The Murder of Shakespeare's Ghost

by Anna Celeste Burke

  “Neely took a photo with her cellphone, but that wasn’t very helpful. We marked the spot with a felt tip pen, though. See?”

  “Robyn insisted we clean up in here. It was disgusting—not the best sight to see at the crack of dawn.”

  “We couldn’t work in here, that’s for sure.”

  “Thanks for doing that, you two,” I said. “I’ll go get the step ladder.” When I returned, Charly had joined the hunt. She was stretching as high as she could, running her hands over the wall adjacent to the back wall on the left. Most of it was lined with shelves. The area she searched held a peg board with hooks. She was examining each hook to see if it moved, like a lever that might trigger a door to open if she wiggled it.

  I handed the stepladder to Robyn who took it from me. I was about to offer to climb up on the ladder when I heard footsteps and voices.

  “Good morning!” Joe bellowed when he and Carl came into the kitchen. Midge and Marty were right behind them.

  “Any luck?” Marty asked.

  “We’ve only been at it a few minutes,” Charly responded. “Neely and Robyn got here ahead of us and cleaned up enough so we could stand to work in here.”

  “It’s crowded already. If you need us to help in there, we can, but I thought Carl and I could check the hallway for any sign of an entrance since Shakespeare turned up there so often.”

  “That’s a great idea!” Robyn exclaimed.

  “What’s on the opposite side of this wall in the garage?” Midge asked.

  “I’m not sure. There are shelves lining it, but I don’t know how they sync up with the location of the pantry.”

  “Then Marty and I will go try to figure that out while you finish searching in here.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe we’re not nuts?” Marty asked. Robyn told them about the blood streak they’d cleaned up before we arrived and pointed to the ‘x’ she’d used to mark its location.

  “Hmm, that’s not much, but it is a little odd given where the body was when you found it.”

  “Have you tried knocking on the walls? If there’s an opening or an empty passage behind the wall it ought to sound different when you locate it. Have you heard the old saying the ‘an empty vessel makes the greatest sound?’” Midge asked.

  “It’s vaguely familiar,” I replied.

  “I’ve heard it before. Is it another famous saying from Shakespeare?” Robyn asked.

  “He used it, but he didn’t coin the phrase. It was an old proverb already in use when he was around.”

  “Let’s give it a try,” I said.

  “Knock, knock. Anybody home?” I called out as I began knocking on the wall from right to left.

  “Wait! I want to do that again!” Neely said. She repeated the knock-knocks I’d used, starting this time from the left side and moving toward the center. “Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

  “Something’s different here toward the middle. Let’s keep at it!” I said, starting over again higher up on the wall.

  “Carl and I are going to go play ‘knock-knock’ in the hallway.”

  “We’ll check out the garage.” Our group disbursed and for the next hour we scoured every inch of the pantry. The knock-knock strategy had revealed what could be an opening large enough for Shakespeare to pass through, but we had no success in finding any sign of a mechanism to open it.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Maybe it’s time to get a sledge hammer,” Neely suggested.

  “They’ll sue me!” Robyn cried.

  “Don’t worry. We won’t do that. Hank might arrest us for vandalism or obstruction of justice or something. I was frustrated and leaned against the wall, listening.

  “Let’s keep knocking, okay? I’m sure I woke up more than once because I thought I heard someone knocking at the door. There wasn’t anyone there, of course, so I just added ‘hearing things’ to the list of symptoms I planned to report when I finally agreed with Devers, that I needed my head examined.” I nodded.

  “Yoo-hoo! Anybody in there?” I asked before I started again.

  “Will you stop asking that question? Do you really want someone tonanswer and invite you in?” Neely suddenly gasped, as I knock-knock-knocked on the door three times. The wall appeared to sink and then slid open.

  “Yippee!” I hollered. Robyn and Neely shouted, too. “Joe! Carl!” I yelled. Charly dashed to the door that led from the kitchen to the garage just as Marty and Midge opened it and came inside.

