Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead (24 page)

Daniel let out a low whistle. “Boy! Susan is never going to forgive me for leaving her behind. I will pay for this for the rest of my natural born life.”

“Well. The night isn’t over. This alter piece is a treasure some would kill for. We need to get out of here as soon as we can.” I took a couple of steps forward and began to search the stucco wall with my flashlight for a way to get into the basement proper, and up into the main house. “Daniel, what is that metal thing on the floor?” He came closer and stood above a dark gray iron rod—which looked to be about two feet long—lying on the floor. “Don’t touch it. There may be fingerprints.”

Squatting down, he ran his light around the floor area and up the wall. “It’s a piece of iron rebar. It’s used in poured concrete walls and footings to give the cement extra strength. I think somebody used the rebar to lock hinges made into the seam of this stucco panel. Look at this.”

I studied the area he spotlighted. There were two interlocking hinges protruding from the wall, each with hollow tracks about the right size for the rebar to slide through. With the rebar in place the wall would be rigid. Without the bar…Daniel grasped one of the metal hinges, pulling it towards us in the darkness. A portion of the wall pivoted and light poured through from the other side. I recognized the section of the basement I’d seen from upstairs. The place Mitchell Sanders had tumbled to his death. We eased sideways through the opening. Barnes’ crime scene crew had left the overhead light burning, casting a garish glow on the chalk outline where Mitchell Sanders’ body had fallen.

I stopped short of the yellow crime scene tape. “Well, looks like part of the mystery is solved. You can get to the inner room either from the upstairs by going through here, or from the outside. My guess is that after Angel Turner learned about the stolen artifacts from her grandfather, she was sneaking in here at night and carrying out what Tournay hadn’t sold. In the beginning Paul thought she was his grandmother’s ghost, then good old Mitchell must have caught her one night and struck a deal with her. He convinced Paul there was no ghost, and he and Angel hauled off the remaining stuff when Paul wasn’t home. Papa Tournay must have died before he realized someone was stealing from him. The partners had a good plan, until Mitchell began to play both sides against the middle. What I don’t understand is why last night, of all nights, would Mitchell come through to the house side of the basement and go up the stairs? Why not just come and go from the outside, like usual?”

“I don’t know why, Promise. I’m still in shock we found anything at all down here. Truth be told, I was sure your theory was about as tall a tale as I’ve ever heard. I would’ve put it right up there with the one about Uncle Corny hunting coon with a pistol toting monkey.”

I was not going to ask. “Daniel, we don’t have time for coon stories.” We edged around the crime scene and looked up the basement stairs to the foyer above. Shadows of Sanders’ last seconds of life drifted across the fringes of my mind. I could not quite identify the figures but knew one thing for sure. “You know Daniel, I think Sanders was determined to get upstairs when Angel killed him. What would he want upstairs?” I shut my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose to clear the horror of Sanders’ free falling: the sound and the pain as his head hit the concrete floor. “Daniel, where’s your backpack with the tracking device?”

He immediately turned back towards the inner room. “I’ll go back and get it.”

I reached for his arm to stop him. “No, let me go up through the house. There’s no point in you climbing back over the wall yet. I’ll bring you the backpack.” Gingerly, I climbed the basement steps, focusing on getting to the front door to let Paul in, and retrieving the backpack. Daniel would wait for me inside the storage room. As I passed into the foyer light, I checked my watch. Eight-thirty. Briar Patch Antiques closed at nine. We had to hurry.

“Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed.”
…Bhagavad Gita

16.

Fifteen minutes later, the tracker was glued in place to the back of the Madonna panels and Daniel was set up at Paul’s kitchen table with his laptop. From there we could see the back yard and crumbling causeway connecting Paul’s yard to the other side of Howell Creek. So long as the kitchen remained dark, we hoped anyone approaching from the woods would be too focused on getting in the house and getting out to look up and spot us. During the next two hours Paul and Daniel exchanged small talk and played name that tune in whispers. When they moved beyond Roy Orbison’s greatest hits and into tunes from
The Pirates of Penzance
, I was way out of my league and stood by the window to watch the night. “I can’t believe you got that one,” Paul whined from behind me, “you are just pretending you aren’t musically educated. You are sandbagging me. That isn’t fair.”

