The Secret Staircase (A Wendover House Mystery Book 1) (15 page)

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My phone rang just before seven and I rushed upstairs to retrieve it from the bedside table where it had been abandoned. It was Harris letting me know that the electrician would be out the day after next, or sooner, if the storm settled. The news was cheering. Hopefully the smugglers would have their whisky out of the cave by the time Mr. Benson was ready to begin the actual work in the basement so there would be no chance of the parties meeting.

When I returned to the parlor I found Jack was asleep. The early dark brought by the storm coupled with soup and the warm fire—and Kelvin’s whisky—had done its work.

As I hadn’t touched the whisky, I was not so much sleepy as contemplative. My subconscious had been at work, thinking about what Jack had said while we were down in the cave. It had gathered its data and presented me with its conclusions as I draped a quilt over Jack and tucked him into his easy chair. He looked very comfy with his leg up on the ottoman and the firelight playing over his face.

Intuition said that the smugglers probably wouldn’t want to risk traveling any distance at sea on such a night, especially once their boats were weighed down with hundreds of gallons of whisky and riding low in the water. But what if the smuggler was already on the island? Would it be so hard to move their boat around to the cave during a lull in the storm, load it, and then go back to the dock? In the morning, after the gale burned out, they could leave openly with no one the wiser.

The wind died down. By eight it was almost calm. It came as no great shock when Kelvin got up from his nest on the settee and trotted for the kitchen. I followed him straight to the basement door where he was busy scratching at the panels. As had happened on other nights, I could feel a current of cold air creeping through the gap at the bottom of the door.

So, they had come back and for some reason opened the cupboard door. The only question was who it was who played smuggler. It could be Bryson—with or without Ben. It might also be Everett. After all, he “sometimes kept company with Mary Cory”—who had been very quick to warn me away from searching for a sea cave. If her employer was an invalid, he might not know what was going on.

And there was nothing to say it wasn’t Harris. His call had sounded awfully clear and he had been tight with my great-grandfather. He knew Mary Cory very well and, though I didn’t like to think it, he and Ben might only be pretending not to get along. I liked both men, but there was no way to know if their morals were a bit smudged. Or a lot smudged.

Kelvin objected to being shut in the pantry, but I decided his presence wasn’t needed. I felt a little anxious so it seemed wise to stop by the library and pick up Kelvin’s gun. My great-grandfather had had it for a reason, and this looked to be the general outline of a good reason for having a firearm.

I took a flashlight as well but didn’t need it for long once I was down the stairs and through the cupboard, which had blown open. They had bright lanterns in the cave and the damp walls reflected the light nicely.

There were two voices veering up the tunnel. Male, I thought, but they were distorted and I couldn’t make out their words until I was almost in the cavern.

“Move, you
bejezurdly
barrel!”

I peered around the corner with a slowness that would have angered a tortoise, giving my eyes time to get over their
dazzlement
. The first dripping back I saw belonged to Everett Sands. He was
muscling
another barrel to the cavern entrance without benefit of a handcart or sledge. About half of the casks were already gone.

His presence wasn’t entirely unexpected, but still he was my least favorite of the candidates I had imagined for the role of villain. He was a multidimensional chameleon—a policeman and a smuggler and who knew what else. He was also unfriendly.

Truthfully I felt trepidation at being discovered by him and was ready to scurry away.

But then there was a muffled shout and large hands appeared at the mouth of the cave. I held my breath, waiting to see who was there and hoping passionately that it wasn’t Harris who was helping Everett. It was something of a relief when Bryson Sands hauled himself inside. His hair was dark with rain and he looked cold and exasperated.

I drew back deeper into the shadows and listened as they talked logistics. Kelvin’s gun was heavy in my hand, but I was glad to have it.

So, I knew who
was smuggling whisky into Goose Haven
. It was enough for the time being, I decided. I liked Bryson and I think he liked me, but I wasn’t insane. There was no way that I was going to confront the brothers and ask about their plans. Though not usually imaginative, I had a frightening vision of Everett shoving me out of the cave and into the sea, which I could hear bubbling like a cauldron under the lashing wind. Bryson might not like it, but Everett was his brother and both of them had a lot to lose.

No, I was going back upstairs, bolting the basement door, and hunkering in by the fire with my sleeping guest. It would take some effort, but I was going to do my best to cultivate a taste for my great-grandfather’s whisky. If Jack woke I would take him upstairs and we would act like civilized people and sleep in beds, but if he didn’t, I was fine with feeding the fire and napping on the other settee until dawn.

Jack was hung over, and after a plain breakfast of oatmeal he decided that he would like to sit in the sun in the backyard and enjoy the morning calm while his pain pill did its work. As usual, day dawned with bright innocence, ignorant of the storm the night before. After using an aging rake to scrape away most of the slippery slime from the flagstones, which I noticed were arranged in the same pattern as the floor of the basement, I left him with a cup of tea and an Adirondack chair that we dragged off the porch and out into the sun.

During the long night I had had a lot of time to think about all kinds of things. Bryson and Everett had, of course, been on my mind for a portion of the night, but after midnight had come and gone, I had gotten to thinking about the things in the attic—the burned furniture and the clothes which were probably my great-grandmother’s. I also thought about the oddly placed windows and why the room had felt so crowded. By the time dawn was stirring, I was sure that I had an answer for the oddities.

