The Body in the Basement (17 page)

Read The Body in the Basement Online

Authors: Katherine Hall Page

BOOK: The Body in the Basement
5.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Fred had flipped the two catches and was fiddling around with the center lock on the footlocker. It looked like the kind you took to camp, and maybe Duncan had, some summer in his past life. Samantha found it hard to imagine him as a normal kid in shorts playing capture the flag in a camp T-shirt.
“These things are pretty easy to open.” Fred took out his knife.
“What's that sticking out from the side?” Samantha asked.
Fred pulled at it. “I dunno. Some kind of black cloth.
Maybe he has orgies or something here and they dress up.” He inserted the knife into the lock and began to twist it open.
Samantha had a funny feeling about all this. It was one thing to walk through an open door but another to open someone's private property, even if that someone was Duncan Cowley. She was also not sure she wanted to know what was inside.
“He's coming! Let's get out of here!” Arlene had been watching at the window. “I can see his shoes! Come on, run!”
They flew down the front stairs and into the woods. Samantha could see Duncan's shoes blinking in the dark. He wasn't far behind them and he'd realized someone had been at the cabin.
“You bastard!” he screamed, “Come back here. I know who you are. You can't get away from me.”
They ran until they reached the pickup and then were back on the main road in a few moments.
“That was close,” Fred said.
They drove in silence for a while. The feeling of the dark cabin and what it might contain seemed to have invaded the thoughts of all three teenagers. Now that she was away, Samantha perversely felt she had to find out what Duncan was up to—even if it meant breaking into the footlocker. She reached over and grabbed Arlene's hand. It was as cold as her own.
“It was great of you guys to come with me, but I've got to get home or my mother will have a fit.”
“Mine, too,” Arlene said.
They pulled into the drive in front of the Millers' cottage and Samantha got out. “Tomorrow night?” Fred asked. In the beams of his headlights, Samantha nodded solemnly. Tomorrow night.
 
