Daring In a Blue Dress

by Katie MacAlister

  Alden knelt next to the window seat, one hand rubbing his chin as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. It was indeed a staircase, a narrow spiraling wooden staircase that was illuminated from below by the golden light they’d seen in the seam of the window seat. The light didn’t waver or flicker, leaving him to believe it was not a candle or a lamp. What was a staircase of all things doing leading up to his window seat? “Mercy, go over to the toolbox in the wardrobe. There’s a torch in there.”

  “Torch? Oh, you mean flashlight.” Mercy hurried over to the wardrobe, poking around in its depth until she came back with a flashlight, a small saw suitable for use on branches, and her dressing gown, the last of which she slipped on after handing him the flashlight. “I feel just like I’m Nancy Drew.”

  “Does that make me one of the Hardy Boys?” he asked, pulling on a T-shirt and his shoes before tucking the hammer into his back pocket.

  “No, you’re Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s handsome but beefy boyfriend. Hang on, shoes are a good idea. Where are my sandals?”

  Two minutes later, with a warning to Mercy not to descend until he told her it was safe to do so, Alden began his descent down the creaking, dusty wooden staircase. He had to duck to fit himself under the edge of the window seat, but since the spiral stairs had a steep descent, it didn’t take but a few more seconds before he was able to straighten up. As he descended, he could see a light glowing along one wall, clearly hung there for a purpose. The stairs ended abruptly, the light disclosing a small alcove, with two narrow, dark passageways leading away into inky nothingness. He eyed the light closely, shining his torch on the wall to reveal black cables snaking off in either direction. “How very curious.”

  “Alden!” Mercy whispered loudly from above him. He looked up, and saw her pinched face peering down over the edge of the window seat. “What’s going on?”

  “I was just looking at the light. Someone has put in quite a bit of work to bring lighting to this secret passageway. Come down, but drag the duvet over to hang into the window seat before you do.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll keep the floor from closing on us.”

  “Oh. Good thinking, Ned.”

  She disappeared, but was back in a few moments, her sandaled feet pattering down the narrow spiral stairs quickly, followed by a long, bulky shape of the duvet.

  “Oooh,” she said when she got down to his level. She rubbed her arms even though she was wearing her dressing gown over the nightie. “Secret passages! Do you think we’re inside the walls of the house?”

  “Possibly, although the windows would keep the passages from running the length. A bigger question is, who put in these lights, and why?”

  Mercy examined the light on the wall. “Huh. Obviously, whoever did it meant to use the passage for something. Maybe wartime activities?”

  Alden shook his head. “I can’t imagine why. This house wasn’t conscripted for use by the army. From what I remember of the records, it was simply shut up during that time.”

  “Huh.” She touched the light. “Well, this is a modern bulb, so it had to have been someone in the recent past.”

  “True.”

  “What I don’t get is who would do it. Not Lady Sybilla or Adams—I can’t see either of them scampering around in the walls of Bestwood Hall.”

  He flipped off his torch. The lights were spaced along the wall in such a way as to light up the passageway quite well. “No, I don’t think this is their doing . . . or at least, I don’t think they placed the light here. I wouldn’t put it past Lady Sybilla to have rented out secret passages, though. Let’s go this way. I believe it should take us toward the great hall.”

  Mercy took hold of the back of his shirt, shuffling after him as he walked forward. Almost immediately, the passage took a sharp turn to the left, leading them away from the front of the house. Lights continued to glow at them approximately every twenty feet.

  “You’ll notice it’s not super dusty in here,” Mercy said softly behind him.

  “I had noticed that.” He kept to himself the fact that although the ground was littered with bits of debris—stones, small chunks of mortar and wood, and lots of rodent droppings—they had been pushed to the side, as if someone had cleared a path. The smell was close and dusty, which led him to believe although mice or rats had once been here, they hadn’t been for some time.

  “Ah. More stairs.” He stopped at the top of another wooden staircase and looked down. Like the one leading up to his room, this one was lit from below. Beyond the top of the staircase was a blank wall and a small square alcove. He frowned, stepping forward to kneel and examine the wall and floor. On the latter, the dust lay heavy and thick, leaving the outline of several squares where something had obviously sat. Something large and bulky.

  “What’s that?” Mercy asked, peering over his shoulder. “Or rather, what was that, do you think?”

  “I have no idea. Crates of some sort would be my guess, but what was in them I couldn’t say.”

  “Hmm. Odd.”

  “Indeed it is.” He gestured to the stairs. “I guess we go down. Are you all right with that, Nancy?”

  “Right as rain, Ned. Lead on!”

  He smiled over his shoulder at her, then carefully made his way down the stairs. This staircase seemed to be in worse shape than the other one, causing him to watch anxiously as Mercy descended, but other than creaking ominously and weaving a little, it held up under their weight.

  “I feel like we should be leaving a bread-crumb trail,” Mercy said when they set off down a slightly wider passage. This one dipped downward, and had a wetter odor to it, the smell of mold driving out the drier, dusty scents of the passage above.

  “I wouldn’t suggest that. It might attract mice,” he said, and brushed against the wall. It was horribly moist, causing him to recoil in revulsion.

