Харлан Кобен - Found

“Okay,” Ema said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

I frowned at her.

“I know how much you want to be part of that team,” she said.

“And I know that scares you,” I said.

“What?”

“You think I’ll start hanging out with them instead of you?”

Ema shook her head. “You’re so thick sometimes.”

“That’s not it?”

“No, that’s not it.”

We were outside now. The night air was cool, and I welcomed it. Hospital air is always stilted and heavy. It is hard to breathe in a hospital. I stopped a moment and sucked in a deep breath.

“Then what?” I asked.

“Never mind.”

“Come on, don’t be like that. What?”

“With some people, you tell them the oven is hot, they don’t touch it,” Ema said. “But other people have to touch the oven. They have to feel the pain.”

I frowned again. “That’s deep, Ema. And isn’t it supposed to be a frying pan?”

She stopped and put her hands on my arms. I saw her eyes in the moonlight look up at me. We just stood there a second and a weird thought hit me:

I wanted to kiss her.

I don’t think I ever consciously thought about that before. We had always been squarely in the “friend zone.” But looking down on her in this wonderful light, I wanted to cup her face in my hands and kiss her.

“You’re going to touch the oven,” she said. “I want to protect you from that pain. But I can’t. I can only tell you that when it hurts, I’ll be there for you.”

“And I’ll be there for you,” I said. “Always.”

“Always,” Ema repeated.

We stared into each other’s eyes. I don’t know how long. I was about to move my hands to her face when someone driving by us honked and yelled, “Get a room!”

That broke the spell.

Ema’s hands slid off my arms. She took a step back. We both turned and started for home. We walked in silence for a while. Neither of us would raise this. We would both just pretend the moment never happened. With each step it seemed farther away, as though we were leaving the near kiss in the hospital parking lot. The tension eased.

We were becoming just friends again.

When we reached the intersection, Ema surprised me by starting down the road toward Bat Lady’s now-burned-down house. I stayed right by her side.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“There are tunnels under the house. That’s what you told me.”

“Right.”

“And last time we went down to the basement, we found a clue.”

“You’re thinking maybe we can find another?”

Ema shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

I had thought the same thing, of course. It was dark out now. It would be easier to approach without being seen by neighbors. Then again, the night also made an already spooky place even spookier. We stopped on the sidewalk.

Up ahead of us, the house’s collapsed remains stood in menacing silhouette. The streetlights were dim. The house had been built right along the woods. It was odd, I thought now, how none of the trees behind it caught fire.

What horrors, I wondered, had this house seen over the years?

We didn’t have flashlights on us, but we had our smartphones. I got the flashlight app ready. I didn’t want to use it until we were belowground. A light might be seen by nosy neighbors. They’d call the police, and let’s just say that wouldn’t end well.

Our approach was blocked by dozens of signs reading KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING. The yellow tape wrapped around the burned ruins worked like a reflector on a kid’s bike.

“Strange,” Ema whispered.

“What?”

“All the signs, the tape. It’s almost overkill.”

I had thought about that too. Were the police and fire department really that worried about keeping people out? The signs didn’t look officially issued, just something you’d buy at the hardware store. I wondered whether Lizzy Sobek had put them up. I couldn’t see that. Maybe it was one of the other people who worked for the Abeona Shelter. Maybe it was the guy with the shaved head whom I had recently learned was named Dylan Shaykes.

Didn’t matter. I didn’t care about the warnings. I was going in. There might be clues about Jared Lowell somewhere in the bowels of this property, but I was more thinking that there might be information about my father’s sworn enemy, the mysterious Luther.

Bat Lady — sorry, I still thought of her that way rather than Lizzy Sobek — had said that Luther had been rescued by Abeona and that his photograph had been in that hallway he burned down to the ground.

“Another thing,” Ema whispered.

“What?”

“Why did Luther set the house on fire?”

“Because I was in it.”

It was too dark to see her face, but I could feel her skeptical frown. “So why not, I don’t know, shoot or stab you? Why burn an entire house to the ground?”

I saw where she was going with this. “Because he wanted to destroy evidence.”

“Could be.”

“And some of the evidence—”

“Could be in those tunnels under the house,” Ema finished for me.

We reached what had been the front stoop before the fire. I remembered how decrepit the house had been, how the very foundations seemed to shake when I knocked on that door, how the paint job was so old that flakes fell off as though it had a bad case of dandruff.

Now the house was rubble. But somehow that didn’t seem to lessen the power. The fire had been put out days ago, but an acrid smell assaulted my senses. There was no smoke or smoldering going on, but it still seemed as though steam was coming up from the wreckage. I thought about what this house had held. I thought about the fact that a legendary hero from the Holocaust, long thought dead, had lived here in hiding for so many years. I thought about all the children who had been rescued, all the ones who had temporarily been hidden here or had healed here or had told their tales here.

The building might be gone, but those voices still whispered to us.

Ema took my hand as we stepped into the debris. We had been here before. We knew the way. The fireplace had been on the left. There had been an old photograph of Bat Lady with a group of hippies, probably taken in the sixties. I rescued that picture from the fire. It was in the drawer next to my bed.

Everything in the room was gone — the couch, the old record player where Bat Lady played her rock ’n’ roll vinyl albums, the chair, the armoire, all of it. They were soot and dust.

I flicked on the flashlight app, keeping the beam low. Last time I’d been here, the basement stairs had been blocked by debris. They weren’t now, but that was probably because I had made an opening.

I turned off the app. Okay, I knew where to go now.

I started toward it. Ema stayed with me.

“I’ll go down first and make sure it’s safe,” I said.

“Because you’re the big brave man?”

“Because I’ve been down there before, remember?”

“I do. You made me stay up here, remember?”

I sighed. “You want to go first?”

“And bruise your heroic ego? Not a chance.”

I shook my head. The moonlight was just enough to catch her teasing smile. I wanted to give her a gentle shake. Or maybe kiss her.

Man, I had to stop thinking like this.

The opening was a giant hole. I shined the light down it for a brief moment. The stairs did not look sturdy enough to hold my weight, but I didn’t have any choice. I knew the drop was not far anyway. I just had to be prepared.

When I reached the third step, I heard a cracking noise. I leapt right before the stair gave way and landed on the concrete floor.

“You okay?” Ema asked.

“Fine.”

I turned on my flashlight app. I was below the earth now. The neighbors would not be able to see the beam.