The phone rang early the next morning. Sam was asleep and Samantha had already left for work, taking her bike. Pix was drinking a cup of coffee, still in her nightclothes, out on the
back deck. She dashed inside. Her hello was a little breathless. It had been the fourth ring; islanders were known to hang up after less, assuming no one was home or didn't want to be bothered.
“Mom!” It was Samantha and she was breathless, too. “Get over here right away! It's the sails! They're covered with blood and all these dead bats are lying around in the hulls!”
“Blood! Bats! My God, what's happened?” Pix could scarcely believe Samantha's words. “Samantha! Samantha!” The line appeared to have gone dead.
“That was Arlene.” Samantha was back on the phone and her voice was marginally calmer. “It's not blood. It's paint, red paint. And the bats are plastic. But it
looked
like blood when the sails were raised and the bats were totally gross with red stuff coming out of them, so we all ran back here. I could have sworn it was real!”
“Darling, how dreadful!”
“Just come, okay?”
“I'll be there as soon as I can.” Pix was already unbuttoning her pajamas. After she hung up, she raced upstairs.
“Sam, Sam, wake up! There's some trouble over at the camp. Someone painted the sails with red paint and they all thought it was blood, because there were bats in the boats that they thought were dead. But they turned out to be fake too.” Pix was struggling for lucidity.
“Bats? What kind of bats? Baseball bats? Paint? Blood?” Sam sat up, rubbing his eyes. “What the hell is going on over there? Wait while I throw something on.”
When the Millers pulled into the parking lot at Maine Sail Camp, they could see that Sergeant Dickinson had beaten them. They hurried down to the waterfront, where the entire camp was gathered. Samantha was in the center of a group of the youngest campers. Two were literally clinging to her. Pix was proud of the way her daughter was handling the crisis. Stroking one head while patting another, Samantha was saying, “It's just someone's idea of a stupid joke. A very, very
bad joke and that's all. We'll get the extra sails and be out on the water in no time.”
One of the children, a little girl, looked up at Samantha with absolute certainty that she would get an honest answer from this goddess. “Are you sure? So many spooky things have been happening—the mice and those other tricks.”
Sam turned to Pix. “Mice?” he asked softly, not wanting to upset the scene further.
“I'll tell you later,” Pix replied. “Another nasty prank.” She wanted to listen. What was this about “other tricks”?
Jim strode over to them, obviously pleased at their presence.
“Sam, Pix. Good of you to come. Earl is down on the beach now and then he wants to search all the cabins. Clayton Dickinson is working here as handyman this summer. He's Earl's cousin, I believe, and is going to help him. The kids are understandably upset. Do you think you could give us a hand? We're going to gather in the dining hall and sing some songs. Mabel is getting together some cookies and milk. The counselors have been terrific, but the kids need some more adult reassurance.”
“No problem,” Sam replied, abandoning his morning sail with only a slight trace of regret. “Before you start your hootenanny though, I think you'd better talk about what's happened. There's the possibility that someone may have some information, but mostly you want to keep it all out in the open or you're going to have them jumping ship in droves.”
“Don't I know it. One kid has already demanded to leave. His parents are on a barge in Burgundy, pretty unreachable, as he well knows, but he's stirring up the others.”
“Is this one of Samantha's group? She said there was a boy who was pretty annoyed at his mother and father.”
Jim nodded. “Geoff Baxter. He may have been too immature for such a long sleep-away session.”
Pix went over to Samantha and began to help her move the
kids into the dining room. Sam went to another group. “Hootenanny?” Had her husband been listening to his old Pete Seeger records while the family was away?
The clingers were still clinging and Pix gently pried the little girl away from Samantha. Pix had the distinct impression that the campers around Samantha, and especially those who had commandeered each of her daughter's hands, were not so much scared as excited, despite appearances to the contrary. There was definitely something in the air. She made a mental note to talk to Samantha about it later—and also ask her how she liked being the object of such devotion. The crushes at Maine Sail were beginning to resemble some sort of food chain—beginning with Samantha's on Valerie.
“Now, listen to Samantha. She's right. It's just a rotten trick. What's your name?” The girl gulped, took a tissue Pit offered, and blew her nose. “It's Susannah.” Obviously the effort was too much and she began to cry, adding the tearful protest, “I didn't do it. I don't know who did it!”
“Shut up, Susannah, and stop showing off.” It was one of the boys in the group. “Nobody thinks you did it. Besides, you would never have the guts.”
Pix was inclined to agree with him. Whoever had done it would have had to have nerve and some to spare. The sails had been fine the day before, Samantha said, so the deed involved getting up in the dead of night, raising the sails, painting them without leaving a trace of the evidence on one's person, then making everything shipshape before going back to bed.
It would have been very difficult for any of the campers—or counselors—to do without someone detecting his or her absence.
That left … Arlene supplied the name uppermost in everyone's minds, whispering to Pix as she swept by, several charges in tow, “It's just creepy Duncan again. If this doesn't get him sent away, I don't know what will.” She was smiling.
In the cavernous dining room, the commotion was deafening
and it took Jim several minutes to get everyone quieted down. During that time, Pix saw Valerie and Duncan slip in through the side door. Valerie looked furious. Duncan's mouth was set in a tight line. He looked as if he hadn't slept—or changed his clothes—for a few weeks. When Pix tried to read the expression in his eyes, all she could come up with was fear. If there was red paint on his body, it wasn't anywhere that showed.
“Campers, staff, I know how upset everyone is, and believe me, I feel it just as much as you do—more. Right now, what we need is to stay calm and do everything we can to help Sergeant Dickinson figure out who did this. While the kitchen crew gives us a little snack, we'll have a few songs and practice for the parade. I'm going to be in my office in case any of you wants to come to talk to me. If you want to bring a friend, fine. I'm prepared to treat this as a very bad joke—something that maybe seemed like a fun idea at midnight, to scare your friends the next morning. But I
will
find out who did it.”
Jim Atherton was definitely displaying the nonpussycat side of his camp-director role this morning. Nobody but nobody messed with Maine Sail.
Samantha joined her parents. Pix took the opportunity to ask her a few questions as the group began to sing “There Was a Tree,” volume increasing as they went along, until it sounded like any other camp group. All they needed was to be on a bus or tramping through the woods
“What did the kids mean by the other tricks?”
“Oh, those were just the normal things that go on in a place like this—salt in the sugar bowls, short-sheeting the counselors' beds—the ones who don't have sleeping bags—and cowpats in people's shoes.”
Pix nodded. These were the typical perils of camp existence. “Nothing else? Nothing like the mice?”
“Not that I know of, though the kids have been saying they hear creepy noises at night—scary music, rustling in the
bushes—but I'm pretty sure it's one or two kids wanting to get the others worked up.”
“Now what is this about the mice?” Sam demanded. He really wanted to be sailing. It was a gorgeous day and through the window he could see luckier folk skimming the surface of the water just beyond the vandalized boats moored in the camp harbor. They did look pretty dreadful and reminded him of an ancient Greek myth, only those sails had been black. He shuddered slightly and put any and all implications firmly out of his mind.
They filled him in on the mice and he commented, “The sole connection I can see is blood and gore. Kids this age love it, but I'm damned if I can figure out how a kid could have done it.”
“The Athertons were at the clambake all afternoon; someone could have snuck away then,” Pix proposed.
“Except the whole camp was here practicing for the Fourth of July parade. The counselors have planned an elaborate routine where the campers flip cards as they march and sing, like at sports events. If someone was missing, it would have been spotted right away. You couldn't do that much damage in the time it might have taken to go the bathroom.”
“Samantha's right, which leaves an outsider.”
Samantha elaborated. “Which leaves Duncan. We know he had a wicked big fight with his parents. What better way to get even than try to get the camp closed down? If Jim can't keep this hushed up, there are a lot of parents who'll want their kids out of here. You know, ‘Kid's Camp Cult Target'—that sort of thing.
“Duncan had plenty of time to do it while the rest of us were eating lobster—or he could have done it later after everyone was asleep.” Or, she said to herself silently, he could have been coming from his painting party just in time to surprise us at the cabin.
“Well,” Sam said, rubbing his hands together, “I don't see
that there's too much more we can do here.” The group was lustily singing “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and it was time to leave—tide or no tide. “Why don't we go talk to Jim, see if anything more has turned up, and skedaddle.” Skedaddle? Pix thought. What was happening to her husband's vocabulary. He definitely needed to be around his family more.
“I'll come, too. Are you staying, darling?”
“Mother! Of course! It's my job. Besides, I want to.” Samantha went back to her post. The worshippers were waiting.
“It seems odd that little Susannah would have felt it necessary to protest her innocence,” Pix remarked to her husband as they started across the ground, so heavily carpeted with years of fallen pine needles that their every footfall released a strong scent of balsam as they crunched along.
“Maybe she's the salt/sugar culprit. She has the perfect face for it—those big baby blues and that sunshine-from-behind-the-clouds smile.”
Pix looked at Sam admiringly. “You would have made a good detective.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Holmes. Now let's say good-bye and not waste any more of this beautiful day.”

Other books

Enchanted by Patti Berg
Candace Camp by A Dangerous Man
Dead Man's Resolution by Thomas K. Carpenter
VC04 - Jury Double by Edward Stewart
Roped for Pleasure by Lacey Thorn
Rhythm and Bluegrass by Molly Harper
Drop City by T. C. Boyle
The Wasp Factory by Banks, Iain
Force and Fraud by Ellen Davitt
Comes a Stranger by E.R. Punshon