Chase Baker and the Lincoln Curse: (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book No. 4) (6 page)

I ponder the question for a moment.

Why not just be honest with him, Baker, and admit you
found the brick wall?

Taking a careful, non-threatening step forward, I say, “I
found it, Booth. I found the wall.”

His face lights up like a lamp.

“But let me ask you something first,” I go on. “In all the
years the Girvin’s lived here, before their unfortunate…ummm…disappearance,
didn’t they search the joint for the dress?”

What I really want to ask Balkis is if he chained them up
down in the basement, put a gun to their heads and tried to make them talk. But
I’m in no position to start lobbing accusations with enough explosive wrapped
around my mid-section to force doctors to ID me by my teeth should I piss him
off sufficiently.

“Alas,” he says, raising his eyes up to the dark, rough wood
ceiling, as if looking through the timbers to heaven, “it’s possible the
Girvins searched their entire lives and in the end, decided to believe in the
legend. That Henry Riggs Rathbone Jr. did indeed break down the brick wall you
speak of, take possession of the dress, and burn it.” His lit face burns even
brighter. Then, “Clearly my instincts have served me right in selecting you to
find Clara’s relic. It would be a shame to have to blow you up.”

“I’ll do my best to serve the cause,” I say. “Besides, who
needs all that mess?”

We trudge our way back up two flights of stairs.

Me and all the death wrapped around my waist, and Balkis aka
John Wilkes Booth with his smartphone stuffed in his trouser pocket and a five
pound mash hammer gripped in his right hand. Heart beating in my throat, I take
the lead while Balkis remains a good five or six steps behind me. Makes me
think that if the time comes to blow me to smithereens, he’ll be able to place
as much distance between “me and thee” as possible in as brief amount of time
as possible.

At the top of the stairs I head into a short corridor and
hook a left into Clara’s bedroom where, not too long ago, Balkis knocked me
cold. Why Balkis felt compelled to drag me down into that dungeon in the first
place is anybody’s guess. But I’m sure dramatics had something to do with it.
He is the civil war reenactor after all. Together, we push the bed out of the
way, stand before the hole in the floor.

Meantime, I await his direction.

He hands me the mash hammer. At the same time, he pulls out
his smartphone, positions his thumb on the particular nasty digit.

“I’m going to assume you’re smarter than that,” he says,
shooting a glance at the weighty mash hammer.

Out the corner of my eye, I see the butcher knife on the
floor. Again, he’s nuts, but he’s sharper than I thought because he sees me
eyeing the knife.

He bursts out laughing.

“Don’t even think about it, Baker,” he says, shifting
himself over to the spot where the knife sits on the floor. He bends at the
knees, picks the blade up, walks it over to the window where he pulls back the
curtain. Breaking one of the panes with the blade, he then tosses it out the
opening.

Crap. No more knife…

The heart pulsing in my throat is now accompanied by a dry
mouth and beads of sweat on my brow.

“Down the stairs please,” he says.

Turning back to Booth/Balkis.

“I need a light,” I say, remembering my small LED light
that’s now AWOL. “A flashlight.”

At first, he shoots a look over his shoulder at the kerosene
lamp. Then he issues an aggravated exhale while punching a couple of commands
into the smartphone which initiates an LED flashlight app.

I hold my breath while a shot of ice cold chill shoots up
and down my spine.

Christ almighty, what if he mistakenly hits the wrong digit?

Of course, I wouldn’t know what hit me should that happen.
Or so I can only hope.

“Down the stairs,” he repeats. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He shines the light onto the opening. It illuminates both
the staircase and the brick wall. Inhaling a breath, I step down onto the first
tread. The board squeaks and strains, but seems strong enough. Taking it
slowly, I descend all six stairs, the thick spider webs breaking against my
face, until I face the brick wall.

Balkis follows, that LED smartphone light shining on the
wall the entire time.

Pulse picks up speed.

Maybe the dress is inside the closet after all. But then, I
can’t rid myself of the persistent twenty thousand dollar question: Why hadn’t
the Girvin’s thought to break through the floor and the wall in the search of
the dress?

It’s a question I once again pose to Balkis.

He douses the LED light. “The Girvins were spooked by this
brick wall and what it might hide.”

“In all the decades they lived here, they’re curiosity
didn’t override the spookiness? Not even once?” I ask.

“It was a question of being careful of what you wish for.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Girvins never really
wanted
to find Clara’s
dress, Mr. Baker. They spoke a good game about finding what, in essence, might
be one of the most prized Lincoln relics ever to be discovered. But to them,
finding the dress would be like opening a Pandora’s Box.”

