Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (39 page)

The deadbolt looked strong, and the door looked solid. I remembered that the overhead garage door was the only other sizable opening, and it was at the end of the boathouse out in the icy, black water. The water would be deep enough to handle the draft of the average boat. Probably four feet. Spot wouldn’t want to go swimming any more than I did.

“Spot, stay,” I whispered, touching the palm of my hand to his nose. I put the penlight in my teeth and waded into the water.

The cold rush of ice water into my shoes and clothes, around my legs and up to my waist was nothing compared to when they’d dropped me in the lake to die. The water rose to the bottom of my ribs as I went around the boathouse corner to the overhead door. Without the light reflection off the snow, it was even darker out in the water. I reached out and felt the door. Its bottom was about two feet off the water’s surface, probably to minimize damage to the door from waves. I could get underneath it without ducking my head, but not much else.

I bent forward at the waist, the front of my chest dipping down into the water as I ducked under the door. It was cave black inside. But the loss of all vision inputs was curiously made up for with audio inputs. In the enclosed space, every little water movement and wave sound was huge in my ears. My breathing was loud. The splash noises of my movements were loud.

I flipped on the penlight. It was like a searchlight, a bright blue-white LED beam that was hard on my eyes. Anyone within a mile of the boathouse would be able to see light in the windows. I cupped my hand over the beam, took three fast steps to the side door, and called Spot into the dark space.

He pushed past me, much less handicapped by darkness.

The inside of the boathouse was as I’d seen it before, a few items hanging on hooks, some other things on the shelves. There was a white rag. I could wrap it around the light beam, but that would light up the balled-up rag.

On one of the shelves, there was a dusty cardboard box with a little illustration of a kayak sinking beneath the surface of the water. I picked it up. It said, ‘Kayak Repair Kit.’ I opened it. Inside was a small plastic bottle of some kind of solvent, a flexible rubberized sheet, and a roll of blue tape. It looked like electrician’s tape. I tore off some small strips and positioned two of the strips over the edges of the light, blocking most of the beam. There was enough light to see, but it wasn’t quite so obvious.

I turned to the wooden shelving unit. It covered most of the back wall of the boathouse and went from floor to ceiling. There were three vertical sections. One was built out into a closet with doors like those on an armoire. Another had wooden dowels positioned such that water skis and kayak paddles could stand on end on the floor and be held in place by the dowels. The third vertical section had shelves for storing miscellany. I opened the closet door and looked inside. There was a rod at the top. Flotation vests and windbreakers and wetsuits hung on hangers. There was nothing behind them but the same wood panel that backed the shelves.

Nowhere on the organizer unit did I see an indication of where there might be a hidden door. I pushed and prodded at different points near the edges of the back panels, looking for some give. It was all solid. I ran my fingertips along the trim boards and down every corner and intersection, feeling for a catch of some kind. There was nothing.

I wanted to knock on the back portion of the organizer to listen for the sound of a hollow area. But I knew that would resonate like pounding on a bass drum. If anyone was around, it would give away my presence.

Standing back, I began to think my idea was just silliness, a feeble attempt to imagine that Street and Gertie were in a place where I could rescue them. The Lassitor castle had probably always been empty since the day when Ian Lassitor drowned.

Nothing stood out.

If I wanted to get into the house, it might be easier to break in the front door. Then I had an idea.

“Spot,” I whispered, getting his attention, wondering how to communicate what I wanted. “Can you smell Street? Can you, boy?” I put my hands on his chest and gave him a shake, a standard way to excite a dog on a search mission. I had nothing to search him on, but maybe the concept of simply smelling people would translate.

I turned Spot’s head toward the wooden organizer. “Spot, find Street! Find!”

I made the hand motion in front of his face the same as if we were out in the forest and I was sending him on a search. My fingers pointed toward the organizer.

In a normal situation, Spot would take off running, looking for whatever smell I’d scented him on.

This time, I had nothing to scent him on, and there was nowhere to run. Nevertheless, he walked over to the armoire closet, poked his nose between the wetsuits and windbreakers and wagged. He turned around and looked at me, then looked back in the closet.