Daniel whispered back, amused, “Man, I never said I was ignorant. I just said I played fiddle in a Bluegrass band. You filled in the rest. Don’t whine. You’re just being snobby.” Even in the dark, I knew he was smiling. It was a joy to hear the two men banter back and forth like old friends.

I yawned and wished I were home in bed. Time for a cup of tea from my thermos. The guys declined so I poured mine and resumed my place at the window, losing the thread of their conversation and falling deep into my own thoughts about Paul’s reaction to what we’d found in the basement. He wasn’t so much surprised as puzzled, and said several times he couldn’t believe Mitchell could pull off such a sneaky trick. He seemed much more invested in Mitchell Sanders’ part in the drama than his grandfather’s, and asked a lot of questions about Angel Turner that I couldn’t answer.

When I told him my theory of the Turner-Sanders connection, I omitted the blackmailing. I didn’t think it my place to tell him what is mother was doing, and I didn’t want to get into a discussion about his grandmother’s death. I’d left him the partially opened box and stacks of coins on his dresser to connect the dots and complete the picture of Stella’s death; that would have to be enough. I chose to tell him my story around the business arrangement between Boo Turner and his grandfather. When I told him I thought the three-part panel was only part of a large cache his grandfather and Boo Turner looted and then shipped out of France after the war, he didn’t seem shocked, or disappointed, that his grandfather would systematically sell stolen art and artifacts. He said he was amazed that his grandfather and Turner hid their secret for over fifty years. To Paul the thievery seemed neither moral nor immoral, just an interesting story he said he wished his grandfather had shared with him. An edge to Daniel’s raised voice brought me back to the kitchen.

“Well, bull-crap. Sounds like more whining to me. You think your generation invented crappy wars? Vietnam wasn’t a walk in the park.”

“I didn’t say that. I only meant…never mind. Let’s don’t talk politics, Daniel, please. We were just getting to be friends.”

I turned from the window. “Susan hasn’t mentioned you were in Vietnam.”

Daniel sighed and met my eyes through the darkness. “Yeah, well, Susan and I don’t talk about it. I finally found some peace after she was born and I don’t usually dredge it up. Paul hit a raw nerve, that’s all. I’m sorry, Paul. Let’s just forget I brought it up.”

“No, now that you brought it up, tell us something you remember. Not the politics. Personally.”

In the half-light of the kitchen I could see Daniel’s eyes darting back and forth between Paul and I.
Talk, don’t talk, talk
. Perhaps memory and adrenaline pushed him out of his silence. “Mostly you want to forget what you did in the war, any war. You just want to concentrate on being grateful you survived, and not feeling guilty so many other boys didn’t. I will tell you I had a friend. Him and me, we both got to Nam in time for the Tet Offensive in 1968. Like most soldiers over there, we were just kids, not even twenty yet. The worst experience most of us had lived through was loosing a ball game, or wrecking our dad’s truck. You tell a lot of personal stuff when you’re hiding in a ditch, ass deep in mud, pig shit, and bloody body parts. All you got is time, waiting for the enemy to wander out of the jungle.”

Daniel rested an elbow on the table and cupped his face into his hand, remembering. “My buddy had a hard time as a kid in Iowa. I’m not repeating the details; that would be disrespecting him, but I’ve thought a lot about him over the years, and I still don’t know what makes some boys so savage to one another. I’m thinking maybe it’s fear; but I’m not sure. What do you think, Dr. McNeal? You think folks hurt one another out of fear?”

I didn’t think a lecture on male-to-male violence was what Daniel really wanted, so I decided to be general. “Maybe. A lot of fear can be burned and buried in the human heart. Violence can be the smoke that rises. Although, I have to say, there are times when I agree with the writer, James Lee Burke: ‘Some folks just aren’t wired right.’”

