P Deutermann - Nightwalkers

So: Secret passage, where are you? It had to have something to do with that one set of shelves down there that had the solid wooden back. I decided to look through the old outbuildings to see if I could find any indications of foot traffic.

Thirty minutes later I'd discovered nothing useful. One building was indeed a smokehouse, a second looked like it had been a blacksmith shop of some kind, and the third was a long, low springhouse, complete with a pool of icy water laced with watercress. All of the buildings were made of the same handmade, oversized brick as the main house. All the fittings were wrought iron and looked original. A tiny brook headed downhill from the springhouse, but nothing else moved on the grounds except for an occasional and now respectfully distant squirrel.

Still and all, I thought, that had to be how it was done, excluding the duty ghostly spirit. Some kind of subterranean access had to be behind that set of shelves. The real question was why someone was screwing around in the first place. Was I supposed to be scared off? I decided to wait for further exploration until I had a crew here working, and then we'd disassemble that wooden shelf structure, with a backhoe if necessary, and find out where the secrets lay. In the meantime, I might still have a real ghost to deal with, back in Summerfield, if the demise of his hired killer failed to deter him. On that dismal possibility, I needed to get going on my move to the country. That meant a second visit to the stone cottage, and then a U-Haul operation.

By Tuesday of the following week, I was all moved in and now a semipermanent resident of Rockwell County. Cubby Johnson, the Lees' outside man, helped me move my stuff into the cottage and get my new digs up and running. Cubby was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties, and, except for a stint in the army, he had never really left Rockwell County. He and his wife, Patience, had worked for the Lees for most of their lives. He was a powerfully built black man, five-eight, with a fringe of graying hair around an otherwise bald pate, a round, intelligent face, and the handshake of a blacksmith. He had a low, mellifluous voice, and I assumed he was as curious about me as I was about the Lee family. It became clear during our first real meeting that we were going to observe a tacit agreement to let further details of our respective backgrounds unfold in the due course of time so as to maintain southern civility. It was also clear that he felt a certain responsibility to protect the Lees in their eccentricities in return for what had become absolute, lifetime job security for him and his wife. I let it be known that I was cool with the Lees' lifestyle, having seen far stranger things than Hester and Valeria Lee in my law enforcement career.

Cubby told me Ms. Hester was ailing, which meant that Ms. Valeria was attending, so I didn't see either of them in the course of moving in. Carol Pollard brought by a proposed restoration plan, and we agreed to get the thing going as soon as I closed the real estate transaction. David Oatley had hinted that closing could happen the following week if I was willing to forgo the due diligence. He'd shown me the four stone boundary markers, which looked like they'd been there since Washington was a surveyor. Being a stranger to these parts, however, I elected to go through the paper drill just to be sure.

The shooting investigation had faded to black, which often happened when the perpetrator got himself killed, thereby solving the major mystery. The sheriff's office had not been able to pin anything on Billie Ray, although he remained the logical suspect. The parole office forced him into a minimum wage job and then made him report what he did with his money, such as it was. The woman he was living with was a supposedly reformed crack queen, who, in the opinion of the detectives, was barely able to get herself from one end of their mobile home to the other. All of which left me with the lingering suspicion that my ghost problem might not be over.

In order to stay as far off the grid as possible in my new lodgings, I did not set up a landline telephone. I left the electricity and propane accounts with the Lees. I told the local post office in Summerfield to send all mail to my office as I was going to be in Europe for the next year. It was admittedly thin cover, but it might fool an ex-con for a while. I contacted a local Summerfield Realtor and made arrangements to rent my house, but not until after I'd closed on Glory's End. In the meantime, I needed to get some more folks on my side in Rockwell County.

Carol brought the first contractor out to Glory's End that Tuesday afternoon. He was the electrical guy, and he gave me a tour of the house's electrical system, such as it was. The wiring was from the 1950s and was the fabric-covered copper variety. There were only eight fuses for the whole house, and four of those had copper pennies underneath blown fuses. The only thing that had saved the house from a fire was that the old lady hadn't used much more than a few lights, an electric hot plate, and the furnace fan.

"So," I said. "A complete rewire?"

He nodded. "That's the safe way to go," he said. "This stuff hasn't met code for forty years, and the woodwork through which it's routed has zero moisture content. Plus, if you're going to live here, you're probably going to put a much bigger electrical load on the system."

He explained that he would disconnect the old wiring but leave much of it in place in order to avoid damaging the plaster and run all new, modern, meaning grounded, conductors. In some cases he could use the old wiring to fish the new cable up through walls and floors. "The good news is that there aren't any fire-stops in these walls," he said. "The bad news…"

He agreed to leave the current system operational until he was ready to proceed with the rip-out and the new installation. He then set about surveying the system so he could work up a bid, while Carol and I talked about the first few major steps to a renovation. As casually as I could, I asked her about the possibility of an underground passage in or around the house.

"Well, I guess it's possible," she said, "but what purpose would it serve? You've seen the covered walkways back to the service buildings, and it wasn't the plantation owners who would have to go out in the snow to fetch the firewood."

"The war, maybe? A place to hide themselves or their valuables if the Yankee hordes arrived?"

She nodded but pointed out that the Yanks had not come through this part of the South until the very end and that, beyond the house itself, the countryside was so impoverished by then that there'd been nothing much to hide or protect.

"The legislature and the governor were forever calling the citizens to arms and to fight to the last man and child," she said, "but the few remaining fighting men who'd survived to 1865 were with General Lee at Appomattox. It wasn't like Georgia when Sherman went through."

She was curious why I was asking, so I decided to tell her about the light-footed candlestick and my convoluted theory about how someone could have done it, if there was a passage.

"Great!" she exclaimed, happily. "A mystery, and maybe even a ghost."

"And that's good news-why?"

"Because every old southern mansion needs a ghost or two," she said. "It's traditional."

"Um…"

"Oh, you don't have to believe it," she said, "but if I tell that story in town, it'll simply make the place more interesting in everyone's eyes. Plus, the stranger now has a challenge on his hands beyond fixing up the house. Cool."

"You have to tell it, don't you?"

She laughed. "Absolutely," she said. "It'll be the first of many stories, Mr. Richter, and, as I told you, this is a-"

"Very small town," I finished for her. "Got that. If it's a human and not hoodoo, though, my cop instincts are not amused."