“Good boy, Spot,” I said. I gave him a pet, then I pulled out all the wetsuits and windbreakers and laid them on the floor.

I pushed on the back panel. It was solid. I looked again at the side corners, the top and bottom corners. I ran my hand over the panel feeling for any irregularity.

Nothing.

I backed up from the closet unit and tried to look at it in a broader way. Never mind how thoroughly I’d inspected it. What hadn’t I touched? What hadn’t I really looked at?

The closet rod.

I’d moved everything that hung from the closet rod, but I hadn’t studied the rod itself. I shined my light on the rod, moving from left to right. The middle of the rod appeared a bit darker than the ends.

Smudged.

I gripped the rod. Gave it a twist.

The rod rotated a half turn. The back of the closet swung out an inch. A gentle, humid breeze blew through the opening into my face.

FIFTY-SEVEN

I reached out and pushed the door farther. It opened with a gentle resistance. Maybe there was a silent alarm. If so, it made no difference

“C’mon, Spot,” I whispered. I shined my dimmed penlight into a dark, narrow stone tunnel. I realized that I was possibly walking into the killer’s lair and I had no weapon other than Spot. I took another look around the boathouse. There was no potential weapon but kayak paddles. But they would be too big to swing in an enclosed space. I played my penlight in another circle, finding nothing smaller except a broom, the kind with a small paddle of bristles on a wooden handle. Because I had nothing else, I picked it up. Then Spot and I stepped through into the tunnel and let the door swing shut behind us.

Spot panted, excited. He’d never been in a tunnel before. I didn’t want him trotting ahead, so I held his collar with my left hand while I carried the broom and penlight with my right.

I turned around and looked at the door. It was a heavy, solid-core door with a metal handle in place of a knob. A hydraulic closer at the top held it shut. On the stone wall to the side of the door was a swing handle that no doubt operated the latching mechanism, just as the closet rod did from the other side. There was no lock. Security came from the fact that the door was hidden from the other side.

Like the rest of the castle, the tunnel was made of stone, flat pieces for the floor with more irregular pieces for the walls and ceiling. My light showed nothing in the distance ahead.

Ten feet in from the secret door, the tunnel began a slight curve to the right. It made me wonder if we’d bump into people should we come around a curve too fast. Better to anticipate if possible.

I pulled Spot to a stop, then turned off my penlight.

The darkness was as black as it gets. My eyes had already adjusted to the relative darkness, but I waited a full minute, letting my irises open fully. With one hand on Spot’s collar and the other on the wall, I moved forward slowly, hoping to round a corner and see something. But after ten or fifteen feet, I still couldn’t perceive the tiniest glow of light. I turned the penlight back on. Spot and I continued walking.

I counted my steps, making a crude guess that the distance from the boathouse to the house was half a football field, or 150 feet. With my steps being slow and tentative, I guessed the length of my stride to be about two feet long. Which meant the tunnel was about 75 steps from the castle. So far I’d come 25 paces.

Another curve made me stop and turn off my light so that I could once again feel my way forward in the dark and be prepared to see the slightest bit of light coming from down the tunnel. Again we moved several feet. Again there was no other light.

I turned on the penlight, and we continued.

One of my feet slipped. I shined my light down. There was moisture on the floor, seeping in from the ground, joining the lake water that was still draining from my pants. I turned my broom around, bristles up at my chest, so I could use the broom end as a safety cane in case I slipped again.

As I went farther, I began to feel two strong emotions. The thought that I might be close to Street and Gertie and that they were prisoners encouraged my rage. But the fact that I’d heard a scream, a clear indication that they were in severe distress, made me despondent. Despair was the antipode of rage, one driving a person to inaction, the other the opposite.

I focused on my rage.

Forty paces down the tunnel, Spot stopped walking. Then he stopped panting. I paused and angled my head for a clearer look. My penlight shined on something other than stone and mortar. The tunnel was blocked by another door, similar to the one we’d come through.

