his voice fast and low. “Funny how things happen, isn't it? All this time, no one knew, no one even guessed.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, nodded to Becca and to Tyler, then spoke briefly to the men as they gently lifted the gurney into the back of the van.
The unmarked white van pulled away, followed by Dr. Baines's car. “Dr. Baines is our local physician. He got on the phone to the medical examiner in Augusta after I called him about the skeleton. The ME told him what to do, which is kind of dumb, since he's a doctor and I'm an officer of the law, and of course I'd be really careful around the skeleton and take pictures from all angles and be careful not to mess up the crime scene.”