“Pretty poetic, I think I’m with you. It’s like that radio show I used to listen to back in the early fifties. The announcer would come on and say: ‘who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only the Shadow knows.’ You ever listen to that show?”

Paul chimed in. “Believe it or not, I know that radio program. It’s a classic. We studied the old sound recordings of the show in theater at USC. Great stuff!” He paused and dropped his voice. “Daniel, finish your story about your buddy in Vietnam. What happened?”

For a moment I thought Daniel wasn’t going to answer. Then he picked up the memory. “We stayed in that frigging muddy ditch for days, waiting for somebody to shoot at. Then when the enemy finally meandered our way out of the jungle, we charged with the rest of the platoon. He saluted me as we came up out of the mud. We ran like hell in the direction the lieutenant pointed, shooting off rounds at anything in our path. I remember rows and rows of green banana trees, at least I think they were bananas, mowed down by the gunfire. Then all around me our boys started dropping from overhead fire… snipers in the taller trees above. The sons-a-bitches had suckered us out in the open. Must have been like picking off fish in a barrel. We ran in all different directions trying to hide from the Cong shooters… lost sight of my friend in the bush. When it was over, the enemy disappeared back into the jungle. I was hit but too scared to do anything but hide. Most of us got airlifted out by the chopper pilots—they were the real heroes in Nam, you know. Didn’t see that Iowa boy again. I like to think they got him out, too. He was a good man, a sad man, but a good man.”

“Oh, Daniel,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

Paul was quiet, head cocked to one side, thinking. After a few seconds he excused himself to the bathroom. Daniel came over to the window and stood beside me. “Promise, what are we really doing here?”

I exhaled the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. How could I explain? “I know it doesn’t make much sense, Daniel, but it’s just something I have to do. I couldn’t turn away. I just couldn’t.” I listened to my voice, more a plea than an explanation, and took time to compose myself. “If you want to go on back home, please do. I wouldn’t think less of you. I admit I probably didn’t think through what I was getting us into.”

He lowed his chin to make sure our eyes met and relaxed a hand on my arm. I could feel his mood change in his touch. He was back from Vietnam. “I didn’t say I wanted to bail on you. I wouldn’t do that. I just needed to be certain you had a good reason for being here. Cause I got to tell you, I’ve had more fun at a calf branding.”

Off to my right, I sensed a shadow of movement in the yard and stepped back against the wall, pulling Daniel with me. “Don’t move,” I whispered, “I think I see someone coming towards the house.” He moved closer for a better look and we scanned open spaces between oaks and pines, straining to locate a human form in the cloud-masked darkness.

“There,” Daniel whispered, his breath stirring my hair as he leaned against to my ear. “To the right. Moving out from the pines.”

I saw a tall caped figure, hood drawn about the face, moving gracefully towards the house. “Good Lord, no wonder Paul thought he’d seen a ghost.” The specter disappeared around the right side of the house, heading straight towards the thorny trapdoor and the outside basement entrance.

Paul appeared beside us at the window and opened his mouth to speak, but before he could make more than a guttural half-sound, Daniel was by his side and clasped his hand over his mouth. I could faintly hear him giving Paul directions to be quiet and still. In another reflexive move, Daniel eased Paul into one of the kitchen chairs and motioned for him to stay put. Paul nodded his understanding. Without a sound, Daniel removed his boots, and now in stocking feet he placed his boots on the counter, out of the way of either of us stumbling over them in the dark. Noiselessly, he sat down at the table, facing his laptop. It booted up, giving a spare greenish glow into the room. He must have worried the glow would be visible through the windows from the kitchen table’s angle, because he eased from his chair and positioned himself and the computer on the floor. If this was a war game, Daniel certainly knew more of the rules than I did, and he was much more mentally equipped for this sleuthing business than I was, since I was still standing gape-mouthed at the window looking at thin air. The realization hit me with a guilty pang that he was slopping through mud and blood in Vietnam trying to stay alive when I was in college worrying about bad-hair days. This was a good man, and I was happy he survived.

