Corpses at Indian Stone (21 page)

Of course, water can flow cockeyed underground, just as it does above-ground. But--

taking one thing with another--I think I'll try to burrow under that porch tonight."

"I wish I could go along with you."

"I won't have time," Aggie said solemnly, "to dig a hole big enough for you."

"Suppose somebody sees you burrowing under that porch?"

"Nobody will. I'll start under the sumacs. It won't take me long. The club's full of people this time of night. Bright inside and dark outside. I've had plenty of experience--

digging. The solarium's on stone piers--with a heavy sill and clapboards between. Of course, if I knew where the other guy went in--" He shrugged. "Maybe he didn't. Maybe Hank's nowhere. That brook could have cut into some sort of minerals--or deadwood--

underground--and stained itself. Somebody could have tossed in the paper." He started toward the kitchen. "I'll get a couple of tools--"

"Aggie! If you find him--what will you
do
?"

"Get him out--quick. And ask him who put him there."

"Don't you
know?"

He stared at his aunt. "Why, no. Do you?"

She shook her head. "I thought you did. You tell me the things you do think in such a spotty way--!"

"Hank ought to know--if, as, and when," he said. "Sarah, didn't you say there used to be a hidden exit to the old hotel? A place the gay glades used for a quick getaway when their irate spouses caught them weekending?"

"Great grief! There was!" Sarah sighed. "But that wasn't on the old plans either, Aggie. It was just--a story. A legend. Your father's father told me. Maybe
his
father used it. I wouldn't have put it beyond old Hilary Plum--to judge from the family records!"

CHAPTER 17

Aggie lay on his belly and dug like a beaver. Over his head was a canopy of sumac leaves. Filtering through was light from the club solarium. He could hear the thump-thump of the feet of table-tennis players, occasional strident voices, and the tap of the ball. Somewhere in the building above, a radio was playing. It began to utter news and the players stopped to listen. It went on broadcasting music, and the people resumed their game. The sill was partly buried, and dry-rotted. The ground outside it was hard.

But Aggie inched steadily into his hole and presently his feet pulled out of sight.

It was pitch-dark under the porch. The thumping of the players was louder. Aggie switched on his light.

Such a place, even if inaccessible to man, can be reached by fungi, molds, and insects. Such a place contains rubble, old boards, nails, wire, rope, shingles--the oddments dropped and abandoned by masons and carpenters at the time of construction.

Aggie could not quite stand up. The enclosed area was fifty or sixty feet long and some twenty feet in width. He walked through it, inspecting the ground. It consisted, mostly of time-compressed ashes, overlaid with dirt, rotted sod, and the debris. The foundation under the club proper--the inside wall of the place--was blackened. Evidence of the burning of the Sachem House.

There were, however, two squares of unblackened brick on that wall--where windows that had once given on the outdoors had been blocked up because the club plans had called for a porch over them. Aggie noted them and thought about them. But he searched the place for a full half hour--with every iota of his trained skill--before he turned to them. Finding nothing that an archaeologist would consider suggestive of an old door or a hidden passage, Aggie finally went up to one of the two bricked-up rectangles.

According to his knowledge of the cellar and Sarah's plan--the area behind those windows was terra incognita. No doubt it would prove to be a mere black hole under the lounge. Aggie reluctantly picked at the mortar around the least firm-looking brick.

When he got it out--in two halves--he removed another. Then, fixing his eye and his light on the hole, he peered in. After that, he set himself to the demolition of the bricks--expertly--and as quietly as he could, although the noise overhead was considerable.

Behind those bricks was a room--lower than the outside ground level, with a venerable coat of whitewash on its walls. The floor looked like a long-entombed bit of field. But in its middle was a huge pile of ashes and at one side of the pile were steps going down to a door.

Aggie scrambled through the bricked-up window. The room was empty. There was no visible sign of any method of ingress save the one he had made. He knew there must be one--but he did not take time to look. He went down the stairway to the door. It was also blackened, and upon it was a new bolt.

