Some Like It Hawk (12 page)

“What’s going on out there, anyway?” Rob asked. “Is Sammy pulling our leg or was someone really murdered out there?”

“Someone really was murdered,” I said. “Shot right outside the barricade, and at first glance it certainly looks as if she could have been shot from behind the barricade.”

“They’re trying to frame me,” Mr. Throckmorton said.

“I’m a witness that you can’t possibly have done it,” Rob said. He started to give Mr. Throckmorton an encouraging pat on the back, stopped just in time, and used his elbow instead, still managing to knock the breath out of him.

“Of course, they will try to claim you two were in cahoots,” I said.

Mr. Throckmorton, still breathless from the force of Rob’s encouragement, shook his head in despair.

“How can we possibly prove they’re wrong?” he wheezed.

“That’s what I’m here for.” Horace drew himself up to his full height and held his forensic bag in front of him as if it were a chain saw and he were about to fell a forest of unjust accusations. “Lead me to the barricade!”

If anyone noticed that his voice was a little shaky, or wondered why he had reverted to wearing his gorilla suit, no one said anything.

“Do their hands and clothes first,” I suggested. “And you’ll probably find it easier if you shed the suit.”

“This way,” Mr. Throckmorton said. He turned and led the way down the corridor. We had to walk single file to get past the file cabinets and boxes on either side. At regular intervals a gap in the file cabinets marked the doorway to another cell. A glance through each barred window showed that the cells were also filled with file cabinets and boxes.

“What is this place, anyway?” Horace asked.

“Used to be the jail,” Mr. Throckmorton said over his shoulder. His voice was thin, dry, and precise. “Now we use it for the archives.”

“I mean, why does it look like a castle dungeon?” Horace asked.

“Now that’s an interesting question,” Mr. Throckmorton said, his voice growing a smidgen more animated. “During the Revolutionary War, there was a small prisoner of war camp here in Caerphilly. Mostly German mercenaries. Apparently there were a number of stonemasons among them, and the town government put them to work building the courthouse.”

“Wait—I thought the Yankees burned down the courthouse during the Civil War,” Sammy said. “How could they burn down a stone courthouse?”

“The German prisoners didn’t finish the whole building,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “They got a little carried away with the elaborate stonework in the basement. By the time they finished that, the war was over.”

“And they went home to Germany,” Sammy said, nodding.

“No, most of them just disappeared into the mountains,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “Throughout the colonies, about a quarter of the Hessians who survived the war never went home. They were landless men—younger sons of landowners, or the sons of laborers. Life was a lot better here than back in Germany. A few that we know of stayed here in town, intermarried with the locals—especially the Shiffleys—and took up farming or went into the masonry and carpentry trades for themselves. Most just went off into the mountains. Without the free POW labor, the town ended up finishing off the courthouse very cheaply, with wood. That’s what burned. The basement survived very nicely.”

He patted the stone walls in one of the few places where they weren’t largely obscured by the file cabinets and boxes.

I had to admit, the Hessian stonework was impressive. If not for the utilitarian metal file cabinets, you could easily imagine yourself in the dungeon of a medieval castle. The fitted stone walls were slightly rough to the touch, but surprisingly even, considering. The vaulted stone ceiling was a little low, but looked reassuringly solid. Some of the keystones over the doorways even had little bits of carving in them. I was surprised they hadn’t gone in for a few gargoyles while they were at it.

What really surprised me was the temperature. I’d heard that the Evil Lender had turned off the air-conditioning ducts to the basement at the beginning of the summer, as yet another tactic to compel Mr. Throckmorton to leave. But the stone walls felt dry and cool and the ambient air temperature was a lot lower than outdoors.

We passed through a stone doorway into a much larger area with a slightly higher ceiling. Like every other space in the basement it was packed with files and boxes, here interspersed with nests of furniture and, at regular intervals, huge stone pillars. I estimated the room was about forty feet wide by sixty feet long, but I wasn’t good at estimating under the best of circumstances, and I had no idea whether the clutter made the space look larger or smaller. The short wall to our right and both of the long walls were interrupted at intervals by doors, presumably leading to other corridors and rooms full of documents. I spotted a kitchenette along one wall, and a curtained alcove that was probably Mr. Throckmorton’s bedroom.