Daniel snapped his fingers to get my attention. I came out of my shoes and tiptoed over to him. The laptop screen was silent; the dot blip lit up on the grid. Our caped intruder had taken the bait and was on the move. Oh, what a beautiful thing to watch. Silently, the dot moved across the screen just like a child’s etch-a-sketch game, except our grown-up version had coordinates top and left to mark our dot’s location. Slowly and methodically, it moved right and then up the grid. Daniel’s arm pointed forcefully towards the window and I took his direction and eased back over to watch. The seconds ticked off in my mind as I wondered how long it could take for her to climb back over the wall, replace ladders to the floor, and sneak out the basement door into the night.

And then where would she go? My guess was back across the half-ruined parapet to the other side of the creek. She probably had a vehicle parked on the street beyond the shallow woods of Howell Creek. Daniel snapped his fingers again to signal the dot was moving again; I strained my neck to peer around the window casing and tried to adjust to the darkness of the yard again. I don’t know how many seconds I counted before I thought I saw a shadow pass between two tall bushes and move away.
Crap! Where did she go?

My heart was thumping low in my chest, echoing in my ears. There was no sign of the shadowy figure. Paul crawled across the floor and pulled me down below the window level, whispering to me that Daniel was saying the tracer dot had stopped. It no longer moved on the screen. He thought it was maybe two hundred feet from us, but not getting any farther away. I jerked on my shoes, hurried across the room to Daniel and knelt beside him to whisper, “She must have crossed the creek by now. We’re going to lose her. Call Barnes and tell him to look for her and a vehicle on the street beyond the creek.”

Daniel grabbed my arm to hold me back. “You’re not going out there?”

“Think, Daniel. I have to. We don’t know where she went and you are the only one who can work the computer. Call Barnes. If for no other reason than to give me hell, he will meet me on the other side.”

Paul stepped to my side and whispered anxiously, “What can I do?”

“Keep watch at the window. She might be doubling back for some reason.”

From the living room, I ran out the French doors onto a brick patio, then down three short steps into the yard leading to Howell Creek. As I left the cover of the side of the house, with its overgrown azaleas, and stepped out into a dimly moonlit expanse of grass, I looked back up at the kitchen window. The dark room silhouetted Paul’s outline, black against gray. That meant she could have seen me watching her.

In a few fast steps I covered the narrow wet lawn and melted into the trees, following the sound of the rain-swollen creek. Once I located the parapet I studied the far side of the creek for a waiting caped shadow. A creeping sensation at the base of my neck, like a spider scurrying into my hair, warned me I was somewhere I had no business being. Nevertheless, when I saw no one on the other side, I chanced a first step and began to cross the crumbling remains of the gristmill wall. From the shore it looked plenty wide for a person to walk across, and I guess it was, if it had been daylight and the stone not slowing eroding into Howell Creek, and if the person crossing the wall weren’t scared out of her wits.

I made it almost to the other side before my left foot slipped off and mired calf deep in cold rushing water. Pain wracked my ankle as I felt the skin peel back from collision with rocks on the creek bed. Cursing myself for being so clumsy, I extracted my wet foot and limped the remainder of the distance across and onto the wet leaves of the bank. Sitting for a moment to assess the damage, I took off my shoe to empty it of water. It was just as I rose to my feet and turned into the woods that I felt the first of two excruciating blows: one catching my ribs on the right side, and another laterally across my right arm. The impact sent me back down on the ground with a pitiful groan. From where I half knelt on a muddy patch of bank, I heard rather than saw my attacker retreat into the woods. For one fleeting moment I questioned what I’d been hit with, and if I could even stand up. But stand up I did, and stumbled after the sound of fast footsteps slapping wet leaves. I knew I had to keep her location in sight before she made it out of the woods and escaped.