by E M Kaplan
“Yeah. So cool,” Josie managed to say even though her heart was still trying to pound its way out of her throat. “Want to know what I found? A locked door.”
“Aw, that’s too bad.” Lizzie set her bag down by her feet.
“Yeah, it’s the last door on this floor. Maybe even the last place in the house we haven’t checked out yet.”
“I mean, it’s too bad I have this set of lock picks, but I haven’t learned how to use them yet.” She showed Josie the small leather case she’d dug out of her bag.
Chapter 27
The last thing in the world Josie thought she would be doing at one o’clock in the morning in a mansion in Texas was giving a tutorial on how to pick a lock to a Goth ghost hunter. However, here she was, talking about tumblers and pins—to an apt pupil, too.
“Okay, you got this. Shake out your fingers and try again. Just go slow.”
Lizzie, on her knees in the thick carpet, had fumbled her first two attempts, dropping her tools in the thick, plush carpet, so Josie coached her to try again. Lizzie muttered the steps to herself, her words muffled by the pick she held between her lips.
“Insert the tension thingy into the bottom of the hole, using a little pressure.”
“Excellent use of the technical term thingy,” Josie said. She’d taught her that.
“Insert the pick into the top of the hole,” Lizzie repeated from memory.
“Yep. Now the slightly tricky part. Nice and easy. Slow and steady wins the race.”
Truth be told, Josie was feeling slap-happy from alternating fatigue and adrenal overload thanks to her constant state of jumpiness. Right now, she probably couldn’t rush even if monsters were chasing her.
“Use a slight torque pressure on the first thingy, and move the second thingy back and forth until the pins set…” Lizzie’s face wrinkled up in concentration, her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows coming down in curled twin awnings over her eyes.
The lock shifted and the door swung open into blackness.
“Hey, you did it! Good job.”
A waft of stale air, smelling of dust and mold, drifted across their faces. Josie froze in the middle of offering Lizzie a high-five as a feeling of dread—no other way to describe it came over her. Kind of like she’d bitten into a raspberry filled donut only to discover the filling was gray with mold. Revulsion at a visceral level.
“Uh, I got the door open. You can go in first,” Lizzie said, stepping backward, her rounded shoulders even more sloped as she scuttled out of the way.
“Yeah. Sure.” Josie tried to sound ballsy and not as reluctant as she felt. She dug deep for some false bravado, as if she’d actually done anything to earn the P.I. license in her wallet. How bad could it be? It was just a room, right?
Deep breath. I got this.
As with the atrocious pink bedroom, she stepped in and felt with her hand along the inside of the wall, searching for a light switch. The wall, as with the room, seemed colder than the hall, but her wrist suddenly sparked and burned right where her new beaded bracelet wrapped around it. The accompanying zapping noise reminded her of a mosquito porch light, except in this case, she was the bug. And that charred smell was not good. Kind of like roasted pork.
“Son of…!” Josie clutched her wrist where the coin on her bracelet had fried her skin.
“Holy chet. What was that?” Lizzie asked from out in the hall. She poked her head in. “Is something on fire?”
“I think it’s me. I just got shocked.”
“By what?”
“No clue, but ouch.”
“Here, take my flashlight.” Lizzie handed her the red “ghost light,” and Josie shined it on the wall she’d been touching.
Where the wall switch should have been was a gaping hole with a couple of frayed wires jutting out, completely uncovered and dangerous. Any unsuspecting fool could come along and—well, she now knew how easily that could happen.
“That is definitely not going to pass the buyer’s inspection,” she said, her wrist still tingling, but not as bad now. “Looks like someone is in the middle of remodel—”
Swinging the light around to the rest of the room, she was unable to finish her thought.
#
If she were going to design a living space for a shut-in…or a dead, mummified mother, this room would have exactly matched that dark and twisted vision. With Lizzie all but plastered against her back, she scanned the room, slowly sweeping the red light from side to side.
