David Morrell - The Totem

"A roof above the servants' quarters in the back. I don't know how he'd jump down and not hurt himself."

"The trees around the house. Are there any he could lean to and climb down?"

"I never thought… I just don't know."

"The back," Slaughter told the two policemen coming toward him. "Make sure no one leaves the building. It's the kid we're looking for."

"The kid?"

Slaughter realized that these two men had not been with him at the boy's house. "Never mind. Just make sure no one leaves. Be careful of the roof above the servants' quarters."

Slaughter gave the injured man to the two men from the ambulance. They stared, and Slaughter looked down at the blood across his own hands and his shirt. "A young boy bit him. That's right, isn't it?" he asked the woman.

She was nodding.

"Bit me," Dunlap heard the injured man repeating, his voice distorted, rasping. Added to what he'd been feeling, Dun-lap was fearful that the jagged throat would do the job and make him sick. He had to glance away.

More sirens, two police cars skidding up the gravel driveway, a dust cloud rising behind them. Slaughter hurried toward them.

Dunlap frowned in the middle of it all. The two men from the ambulance had opened out the back and set the injured man inside. The woman was inside her car and moving it. Slaughter stood between the cruisers, talking to the officers who'd just arrived.

Dunlap turned to face the mansion, squinting through the dusk toward the two policemen at the front door. This was all too much. He was shaking even worse as he walked toward the woman who was getting from her car where she had moved it to the side.

"What is this place?"

"The Baynard mansion."

"Who?"

And Dunlap learned then about Baynard who had been the richest man around here. Back in 1890. "He had cattle all across the valley, and he built this place up here to suit a Southern woman he had married."

There was something automatic in the way she said it, Dunlap thought. As if she'd said it many times before. He listened with wonder as in bits and pieces she explained how Baynard had brought from the South the wood, the furniture, the bushes, everything to make his wife feel more at home. And then his wife had gone back South one summer where she died. Either that, or else she left him, and he lied about her dying.

"No one knows for sure," the woman said. "We've tried to find the record of her death. We never managed. She had reasons if she left him. He was hardly ever home, tending business, working as a senator. Plus, there were rumors about certain kinds of parties on the third floor. But he said she died, and everyone agreed to that, and he came back and never left the house again."

Dunlap was amazed that she seemed more concerned with what she said than with the preparations going on around them. He learned how people said that Baynard wandered through the house for days on end. The cause of death was claimed to be a heart attack, but everyone suspected he just drank himself to death. And one thing more-the rumors that he killed her, that she told him she was leaving, and an overbearing man like him, he flew into such a rage that she was dead before he even knew he'd struck her. Then he hid the body, and he wasted in his grief. At last he killed himself, and people in the family hushed it up.

"But those are rumors, as I said." The woman shrugged. "Nobody ever proved it, though in recent years they looked for her. They never were successful."

"But back in eighteen-ninety… how come you know all about this?"

"I'm a member of the Potter's Field Historical Society."

"I still don't understand."

So she explained. "No one lives here. Baynard had two children. They grew up to manage the estate. Then they had children, and this new set gave the mansion to the county to avoid the taxes. They're not very wealthy now. They live in houses down the hill beside the swimming pool. We've fixed this place up just the way it used to be. The plumbing's from the eighteen-nineties. We even shut the power off. To get around at night, you have to use a flashlight, either that or candles or a lantern if you want to be authentic."

Dunlap faced the mansion. Oh, that's swell, he thought. So now we've got a haunted house. The only thing that's missing is a thunderstorm.

Well, there wouldn't be a storm, but sundown would do just as fine. He saw the orange distorted disc where it was almost behind the western mountains. In a while, the grounds would be completely dark, except for flashlights, headlights, maybe even candles, lanterns as this woman had suggested, and the search up through the mansion for the little boy. He felt his scalp tighten as the woman said beside him, "Whose child is it?"

"I don't know."

Exhausted, Dunlap walked toward Slaughter, who spoke to four policemen.

"We need nets," Dunlap heard as he came closer.

"Nets?"

And Dunlap saw that it was Rettig, standing with the young policeman Dunlap had gone to Slaughter's with this morning. That seemed several days ago.

"You heard me. Nets. You think that we should club him, do you?" Slaughter asked. "Or shoot him?"

"But nets, I don't know where you'd find them."

"Try a sporting-goods store, or that zoo down in the park. Rettig, you're in charge of that. The rest of you, I want you watching both sides of the mansion. Let's get moving."

They stared at Slaughter. Then they hurried toward the mansion.

"Hold it," Slaughter told them.

They spun to face him.

"Give your keys to this man. I want your headlights on the building."

They glanced at Dunlap who had not expected this. Instinctively, he held his hand out. Then he had a set of car keys. Mindless, he expected more, but then he realized that Rettig would take one car. These keys fit another. Slaughter's was the third car, and the fourth had been driven by the two policemen who were in the mansion. They separated to watch the sides as Slaughter shoved a ring of keys at him.

"You understand?"

"I think so," Dunlap said. "I'll spread the cars out so they're pointed toward the windows."

"Run the engines. I don't want the batteries to die. And use the searchlights by the sideview mirrors."

"What about the woman's car?"

"You've got the right idea."

Dunlap nodded, running toward the cruisers. Slaughter's car he recognized, and Rettig now was driving down the gravel driveway, siren wailing. Dunlap went toward the car beside where Rettig had been parked, and got in, fumbling for a key to fit, and started the engine. In a while he understood that someone else could just as easily have done this, but the tactic was a way for Slaughter to distract him.

It helped. There wasn't any doubt about that. Breathing quickly, taken up with interest, Dunlap adjusted to the burning in his stomach. He was glad to be in motion, driving the cruiser toward the mansion, aiming straight ahead and stopping where he judged that the headlights would be most effective. He groped down to turn them on. He found the switch upon the searchlight, and he flicked it, and this right side of the mansion, almost to the second story, was bright against the dusk.

He got out, running now toward Slaughter's car and did the same, this time aiming toward the left side of the mansion, and the place was lit up there as well. The woman had been watching, and she didn't need to have somebody tell her. She was getting in her car to move it once again, aiming toward the front door, and the sun was down below the mountains, the park a murky gray below him, but the windows reflected all the headlights, and people wouldn't have to stumble in the darkness.

Dunlap heard another car. He thought it was a cruiser, but the siren wasn't wailing, and he didn't see the silhouette of domelights on the roof. As it stopped where he was watching, he could see the mother and the father. Oh, dear God, no.