January Thaw (The Murder-By-Month Mysteries) (19 page)

Forty-Seven

“I will say this
once.” His voice was low, dangerous, metal scraping against pavement. “I have Taunita and the kids. I will trade them for the gun.”

“What gun?” I wasn’t playing stupid. I really
was
stupid. He couldn’t possibly be talking about the Civil War musket, which only me, Curtis, and Mrs. Berns knew about. What other gun was there?

“I know about Maurice’s letters. I know the crazy shit thought he had an inheritance coming to him. I can’t take a chance that he might be right. When I heard the stolen gun called in on the police radio, I thought immediately of that damn ‘tunnel of justice.’ I figure you were thinking the same thing, after Taunita told me she’d asked you to look into the whole shitpile when she come to ask Ray to turn himself in.” He laughed, and it was a black sound. “Like Ray would be dumb enough to do that. But Taunita didn’t even give him a chance, did she? She went straight to the police.”

“What?” I felt like the world had flipped me upside down and was going through my pockets for change.

His shifty eyes landed on me. “Where exactly do you think this inheritance was gonna come from? Everyone in my family knows the story that a crazy black man showed up pretending to be a good friend of old Barnaby, claiming he had property rights if anything were to happen to Barnaby’s daughter. But Barnaby’s daughter didn’t live and the man disappeared, and so it all went to my great-great-great-grandpa. Not much of it left, but enough, and my dad isn’t going to live much longer.”

It was falling into place, but into weird place. “You’re not here to deal drugs?”

He laughed. “What is this, a Bond movie? You don’t need to know why I’m here. Suffice to say that it’s a happy coincidence that I first met Maurice Jackson a decade ago, when he was here visiting his grandma, and that we stayed in touch. And it’s an even happier one that he spilled to me about the inheritance he thought he had comin’. How could he know it was tied to the Prospect House? Only people born and raised in Battle Lake know those stories. Crazy world, isn’t it? But I need that gun, now, just in case there’s something to it all.”

“It’s at home.”

“Then you better get it. You think you can find the cabin on Silver Lake, Fire Number 23470?”

I nodded.

“Good. I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes. You better have the gun and no one else. You show up alone, you hand me the gun, and I hand you Taunita and the snot babies. You tell anyone what you’re up to, and the world has three less mouths to feed. And I’m watching you. Understand?”

I nodded again, tongue-tied.

Forty-Eight

I raced back to
my car outside the Fortune, pushing my sore lungs to take in more air. I didn’t see anyone watching me, yet I felt a million eyes crawling across my back as the morning dawned. Plus, Eric’s uncanny ability to anticipate where I was going to be made me feel as vulnerable as a cow in a slaughter chute. I reached my car and let myself in, trying to think things through as I drove. Thank goodness I’d walked to the library, or Eric would have spotted the gun in my back seat. My best bet was to drive home exactly as I’d promised him I would, charge inside, and call Gary immediately. Only in movies are people stupid enough to arrive at an isolated location alone for a trade. Who was I, Chuck Norris?

I raced home and ran to the house. Luna and Tiger Pop were both outside, appearing miffed. One glance at them and I knew what I’d find on the other side of the door: destruction.

All of Taunita’s cleaning was buried under ripped-up cushions and torn-open cupboards. Potato Buds and canned goods were strewn across the floor, furniture tipped over, everything in my bedroom closet thrown onto my bed. I ran from room to room, my breath jagged, but in every space, the story was the same.

Eric had already visited, and he’d left no corner intact.

That meant he knew I’d lied to him about the gun being here. My heart dipped. I hurried to the phone, fear crawling like cold-footed beetles across my skin.

“Calling someone?”

I turned. I hadn’t bothered to close the door behind me. Eric stood there, Timothy on his hip. He must have followed me, and I’d been too frantic inside the house to hear his car.

“Mee-wa!” Timothy held his arms out to me. Dried tears caked his face, and he was sniffling.

I ran forward, but Eric swiveled so his body was between me and Timothy. Luna stood just behind them both, her hackles raised and a low growl in her throat. She was confused. She liked Timothy but knew something wasn’t right here.

“Thought I’d give you time to call the police, did you? What do you think this is, the movies?”

I would have laughed at the irony if I wasn’t so scared. A fresh tear rolled through the crust on Timothy’s face, and he was trembling like a kitten, despite the winter jacket he wore. “The gun is in the back seat of my car.”

“Get it.”

I hurried past him, trying not to look at Timothy. He was leaning away from Eric like he wanted to push off him but was too terrified to do so. I returned in seconds hauling the black hockey duffel. Eric closed the house door behind me, trapping the animals outside.

“Open it.”

I followed his orders, pulling out the long gun.

“Is there something inside of it?”

“I can’t tell,” I said. “It looks like.”

“Get it out.”