  “We heard shouting! Is everything okay?” Marty’s eyes widened as she spotted the gaping opening in the wall. “There’s no light in there, huh?”

  “I’ll check,” Joe said as he raced to the opening. He didn’t go far before he grunted. He stepped back into the pantry rubbing his nose. “It’s not very roomy in there. Do you have a flashlight, Robyn?”

  “Lots of them,” she replied. In seconds she’d gone to a drawer in the kitchen and came back with not one, but two flashlights. “I never wanted to get caught in the dark in this house with you know who on the loose. There are more flashlights stashed in the laundry room storage cabinet. There must be almost enough for each of us to have one.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.” I ran to get them. The idea of being stuck in a narrow passageway in the dark didn’t appeal to me even though we no longer needed to worry about bumping into Shakespeare’s ghost in there. When I reached the laundry room, I suddenly wondered if there was a passageway in here, too. A few triple knocks later, a panel in the wall did the sink and slide thing again. This opening was closer to Robyn’s master suite. Maybe she’d heard knocking when Shakespeare used this doorway.

  I leaned forward, and without stepping into the passageway, I bathed the corridor in a beam of light. It was narrow and ran in both directions. I was about to pull my head out of the opening when, off to my right, I glimpsed what appeared to be stairs leading down into the darkness. Laughter drew my eyes in to my left. In the distance, I could see a dim glow which had to be coming from the opening in the pantry.

  On impulse, I stepped into the passageway and took a couple of steps toward the source of that light. The opening behind me slid closed. I felt panicky, turned around, and knocked three times. Nothing happened. I tried it again. Still nothing. Then I switched to two knocks and a single knock without success. Panic hit me again and I bolted toward the light hoping I’d reach it before Joe or someone else stepped into the passageway and that doorway closed too. I was afraid to call out for fear that would cause someone to bolt into the passageway and trigger the door to close.

  “We’ve got a problem,” I said as I stepped back inside the pantry and the door slid shut behind me. When the screaming died down, I explained what I’d done and told them about the stairs I’d seen before I locked myself out of the house, so-to-speak.

  “You must have tripped an infrared photo sensor or something—you know like the automatic sensor that keeps your garage door from closing if there’s something in the way. I’m lucky I turned back around after banging my head against the wall without moving right or left before I came back in here.”

  “Do you want to try it again?” I asked. Joe considered it as I knocked three times and the door opened again.

  “Will one of you do the triple knock from inside and let me back in if I can’t figure out how to get it to open? I’ve got a touch of claustrophobia.” Carl’s lips twitched and then he nodded yes.

  “Of course, we will,” he replied with a serious tone in his voice. His upper lip quivered again, though.

  “Not you, pal. You’re going with me. I don’t trust you.”

  “Good grief! Let’s try this to test your idea, although that must be why the door shut after Miriam moved around in the passageway.” Robyn reached up and took down a long metal tool from a hook on the peg board. “This is my grabber I use to get things off the upper shelves without dragging the step stool in here.”

  Without another word, Robyn put one foot into the
passageway then swished the grabber around on one side and then the other. The door began to shut, slowly, as she stepped back into the pantry. I used the triple knocks again, although this time, I made much less noise. The entrance to the passageway opened again anyway.

  “I guess it’s not about the volume,” I said.

  “Vibrations, maybe,” Charly suggested. “The rhythm or a counter of some kind because the number of knocks matters.”

  “Now that we know it’ll open again right away, let us try a few things,” Joe said as he motioned for Carl to join him. Once they were in the passageway, Joe tripped the beam and the door slid shut. “If we’re not back in five…”

  The panel must be soundproofed because I didn’t hear another word as soon as it shut. We milled about, nervously, as I kept my eye on the minutes ticking by. I was about to use the triple-knock trick we’d learned to open the door when it moved on its own.

  “Shave and haircut,” Joe said in a sing-song voice. Carl responded quickly.