Rocking chair in the corner—check. Dressmaker’s mannequin by the wall—check. Antique birdcage large enough to hold a small child or…a velociraptor—check. Stacks and stacks of old magazines and newspapers, enough to make a hoarder feel at home if not crush her to death—check. Apparently this enormous mansion didn’t have an attic because this room was a catch-all for the family’s weird and nightmare inducing cast-offs.
And that smell…ugh. What was that dank, fetid odor, and how had a single closed door managed to trap the smell in this room?
“Phew!” Lizzie waved a manicured hand in front of her face. Then she grabbed Josie’s arm in excitement. “I think it’s a paranormal smell. Oh my God, my first ghostly odor. I should take a selfie or something. Oh, well, maybe not a picture.”
“Huh?” Josie wasn’t too sure about that. Something could have died in here—easily—and stayed undiscovered for years.
“And that disgusting burning smell on top of it. This is amazing.”
Josie looked at her with narrowed eyes. Lizzie looked like she was about to enter a state of rapture.
“That disgusting smell would be my burnt flesh.”
She held up her wrist, a bit afraid to remove the bracelet to see what kind of damage her skin had suffered. She had Schrödinger's arm burn, just like the famous cat in a box paradox. Her wrist was both burned and unburned as long as she didn’t look underneath.
“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Then Lizzie gaped at Josie’s wrist. “Oh my God, that bracelet totally protected you. You could have been shocked to death.”
“Huh?”
She stared at the black sparkling beads wrapped around her bony wrist joint. Now that she thought about it, it kind of looked like a Victorian version of one of Wonder Woman’s Amazonian cuffs that she used to block flying bullets.
Well, sure. If it’s a love charm and also a deflector of evil, I’ll take it. It’s not like I’m going to say no just because I’m stuck in a skeptical frame of mind.
Josie edged further into the room. The red flashlight was less than inadequate in warding off not only the inky darkness, but the willies that zinged up and down Josie’s spine. She didn’t sense any other people in the room—living people, that was—no crouching bad guy waiting to spring out at her.
Josie swung the flashlight again, and Lizzie shrieked, making Josie flinch and nearly fling the light out of her hand. She cursed her jumpiness, which she knew wasn’t normal, at least not for her. Her stupid adrenal glands were in constant hyperdrive.
I need to get a frickin’ grip.
“Oh my God, I just saw a face,” Lizzie said, her voice high with either excitement or fear—or a combo of the two. She’d also dropped her device when she screamed and ducked down to snatch it back up from the floor. Waving it in front of her again, she stared at the lights, which weren’t moving, giving a cry of frustration when she couldn’t get her machine to work.
“Yes, it’s okay. You really did see a face,” Josie said, shining the light around the room again. This time, she let it come to rest on a framed portrait leaning against the wall. “A whole bunch of them.”
The painting was one of those posed family deals, with the father seated and the rest of the family clustered around him, patriarchal and pretty stuffy-looking. From the clothing and hairstyles, she thought the portrait had been taken in the early 80’s, maybe. Mom and daughter had donned matching Laura Ashley floral dresses with wide, white Peter Pan collars. The three boys were stiff and unsmiling in matching gr
ay suit coats and red ties, like miniature Republican senators. Mary Clare’s family portrait. Josie stared with morbid curiosity at the girlhood face of the dead woman and at her family’s faces as well.
In the portrait, Mary Clare was pretty, in a starched and artificial way. She’d been brunette back before Miss Clairol had gotten ahold of her. Her expression wasn’t exactly a smile—more like facial rictus. Her lips had either been glossed with pale pink lipstick or she’d been later painted that way. Too perfect, too plastic, like some of the other poor little rich girls Josie had known and felt sorry for in her life.
She located a Tiffany lamp against the wall and reached under the shade to turn it on, hoping it was plugged in and properly wired, unlike the wall switch. With a twist of her wrist, the bulb came on, and the entire room was bathed in red, bloody light.
“Hey, what do you know? A red lampshade. That’s much better,” Josie said.
“Red-rum,” Lizzie blurted out with a nervous giggle.
“What is this place?”
