The shadows pooled thick under there. She couldn’t see anything.
Breathing in shallow, ragged breaths, she pushed herself forward on her toes.
The shadows stayed where they were, hiding everything.
Katie moved closer.
When her eyes adjusted, she could just make out the shape of the wall, and the four legs of the bed. Besides a single sock, there was nothing else under there.
She heaved a sigh of relief, sitting back on her heels and wiping a hand over her face. What was she doing? Searching someone’s house for a dead body? What was wrong with her head?
“Stupid bed,” she said, directing her fear and anxiety at the blankets as she grabbed them by the corners and threw them up into the air.
They settled into the shape of a person as they came down, like a cowl over the invisible form of the boogie man, outlining a head and shoulders and arms that weren’t there.
The shape of it reached for Katie, and she heard it speak.
“Help me...”
Stumbling back, Katie’s left foot caught on her right foot, and she tripped, crashing back into the wall with a thud that rattled half-empty bottles of cologne on the dresser and then the blankets were falling over her, and she screamed. She thrashed. The blankets tangled around her and caught at her wrists and twisted over her head.
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t escape. There was nothing she could do to save herself.
“Help me...”
She dropped to the floor, still fighting with the blanket, still panicking, still trying to get free. She was suffocating. If she didn’t tear herself free, then she was going to die, right here and now. The ghost wanted help, but it was killing her.
She tried to say that, but the words stuck in her throat. There was no air to push them out.
She rolled onto her back and kicked with her legs and pulled with her fingers fisted tightly in the blankets.
The world started to spin. She opened her mouth to scream.
The sheets pushed their way in between her teeth, gagging her, choking her, making her jaw ache with the pressure.
With a tug that sent her rolling across the thin carpeting, the blanket was pulled away from her, and she found herself looking up into the deep brown eyes of Jim Sutter.
He held the sheets in his hands, just hanging there limply. She pulled in breath after breath, coughing, wheezing. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the sheets, but they weren’t trying to get her anymore.
The ghost was gone.
Jim stared at her for a long moment before tossing the blankets back onto the bed. “It sounded like you were getting yourself killed down here,” he said, offering her a big hand to help her get up. “Are you okay? What were you doing? Trying to find his stash of pornography under his pillows?”
Katie stared at him as her brain tried to process everything that had just happened. The sheets, the voice, the bed attacking her with the form and the shape of...someone.
Amber. It must have been Amber, asking for their help, angry she hadn’t been found yet.
If they didn’t find her soon, what would the ghost do next?
And did Pastor Jim Sutter just ask her about pornography?
He noticed the look on her face and gave her a wry little grin. “I’m still human, Katie. I know all about pornography, both the magazine version and the online stuff. I can’t very well tend to the sinful nature of man without knowing what those sins are. I don’t partake myself, but I still have to be able to talk about it all.”
“No, I understand, you just surprised me, I guess. Besides, I already found his pornos. There wasn’t anything else in the room.”
“What about the sheets, then?”
“Um. They attacked me.”
Most people would have looked at her like she’d lost her mind. Some would have laughed at her like she’d made some sort of joke. Pastor Sutter saw the truth in her words. His eyes got wider. The muscles in his jaw tightened. He began looking around the room, peering into each corner for something unseeable.
“Her ghost is here?” he asked Katie. “Amber’s ghost is here?”
“It was here,” she corrected him. “In this house somewhere. I think she wants us to find her body. She, um, wasn’t under the bed.”
“Hmm.” He stood up, still examining the room with a critical eye. Then he went across to the closet and threw open the folding door.
Empty suitcases and boxes tumbled out.
When Jim could catch his breath again, he expelled a string of words that, from a pastor, were practically blasphemous.
Chapter 13
There was no reason to tidy up the bedroom. Connor Norstrom was already going to know they broke in, just from the damage to his front door. All they could do was keep looking, and search through the entire rest of the house before Connor got back.
The problem was, the entire rest of the house took only fifteen minutes to look through, and there wasn’t anything for them to find.
Bathroom, closets, living room. Everywhere it was the same. This was just a normal house, with normal stuff inside of it. Whatever she thought she’d been looking for, Katie wasn’t able to find it. There was no evidence of murder, or of a dead body ever having been here. If Connor Norstrom had ever done more than get a traffic ticket in his life, she and Jim hadn’t seen anything to say so.
Then why did Amber’s ghost want them to come here?
What was the point?
After taking the last paperback novel off a shelf and leafing through the pages to find exactly the same thing as before--nothing--Jim dropped the book on the floor. “Gotta tell you, Katie. I believe what you’re saying to me. At least, I know you believe it and that’s good enough for me because I have to admit, this is a whole lot of weird going on, and sure enough. Except, I don’t think we’re going to find anything here. We’re going to have a lot of explaining to do when Connor does get home.”