  “What’s wrong?” Mercy asked when he staggered backward a step. “Did you see a mouse?”

  “No.” He reached out and touched the wall with the tips of his fingers. “It’s damp.”

  “The wall?” She mimicked his movement. “Huh. That’s probably because we’re near the ocean.”

  “We can’t be near the ocean. That’s a quarter mile from the house, and we’ve only gone half of that distance.”

  She peered over his shoulder. Just as with the original passage, this one was very well lit. “I wonder where this is going. To the old part of the house?”

  “I have no idea. Shall we see?”

  “Yes.” She gave his back a little prod, and he continued forward down the passage, soon coming to another blank wall as the passage made a right-angle turn. This time, the floor was dust free in front of the wall, but there were a few torn scraps of paper, and a ghostly white object that lay forgotten in the corner.

  “What on earth?” Mercy asked, picking up a milky white plastic bottle. “It’s a wash bottle.”

  Alden gathered up the couple of bits of paper, frowning. “A what?”

  “Didn’t you ever do any chemistry classes?”

  “No, the physical sciences are not my forte.” He eyed the bottle she held. It had a red cap with a long tube bent at ninety degrees. “What does a wash bottle wash?”

  “Anything you want.” She turned it around in her hands, tipping it so as to catch the light. “In my chem classes, we used these for solvents. Which I bet is what this is—see here? Most of the lettering is rubbed off.”

  She held the bottle to him, pointing out where the letters CETONE were written in red.

  “And what exactly would an acetone chemistry bottle and”—he glanced at the scraps of paper—“over-the-counter cold medication be doing in the walls of my house?”

  “Maybe you have a mad scientist with sinusitis living in your walls?” she offered with a smile to let him know she was joking.

  He sn
orted. “It would be more likely to be a homeless person conducting illicit drug activity than a mad scientist.”

  “True, but at least you know one thing: it’s someone contemporary, not one of Sir James Baskerville’s long-dead ancestors.”

  “I think I’d prefer the long-dead ancestors,” he said, pocketing the scraps of cold medicine label. “They, at least, have a chance of hiding treasure. Shall we continue?”

  “Onward, Ned!”

  They continued down the passageway, the walls still damp and unpleasant. Before long, the change in air could be noticed.

  “Salt water,” he said, sniffing.

  “Told you it was the ocean.”

  “Hmm.” Another two minutes, and they reached an arched opening, through which they came into a cave. At their feet, an ebony rippling line of water lapped at what looked like a primitive pier. Here the lights hung drunkenly from a zigzagging copper pipe that had been bolted to the low ceiling of the cave, the lights moving gently with the breeze coming in from the entrance. “I’ll be damned. Do you know what this is?”

  “A cave? With water in it?”

  “It’s exactly that. And who would use a cave with water access in Cornwall?”

  She sucked in her breath. “The free-traders! Holy moly, Alden, you have a smugglers’ cave under your house! An actual, honest-to-god smugglers’ cave! One with . . . electricity?”

  “Exactly. Smugglers may be using the cave, but it’s not free-traders. I’d be very interested to know who else is aware of the cave’s existence . . . and why they’re lighting up the insides of my house.”

  “Not to mention what they’re doing in there. I mean, a homeless person wouldn’t string lights all over.”

  “This is true.” He took Mercy’s hand, her fingers cold and stiff in his, but curling around his hand in a way that not only provided comfort but stirred his desire. “Shall we see if anyone is out at the cave entrance bringing in some contraband?”

  She waved the heavy spanner she’d evidently taken from his tool chest. “You bet. I’m armed, so even if it’s white slavers or ivory smugglers, we’ll be safe.”

  “You have the oddest notions of the sorts of things people would want to smuggle in this day and age.” With another quick glance around the area, he turned his back on the dead end to the left, and led Mercy along the stream, into the unknown.

  Chapter 12

  “So you’re saying you didn’t find anything in the tunnel?” Fenice, who had listened to my tale of my nocturnal subterranean adventures with Alden, sat with her toast and tea getting cold, too riveted to consume the breakfast I’d interrupted. “Nothing? Not even so much as a clue as to what was going on? Or who put the lights there?”

  “Nothing. The stream led out to an entrance in the cliffside, about eight feet above the beach. Alden said watermarks on the cave walls show that it used to be much more of a river than a stream, which would explain why the smugglers liked it. We couldn’t see any signs of a person on the beach—no boat, no campfire, nothing—and likewise, when we backtracked our way to his bedroom, we didn’t encounter anyone.”

  She blinked a couple of times before absently picking up her cup, and promptly setting it down again. “How utterly, utterly bizarre. And unsettling. It does sound like homeless people are using it.”

  “Possibly, although that doesn’t explain the lights. There was a big switch where the cave meets the passageway to the house, and three others that we found at various points, but no clue as to who turned the lights on, let alone put them in. Alden thinks the lights have been there for several decades, though. They look kind of old.”

  “World War Two?” Fenice asked.

  I shook my head. “We think earlier.”

  “Well, it’s odd. And unsettling.”

  “I know, right? Just the idea that someone could be sneaking around in the walls of the house spying on us . . . it’s creepy as hell.”