Now that she could see better, she turned in a circle, taking in the rest of the room, and discovered a couch and a fully made-up bed with a ratty quilt and pillows. A bedside table was littered with papers and tissues, a plastic drinking tumbler, and medicine.
“Was someone…living here?” Lizzie asked.
Chapter 28
“Someone definitely could have stayed here. There’s a bed. A bookshelf. No kitchen or fridge. No windows.” Lizzie turned in a slow circle.
She was right. This weird…cell was a temporary bedroom, a barely livable room for a person with a real penchant for the solitary life. Basically they were in a storage room with a bed. Or…a prison cell? With a really weird selection of books—a leather-bound, embossed Children’s Bible and what looked to be a full shelf of hardback Nancy Drew mysteries, the older ones with the yellow covers. The first six Harry Potter books, but not the last and final one.
Maybe this is hell.
With a sour taste in her mouth, Josie went back to the door to check for a lock, but no, other than the standard lock on the handle, there were no special deadbolts to indicate imprisonment. No fingernail scratches on the inside of the door. No tally marks counting off the days like a prison wall etching. No bars on the bed. No handcuffs either, fuzzy or otherwise.
Okay, whew. At least that was one question answered. This room was no torture chamber or freaky playroom. But why, if a person lived in a mansion like this, would they stay in a windowless, dank-smelling monk’s cell even for a few days?
“Oh, and here’s the source of that rotten stench.” Josie picked out a wooden walking stick from a canister by the door and poked it into a heap of something furry—which she prayed was dead—on the floor, partially obstructing the heating duct. The fur, which turned out to be some kind of stole, maybe sable if she had to guess, was like the kind which elderly ladies used to wear around just their shoulders with a tie in the front. It fell into two pieces as she tried to pick it up with the end of her stick. As it disintegrated, it released another cloud of gamey, rotten stink which had Josie breathing through her mouth.
Ew. Burnt fur and skin. So nasty.
Lizzie said, “Did you know that when you smell something—a good smell like fresh bread or a horrible smell like dead skunk—that you’re actually inhaling tiny particles of whatever it is that you smell? That’s what makes a public toilet or a latrine extra disgusting. I mean, you’re actually breathing in other people’s feces. Or like when you’re driving in your car and you get stuck behind a really slow garbage truck on a hot day…”
“Thanks. I didn’t know that.” Josie yanked the collar of her t-shirt up over her nose, wishing she had a face mask. She hadn’t even considered the possibility of something actually toxic having been stored in this room, and she had Lizzie’s safety to consider as well, not just that of her own foolhardy self.
A freestanding rack of clothes stood along the opposite wall. The bar of it had nearly buckled with the weight of coats and dresses, all women’s clothes and some of which looked suitable even for a formal evening in Dallas. A mass of iridescent sequins glowed in the dim, red light from her flashlight. On the floor below, matching shoes made a front line at a debutante’s battle. The foot soldiers. Josie snorted to herself at her horrible pun.
Josie crossed the room and squatted down to examine the prescription bottles on the bedside table without touching them. Clozapine. Prozac. Lorazepam. Xanax. Bottles all prescribed to a Janet Martinez with handwritten labels in Spanish and no dates, which was shady as heck. Not even expiration dates, never mind when they had been filled. Okay, then. Fake prescriptions. Fake identity for anonymity. Real drugs—a major pill stash, with weeks’ worth of doses just sitting here in the dust.
She did a double-take—not at the pill bottles, but at the layers of dust on the table and on everything else in the room. Unlike the rest of the house, which had been well-kept and spotless, this room was a dump, grimy and foul-smelling. But how long had it been this way? She went the nearest pile of newspapers and took the first one off the stack. If the very top paper was dated September 28, 1995, she’d consider this a closed case, job done. To her mind, a newspaper dated the very day Mary Clare had disappeared would more or less confirm that this room had belonged to her at some point in her troubled existence.
Josie scanned the top of the front page, then found the date under the Legislator title bar.
“October 10, 2005.”