Katie dropped herself down into a chair in the kitchen. Jim was right, even if she didn’t want to admit it. They hadn’t found anything that would help the ghost of Amber. Nothing that would explain where she disappeared to or even if she was really dead. Now, she was going to be arrested for breaking and entering and disturbing a man’s porno magazines. Oh, wouldn’t that just go over great with the rest of the chamber of commerce? They would just run her out of town after that, now wouldn’t they?
She needed a drink. Scotch on the rocks. Or some of that wine that her best friend Mel Wragg liked to drink. Man, she wished Mel was here right now. She might not be able to see ghosts like Katie did, but she understood life uniquely. One that always brought things into focus for Katie.
Well, She didn’t have Mel. She didn’t have alcohol, because they hadn’t even found any of that while they were searching the house, except for some very cheap beer that she wanted no part of. She’d have to settle for a glass of water.
Jim was leaning against the kitchen entryway, but he wasn't very patient about it. “Katie, we really should oughta go. I’ve got no idea where cousin Connor is, but I can’t imagine he’ll be gone for too much longer. It might be better for everyone if we didn’t get found here.”
“I know,” she said, halfway to the sink. “I just want to get a drink.”
From the sink.
“Just a glass of water.”
She stared at the sink.
“Water.”
The sink.
She spun around, facing Jim, a sudden realization startling her. “Did you see a water tank anywhere? Or a furnace?”
“What? Uh, no, but I wasn’t really looking for one. Why?”
“Because. Look, I’m from out west. I’ve always lived in places like California and Nevada where it’s warm. We didn’t have to worry about having a furnace. So I didn’t think about it until now, but this is New Hampshire. It gets freaking cold here every winter. Nobody in their right mind has a house here without a furnace. We’ve been all through this house, and we didn’t s
ee one. And no water pump either. So what does that mean?”
Jim scratched at his nose in confusion. “It means that Jim Sutter isn’t in his right mind?”
“It means,” she said impatiently, “that we’ve missed part of the house.”
“What? Katie, we’ve been all through here. All over. There’s no place else to look.”
She went out of the kitchen, into the long central hallway, and tried to imagine what she had missed. If she was a furnace, where would she be?
That was a great question, but one she couldn’t answer. She ran through everything she’d seen in here. She counted the doors. She pictured the house from the outside, then the inside, and tried to build a floor plan in her head.
It didn’t matter. The answer still eluded her.
From the bathroom came the sound of something clattering to the floor.
Katie turned to look that way.
A can of shaving cream rolled out into the hallway.
As signs from beyond the grave went, this was an odd one to be sure, but Katie would take whatever help she could get. She started that way. Jim’s hand on her shoulder stopped her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“She wants us to go in there.” Katie knew it as sure as she knew her own name. Amber’s ghost wanted her to find something in the bathroom. Something she and Jim had missed.
He let go of her, slowly, and she bent down to pick up the shaving cream.
When she touched it, she was taken back in her mind’s eye to that dark hallway, and the single mirror on the wall reflecting the lights in their sconces. She saw the woman in front of her with the short red hair and the purple streak on the one side.
Amber Norstrom.
“Help me,” the woman in the mirror said, plain and clear. “Help me, please.”
She dropped the can like it had bitten her and the vision broke apart. The house faded back into focus. In front of her was the bathroom, all grungy white tile and bottles of cheap shampoo and body wash. They’d been through here. Moved every towel in the corner closet. Gone through every bottle of aspirin and tube of toothpaste in the mirror cabinet.
They were missing something. How could she find what Amber wanted?
On top of the sink, a red plastic cup tipped over, as if something had pushed it from behind. It bounced, and landed again, and rolled in a circle to the edge of the sink.
It hovered there for a long few seconds and then dropped to the floor.
Which is where it should have stopped. Gravity, and inertia, and all those other things that she learned about in high school should have kept it there. Instead, it rolled another circle, disappearing into the closet.
Standing next to her, Jim pointed and whispered. “You saw that, didn’t you?”
“Yes. The cup went in the closet.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Thought so. Wasn’t supposed to do that, was it?”
“No. I don’t think that happened on its own.”
Katie stepped over to the closet and peered around the corner of the door. The shelves were only in the upper half. There had been pillows and blankets stored in the bottom part, but she and Jim had moved those out during their search and left them over by the tub. Now it was just empty space.
The cup was spinning a slow circle, right in the middle of the floor.
Katie knelt down and grabbed the cup on its next pass. It felt just like a regular cup. There was nothing unusual about it, as far as she could see. She set it down again, just outside the closet, and began silently counting.
She got to three before the cup began rolling again.
It rolled inside the closet and did one perfect circle.
Then it stopped and tipped itself upright onto its rim.
As Jim made the sign of the cross over himself, Katie picked the cup up, and set it aside. Here. Whatever she was supposed to find was right here. She ran a hand over the floor. It wasn’t tile like she had thought it was at first. It was linoleum, with square patterns printed on it made to look like tile.