Near the short wall to our left, at the far end of the room, was the counter that, in happier times, had separated Mr. Throckmorton from the customers who came to apply for permits and licenses or access documents from the archives. He’d hung curtains across the width of the room just behind the counter, cutting off our view of the entrance door, now barricaded both inside and out. Although, come to think of it, the curtain was probably there less to shield the barricade from his view than to keep the Evil Lender’s forces from peering in at his lair when he opened the plywood doors.

Most of the horizontal surfaces in the basement were piled high with stacks of paper, all weighted down with bricks, large stones, and other heavy objects to keep them from blowing away in the breeze created by half a dozen revolving electric floor and table fans. The whirring of the fans and the constant rustling of the papers made a rather restful background noise.

In the middle of the space was a battered but sturdy oak table. One half of it was piled high with dice, a hand-drawn map, and stacks of game cards and all the other paraphernalia of one of Rob’s role-playing games. The other half was empty, and I suspected Sammy had cleared away a space for Horace to use.

“You’re right,” Horace said. “I should take off my suit.”

He set down his bag and began scrambling out of it. He, it, and the clothes underneath were soaked with sweat.

“There are towels over there,” Mr. Throckmorton said. He pointed with his elbow, as if that was the only way he could refrain from grabbing the towel himself and handing it to Horace. “And you’ll find hangers a little to the left.”

Sammy obliged by handing Horace the towel. While Horace toweled the sweat away, Sammy, under Mr. Throckmorton’s close supervision, arranged the gorilla suit neatly on a heavy wooden hanger and hung it where one of the fans would blow it dry.

Horace stood in front of another fan for a few moments with a blissful look on his face. Then he straightened up, folded the towel neatly, set it on the floor, and picked up his kit.

“Okay, let’s do your hands,” he said.

“You should probably swab Rob’s cell phone, too,” I said. “He’s been handling that recently. Before he got the orders not to touch anything,” I added, before Rob could protest.

As I watched the now familiar process, I realized I had two options. Now that I’d safely escorted Horace here, I could go back through the tunnel to the outside world—and maybe have to come back again to coax him out when he was finished. Or I could twiddle my thumbs here until he was finished.

“While you’re doing that, I’m going to call Michael and check on the boys,” I said. Perhaps I could invent a child-care crisis that would require me to leave.

“The telephone is over there.” Mr. Throckmorton pointed to a desk piled with one- to two-foot stacks of papers, one of which had a phone sitting atop it. “But we operate on the assumption that they’re bugging it.”

“That would be illegal!” Horace said.

“And you think that would bother them?” Rob asked.

“I can make the call, if you can figure out a coded way to say whatever you want to say,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “But it might be easier to e-mail.”

“I have my cell,” I said, holding it up.

“If you get a signal, let me know and I’ll switch to your carrier.” His smile wasn’t exactly smug, but you could tell he enjoyed knowing something I didn’t. “The walls are a foot thick. Ceiling, too. No signal here.”

“We got a signal outside the barricade,” I said.

“Stone’s not as thick up there,” he said. “I can sometimes get a signal up by the barricade, but not down here. You could try going up there.”

“Stay away from the area near the barricade until I’m finished with it,” Horace said. “Okay—now your clothes.”

“My clothes?” Mr. Throckmorton’s voice sounded anxious, and he glanced over at me.

“I’ll just step out for a moment,” I said. “I’ll come back and e-mail Michael when the coast is clear.”

I made my way back to the corridor and sat down on a box to wait. As I sat, I gazed around at the books and papers surrounding me. Normally, clutter drives me crazy, but the more I looked around, the less chaotic the basement looked. Everything was definitely organized. There were very few loose papers—everything was confined to boxes, file folders, or neat string-tied parcels. And everything bore a neat tag or label. I could spot at least a dozen different styles of printing or handwriting on the labels—probably representing at least that many county clerks over the years. All of them, from spidery copperplate to neat modern block printing, were uniformly precise and tiny.

