A Real Pickle (13 page)

I had a hunch that I was going to be in for a long night.

To make matters worse, the storm picked up again, and as lightning flashed just outside my window, I decided that a candlelit bath would be a luxury that I didn’t need.  I slipped into my jammies and crawled into the big bed, preparing myself for a long and restless night.

Chapter 12

 I woke up sometime in the middle of the night in complete and utter darkness, and at first I thought that the storm must have been what had brought me fully awake.  

Then, as the lightning flashed outside, my room was lit up for one brief instant.

And though I couldn’t see a face, I could clearly make out a figure standing just a few feet from my bed.

Chapter 13

I’m not all that proud of what happened next, but who could blame me?  It wasn’t easy waking up and finding somebody in my room who didn’t belong there.

So I screamed.

The lightning died, and as the thunder boomed, I wondered if anyone had even heard me.  I fumbled for the candle and the matchbook Humphries had given me, but the problem was that I’d been blinded by the intensity of the lightning flash.  I heard a swooshing sound nearby as I knocked the candlestick over.  At least it hadn’t been lit, so there was no danger of me starting a fire.  I slid out of the bed, found the candle, and then I groped around on the nightstand until I found the matches.  As I lit one, I half expected whoever was in there to blow it out.  If they had, my earlier scream would have sounded like a whisper compared to the one I was about to let loose.

The match flared for a moment, and then the flame steadied.  I lit the candle, prepared for a fight.

No one was there, though.

I searched the room, including under the massive bed and behind the shower door, but I was alone.  Worse yet, the chair was still jammed solidly under the bedroom doorknob.  

No one had gotten in that way.  

Was it possible that I’d just dreamed it?

There was a knock coming from the hallway.  

“Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s Moose,” my grandfather said.  “Victoria, are you okay?”

“Hang on a second,” I said.  I struggled to pull the chair out from its place, and I had a tough time moving it because I’d wedged it under the knob so tightly.

“Victoria,” Moose said again more urgently as he knocked again.

I finally managed to unlock the door and I let him in.  

He had a candle of his own, and he was standing there in his pajamas and robe.  “Did I hear you scream earlier?” he asked.

“Someone was in my room,” I said.

“Let me have a look,” Moose said urgently as he brushed past me.

At least no one else had heard my scream.  I locked the door behind him, and then I said, “Moose, I’ve already searched the place thoroughly.”

“Then it won’t hurt if I have a look around myself,” he said.  My grandfather checked every space there that was large enough to hide someone, including the back of the closet and under the chest of drawers.  After he was satisfied, he said, “Sometimes after I eat a particularly spicy meal, I’ve been known to have nightmares that strangers are in the house,” he said.

“This was no nightmare,” I told him.  “I’m certain of it.”

“Take it easy.  I believe you.  Was it a man or a woman?”

“I couldn’t tell you.  Whoever it was, their back was turned to me.  It was eerily like what happened at the diner yesterday.”

Moose frowned.  “I know that you don’t want to hear this, but it could still just have been a nightmare,” he said.  “Why
wouldn’t
you have bad dreams about what happened, Victoria?  Someone came into our space and killed a friend of ours.  I’ve had a few nightmares about that tonight myself, and I wasn’t even there when it happened.”

“It was real enough,” I said as I looked around the room again.  The light from one candle wasn’t all that much, but with Moose’s added to the illumination, I could see decently now.  

As I looked at the desk, I suddenly realized that I had proof.

The box we’d used to collect clues from Curtis’s room was gone.

Chapter 14

“The box is gone, Moose,” I said calmly.

He looked hard at me.  “Where did you put it?”

“It was right there on top of the desk when I went to sleep,” I said.

Moose shook his head.  “That’s really too bad.  I had high hopes for what we found, and now it’s all gone.”

“Not so fast,” I said as I reached for the pillowcase where I’d stuffed everything.  I felt a little dread in the pit of my stomach as I grabbed it.  How could the killer possibly know what I’d done with the actual contents?  Then again, if the killer watched me hide everything through some kind of secret panel or hidden camera, we didn’t have a chance.