  “Two bits.” Then they both stepped back into the room and explained the knocks they tried, including the Morse code S.O.S. signal before they found the one that worked.

  “That’s from a really old song, but I knew guys in Viet Nam who used it to figure out if a new POW in the next cell was from the U.S.”

  “Now what?” Carl asked.

  “I want to go see where those stairs lead.”

  “I wondered why no one ever reported seeing Shakespeare coming and going above ground until we chased him down that night. There must be another way in and out of here that’s underground.”

  “Do you think it’s possible to block this open just in case our knock-knock code doesn’t work?” Marty asked in an anxious tone.

  “Why don’t we try that before we go any further.” I took the step ladder, opened it, and set it in the way to prevent the door from shutting. Then Robyn used her grabber to trigger the door to close. That worked! It might be a little tricky for one of us to squeeze through or crawl under the ladder, but it was good to have a backup plan if we couldn’t get the code to open the door here or at the laundry room entry point.

  I handed out the flashlights and stepped into the passageway first. The others followed and their beams bounced around striking the walls, ceiling, and floor. The floor beneath us was tile. The walls were made of dark wood that seemed sometimes shiny and reflected the light. In other places, it was as if the walls absorbed the light. I wondered if anyone else had noticed or had an explanation, but I was more motivated to see where those stairs led.

  The stairs were narrow, stone steps that abutted cinder block walls on both sides. Our house in Ohio had a basement with walls that looked very similar. This one had been dug deep—I counted eighteen steps before we reached a floor made of poured cement. I stepped away from the stairs and the space opened wider.

  “Wow!” Joe said as he joined me. “Will you look at this?”

  16 Neither Rhyme nor Reason

  “Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season, when the why and the wherefore there is neither rhyme nor reason?” – The Comedy of Errors

  ∞

  A corridor stretched out ahead of us. It was wide enough that I could stretch out both arms without touching the walls. In fact, it was large enough you could drive a golf cart down here. I’m not sure why that idea popped into my mind since there wasn’t any obvious way to get could get anything that large down here. Then, off in a corner, my flashlight caught a forklift in its beam. Clearly, there was an entrance somewhere that had been used to get that down here.

  What had caused Joe to express such amazement was the fact that the main corridor went on as far as we could see in the beams of our flashlights. More than that, though, it appeared as if there was a network of passageways leading off to the left from the main corridor. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I could see doorways on our left and right.

  “What the heck is this place?” Midge asked. “For me, ‘there is neither rhyme nor reason’ for an underground complex that’s so, so, …complex.”

  “I thought if we found a secret passageway, it might be part of an escape route for De Voss family members to use if they were under siege—by police or by bad guys. Now, I’m not so sure.” Charly paused sweeping the area, bathing it in light. “It doesn’t make rhyme or reason to me, either.”

  “Especially since De Voss family members no longer live here,” Robyn added.

  “This must have been built back when the cottage was constructed more than fifty years ago. We’re under their garage or the back yard. I’ll bet there’s an entrance in the garage and maybe one in the pool house, too,” Charly asserted. Neely walked over to a metal door nearby.

  “Is it the vault?” Joe asked. “Have we found the hidden family treasure?”

  “It’s no vault and it isn’t that well-hidden, or Shakespeare would have found it long before he was murdered,” Neely said. “Besides we’re not here on a treasure hunt.” As soon as Neely opened the door, overhead lights flickered on.

  “This is heavy and solid enough to take a bullet,” Neely said as she opened a door which looked a lot like those in restaurant kitchens. “Someone sure was paranoid.”

  “Now this is a pantry where I could be prepared for any disaster!” Robyn exclaimed as we filed into the room. The large room was lined with shelves piled high with food, toiletries, and other supplies. “I’ll admit to being on the paranoid side when it comes to apocalyptic events. The steel doors are great, too.”

  “It’s not paranoia if people really are after you,” Joe noted.