I stopped, turned off my penlight, and waited in the blackness for my eyes to adjust. A minute later, I could see nothing. I turned my light back on, shining it down on the floor, and moved forward. We walked slower as we approached the door. I worried that Spot would smell something and make a noise. I put my finger across his nose, the sign for silence.

This door had a regular knob. There was no lock. There could be a deadbolt on the other side, but there was no way to tell from the tunnel side. A regular knob suggested that this tunnel entrance was not hidden from the other side. The architect must have figured that once you were in the secret chambers, there was no point in hiding the passages.

As we approached the door, I was aware of Spot’s nails clicking on the stone floor. There was nothing I could do about that. Moving very slowly, I again turned off my penlight and put my ear up against the door and listened for a long minute.

Nothing. No sound, and no light escaped from the edges of the door.

I let go of Spot’s collar, grabbed the doorknob, and gave it a slow, gentle twist. The knob turned without making a sound. It reached the end of its motion. There was no way to know what I was walking into.

Still holding my broom in my right hand, I pushed the door inward with my left.

I tried to ease the door open, but Spot was eager to find out what was on the other side of the door. Or maybe he smelled Street. He pushed forward next to me. I let go of the doorknob and reached for Spot’s collar. I missed.

A dim light came through as Spot’s nose hit the door and it opened. I took a step forward trying to understand what I was looking at. There was a wall sconce throwing off low light like that in a castle in the movies. The dim light showed a stone wall off to the left but curving to the right. A room that stretched out to the right.

There was a muffled woman’s scream as I sensed a streak of movement to my left.

A baseball bat swung at my chest.

The bat came as fast and hard as the swing of a major league lefty hitting a line drive out to right field.

FIFTY-EIGHT

The bat struck the broom that I held at my chest. The blow was so intense that the plastic bristle base seemed to explode, bristles flying into the air. A chunk of the handle hit my abdomen as the broomstick broke into pieces.

The blow was hard and mean and deadly. It threw me back against the door frame. The impact blew the air out of my lungs. The shock was astonishing. But the plastic piece and the bristles probably saved me from a collapsed lung or a ruptured aorta.

 At first, I didn’t see the batter. My attention was on Spot, whose head was just below the bat’s arc. In an instantaneous movement, Spot reached up under the batter’s leading right arm and grabbed the man’s left elbow. Like other dogs, Spot was quicker than a person. Unlike other dogs, Spot’s jaws are bigger than a mountain lion’s.

Spot’s mouth fully enclosed the man’s elbow. I couldn’t see the details, but I knew how it worked. Spot would initially bite medium hard, enough to hold on no matter what happened. The assailant who acts subdued is held but not critically injured. The assailant who resists gets a harder bite. If an attacker is foolish and tries to throw the dog off, the bite gets serious.

I saw the man try a big jerk to pull away from Spot or maybe swing Spot into the stone wall. The crack of breaking bones came fast and loud, three or four crunching sounds. The man screamed a high yelp of pain. He dropped the bat and fell to his knees as Spot pulled him down. The bat bounced and rolled away. As the man tried to kick, Spot growled his deep guttural rumbling, not unlike a lion’s roar. He shook the man’s arm. The man screamed louder, terror creeping in as he realized that the huge dog was able to crush his arm and maybe rip it off.

I sucked air into my burning chest and ran towards the bat. As I bent down to grab it and then straightened up, I saw the women.

Street and Gertie were over in a far dark corner of what looked like a windowless dungeon room. They sat back-to-back on the hard stone floor. Their arms were pulled behind their backs and down to some kind of anchor bolt in the floor, their wrists handcuffed to the bolt. Across their faces were pieces of duct tape, sealing their mouths shut. And in their eyes was a terror that nearly broke me.

My rage welled up, a searing anger. My vision narrowed.

I carried the bat over to the man.

“Spot, let go,” I said. I nudged Spot with my foot. He moved away.

The man looked up at me from the floor.

“You sick, twisted bastard,” I said.

“Go to hell,” the man said. He pushed up onto his knees, then stood. He spat at me.