“Does it mean we are out of job now?” One of the supervisors asked her. She understood his fear as the times were trying and switching to a new job was not convenient.
“I hope not.” She tried to smile. “Leave your contact number and I will call you as soon as the store re-opens.”
The staff left one by one after leaving their contact numbers with Alicia, except Sam. Sam stared at them lazily trying to scratch the sidewalk with his toe. He didn’t look like in the mood to leave.
“You are not going?”
“I had thought about buying new boots for my old man from the salary.” He looked distinctly unhappy.
“I didn’t even get my first salary, but its fine. The police will release him soon. It’s not like he is gone for good.” Alicia was also in need of money, but the least, she could do, was to give him some positive reassurance.
“It is strange that I am working here for so long and nothing ever happened. You came and ...” He left the sentence without finishing.
“Yes, I bring bad luck.” Alicia echoed her parents’ words which made Same blushed.
“I was not saying that …” Sam tried to explain feeling embarrassed, but Alicia had got an idea which could not wait for long.
“Listen, what about working on our plan?”
“What plan?”
“Getting into Ken’s place. The coast is clear now. I don’t think police is going to release him today, and nobody expect us at home either. We have got the whole day at our disposal.”
“But he is already arrested. What do you want now?”
Yeah, what exactly do I want? She was unable to give a name to her feelings.
“My job is to find out the truth. We might get something that help Ken. For what I know, it can all be just a big misunderstanding.”
“Let’s go then, but don’t blame me if we will not be able to get in.” Sam warned her.
————
The museum was located at the farthest edge of the town on the road connecting the town with the highway. People who came here, were either tourists, or the locals going out of the town, which made this place rather stranded compared to the other places in Georgestown. The museum building had a sandy exterior and it was surrounded by broad stairs on all sides. It took Alicia and Sam nearly forty minutes to reach there.
“Where is it?” Alicia asked Sam getting out of the bus. The warm and quiet countryside was deprived of any kind of human presence except for the security guards in front of the museum.
“Behind it.” Sam pointed towards a narrow road on one side of the museum.
Together they walked on the road to its farthest edge, when a white building emerged from the back of the museum, of almost same size, surrounded with tall pine trees. The ivy-laden snowy house was gigantic with two floors just like its neighbor. It was a calm and serene view. In the midst of nowhere, the house looked like a monk peaceful and grateful for the solitude. The road turned right towards the mansion, but there was no door in sight.
“Where is the door?” She asked in bewilderment.
“He met me here.” Sam looked confused. They checked all the other sides of the building for an entrance point, to no avail. “There is no way to get in.”
“There is a way we can get in.” She said looking at one of the pines leaning towards the building. “Are you sure there is no one living with him?”
“I am positive.” When Sam saw her eyeing the trees, he laughed. “You can climb?”
“No, but it’s not a rocket science.” She took off her heels and stuffed them in her bag.
Sam was one step ahead of her. He had already climbed to the second branch by the time she pulled herself to reach the first. Sam was climbing the tree at an alarming speed with his sneakers on.
“I will buy sneakers if I ever get a salary.” She tried to untangle her hair from the branches after reaching the first floor. Sam had already jumped into a balcony at first floor few minutes earlier than her.
“Also get a haircut.” He commented with a smile. “Detectives don’t keep long hair.”
She tried to control her breath. She did not remember when was the last time she had done physical exercise.
Damn. I am getting rusty.
The first floor had many doors and windows but most of the rooms were empty or locked. Few opened rooms contained storage boxes. Alicia thought about using hairpin to pick a lock but then left the idea as there were too many doors and she had no idea about how to lock it back with hairpin. She decided to inspect the ground floor instead. The large staircase led them to a great hall which was totally drenched in darkness. Sam pulled out his mobile and turned on the torch.
The light was not bright enough to show them their exact surroundings, but she saw that there were many small tables and chairs around as if it was used to serve many people at a time. After searching, Sam managed to find the switch board and turned out the light.
The first idea that came to her mind was that they were in some kind of a library. The walls were covered with the bookshelves without leaving any space around. There were dozens of tables, chairs and couches in the middle of the hall with a large screen on one end. The hall was designed to have proper lightning at all times of the day with table lamps and floor lamps all over the place.
She was unable to think of any other purpose this place could serve except for a library. She looked at Sam who was as befuddled as her. After roaming around, she realized that there were doors on the west wall crammed between the bookshelves.
One of them was a kitchen with a fully stocked refrigerator full of beer and frozen food. Alicia found it difficult to believe that she was in a residence of a single man. It more looked like a fraternity to her. She left Sam eyeing the food in the kitchen. The second room was a small bedroom with nothing of much substance. There were no personal belongings in it; no photographs, no paintings, no musical instrument, no books, and no flowers. Just a small bed, a dresser and a plant in a corner. She was unable to define the type of person living in this room.
The next door led her to an empty room which was full of dusty cartons. She was looking around for anything valuable when she heard—voices.
There were people upstairs and they were talking loudly. Sam entered the room looking for her with a panicked face and pointed upwards. Alicia signaled him to stay silent and bolted the door from inside. Sam opened the torch in his mobile again, but the light was not enough to see anything properly. She opened the light in her mobile as well and turned cartons to check if there was anything beneath them when somebody turned the door handle from outside. Whoever was outside really wanted to come in because he kept trying to open the door for several minutes which involved lots of kicking and cursing.
“This one is not opening.” She heard him yelling at the top of his voice.
They are searching for something.
She tried to hear more of their conversation but whoever was outside had moved away, only the faint sounds of dragging furniture were audible to her.
