“They can be protective. I think it’s a biological thing,” Vickie assured her.
“Your dad is overprotective?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.” Vickie told her a bit about her parents, dear and wonderful people who constantly worried about her but had finally accepted the fact that, with her life, she was probably better off going through training and becoming an FBI agent rather than waiting for more strange things to happen around her.
“So, yeah, parents,” Vickie said. “But...Alice, you remember nothing?”
“Well, no, not nothing. I do remember heading down to the kitchen. I was thirsty.”
“But you don’t remember getting anything to drink? Talking to anyone else in the house? That’s all?”
Alice shook her head. “No, I’m so sorry! I’d give anything...to help, to know!” She inhaled a long breath, staring at Vickie. “They say that I was heavily drugged. That’s why, even if I thought I remembered something, I’d be afraid of what I thought I remembered.”
“Alice, do you think that you remember something?” she asked.
Alice was silent a minute.
“What? Please, whatever it is, you can tell me,” Vickie said softly.
Once again, Alice inhaled deeply. “I came down the stairs and it was the middle of the night. This house is so weird—sometimes I wish it would burn down.” She paused, looking at Vickie. “You’re not going to tell me that’s a horrible thought?” she asked.
Vickie shook her head. “Probably not the nicest thing to think, but...not horrible, unless you have people in the house.”
“Oh, God, no!” Alice said.
“Then in my book, you’re fine. A house—no matter how historic—is a thing. Sometimes things can clog up our lives. People, however, are different.”
“I wish no ill on anyone, I swear!” Alice said.
“I believe you. So...the house was weird. You went downstairs. You were thirsty, and you were headed to the kitchen.”
“Yes. And then I heard the whispering.”
“Someone was whispering?”
Alice looked at her and nodded, casting her head at an angle and adding drily, “The walls were whispering. I know it sounds bizarre. But I could swear the walls were talking, and I could hear them.”
“And what were they saying?”
“Alice... Alice...” Alice paused and looked at Vickie. Her eyes were enormous and suddenly damp with tears. “That’s crazy, right? The walls...the walls were whispering my name. And it was so terrifying. It was as if they were reaching out for me. As if they wanted to drag me in. As if they wanted to make me part of the awful miasma of this place!”
17
“It stopped!” Monica Verne told Griffin. She was effusive as she hurried on to say, “That’s why, forgive me, it needed to be you. I mean, try to tell the police that you’re certain you hear screaming, but that there’s no one in your house—other than your guest and your housekeeper, neither of whom are screaming. Or hear the screaming. The police already want me incarcerated forever, the key thrown away, convinced I’m the evil one who did in my husband. And Adam promised that you wouldn’t just think that I was making things up.”
Griffin had arrived at the Verne house; Monica stood with Adam just inside the doorway.
He looked at Adam. “So—you didn’t hear the screaming?”
“I was sleeping,” Adam said. He shook his head. “I didn’t hear it, but Monica swears that there was screaming.”
The ghosts of Josh Harrison, Dylan Ballantine and Darlene Dutton hovered behind Monica Verne. Griffin looked at the ghosts.
The three of them gave him grim, wide-eyed nods.
“We’re going to need to inspect the house,” Griffin said. “All right, so the alarm system has been on and working the entire time?”
Again, he received a number of very serious nods—from the living and the dead.
“No one has gotten in here—you’re certain?”
“Not through the front,” Adam assured him. “Or through the back door, for that matter. The alarm covers the entire house, including the windows.”
“What about the basement?” Griffin asked.
Adam looked at Monica. “What about the basement?”
“Well, you get to it by the back stairs—through the kitchen.”
“Is there an external entrance?” Griffin asked.
Monica looked at him blankly.
“Could you call the housekeeper?” Griffin said.
Monica did so, shouting, “Tanya!”
“And Tanya’s full name is?” Griffin asked.
“Tanya Cermak—she is Czech, and in the country legally,” Monica informed him. “My husband and I saw to that.”
The pretty young dark-haired woman they had met on the first day they’d come to the Verne house appeared in the hallway.
Griffin smiled at her. “Miss Cernak, what can you tell me about the basement? I’m sorry, what I mean is, can you tell me if there are other ways into the basement? And, by any chance, did you hear anything at all that might have sounded like screaming?”
Tanya looked uncomfortable. “No, I did not hear screaming this morning.”
“That’s okay. If you didn’t hear it, you didn’t hear it.”
“I—I heard it before, though,” she said, looking at her employer uneasily. “I am so sorry. I didn’t know anything. I thought that it was something that warned us about Mr. Verne. I cried when I thought about him, when I thought that I had heard the sound. It was like the walls were crying, as if they mourned for Mr. Verne. As if...as if the walls knew.”
Griffin prayed that no human being had been walled up. If that was the case, they’d now been trapped for days.
And if not, what the hell made the noise?