  “That’s a good point. By the sixties when the cottage was built, at least three generations of the De Voss family had been involved in dangerous, illicit activities, and some had paid for it with their lives.”

  As Charly said that, first aid supplies caught my eye. In addition to food and bottled water, there were batteries, lanterns, blankets, tools, soap, and toilet paper. Odd items were stacked in here, too, including paintings and old lampshades, a stack of throw pillows and other things like that.

  “Someone laid in enough supplies that you could live down here for months. It could have been built to serve as a fallout shelter, too. Paranoia about a nuclear attack was rampant around the time the cottage was built.”

  “You can tell someone’s been in here recently,” Robyn commented as she pointed to places where items had been moved leaving spaces in the dust on shelves. “Maybe Shakespeare was living down here since he was such a frequent visitor these past few months.”

  “You could be right about that,” Charly responded as she left the room walked over to another door across the way. The door was also made of heavy metal. There was a keypad alongside it, but there was no light indicating that it was activated. In fact, up close, it appeared as if it had been pulled loose from the wall. In any case, the door swung open when Charly gave the handle a yank. “Now this is what I call a panic room!”

  We all walked into a well-lit, tiled foyer. The lighting in here was more like daylight than that rendered by the fluorescent overhead lighting in the storage room. It’s as if we’d walked into a hotel suite circa 1970. No windows, of course, but the living room with orange and brown shag carpet was as comfortable as any you’d find above ground. A dining area, kitchen, along with several bedrooms and bathrooms could have provided enough room for the whole De Voss family. Close quarters, though, if you weren’t on good terms which seemed to the case for Bernie, Danny, and Ted.

  “What a hideout,” I said aloud. “Perfect if you have to lock yourself up. It’s a gorgeous jail cell.”

  “It sure beats going to a real one,” Joe quipped.

  “Or ending up in a tomb which this place also calls to mind,” Charly added.

  “Someone’s been sitting in my chair,” Joe said in a gruff voice that probably was supposed to be Papa Bear. “Guess who?” There were white streaks on the edge of one of the large club chairs near us. Shakespeare’s ghost had le
ft his mark.

  “There are dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, too. How about the bedrooms?” Marty asked. “The least he could have done was put his dirty dishes in the dishwasher.”

  “Don’t touch anything! We’re going to have enough to account for as it is by roaming around down here without a police escort.” It’s more likely that if we’d reported the opening, we would have been told to leave, so we wouldn’t have been allowed down here at all.

  “Yep!” Carl replied as he returned from checking the bedrooms. “Shakespeare was here! Go see for yourselves, but that’s where Danny De Voss donned his costume. There’s a spare wig in there and makeup. Who knows what else?” Then he scanned the suite. “There’s real plumbing in this place—unlike a bomb shelter. All the comforts of home if you had to wait out a police manhunt before you could put the passageways to good use as an escape route.”

  “Hank is going to want to send a team down here. Maybe there’s evidence in there about who killed Shakespeare,” Charly said as we exited the suite.

  “Or where,” Neely said pointing to a spot we’d passed earlier. In the light from the open door, we could see smears of white greasepaint on the floor and wall not far from the foot of the stairs we traipsed down. A few drops of what appeared to be dried blood were also on the floor.

  “I’m so glad we didn’t step in it,” Marty said. “That’s disgusting.”

  “You have more than that to be grateful for. Can you imagine the tongue-lashing we’d get from Devers if we’d done that? Even though we found secret passageways that he would never have found because he would have dismissed the idea as crazy.”

  “Why don’t we break up into teams of two and check out as much of this underground network as we can in another twenty minutes or so? Then we’ll go back upstairs and call Hank,” Charly suggested. We were going to pay a price for roaming around down here like a small herd of lost sheep. On the other hand, we’d not only found our way into the underground complex as Midge pointed out, but we’d located the place where Danny De Voss had been attacked. Suddenly, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.