Part 11 (2/2)

But then she saw it, half hidden behind one of the wooden file cabinets, which had been pulled away from the wall just far enough to reveal- ”A tunnel,” breathed Ellie, s.h.i.+ning her flashlight at it. ”So it's true.”

”Seems like,” said Jake, eyeing the opening mistrustfully. It was a brick archway, five feet wide, maybe seven feet tall. In the light of Ellie's flashlight, it gaped like a dark, open mouth.

”Roger was telling the truth about that much, anyway,” she went on. ”Did Anne know about it?” she added to Bella.

But Bella just shook her head, tight-lipped. It struck Jake suddenly that Bella didn't like being down here at all.

Nor did she appear to want Jake to notice this; Jake turned her attention back to the tunnel, and the huge piece of furniture half blocking it. Experimentally, she leaned on the thing. ”You know, there must be a way to move this... .” she began.

Whereupon it did move; the cabinet was on wheels, and despite its weight it slid easily. Once she had rolled it farther away from the tunnel, they could see that a pair of old rails led into it, like train tracks but thinner and set more narrowly together.

At their near end a chunk of old railroad tie was secured to the cellar floor with two huge spikes. It was a stop block for the rail car, Jake realized. A pulley was bolted into the bricks above the arch.

For pulling the cart back up, she supposed. ”They brought the finished cans down here from the factory that was at the rear of the house, back then,” she said, imagining it.

Nowadays, the factory building itself was only a memory. But there were photographs of it in Peavey Library, of long, shedlike sections built onto one another as the business grew.

”On a conveyor belt, maybe. Or on carts. The cans went on a car, probably, down to the wharf.”

There they would be filled with small, silvery fish. ”They could bring the pallets of tin up here that way, too. The tin to make the cans with.”

The raw materials, as Roger Dodd had put it. Jake thought about the domestic life of the house going on upstairs, of the starched white curtains, cooks and scullery girls, and maids in caps, with all that industrial rumbling going on below and behind.

”Everything they needed came in here.”

Not the pleasantest sounds to live with, probably, but maybe they thought of the commotion as the sound of money pouring in. Still, why put the tunnel here at all?

”I suppose since they already had a cellar here,” she began doubtfully.

”Ledge,” said Bella, understanding Jake's puzzlement. A wish for domestic peace was one thing they had always shared.

”This is the only place on the property where they could put a tunnel,” Bella went on. ”The rest is granite ledge, like the whole island. Anne wanted a garden, but you can't dig six inches without hitting rock. Except right here.”

Here Jake could see far enough into the tunnel to note that its walls were of earth, braced with enormous timbers. And digging was cheaper than blasting, as well as less likely to damage the house.

Drawing back, Bella made an unhappy face. ”Dark.”

”Over here,” called Ellie. Jake turned from the tunnel's mouth toward another part of the bas.e.m.e.nt.

”Look,” said Ellie as she emerged from a small room under the cellar stairs. ”I think Randy Dodd's been here. I think he's been-”

The tiny, granite-block-walled room looked as if it might once have served as a bomb shelter. ”Back in the fifties a lot of people around here built rooms like this,” Bella told them. ”Stocked them with supplies. But I didn't know the Langs had one.”

They went in. The room had no windows, just one thick, heavy wooden door, and many wooden wall shelves loaded with water jugs and old, unappetizing-looking cans, their once-bright labels now faded, mouse-chewed, or absent altogether.

But it also held a low iron bed, a bedside table with a lamp on it, a wooden chair with a denim jacket thrown over the back of it, and a card table with a spiral notebook open on it.

Tattered paper bits in the notebook's wire spiral said that pages had been torn out of it. Otherwise the room was bare-no books or newspapers, no radio or TV. It was more like a cell than a room where anyone actually lived.

A place where the life of the mind had been extinguished, or had never existed at all ... but then, Jake guessed Randy Dodd didn't care much about what went on outside his own head. On the other hand, what went on inside his head creeped her out very thoroughly, never more so than now as she took in the undeniable fact that he was real.