  “What’s Alden going to do?”

  I went over to the electric kettle to make myself a cup of spicy orange tea. “We talked about that for a while once we got back to his room. I thought he should nail everything shut that could be nailed shut—like the window seat—and block the entrance at the beach, but he figured that would let whoever was using the tunnel and secret passageways know that we were on to him. Or her. But probably a him, because honestly, can you imagine a woman sneaking around like that?”

  “Yes,” policewoman Fenice said, taking a bite of her toast.

  For some reason, I thought of Lisa. I could picture her being up to something nefarious like poking around secret passages. I chastised myself for such ungenerous thoughts almost immediately, however, telling my inner bitchy self that just because I didn’t like her, that didn’t mean she would do something underhanded. “Anyway, in the end, Alden decided to put some stuff in the window seat—heavy books and some iron doorstops, et cetera, that he found in one of the attics—so that the lid wouldn’t lift up when you pressed down on the latch. That should, at least, keep anyone from entering his room that way.”

  “What about the other rooms?” she asked, pushing away her half-eaten toast. “I have some pepper spray, but if I need a hand weapon—”

  “Your room is safe,” I said quickly. “We went all along the upper-floor passages to see where they went, and it just went to the lord of the manor’s chamber—Alden’s room—and to a staircase that led down to a small room that Alden thinks used to be the butler’s pantry. He’s going to map the passages over a layout of the house today, in order to figure out just where they are, so he can check those rooms for any secret entrances that we couldn’t find.”

  “At least I won’t have to move in with Patrick,” she said. “But I’d still sleep better knowing there wasn’t someone hiding in the walls.”

  “Well,” I said, making a show of looking around before I leaned in and spoke quietly. “As a matter of fact, Alden and I came up with a plan last night. In one of the forensic detection classes I took, we did a project using this stain that fluoresces under black light. The police use it to find residual traces of human-based fluids, like blood and semen. Anyway, while I was taking a shower this morning, Alden got online and found a place in town that stocked the dye in powder form. He’s off getting it now.”

  “What good is that going to do?”

  “He’s going to dust it on the light switches, so that whoever touches them will stain their hands. Only they won’t know it because you can’t see the dye unless you have one of those black light wand thingies, which Alden’s also picking up.”

  “But how will you know whose hands to look at?” she asked, picking off a crust of her toast.

  “We’ll check everyone out. Naturally, you and Patrick don’t have to worry, but to be fair to everyone, we’ll just do a hand check every morning. I bet you that we’ll get whoever is hanging out inside the walls in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “I wish I had your confidence,” she said with a glance at the clock. “Lord, it can’t be that late already. People will be here in ten minutes—we’d better make a move.”

  “I’ll be there in a couple,” I said, hastily stirring some lemon juice into my tea. “I have to have a cuppa or else I’m totally worthless.”

  “Right. Remember that today you’ve got that group from the Women’s Institute to handle.”

  “Dress-up and archery, in that order,” I repeated from our discussion the night before.

  She grimaced and, grabbing her toast, headed for the door. She paused to say, “If I were Alden, I’d call the local police.”

  “We thought of that, too,” I said, blowing on my tea and taking a tentative sip. “But as Alden pointed out, there’s not a lot the cops could do unless we found someone in the passages or, at the very least, something that gave us an idea of who was doing it.”

  “I’d still let them know,
” she pronounced, and then hurried off to greet the people who were due to arrive that morning. I sipped my tea, and thought of checking on Alden, whom I’d left going through all the documents related to the purchase of the house in search of a floor plan, but the sight of a long van pulling up with a bunch of excited women had me bolting for the garden.

  By the time my lunch break rolled around, I was hot and sweaty, and my ears rang from the constant chatter, laughter, and, at some points, song from the group of women from a nearby town. The ladies had brought liquid refreshments with them (“So we don’t get heatstroke,” one of them said, raising a not-so-frozen daiquiri at me), and were well on their way to feeling no pain by the time the catering lady arrived with the selection of sandwiches. The day’s choices of beef tongue or cheese sandwich, even if I hadn’t established a policy of eating lunch with Alden, would have driven me up to the house for food.

  I found Alden in the library, which was bare of all except the table where I occasionally went through Lady Sybilla’s old ledgers, journals, and file folders filled with everything from fifty-year-old society column newspaper clippings to receipts for hunting dogs, horses, and even a sloop named the Lady S. Next to him, in the chair, sat Lady Sybilla herself, both of them bent over a large sheet of paper.

  “—thought that it must be the space between the great hall and those three rooms along the south side, but that doesn’t work out. I measured the width of the rooms, compared it to the width of the house from the door to the hall to the outer edge of the wall, and there’s no lost space.”

  “I told you that there would be little call for your passageway to run along the ground floor,” Lady Sybilla said with slow, perfectly enunciated measure. “If it runs to the smugglers’ lair, as you assure me it does, then it must be the passage that my late husband mentioned his father using to store valuables during the Great War. James mentioned once that his father had access to a hidden location accessible only to him, where he placed all the family portraits because he was certain that the kaiser would be landing on our shores.”