#
What the heck? This newspaper was much too recent to have been here while Mary Clare was alive. Unless…
“Sorry, what did you say?” Lizzie had finished making a full circuit of the room with her unblinking gadget and tossed it back in her bag, where it clanked against some of the other junk she had in there.
“This newspaper is from 2005. Mary Clare disappeared ten years before that. There’s no way she could have put this on the stack of papers here when the last day anyone heard from her was September 28, 1995.”
“Maybe someone else put it in here, like as a storage space. Maybe they wanted to save all the newspapers in case she ever showed back up again. You know, so she could read about everything she missed. I mean, look at all this junk...” Lizzie’s voice tapered off tiredly after that. In the red light of the room she looked tired, even under all of her makeup. The actual mental cataloging of clues didn’t seem to be her thing after the initial discovery of the room.
Don’t give up now, girl. We’re almost onto something.
The thrill of the chase, on the other hand, had awoken Josie. Or maybe that was just another gush of adrenaline from her overtaxed glands. She knew she was headed for burn-out, but that was a worry for another day. After this was over, she could lie on the couch for a month. But for now, they were just so close to…something. She could almost smell it.
“Listen, do you hear something?” Lizzie was clutching Josie’s arm again.
“Hear wha—”
“Shhh.”
Josie frowned as Lizzie shushed her. Of all the nerve. Miss Scaredycat Ghosts-in-Theory was telling her to be quiet—
A police siren wailed outside, and Josie executed a mental about-face, taking back her uncharitable thoughts.
“Seriously? Someone called the cops on us? I thought the neighbors liked Marion. I can’t believe they turned on him like that! Bunch of two-faced liberals-just-for-show. Oh, it’s all fine and good until a trans-skimpily-vestited hobo lives next door to them. Then the claws come out. Not in my backyard. Not on my…hard-scrabble, gravel composite front yard.”
“We need to hide,” Lizzie insisted, looking wild-eyed in the red gloom. A pulse visibly pounded in the girl’s neck. Josie recognized a burst of fear-fueled energy when she saw one. But no way was she going to get trapped in this godforsaken Miss Havisham-esque dungeon of bad memories and creepy cast-offs. No, thank you. She had no idea if the police were going to have to search each room while they crouched and cowered in here for hour
s. One night in this monastic cell of misery was one night too long. No way, no how.
“Hit the lights. We’re getting out of here,” she told Lizzie as she clicked the feeble flashlight on again. After they had both stepped back out into the hallway, Josie made sure Lizzie still had her shoulder bag and that nothing had been left on the dirty floor in the room. She didn’t want any trace of them left behind, especially since she was going to tell Skip everything she knew at the soonest opportunity. She locked the door behind them and they went down the hall the way they’d come.
Lizzie gave a moan so long, drawn-out, and full of dread it actually made Josie feel like the place might be haunted after all.
“We don’t know why the police are here,” Josie said, trying to mollify her as she led them back down the spiral staircase—granted, at a much faster clip than they’d ascended. “It could be just a routine security check.”
With siren blaring and turbo-charged engine roaring up the street.
If they ignored Lizzie’s SUV parked in driveway by the front door.
“And even if they do want to ask us a few questions, we haven’t done anything wrong.”
Other than criminal trespassing. But hey, we hadn’t broken anything, other than nearly frying my skin in the hell hole upstairs. It will most likely be classified as a misdemeanor and not prosecuted as a felony. If we’re lucky.
“Hold it right there. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Oh, chet,” Lizzie said, yelping her mixed English-Spanish curse again. She dropped her bag at the foot of the stairs with a thunk and raised her hands sky-high in light of the service firearm pointed at them.
Part 4: Inferno
In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is made up of nine concentric circles of suffering—the usual peccadilloes: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.
I know what you’re thinking: What is she talking about? After all, you didn’t come to a food blog for lessons on ancient allegory. You want to know how long to smoke a pork butt or what’s my go-to classic Sonoran style rub recipe. You want to know how long you can keep a Santa Fe Green Chile Chicken Casserole in the freezer.