“You can come back in now, Meg,” Horace called.

Mr. Throckmorton was dressed, as he had been before—gray slacks, white shirt, suspenders, and bow tie, though now the suspenders and the tie were royal blue. I suspected his wardrobe was well organized and didn’t contain a lot of variety. Rob was resplendent in black-and-green polka-dotted silk briefs.

“Have either of you been near the barricade lately?” Horace asked.

“Not since just before the incident,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “We heard someone knocking on the plywood door. I thought it might be Randall, but sometimes one or more of the security officers come with him.”

“So he pulled the curtains closed, and I hid just inside the corridor leading to the tunnel,” Rob said.

“Wasn’t that overkill?” I asked. “The curtains look solid enough.”

“The idea was that if they battered down the barrier, Rob could run down to the cell where the tunnel comes out and lock the door from the inside,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “There’s a spare key in the cabinet. And then he could retreat into the tunnel, pulling the cabinet behind him, and we might have a chance of keeping the secret of the tunnel.”

“So you weren’t with Mr. Throckmorton at the exact time of the murder?” Sammy asked.

Rob opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it grimly and shook his head. Mr. Throckmorton sighed softly.

“I went over to the plywood privacy door,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “And I was about to open it, but I heard raised voices. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell the tone was angry. I wasn’t sure what was going on. And given how strange everything has been lately, I decided maybe I shouldn’t open it until I knew precisely what was going on. I was backing away from it when I heard the shots.”

“Shots?” Sammy repeated. “Plural?”

“I think so,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “Two shots, very close together. Although I suppose it could have been one shot with some kind of echo. I’m afraid I don’t know much about guns.”

“He ran back here and told me what was happening,” Rob said. “And I was going to run up there and look, but Phinny pointed out that if there was something going on up there, the area just outside the barricade would be swarming with people, and we shouldn’t take the chance of anyone spotting me.”

“Or shooting at him,” Mr. Throckmorton added.

“So I didn’t open the plywood, just stood there inside the barricade. And I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so that was when I called you on my cell phone. That’s the only place you can get a signal, remember?”

“I stayed well away from the barricade after that,” Mr. Throckmorton added. “But I kept Rob in sight, in case he was hit by a stray bullet.”

Horace nodded and picked his way along a path through the file cabinets and boxes toward the far end of the room. The counter that ran all the way across that end had a break, where you could lift up a movable segment of the countertop to exit or enter Mr. Throckmorton’s part of the room. Rob and I followed. Mr. Throckmorton did, too, but at a greater distance, as if he more than half expected gunfire to break out again.

Horace drew the curtains to reveal the far end of the room. Some wide wooden steps led up six or seven feet to a raised area, eight feet deep, that ran the width of the basement. If I recalled correctly, the raised part was level with the part of the basement outside the barricade. The exit door was located in the middle of the wall on the raised area—though now the door was gone and a series of huge landscaping ties ran across the doorway. They appeared to be bolted into the stone, and on each end more huge timbers ran perpendicular to the barricade, braced at the other end by two of the immense stone pillars. Clearly, any would-be intruders who tried too hard to batter down Mr. Throckmorton’s barricade risked bringing a large part of the building down on themselves.

The middle of the barricade was covered with the plywood—two sheets, on hinges, so they could swing out like double doors.

“That’s to keep anyone from peeking in,” Mr. Throckmorton said, when he saw Horace eyeing the plywood. “There’s a latch at the top.”

“First things first,” Horace said. “When was the last time you opened the plywood doors?”

“Yesterday,” Mr. Throckmorton said.

Horace set his satchel down on the counter, pulled out his digital camera, and climbed up the wooden stairs. Rob, Mr. Throckmorton, and I followed, although we stayed several steps down from the top, so we could watch without being in his way. He took dozens of photos of the barricade, from the front and from both sides, and of the floor in front of it.