Not an imaginary bogeyman, one others had seen recently but not her. A living man, who slept in a bed, wore clothes, and ate-she looked into the small metal basket by the table-Ritz crackers and Campbell's Chunky soups.

”Do you think Roger knew Randy was down here?” Ellie asked as she lifted the denim jacket and stuck her hand in each of its pockets.

Jake shook her head as Ellie's search came up empty. ”If he was.” But as a hideout it made sense. No windows down here, so no light spied by anyone outside ...

Jake recalled Roger saying that Randy had found the tunnel while scavenging the cellar for valuables. So he would have known about the room. ”I'm betting it was him, though,” she finished.

She snapped on the bedside lamp, its bulb casting a weak yellow glow on the room's dingy walls. ”I wish I knew what he wrote in this,” she said, eyeing the notebook.

Bella plucked it up, angling it this way and that in the sallow lamplight. ”Hey,” said Jake, ”what're you-”

Bella put the book down again and left the room hurriedly, returning a moment later with her hands extended in distaste. It was the way she held them at home, Jake recognized, when they had gotten filthy and she wanted to wash them, p.r.o.nto.

But this time, the stuff on her fingers was furnace soot. Brus.h.i.+ng past Jake and Ellie, she positioned the spiral notebook on the table under the lamp. Something had been written in it, and urgently, too; with the light at this angle, grooves showed where someone had pressed down hard with a pen or pencil.

Lightly, Bella smoothed a finger across the blank top page. Sooty smears appeared, but not in the grooves. Whatever had been written on the torn-out page showed as faint white lines in the blackened soot marks.

Around them the Dodd House seemed to hunker down for another evening of lonely misery. Another mouse squeaked, cousin no doubt to the one the cat had dispatched. A timber settled; a floorboard creaked.

Bella's hand trembled, resting on the sooty page. Suddenly, Jake was again aware of the silent kitchen upstairs and the happy hours Bella had probably spent there with her friend, before Anne Dodd was found stabbed to death on the linoleum floor.

She looked down at what the touch of Bella's hand had revealed.

It was a map.

”SO YOU'RE AWAKE.”

Hours after he'd grabbed her off the street and bundled her into the trunk of a car, the man who'd taken her crouched beside Carolyn Rathbone on the deck of a boat bound for who knew where.

By now it was dark again; twenty hours or so, she thought, since her old life had ended and this new, terrible existence had begun. The boat had sat idle for a while, she did not know where or how, but now they were under power once more.

She fought to keep her eyes open, her mind clear. But it was no use; the damp, cold hours she'd spent lying there injured on the hard deck, weeping and suffering and fearing she was about to be killed at any moment, had taken their toll.

Everything hurt: her head, her hand, her neck, her legs. No physical part of her had escaped the constant battering of the boat's b.u.mp, b.u.mp, b.u.mp across the waves. As for her mind-Better not go there, some tiny surviving part of her sanity instructed. No siree, best not lift the lid of that particular b.o.o.by hatch, or what flies out at you- He put the point of his knife to her neck. That woke her up, all right, that tiny sharpness in her vulnerable flesh.

What flies out at you might scare you to death. A whimper forced its way up her swollen throat; on top of everything else she was thirsty, so thirsty ...

Now she knew what those other girls had endured, the ones whose pictures she'd seen, whose case files she'd read through, while writing her first book. She licked the salty mist from her cracked lips, knowing it would make her feel worse but unable to stop herself.

The man touched the tip of the knife to her throat again, drawing it lazily across her skin and then, suddenly, moving it to her eyelid. ”Here,” he murmured. ”Or ... here.”

She cringed, holding her breath. Something in his face said he wanted to kill her, wanted to very badly. His weird, worked-on face with its tiny white scars and odd, lumpy places ...

Right now, he wanted to do it. Right this minute. She looked past him, up into the sky at a white seagull sailing on a sea of darkness.

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