It had taken no more than a glance to reconstruct the raison-d'être of the stairs and the door. Into this place, as the old Sachem House burned, had poured much of the water that had doubtless been carried to the fire by a bucket brigade. Into it, too, had fallen a sludge of ashes, covering the door and filling the stair well. Afterward, the charred foundations had lain naked in the wind and the rain for years--until the site had been purchased for the club. During that period, every trace of the staircase had been erased by drifting earth, by leaves, by growing things--if, indeed, the ashes had left a visible trace.

Somebody had located the stairway, either by search, or--as in Sarah's case--from an old document, and dug it out.

Aggie shot the bolt. He pushed the door open. Ahead, was a long, downsloping passage. He followed it for a hundred yards. Its walls became rock. Cut in the wall, at that point, was a door; and on the door, another new bolt, as well as a heavy beam. He lifted the beam and slid the bolt. This door opened out.

Behind it was a chamber. The walls were rock. The ends of freshly broken roots spiked the ceiling. From somewhere inside came an incessant gurgling of water. Aggie's torch, moving across the floor, touched a heap of opened tin cans and an old chair--and held for a moment on the opposite corner, where a pool of water flowed slowly out of sight in a cavern no more than a foot high. The air in the place was tinged with a chemical smell, but it was not foul. He had the impression that it was replenished from the little cave where the brook ran out.

Aggie spoke. "Mr. Bogarty!"

There was no answer. He stepped into the room and moved his light. Then he held it very still. Stretched out on the floor--raggedly bearded and in filthy clothes--lay a man.

At his side was a pail set on two stones and under it was an empty solidified-alcohol can.

The man did not look very much like the Hank Bogarty of the photographs Aggie had seen--but it was Hank. Aggie thought for a moment that he was dead. Looking closer, he saw that he was breathing--lightly, rapidly.

Aggie knelt and took the man's wrist. His pulse was racing and feeble. He had been there, Aggie thought, for more than two weeks--supplied with food by his captor--

and with canned heat, for cooking it. Light too--Aggie saw--for there was a mound of candle grease on the ground near by. Aggie thought, for a moment, that exhaustion--fear-

-fury--shock--had prostrated Hank. Then he saw the true reason.

Hank's head lolled. On the side of it, toward the back, was a savage wound that had not healed. The wound was infected. Reddish streaks ran into Hank's scalp and down his neck. He had needed medical attention for the injury that had knocked him out--and made it possible for someone to take him there.

Aggie considered the two courses open to him. Hank was a heavy man--and unconscious. To take him out would be a tremendous task--and a rough journey for the sick man. To leave him might mean that his captor would check up on the prisoner-and see the hole in the bricked window. Aggie knew much about Hank's captor. He shuddered. Then, taking a deep breath, he rolled Hank on his face, wormed underneath him, wrapped his right arm around a thigh and seized a wrist with his right hand. He picked up his light with his left hand and lifted mightily.

He went back up the passage at a running walk. He climbed the steps swiftly. He was panting. To lift Hank up and into the old window seemed at first impossible. Then Aggie saw he could do it by removing more bricks. He worked with frenzy. The radio overhead was still going--the feet were still thumping--but it seemed far away and Aggie did not feel safe in that place.

When his task was ended and he was ready to try lifting Hank again, he stopped to breathe. Overhead he heard a slight creak--a sound disoriented from the others.

Instantly, he switched off his light. He peered up in the darkness. He saw--some distance away, between two of the floor joists that made the ceiling--a long thin wedge of dim light that disappeared as he looked at it.

Grimly, he lifted Hank again and thrust his head into the hole. Fiercely, he levered the big man up to it and pushed him through. He plunged after Hank even before Hank had fallen limply on the other side.

There was some sort of trap door that opened into the clubhouse. Under a rug, probably. And whoever had put Hank down there had opened the trap a little--and seen Aggie's light--and closed it. Aggie thought of yelling. But it might take the people upstairs many minutes to find him. In the meanwhile--the man who had opened the trap door would have come out, and around the club. Then what? Aggie didn't know.

The thing to do was to drag Hank to the hole under the sill, leave him there for a moment's reconnoitering, and come back. The tunnel would have to be enlarged for Hank. Aggie squirmed out. He stood in the sumacs, panting, sopping wet with sweat. He heard nothing. He waited, hiding against the side of the building. Still nothing. He ventured to crawl back and shine his light at Hank--and the space under the solarium.