“And what about the basement, Tanya? Do you know if there’s any kind of an outside entrance to the basement?”
“There is storm door,” Tanya said. “Near back of the house, with ladder into the basement.”
“Okay. Thank you,” Griffin told her. He looked at Adam. “I’m going to try the outside. I’ll meet you down there. Put on every light down there, please.”
Adam nodded. Griffin left the house and walked around it. He had a feeling that Franklin Verne and Monica had treated their alarm the way most people did. Sometimes, they remembered to set it. Right now Monica would definitely be making a point to turn on the alarm. But they had probably been careless in the past, as many people were. Unhelpfully, there was no camera surveillance.
He walked around the house. Bushes grew alongside it, but there were breaks beside the wall. They were dwarf azaleas, he thought—something he knew, only because his mom loved them so much.
They were well kept, but they still seemed to run over what appeared to be a storm door.
He’d found it.
There wasn’t even a padlock on it.
Griffin shook his head, threw the door open and looked in. Adam and Monica had already reached the basement and switched on lights.
Narrow steps, almost attached to a rear wall, led down to the floor.
It wasn’t a finished basement—the floor was raw concrete. But there were rugs thrown here and there. Franklin Verne had used it to store all kinds of tools, and evidence of his life and work—there were some bookshelves, and there were boxes and boxes of books, labelled by country; Verne had been published in at least thirty languages, according to the boxes.
“You never noticed the steps?” Griffin asked Monica.
“Griffin, I’m so sorry, and I’m sure I sound like a terrible human being, but I just never came to the basement. The washer and dryer are down here—a whole laundry room,” Monica said. “All kinds of things. But honestly...”
“You don’t do the
wash,” Griffin said.
“No. I haven’t done the wash in...well, at least twenty years,” Monica said.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Adam assured her.
“No, it’s okay. You don’t need to apologize for success,” Griffin said.
“Franklin’s success,” Monica said.
“He loved you. You were his everything,” Griffin said. “That helped to make him a success. Don’t undervalue what being an amazing wife can mean to someone.”
Monica smiled at him and touched his cheek. “Thank you for that!” she said.
And as she spoke, Griffin heard it. The sound was terrible. It sounded like something straight out of hell, out of a horror novel...something terrible and eerie.
And it sounded almost as if it had come from the entire house, as if brick and mortar and stone had screamed from top to bottom.
“What is it? Oh, my God, what is it?” Monica asked, shaking. “You heard it, right? You all heard it, too, right?”
“Definitely,” Adam said.
“Yes,” Griffin agreed.
He looked from the stairs—where he had entered—across the expanse of the room to wall separations and the stairs that led up to the kitchen.
“How many rooms is the house divided into down here?” Griffin asked.
“Six,” she told him. “Three here, three the other side. There’s a Ping-Pong table in a room with some chairs and a few bookcases, the laundry room—and an ironing room, though, seriously, I haven’t even asked anyone else to iron in at least twenty years.”
He nodded curtly and hurried past structural pillars to the other side of the house. The walls in the room with the Ping-Pong table were too visible—too obvious. In the laundry room, there was evidence of recent activity, and it was clear that the washer and dryer, folding tables and even a few clotheslines were easily accessible, but the walls appeared to have been as they were for years.
Griffin almost pushed past Adam and Monica—who had followed him—to reach the ironing room. There, he saw that wire shelving for luggage and cleaning supplies had been pressed haphazardly against the walls, and he suddenly realized that at least one of the shelves had been dragged from one area to another. He hurried to that point and pulled the shelf unit away from the wall.
He quickly saw that the brick here against the wall had recently been replaced. The mortar was not hard and firm like that around it.
For the second time in recent memory, he was certain that he looked like a crazy man. He searched the room. He didn’t find a crowbar, but he saw a set of old building tools against the corner of the room that included something much better.
A sledgehammer.
He quickly picked it up and sent it flying against the wall with all his strength. Brick and mortar began to fly.
The terrible wailing scream seemed to tear through the house again.
And then echo as Monica picked up the sound.
And Griffin stared into the blackness of the hole he had just created.
* * *
The walls called her name; the walls in the old house called out to Alice.
So very Poe! Vickie thought.
There was an explanation somewhere, she determined. On the one hand, the killer had pressed Brent Whaley into a floor—and they’d heard a heartbeat. His phantom heartbeat? A killer’s heartbeat? Vickie didn’t know. Even a mutually imagined heartbeat—once again, something à la Edgar Allan Poe. Fear was in the perception. It was physical, yes, still it became a far greater force when expanded in the mind.
But the walls here...
Whispering the word Alice.
“There’s an audio player somewhere,” Vickie said flatly. “Alice, you know that you were attacked by someone—plied with baby-baby. That’s why you can’t remember anything clearly. But if you heard your name called over and over—and in this house—I’m sure someone is playing parlor tricks.”
