P Deutermann - Nightwalkers

"Saw the gates open, thought I might find you here," he said, getting out of his vehicle. The shepherds greeted him, and he stopped to pet each one. "Heard you resolved your ghost problem the other night."

"After a fashion," I said. "I nailed a shooter, and the weapon was the same one that fired the warning round, but so far we can't tie him to an employer." I told him about the parole officer's little playacting with Billie Ray.

"I'll pulse the Manceford County system, see if we can find out what kind of ride your ghost is drivin' these days," he said. "Get that data up in our patrol division computers. One of my deputies sees your ghost, we'll get you some warning."

"I'd certainly appreciate that," I said. "I don't think he knows about this place, but there's no telling, these days. A deed gets recorded, and a Web search can find it."

"Maybe not quite yet, not in this county," he said with a grin. I remembered the old man down at the courthouse.

We chatted for a few minutes. I gave him my cell phone number and told him I'd be staying across the road in the stone cottage as soon as they got a lease drawn up. He took it all aboard, wished me luck with the restoration project, and left. I went inside the house to look around some more.

Some old houses are spooky by nature. This one wasn't. I think there were simply too many tall windows to give any self-respecting real ghost any privacy. I liked the way the floors had become a little wavy here and there, and I tried to visualize what it would look like with new paint and furnishings. I reminded myself to get all that weird wallpaper off the ceilings. The subground floor was a little more gloomy but smelled pleasantly of a hundred-plus years of fireplace smoke and old wood.

I noticed that the floorboards on the lowest level did not feel as solid as I would have expected. Was there a basement? I went looking, and the shepherds followed me from room to room, sniffing everything. The main kitchen was on this half-underground floor. It was dominated by a huge, nineteenth-century-style walk-in stone fireplace built against the rear wall. Based on the layer of ashes in the grate, it was still operational. The floor was made of random-width pine boards, burnished to a mahogany color by years of use and kitchen spills. The fireplace stuck out into the kitchen a good five feet from back to hearth. It was flanked by pantries on either side. I found what I was looking for in the right-hand pantry-a trapdoor, which I assumed led down into a basement. What surprised me was the bits of fresh mud on the floor and the fact that the crack around the trapdoor was clear of any dust and debris. Someone had been down there, and recently, too. I wondered if it had been Ms. Valeria, on that day when I encountered her in the house.

I pulled up the trapdoor and latched it back against the empty shelves. A set of surprisingly wide wooden steps led down into complete darkness. I looked for a light switch, but there wasn't one. I searched around the kitchen for a flashlight, but the drawers were mostly empty except for some ancient cooking utensils. There was a single, well-used candle in a lead-colored holder in one corner, but no matches that I could find. Glory's End had electricity and relatively modern indoor plumbing, at least in the upstairs floors, but if Valeria had come over here to go into the basement, it was much more likely that she would have matches in her pocket, because candles were a way of life across the way. I fingered the wax at the base of the candle holder to see if it was freshly melted. It told me exactly nothing. The shepherds were looking at me as if to ask, We about through? We saw squirrels out there.

I went back upstairs and out the front door to get a flashlight from my Suburban. I turned the mutts loose to go chase squirrels and went back inside. When I got back downstairs to the kitchen, the candleholder was no longer there.

I stopped and looked around the room. I'd picked it up, felt the wax melted onto the base, and then put it back on the counter. Now it wasn't there.

Oka-a-a-y.

Was someone else in the house? The shepherds would have noticed another human lurking about. I looked around again. I hadn't been gone two minutes, but there was no getting around it-the damned candlestick was gone.

I went over to the trapdoor, which was still upright, the way I'd left it. I pointed the flashlight down the steps, looking for tracks in the dust, but there weren't any, possibly because there wasn't any dust. That, too, was a bit strange. The steps were made of rough-cut planks, smoothed and even hollowed out slightly in the center by generations of foot traffic. I went down the steps, wondering if I should go back out and get my SIG.

The basement was large, with almost ten-foot ceilings, a hard-packed dirt floor, and heavy, mortared stone foundation walls. It smelled of dust, mildew, and old dirt in equal proportions. There was an expansive but unfortunately empty wine rack down one wall and floor-to-ceiling bare shelves on all the others. There was no plumbing or wiring in evidence, which made sense since the next floor up was itself partially underground. The basement seemed to match the footprint of the main house, and as I swung my light around, I saw what looked like an open grave in the floor, except that it was only three feet deep. I tried to think of what they might have used that for. The shelves would have contained provisions, perhaps, and possibly weapons. There were meat hooks hanging from some of the joists above, which might have accounted for the unusual height. The temperature was cool, and the place seemed to be perfectly dry. The shelves were empty except for a single item: my AWOL candleholder.

I stopped and stared. That candleholder. The one I'd left up in the kitchen when I went out to get a flashlight.

Curiouser and curiouser, I thought. This is about the point where the trapdoor goes bang up there at the top of the steps and I start to hear rattling chains and ghostly cackling. Except nothing happened. No cold vapors, no violins. Just the candlestick sitting there on that shelf, the one that apparently had grown legs.

Obviously someone had been watching me in the kitchen and had moved the candlestick down here while I was outside. The dogs hadn't sensed anyone in the house, which implied that he'd been down here the whole time I'd been in on the lower floor. So he'd been listening or watching from the top of the stairs, heard me go out, went into the kitchen, grabbed the candlestick, and then-what?

All right. Now: why? He'd grabbed it and moved it down here. Logically, he'd wanted me to know that I wasn't alone in the house. Then he had gone-where? Back upstairs? I didn't think so, unless he was really light on his feet, because I think I would have run into him, or at least heard him. There were back stairs from the lowerlevel kitchens up to the main, public rooms floor, but they changed direction twice before coming out in the central hallway above.

I decided to test all my theorizing. I went back up the stairs and lowered the trapdoor while standing on the steps. Instant black darkness, with a tiny crack of light around the door edges. I then knelt down on the topmost step, hunched over underneath the door, and scanned the wall between me and the kitchen, using the flashlight. Nothing.

I turned off the flashlight and looked again. There: a tiny, pencil-sized hole between two studs. I peered through it and could see most of the kitchen. That solved the watching problem. I pushed the trapdoor back open and latched it back. The tiny peephole was under the counter, visible only if you knew where to look.

If he hadn't gone back upstairs, then he was down in the basement somewhere. Since the basement was empty, there had to be another way out of the basement. I went back down the wooden stairs and began to walk along the four stone walls, probing with my hands and the flashlight, looking through the empty shelves for signs of a secret doorway. There seemed to be nothing but solid stone. I checked the pit, but it was just hard-packed dirt and still about three feet deep.