Nobody. Hank lay still, breathing rapidly. Aggie began to widen the hole--and listen--and work again. Ten minutes later he dragged Hank through it.

He paused once more to consider.

Suppose he picked up Hank again--walked boldly into the light--carried him around to the veranda--took him into the club? Was someone waiting for him--out on the shadowy golf course--with a rifle? Would there be a couple of shots--and somebody running away in the night? It was possible. But--suppose he slipped along the side of the club with Hank, and into the lilacs, and through them to where the sumacs met, and from there, down into the woods? Aggie caught his breath and struggled to lift the man. Then--

a shadow among the black shadows--he began to move.

Half an hour later, at the edge of the road in front of Sarah's cottage, Aggie waited for a car to pass and went across--palsied, gasping, almost demented by physical strain and sustained fear. He kicked at the screen door and Sarah opened it. He was too winded to speak. He staggered through the living room and into the butler's pantry, where he stretched Hank on the floor and lay flat beside the man, struggling for breath.

Aggie's appearance--dirty, sweat-covered, bramble-torn--and his behavior--were a test of Sarah's nerve. But she understood, at least partly. To have possession of Hank Bogarty, now, was to be in as grave danger as Calder had once been--and George Davis.

She pulled the blind on the one window ill the pantry. She made a cursory examination of Bogarty. She said, "No word yet from Wes! I've sent out as urgent a message as I could--

to get them trailing him."

Aggie nodded. "How long--how long--for an ambulance to come?"

"Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty."

"Call one."

When she came back from the phone, Aggie was breathing with less violence. He knelt over Bogarty. "Blood poisoning. From that sock on the back of his head.

Ambulance coming?"

"I told 'em," said Sarah, "that if they weren't here in ten minutes, I'd shoot the driver."

"Somebody saw me taking him out," he went on. "Opened a trap door a slit. He was--just where we--figured--he would be. So they know--whoever it is--that I've got him out. And they know--"

"--that the minute Hank can speak--it'll be all over for them."

"That old exit from the hotel," he said, nodding, "has a room off it. The passage goes on--doubtless is blocked up. The room was probably for that safe--originally--but they hit water. Didn't use it for anything, I guess. Afraid it might be flooded. The brook runs in and out through a cave. Air comes up it. But I don't imagine sound travels down very far. It's probably crooked--like a muffler or a gun silencer. Hank was in there. He would have died--!"

Sarah tried to calm the expression of horror in his eyes. "Don't think about it now, Aggie. We'll take Hank to the hospital--"

"You," he answered. He stood up. His muscles were trembling so that his whole body seemed to shiver. "You get in that ambulance and go with Hank! Take Chillie too!

I'll send old John away with Windle!"

"You
can't
stay here! Your life isn't safe for a second!"

"I'm staying! I
hate
--whoever did this! Somebody's going to pay for the last hour I went through! I believe I know who it is--but I'm not sure, and I don't care! You get out of here--and I mean it, Sarah! It's not a question--any longer--of being ingenious or of using my head! When I saw this poor devil dying in that hole--I
lost
my head! Do you understand?"

Sarah stared at her nephew for a full ten seconds. "Yes, Aggie. I do. Be careful!"

He left the pantry quickly. He was in his room, changing his clothes, when the ambulance came. Its siren murmured and its motor thrashed. The feet of men carrying a stretcher pounded in the cottage. Then the murmuring siren faded away on the dirt road.

Indian Stones was silent again. It took Aggie a considerable time to change. But, when he had finished, he hurried downstairs and went to Sarah's teapot. The station wagon keys were gone. Windle and old John had used it for their departure. Aggie ran to the barn, started the vintage limousine, and drove up to the club.

He entered the main lounge calmly enough and walked through the rooms. It was a quarter past eleven. The usual crowd had thinned. But the late-stayers were still on hand. Byron Waite, reading a newspaper, Ralph and Beth at their interminable game of table tennis, Mrs. Drayman shepherding her daughter and, in the exercise of that function, scolding Bill. Danielle wasn't there. Neither was Jack Browne. A more complete showing than Aggie had expected.