Alice’s eyes were wide. “You think there’s a player in the parlor?”
Vickie sighed inwardly and started over. “There may be a number of devices.”
“So, you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t believe that ghosts are holed up in the walls, calling your name,” Vickie said. “I do think someone very much alive is playing tricks—besides murdering people. Maybe you were supposed to die—”
“Oh, God!”
“Sorry, sorry! Or cause someone to get hurt—your father to have a heart attack, for one,” Vickie said.
“My dad, my poor dad. I mean, he aggravates me to hell, but he is my father!” Alice said.
“Of course. Okay, get some rest. I’m going to prowl around the house and see if I can find evidence of audio devices.”
She smiled and stood, heading toward the door. Turning back, she told Alice, “Don’t worry, stay here—rest. We’ll find the truth.”
Alice smiled wanly.
Vickie ran down to the office first. Gary wasn’t there anymore. Jackson had a laptop out on the desk.
“Gary went up to rest—he’s still pretty shaken. Not that old, but old enough, I guess, for this to have taken a toll on him, physically,” he said.
“He should get some rest,” Vickie said. “Jackson, Alice believes she heard talking in the walls. I believe someone has put some kind of audio device in a wall somewhere. She’s convinced that ‘ghosts’ in the walls talk.”
“And what do they say?”
“They say her name, Alice—over and over again.”
“Well, there’s an easy recording for you.” He closed his laptop. “Let’s start looking. I’ll take the basement and downstairs and you can have upstairs.”
“Okay. I didn’t mean to stop you from whatever you were doing.”
“Not a problem. I was doing research on your Poe writer. That fellow Walter Randolph. Angela told me what you’d discovered. She’s got a few people working on uncovering just who he was and what his story was. And how he could have something to do with what’s going on here and now. She’s the best.”
“So I hear. Okay, I’ll head up.”
“And I’ll head down.”
“Perfect,” Vickie said. She started out of the room. Hallie caught her in the hall. “Your sandwich is ready!” she told her.
“Hang on to it for me for just a minute!” Vickie pleaded. “I’ll be right back.”
Determined, she headed up the stairs. But then she paused.
One of the paintings on the wall that she hadn’t taken the time to really study earlier was a very old painting of a number of great writers, all who had lived and worked in the mid-1800s.
One of them, of course, was Poe. Around him were James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and two others Vickie didn’t immediately recognize.
She froze, however, staring at it. Arrayed at the bottom—in various odd positions—were three blackbirds.
They all appeared to be dead.
She had to show Griffin and the others!
She realized now that the painting wasn’t hanging exactly flush with the wall; it seemed to extend just a bit too far.
Vickie studied it for a moment, then lifted it from the hooks that held it. The painting in its thick wood frame was heavy. She nearly dropped it.
Someone else had already dropped the painting. The frame was cracked in one corner.
And behind the painting, duct-taped to the back of the bottom of the frame, she discovered what she’d had a feeling she’d find. A small digital audio player. Vickie pulled the device free. There was only one file on it, unnamed. She pressed the play button.
“Alice...” a haunting voice whispered.
There was also a plastic baggie taped to the back of the painting.
Vickie turned
the painting to look at it again. The great writers were all gathered around a table in an old tavern. Their names were written in tiny ornate balloons just over or near them.
She realized that there was a balloon on a man who appeared to be the bartender or tavern keeper.
Vickie nearly dropped the painting.
The name in the balloon was Walter Randolph.
“Jackson!” she shouted.
He came hurrying in from the eastern end of the house.
Hallie followed close behind him; she nearly crashed into his back when he stopped. Jackson turned, taking her by the shoulders firmly.
“Stay!” he told her.
He hurried up to the middle of the stairway to join Vickie.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Look! He’s here. Walter Randolph is here—he’s in this painting. And I found a player—right behind the painting.”
“Oh, my God!” Hallie breathed.
Vickie and Jackson both turned to look at her.
“No, no, no! I didn’t do it!” Hallie said. “I didn’t, Sven didn’t... We’re not here all the time. This house doesn’t have any real alarm system. Anyone could have snuck in. I swear to you, I don’t know how that got there!”
Jackson ignored her. He looked at Vickie. “We may be able to pull prints.”
“Oh, my God!” Hallie repeated.
Vickie turned to frown at her.
But Hallie wasn’t looking up the stairs anymore. She was staring down the central hallway—through the shotgun center of the house.
Jackson trotted down the stairs and stood next to her, looking out. He swore softly and went tearing toward the back of the house.
Vickie chased after him, catching Hallie by the shoulders. “What? What is it?” she demanded.
“Alice...and her father. Again!”
Vickie spun around. She did so just in time to see that Jackson had taken off after Alice, who was still in a white gown, beckoning her father—who appeared to be in shock—out through the sculpture garden.
And into the cemetery.
* * *
The wall of the basement was remarkable for what they did find...
And what they didn’t find.