The curse…

“Why didn’t you just sneak into the house, make an effort to
find the wall, and break it down yourself? You didn’t need me to find it.”

He shakes his head.

“I thought of that a hundred times. But searching the house
for the wall wouldn’t be easy. The Girvins were permanent fixtures of the place
and Mrs. Girvin always locked both the closet and her room whenever she wasn’t
inside them. It would be impossible to break in without their knowing. And now
that I know the brick wall wasn’t located in the closet at all, but under the
floor, surely they would have tried to stop me.”

“They’re old and infirmed…Or, were old and infirmed anyway.
You could have walked right past them and headed upstairs and they might not
have known.”

He shakes his head.

“The old man, Mr. Girvin, he’s more with it than you think.
He would have shot me on the spot if I went anywhere near Clara’s bedroom. He’s
not only a gun owner, but he often carried a pistol on his person even while in
the house. Sometimes he carried a rifle too. They were that fearful of the
modern world outside their home. A world they viewed with paranoia. And as the
years passed, they came to be even more terrified of the dress. If I were to
expose it to them, they would be haunted for all their days, just like Clara
and Henry before them.”

That’s when it dawns on me. Balkis is also afraid of the
curse. Which is precisely why he’s making me do the dirty work by digging it
up…so to speak.

“Turns out the Girvin’s days were numbered anyway,” I say,
knowing I probably shouldn’t have.

Balkis/Booth once more shifts his thumb so that it rests on
the nasty digit.

“As much as you’d like to believe Dr. Balkis killed the
Girvins, you couldn’t be more wrong, Mr. Baker.”

“I get the message, Mr. Booth,” I add.

“Mr. Baker, tear down that wall.”

Screw the Lincoln Curse and the horse it rode in on…

Raising the mash hammer, I strike at the brick.

The brick crumbles.

A small hole appears.

“More, Baker,” Balkis/Booth says, his voice trembling with
excitement. “Break more of it down.”

He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I’m an explorer after all.
A sandhog. Even with a bomb wrapped around my belly, I need to see what’s
behind the wall as much as he does.

I pound more of it out. Almost immediately a cool, stale,
moldy odor slaps our faces.

“The light,” I say. “I think I see it. I think I see the
dress, Booth.”

“It’s true,” he says. “It was here all the time. I just
needed the Girvins out of the way.”

With a trembling hand, he turns his LED light back on,
shines it inside.

“God almighty it’s true,” he repeats, now apparently
unconcerned with the curse. “Where is it?”

“Closer,” I insist. “Move in closer with the light. It’s
right there, glowing as if the ghost of Clara is still wearing it. It’s the
most beautiful apparition I’ve ever seen.”

He holds the light inside the opening, his eyes peeled onto
the empty space. That’s when I crack the son of a bitch over the head with the
mash hammer.

He goes down hard, the smartphone landing inside the broken
wall. Rather, not landing on a floor, but falling down what sounds to me like a
series of iron steps.

I pat him down, find he’s unarmed. Reaching around back, I
unbuckle the bomb belt, set it to the side. I dig into my pocket, find my Swiss
Army knife, open the blade. Gently, I slit the translucent plastic on the first
piece of C-4. Taking a sniff of the material, I recognize the smell easily
enough. Part sweet, part sour. You’re everyday construction putty.

The C-4 belt was a fake.

Go figure…

Balkis is not only nutty, he’s psychopathic phony. I head up
the steps to Clara’s water basin and discover there’s still water inside it.

I carry it back to Balkis, stand at the edge of the square
opening and pour it over his mustached face.

He comes to in a fit of spitting and coughing.

“What has thou done to me?” he says.

“Cut the shit, you crazy bastard,” I say. “The show’s over
which means you can stop talking like somebody you’re not. This ain’t no
reenactment.”

“What happened?”

“I’m smarter than you is what happened. You’re lucky the
police aren’t dragging your psychotic ass to prison right this second…
Ball-Kiss
.”

“You don’t have to mock, Baker,” he says, his voice
returning to its normal contemporary whine, his face deflated if not defeated.

He sits up, shakes his head. “Where’s my damned phone? I’ve already
lost two this year alone.”

“You’ll see what happened to your phone in just a second.”

Stepping over to Clara’s bed lamp, I grab a box of wood
matches from beside the old kerosene fixture and light it up. I carry it over
to the hole in the floor, careful to step over Balkis’ crumpled, chubby body.
Making the steps back down to the brick wall, I hold the lamp inside the
opening. I become witness to the reason the professor’s smartphone seemed to
bounce down a series of steps. Hidden behind the wall is not Clara’s dress, but
a spiral staircase.