Her fingers found a seam that followed that pattern, three feet square.
Following it around, she found hinges set in the side toward the back of the closet, hidden from view. If that was how it opened...
She ran her hand forward, to the nearer edge of the square, and that was how she found the finger hole. The linoleum had been slit over it, but in such a way that just to look at it, no one would ever see it.
Katie took a grip and swung the hidden panel up.
A gasp of air escaped, cold and dry, and in it, Katie heard the echoes of a voice begging for help.
Chapter 14
“We’re going to need a flashlight,” Katie said.
It was dark below the square access panel. The light from the bathroom reached down just far enough for them to see the metal rungs of a ladder bolted to one side of a shaft. Katie could smell the staleness of the air down there and knew that there was some sort of cellar down under the house.
“Down cellar” was another one of those terms they used here in New England. Katie had first heard it when she moved here. It never seemed so appropriate as it did right now, in this minute.
They would have never found this, if not for the help of Amber’s ghost. It was possible that Connor Norstrom had the access concealed like that just for looks, she supposed, but she knew better. Anyone who concealed something with this much effort had something to hide.
Jim was a moment finding his voice. “I think I saw flashlights in one of the drawers in the kitchen,” he said. “Hold on. I’ll go get them.”
When he was gone, Katie was left staring down into the hole. The square opening led to a round, metal pipe that was corroded and rusty with age. It might even predate the house itself, she thought. Maybe the cellar had been retrofitted from whatever purpose it used to serve. A bomb shelter, or root cellar. A deep, dark, mysterious hole in the ground and this house had been built right on top of it.
But why? What would be the point? Katie sighed, reaching her hand down to feel the smooth sides of the shaft. If this were a movie, it would all make sense. There would be something that would explain it all.
This wasn’t a movie like Riley had told her. This was real life, and in real life things hardly ever made perfect sense.
Why this shaft, she wondered, feeling down further, leaning over the edge to strain her vision against the darkness below.
Light flooded down around her, throwing her shadow down deep and giving her the sensation that she was falling.
Katie gasped and grabbed at the edges of the closet to pull herself back up. Her breath caught in her throat for a moment until she realized that it was Jim holding a flashlight up high, shining the beam down to illuminate the rungs of the ladder.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Should’ve said something when I came back in. Wow, that goes down a way, doesn’t it?”
Rather than answer, she took the second flashlight from his hand and glared at him. She was scared, and there was no reason to be ashamed of that considering what was going on around them, but she wasn’t going to let Jim see it. She was the one who got them into this in the first place. It was all on her.
So, flashlight in hand, she stood up and set her foot on the first rung of the ladder.
She waited until she was about halfway down before she turned on her light. It was just a small plastic flashlight, operating off two double-A batteries, but it gave her enough light to see around her, and to see below when she pointed it that way. The access shaft really did go down and down some more. Or maybe it just seemed that way to her. She was counting the rungs, and when she got to twenty-five, they stopped.
“There’s a drop here,” she called up to Jim. “Looks like just a few feet. Careful, it’s a low ceiling.”
“Tight enough in here as it is,” he complained, hunching his shoulders in tight so that he could fit his considerable size down the shaft.
Katie pointed her flashlight down again t
o judge the distance, and then stepped off the last rung, flexing her knees as her feet hit the floor. She quickly stepped aside, waiting for Jim to follow her.
While she waited, she looked around.
The floor was dirt, packed solid after years of use. Decades, even. The ceiling above looked like rock braced with heavy wooden crossbeams. It was just high enough that it only brushed the top of her hair. The flashlight found walls around her, separating the cellar into rooms and alcoves and a long central hallway. Off to the side, leaning against the wall, was a short stepladder. That must be how someone gets back up, she thought to herself.
There were no windows anywhere. They must be completely below ground level here. She looked for a light switch and didn’t see one anywhere.
It was eerily quiet. It was like she had stepped into a tomb.
Jim dropped down beside her, his flashlight covering the same places that hers had already seen. He had to crouch to keep from banging his head against the ceiling. “Weird place,” he said, shaking his head. “Got a bad feeling about this, way down in my pastor soul.”
“If you don’t want to stay, Jim, I’ll understand. Maybe we should call the police?”
He thought about it and then shook his head. “No. By the time we got the police had involved and explained that we broke into Connor’s house, I doubt they’d be willing to listen to anything we had to say. If he had anything to do with my cousin’s death, if he has her body down here like some sicko, then I want to know. If we’re wrong, well, then I’ll pay to have his door fixed. Maybe even stay to help him clean up.”
Katie smiled at him. “You’re not like other pastors I’ve met.”
“Why? Because I’m willing to help a guy who might have killed his sister? Heh,” he shrugged. “Jesus said to turn the other cheek. So I’ll turn mine, and break his if I find out he did what we think he did.”
Sight Unseen Complete Series Box Set Page 79