Thankfully, it was all there.

“I’ve got it,” I said.

Moose’s grin was broad and wide.  “That was brilliant, Victoria, just brilliant.  What made you hide everything in a pillowcase?”

“I figured that it couldn’t hurt,” I said.

“I’m glad that you did.  You outsmarted a murderer tonight, young lady.”

“What if they come back when they find the two paperbacks I stashed in the box?  There is no way that I’m getting back to sleep tonight.”

“Bring everything with you.  You’re bunking in my room tonight.  You can have the bed.  I don’t sleep as much as I used to, so I’ll stand guard duty.”

“I don’t feel right putting you out like that,” I protested.

“Sorry, but I’m going to have to insist.  Come on, it will be fun.”

I honestly wasn’t all that happy about spending what was left of the night by myself, so I really didn’t fight him that hard.  “I’ll come with you, but only if we take shifts staying awake.”

“Sold, as long as I get the first watch.”

“I can live with that,” I said.  I hesitated before I made a move to leave, though.  “Moose, how did they get in?”

“Humphries told us that this place was riddled with secret passageways, remember?”

“Then what makes you think that your room is going to be any safer than this one?” I asked.

“Because we’ll be ready for whoever it is the next time,” he said.  My grandfather sounded a lot more confident than I felt, but really, I didn’t have much choice.  We had to stay at the house since that’s where all of our suspects were, but there was no way that I was spending another night alone.  I would rather sleep a bit and then wake up in the morning a little cranky than wrestle with the killer.  

“Let’s go, Victoria.”

“I’ve still got to pack my bag,” I said.

“You can’t do that.  We don’t want the killer to realize that you saw them.”

“Moose, I screamed, remember?  
Nobody’s
going to forget that.”

“Maybe not,” my grandfather said, “but I’m betting they believe you’ll pass it all off as a bad dream come morning.  After all, what proof is there that they were even here?”

“I don’t know. That stolen box is a pretty big clue,” I replied.

“Yes, you’re right.  I hadn’t thought about that.  Do you have any suggestions?”

“We could always tell Jeffrey and the others that I misplaced it.  We can even have them help us look for it in the morning if we decide that it’s a good idea.”

“That might work if we get desperate,” Moose said.  “I’m afraid that it’s going to make you look a little scatterbrained, though.”

“If that’s the worst thing that happens to me in the next few days, I’ll consider myself lucky,” I said.  “Besides, it could be helpful watching how everyone reacts to the news when I admit that I had a nightmare last night.  It might make the killer complacent enough to make another mistake.”

“What did they do wrong this time?” Moose asked me as we walked to his room.

“They tried to play me for a fool,” I said, “and I’m not about to forget that.”

I don’t know how I managed it, but I slept a bit more after all.  I stretched as I got out of Moose’s bed, and I found him nodding off in one of the chairs.

I touched his arm lightly, and he came straight awake.  

“Moose, it’s morning.”

“What?  I must have dozed off.  Did they get your pillowcase?” he asked.

I checked and found the contents intact.  “We’ve still got everything we took from Curtis’s room.”

“I can’t
believe
that I fell asleep.  Some watchdog I turned out to be.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it.  Nothing happened.”

“No,” my grandfather said, “but it
might
have.”

“Cheer up,” I said.  “It’s a brand-new day, and we’ve got a lot to do.”

“You’re right, there’s no use worrying about spilled milk under the bridge,” he said with a wry smile.  That’s when I knew that he was going to be okay.  My grandfather enjoyed wordplay, and mixing old adages was right up his alley.  “What’s first on our list?”

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but the first thing that
I
want to do is to figure out how someone got into my room last night.”

“I’m curious about that myself.  You might not know this, but I’ve studied some of the old house plans that sported secret passageways.”

I looked at him oddly.  “Why in the world would you ever do that?”

He grinned at me.  “I wanted to put one in the house Martha and I were building, but she wouldn’t let me.”