Jack would have come with me had I asked him, but the stairs were steep and narrow, and I had a feeling that I might not like what I was about to find. If it was anything personal or painful—or just plain weird—I didn’t want any witnesses to my reaction. This was a private moment between me and my family’s ghosts.

Kelvin and I went back to the attic and walked directly to the wall that had troubled me before. Now I knew why the proportions looked wrong. To the right and to the left were outside walls with windows. In this style of house, windows in pairs were usually spaced equidistant in the wall, causing a pleasing symmetry. But one window on each side appeared off by about four feet. And, of course, they weren’t misplaced at all. It wasn’t the windows that were off. The builders were not clumsy. There had been an addition to the room, a new wall. And it wasn’t that old. I could still smell the lumber.

It took some effort to move the wardrobe full of stuffed, rotting animals, but I found a small, hidden door just where I expected it to be. It took some forcing but eventually I was able to open it far enough to squeeze through the opening.

The room beyond was closet-sized and the whitewashed outside walls were blackened in places with what I suspected was smoke damage from a leaking chimney.
Or maybe from the fire in the old house.
There was only one small window but the attic was bright enough that extra light spilled around me and into the room and it made up for the deficit.

Here were the missing portraits of my family, hung haphazardly on the walls and especially eerie in that dim light because they all did look like me and a lot of them had cats that looked like Kelvin. Taken altogether, they looked like a coven of constipated witches. The main difference between us was that they all looked very grim. Of course, in that moment, I probably wasn’t smiling either, so maybe the match was closer than I thought.

There was a harp up there as well. It had my grandmother’s name carved on it in crude letters which I suspected she had done herself. Had she liked playing it? Or was this something her father forced her to do because of that idiot legend Harris had mentioned? It might have been the latter since she never showed any inclination to play a musical instrument in the years I knew her.

Kelvin sneezed.

“Bless you.”

There was a small table in the corner. I found a journal there along with several books of local history which I was sure would be instructive. I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover it was my grandmother’s diary.

Though I eventually wanted to read the whole thing, I turned to the final entry.

If I don’t leave while my father still lives then I shall be forced by the others to stay. What will happen later I cannot guess, but I will not allow it to affect me any
longer.
My children, God willing I have them, shall not be bound by the curse either.

In spite of the trapped heat in the stuffy room, my flesh was chilled. Empathy was too weak a word for what I was feeling.

My grandmother hadn’t run away from Little Goose because she didn’t believe the crazy legend that haunted her father and made him demand that she stay. She had left because she
had
believed. And because others in Goose Haven believed too, and she would have been
forced by the others to stay
if she did not escape while she could
.

I felt pity for the frightened girl she must have been.

Kelvin meowed and patted my leg.

“We’ll go soon.
Poor thing.
I guess your family has been stuck here for a long time too.”

Had my great-grandfather built this room and tried to hide the ugly truth of his family’s misery away from himself? Maybe thinking that once out of sight he could forget his own imprisonment? It’s what I would probably do, but I didn’t think this room was here because of Kelvin’s sensitivities. This felt more like something Harris would arrange. His search for an heir had been a long one. He had certainly had time to construct this chamber while he was looking for my grandmother, or more likely, her children. And it would be worth the effort to hide all this stuff, at least in his mind. He wanted the heir to stay—desperately, it seemed—and nothing could be allowed to interfere with that.

He couldn’t bring himself to destroy family portraits or my grandmother’s things though, not even her diary, which would probably tell me all kinds of stuff about the local cult, or whatever it was, that believed
Wendovers
had to stay on the island to keep the town from perishing. But knowing on some level that any rational person would reject both the legend and also any ties to a community that believed the insane story enough to imprison someone on the island, Harris had created a hiding place and stowed all the unattractive and betraying things in it.

He had overlooked my grandmother’s clothes, maybe because of being in a hurry and he had forgotten to empty the wardrobe before I arrived, or perhaps because the clothing by itself didn’t have anything to do with the damned legend and could be left in place for me to use.

“Damn it, Harris.”

Now I knew two potentially dangerous things. The question was what I wanted to do about either one.

Jack’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“I’m in the attic!” I called down.

For half a minute I had an urge to close the door on the disturbing trove of family portraiture, but there was no way I could move the wardrobe back into place before Jack made it up the stairs.

I decided to compromise and tucked away my grandmother’s diary. The portraits were quite distracting enough. I didn’t need to bring up the whole island cult thing and get him started fussing again. Not that there wasn’t reason for concern, but I hadn’t made up my mind what I wanted to do. As crazy as it sounds to write this, I thought that I still wanted to live on the island.

Jack thumped to the door. He didn’t squeeze into the small space but stuck his head inside.

“Good God!” he exclaimed.

I glanced at him. His face had color and he looked a lot
more lively
. His pills were clearly working.

“They look like a murder of crows,” I said, opting to leave the witch metaphor out of the conversation.

“Were they Puritans? All that black clothing. I can’t see any of them whooping it up at a church sociable.”

“I can’t either. Nor can I see any reason to take these paintings downstairs. I’m glad to have them as historical references, but there is no need to ruin one’s appetite looking at their sour mugs.”

“Are those books?” Jack asked. It figures he would notice. Jack is an avid reader.

“Yes. I thought I would bring them downstairs and have a look in more comfortable surroundings. I think that they are all local history—probably boring and full of lies. Why else relegate them to the attic? But I’ll read them anyway.” I started picking up the heavy tomes. I got about half of them and it didn’t include my grandmother’s journal. “This is enough for now. I’ll get the rest later.”