“I
can’t
. If I could, I would have already. It’s shoved too far in there.”

“Then smash it.”

“I’m not strong enough.” I didn’t know if this was true or not. “Let me hold Timothy, and you can smash it.”

Eric considered his options, and then tossed Timothy at me. I caught him just before he hit the floor. He clung to me like a baby monkey, trying to crawl inside my coat. I hugged him tight and whispered soothing words, all of them lies.

Eric picked the gun off the floor and glanced down the barrel, presumably spotting the same shadow of paper that I had. He raised the gun above his head and smashed it into the doorway. The crash was deafening. Luna began barking. Eric swung at the door repeatedly until the barrel separated from the stock. He laughed in triumph when he ripped them apart, revealing a scroll of fragile yellow paper.

He yanked it out and unrolled it, his hands shaking. His eyes moved as he read. He smiled. At least I thought he did.

It took me a moment to realize it was a grimace of fury. “It’s a goddamned letter from Orpheus to his wife. It says to look into the tunnel of justice, that she’ll find their due in there, just like the other letter.”

He moved his glance to me, his eyes bright and dangerous. “You have five seconds to figure out what that tunnel of justice is.” He ripped Timothy out of my arms, dangling the boy by an arm. Timothy screamed and tried to kick at him with his tiny legs, but Eric didn’t flinch. I hated him with a rage I’d never felt toward anyone before. I lunged forward, but Eric balled his hand into a fist and held it over Timothy, his threat clear.

I stopped, the rage burning through me with a white heat. I breathed deeply, forcing my mind to clear, thinking as I spoke. I needed to stall until I could think of a way out of this. “How do I know what the tunnel is? It might not even exist at all. Or it might be a place they traveled through, or a … ”

My breath caught in my throat. I could read Libby’s inventory of belongings left with the hanged man as if the words were floating in the air.
Musket 25A, a Bible, a wooden fife, and two quarters, two nickels, and a penny
. The tunnel of justice wasn’t the gun, it was the fife—a battle instrument used to signal victory.

“What is it?” Eric was eyeing me suspiciously, ignoring the squirming, sobbing child reaching out desperately for me.

“If I tell you, you’ll let Taunita and both kids go?”

“What do I want them for? I just need whatever Orpheus thought he had that would give him what’s mine.”

I didn’t trust Eric, but what choice did I have? “I think it’s the fife. Orpheus was the hanged man they found by the Prospect House in 1865. The hanged man came back from the war with a fife, and I think that’s what he meant when he referred to the tunnel of justice.”

Whether it would have anything in it, or whether it was what Eric and I were looking for, remained to be seen.

“Take me to it.”

Forty-Nine

Which is how Timothy,
Eric, and I found ourselves in the kitchen of the Prospect House, talking to Carter Stone. Eric had warned me that I better keep quiet and make sure the same was true of Timothy, or we’d never see Taunita and Alessa again.

“
Tell me again why you want to see the wooden chest?” Carter directed the question at me, but he was eyeing Eric.

“We think there might be something inside it to help with the … story I’m writing,” I said. I was sweating desperation. Eric had let me hold Timothy to quiet him down, but I was hyper-aware of the Offerdahl heir’s hair-trigger penchant for violence.

Carter shrugged. “It’s still up by the attic. Let me tell Libby what we’re up to.” He disappeared downstairs and returned moments later, not making eye contact with any of us. Had he felt the terror oozing out my pores? Could he see how frightened Timothy was? Had he told Libby to call the police? I prayed to every god I didn’t believe in.

“Follow me.”

Eric signaled for me to trail immediately behind Carter. The hair on the back of my neck prickled and every animal instinct in me yelled not to let Eric stand at my vulnerable back, but without knowing where he had Taunita and Alessa or what sort of shape they were in, I had no choice.

As we took the first flight of stairs, Eric was too amped up to make appropriate conversation but tried nonetheless. “Must be nice to live in a house like this. You get to live here?”

Carter glanced over his shoulder, his hand on the stair railing. The Prospect House was closed for business today so the police could continue to gather evidence on the break-in. We were the only ones inside, besides Libby. “My wife and I live next door, in the carriage house.”

“This used to be my family’s place. I’m an Offerdahl.” There was an uncomfortable note of possessiveness in his voice, like he was daring Carter to contradict him.

“You don’t say.”

We climbed the second set of stairs, this one steeper than the first. I wanted to run, to inform Carter what was going on, to believe that help was on its way, but I kept myself calm through force of will. My hope was that we would find exactly what Eric was looking for and there would be no violence. We ascended the final full set of stairs, the narrow ones. We had to duck to reach the third-floor landing.

“They must not have had many fat people around when they built this house,” Eric remarked with a snigger.