“I find it hard to believe that she’d say no about something like that.”  My grandmother enjoyed a good joke as much as anyone, and having a passageway in her home that no one knew about fit that bill perfectly.

“She was on board until she found out how much square footage it would have eaten,” Moose said.  “Still, I picked up a few tricks when I was studying.”

“Then let’s see what we can find,” I said.

“You go on.  I want to change first.  You don’t mind, do you?”

“Go right ahead,” I said, though I wasn’t really sure that I felt brave enough to go back into my room alone.  At least it was morning, and with fresh light pouring in through the windows, I didn’t have to deal with candlelight.  “I’ll see you soon.”

I opened his bedroom door slightly and peeked out into the hallway.  No one was up yet.  Well, they might have been, but if they were, they weren’t out of their rooms.  I hurried down the hall to my room, and I was breathing hard as I opened it, slipped inside, and locked it behind me.  As I changed quickly, I felt a little paranoid, as though someone might be watching me.  That fear was not without merit.  I had to admit that I felt better once I was in fresh jeans and T-shirt.  Moose still wasn’t there yet, so I decided to have a look around myself.  As I approached a paneled wall, I started pressing everything in sight, from moldings to wall sconces to the panels themselves.  While I was searching, I flipped on a table lamp to see if our power had been restored yet.  It had, much to my delight, so I got out my charger and my phone and I hooked everything up.

After I plugged it in, though, there was no green light displayed on my phone showing that it was charging.

I tried another outlet, and sure enough, this time the light shone brightly.  Was the first outlet dead, or was it something else entirely?  Getting down on my hands and knees, I tried looking into the slots where the plug went, but I couldn’t see anything that didn’t look right.  Glancing around the room, I couldn’t find anything to use to unscrew the wall plate, but then I remembered that I had a pair of tweezers in my overnight bag.  Holding them on an angle, I was able to work the compressed blades into the slot of the screw that held everything in place, and I started to turn it.  It took a few tries, but I finally got it all the way out, and I pulled the plate off.

No wonder I couldn’t get the phone to charge.

There were no wires leading into the outlet, but there was a single thin rod threaded through the back of it.

I pressed the outlet and realized that it was loose.  I tried the top, and then the bottom, toggling it back and forth like a switch.

Nothing happened.

And then I turned back to the paneled wall where I’d been searching earlier.

One of the sections looked a little out of alignment, and as I got close to it, I could see that instead of being attached to the wall, it was on a hinge.

I’d found my secret door.

Before I could explore further, though, there was a knock at my door.  Was it Moose, or had someone come to see what I was up to?

“One second,” I said as I put the outlet cover back in place and replaced the screw.  As I walked to the door, I took a moment to push the secret entrance closed.  If it was Moose, I was sure that I could repeat the results, but if someone else was visiting, I didn’t want there to be any evidence of what I’d found.

The knocking was harder now.

“Victoria, are you okay?”  It was Moose.

I opened the door and let him in.  “Take it easy.  I’m fine.”

“What took you so long?” he said as he rushed in.

“I found something,” I said.

“Well, don’t keep me waiting.  What is it?”

“Watch this,” I said as I knelt down by the outlet again.  I didn’t have to remove the cover this time.  Pushing on the top, then the bottom, and then the top again, I grinned up at Moose as I saw the door release behind him.

He didn’t see it, though.  “I don’t get it.”

“Turn around,” I said.

He saw the passageway instantly.  “How did you
do
that?”

“I’d love to say that I figured it out all by myself, but I was actually just trying to charge my cellphone.”

“It’s not what I was expecting,” my grandfather said as he peered into the darkness.  Moose started to step in, but something was holding him back.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“You found this.  You should get to explore it first.”

“You don’t mind?”

“It’s killing me not to go first, but right is right,” he said.  “I’ll stay here and guard your exit.  Would you like to take a candle with you?”

“I guess I’d better,” I said as I grabbed the one on the desk.  “This is going to be so cool.”