“Over there,” Carter said, pointing across the room. We stood in the only clear area on the landing. Around us was the chaos of uncataloged items that I remembered from my first visit here—cardboard boxes with scribbled labels, stacks of musty-smelling clothing, old toys, moldering newspapers. “We have a record of what’s inside, but we don’t know where to put it yet.”

On the edge of the chaos rested a plain wooden box, so old the wood had gone gray. “Hanged Man” was written on the side of it, along with the date of March 1865. A stack of newspapers towered behind it, nearly reaching the ceiling. Behind that was one last tiny set of stairs that Carter had informed me led to the attic the first time I visited.

Eric strode to the box and kneeled. He undid the brass latches on the front and lifted the lid, pawing through the contents. Carter, Timothy, and I were all watching as Eric stood and turned, the wooden fife in his hand. It was nearly as long as his forearm, carved out of a blonde-gray wood, crudely formed but lasting all these years. Eric peered through one end as if it were a telescope. A triumphant smile slid across his face like oil.

“I see it.” He dug his finger in. The sound of dry paper riffled through the air.

Behind Eric, the door to the attic, the unreachable door, began to slowly, deliberately creak open. My heart jumped into my throat. Eric, oblivious, continued to dig inside the fife. I held my breath, terrified of what would reveal itself on the other side of that door. A zombie ghost in ragged tatters, coming to reclaim his inheritance? A floating girl corpse with maggots for eyes? How bad could one day get?

But then the door was fully open, dusty sunlight trailing in. There was nothing on the other side.

“Got it!” Eric said triumphantly, holding a yellowed scroll in his hand. He was framed by mountains of papers, and above and behind, the attic door.

“Hi,” Timothy said, his tiny voice reverent.

I glanced at him, confused. He was talking to the open attic door.

“Hi!” he said again, with more force.

My heart stopped. I didn’t see what he was seeing. The doorway was empty. But I did witness the musty tower of newspapers behind Eric slowly rock, as if pushed by an invisible wind. Reflexively, I opened my mouth to issue a warning, but I wasn’t quick enough.

The enormous pile of aged papers fell on Eric.

He dropped the fife and the paper. Both fell at my feet.

I grabbed the scroll and Carter snatched the instrument before giving a floundering Eric a firm push back into the chaos of papers. He speedily herded Timothy and me down the stairs. He shoved us into a bedroom off the base of the stairs at the second floor and locked the door behind us. He ran to the phone mounted on the far wall.

“I’m calling the police. You can explain what’s going on when we have handcuffs on that waste of air.”

I set Timothy on the bed, pushing aside the gorgeous, yellowed lace dresses that were draped across it. He didn’t want to let me go, but I couldn’t trust the lock. I leaned into the heavy oak of the dresser to the left of the door, hoping to push it over and seal the entrance. I was grunting and straining when I heard Eric’s footsteps hammer down the stairs toward us. He tried the doorknob, cursed, and kept running.

We weren’t in the clear as long as Eric had Taunita and Alessa. I ran to the window. The moment Eric’s car sped away, I ran down the stairs. Libby was there, wondering what was going on. I handed her Timothy, told her and Carter where I was going, and begged them to call the police.

I had no illusions that I could fight Eric, especially not if he had Hammer with him. I needed to stall for time, though, and I would do that by putting myself in their path. They could be hiding out in one of the cabins, but the police had been watching those carefully since the string of break-ins. They also could be in the rec house of the brewery, though that was next to impossible as no way would Taunita have let Eric take Timothy without a fight, and the noise of that would have alerted the brewery staff.

That left only the old cabin behind the dormitory, the one Vienna called the grow room.

I drove like lightning, the roads so icy that the front of my car was not always in agreement with the back as to what direction we were going. I roared past Vienna’s, past the dorm, and found the little road behind it leading to the cabin. When I spotted Eric’s car there, the relief washed over me like warm water, quickly followed by fear. I had no plan, only a conviction that I couldn’t leave Taunita and Alessa alone with Eric.

I squealed to a stop, tried to breathe around my pained heartbeat, and stepped out of my car.

What Vienna had referred to as the grow room was a one-room cabin tucked deep into the woods. Puffs of woodsmoke curled asthmatically out of the chimney. Naked oak branches scraped against the snow-buried roof, and the whole unpainted structure leaned a little to the right. Two murky windows stared at me from each side of the door.

Eric was inside.

With luck, Taunita and Alessa were as well, and alive.

I felt a muddy mix of helplessness, fear, and anger. Inexplicably, horribly, the image of the Candy Cane Killer rose into my mind, paralyzing me where I stood. A wave of nausea so strong it felt like vertigo washed over me. I didn’t know if I could override my self-preservation instinct and force myself to enter the cabin. How could I?

But then, I heard a baby cry from inside.

Hot tears clouded my eyes, and I sprinted forward, charging into the cabin, hoping that my directions to Carter and Libby had been clear enough, and that the police were on their way.