Ring, ding, ding.
The crazy frog ring tone buzzed in the empty hall outside. Soon after, a man yelled at his companion.
“Out, out, we need to get out of here.”
It followed by a rush of panicked footsteps across the hall. After few minutes of hasty running, the silence reigned at last.
“I think they are gone.” Alicia opened the bolt soundlessly and peeked out. There was no one in the great hall, but all the books from the shelves were scattered on the floor.
“Now what?” Sam asked her when they came out of the empty room. Unfortunately, Alicia still had no clue. She did not know what she was searching for. The whole building was so badly nondescript that it was impossible to find a clue.
“We need to find a lock which is outdated.” Sam looked at her shrinking his eyebrows.
The key Ken gave to her was old, the one which usually found in novelty shops. It could not be used with the modern brass locks used in the do
ors. It was safe to assume that the corresponding lock would be old and outdated as well.
“We have checked here, what about first floor?” He asked her.
“You checked the first floor, I am going to check the bookshelves.”
Sam nodded and left her analyzing the bookshelves. She patted the wooden frames of shelves and picked books outside to see if there was anything behind them, but there was nothing odd. It all looked perfectly smooth for a library. She found the whole setup as odd and artificial.
Is it possible to live without leaving a personal mark on your surroundings?
She went back to the bedroom. If she could find something, it was bound to be there. The bed was made with the utmost perfection. The curtain was covering the large window looking out at the countryside. The bathroom was large and luxurious. There were lots of bottles of personal hygiene, but nothing that could throw light on the person who used them except that he was extremely neat.
She gave a final look to the room before leaving when she stopped. She just noticed that the plant in the corner was not exactly a plant, it was a tree—a bonsai—she just noticed.
The red maple bonsai was beautiful, but she never liked bonsai trees. She even had a fight with Flora when she tried getting one for herself. These are unnatural, she had told her in anger. You think you can change nature of a living being by forcing it to live under a restrain forever? Only a monster can do this.
To which Flora had given her a long lecture on the historical and spiritual significance of bonsai trees which she turned a deaf ear to, but she had prohibited her to buy one.
She touched its leaves, stem and container, and then her hands touched something unusual which should not be there on a container. She had found what she was looking for—a keyhole. It was difficult to find it with a naked eye, unless someone touched it. Alicia gritted her teeth and pulled the key out of her bag. She inserting the key and holding her breath, she turned it.
The wall on the right moved, without a noise, revealing the lift behind it. A cold drift came out of the gap and knocked Alicia on her face. She took a deep breath and pushed the button on the side. The lift doors opened with a hiss and she went in. The panel to operate life was full of buttons, but there were neither numbers nor icons of any kind which she could understand. She looked up, down, right and left to make sense of it, but the lift was just a standard piece of machinery. She finally pushed the biggest rectangular button on the panel. The lift door closed and it moved. The movement was so swift that, if she had not seen the building from outside, she could have assumed that it was going upwards.
It took her only few seconds to reach the destination. Where she stepped out, a narrow staircase was started in the darkness just from the edge of the wall. Nothing was visible after the first few steps. She thought about going back but then she changed her mind. Ken had given her the key trusting her. If she told this to anyone, it would have counted as betrayal. She started the descend hoping that she would be able to face whatever was waiting for her in the depth. After taking a dozen steps in complete darkness, the stairs ended abruptly under her feet. Standing in pitch darkness with one hand on the railing, she had no idea what to do now. She moved her left foot randomly out to check what was there, when the floor lit up.
There had to be motion sensors under the floor because the row of tiles under her foot was showing a glowing green arrow pointing towards her left. The only thing she was able to see in the dim light of arrows were bookshelves. There were bookshelves as far as she could see on the both sides of the narrow path, which was now lit with the glowing guiding arrows. She could not see how big this place was, except the columns and rows of bookshelves around her. After walking for few minutes, the arrows started to lit on a column towards her right, which she followed religiously. The arrows were taking her somewhere.
The bookshelves were the same as the above, except that they did not contain books. They contained files. Alicia had seen these files before with her previous employers who used them to keep records of the law cases. This whole place was a gigantic size record room. She remembered the intruder’s words, they were looking for a secret entrance. This had to be the place they were looking for. Alicia knew she could not stay for long. Even with Ken locked up, anybody could have visited his house. It could me Melanie or her lawyer or any of his other acquaintances, if he had any.
After taking few more left and right turns in the maze of bookshelves, she finally reached a place which appeared to be a clearing. It had some couches and a big white display box. She moved to the display case fixed on a pillar and she could see there was a worn down leather bound kept inside it. When she touched the display case, it also lit up like a decoration ornament. She opened the case and took the book out. A huge L was engraved on it inside a circle. The circle was also made up of letters which were too small to be legible. She opened the book curiously; the first page was blank but the second contained two words in large letters.
“Legatum Literarum.” She read aloud.
She was no expert in languages, but she guessed it was Latin. She turned more pages to find out the names of people on it with code numbers in front of it. It looked like a log book to her; someone was keeping records of something. She kept turning pages mindlessly. The last entry had the name of a Garret Michael.
She didn’t know anyone with this name in Georgestown. She was going to put the book back in the display case when a long drawn out sound came out of her handbag which echoed in the labyrinth of shelves much to her chagrin. It took her a moment to understand that her mobile was ringing. She quickly picked it and checked the caller ID. The screen showed the landline number of the bookstore. She picked the call wondering who could be calling as the bookstore was sealed in front of her eyes few hours ago.
“Hello!”
“Where are you?” In spite of the fact that she was listening his voice for the first time on phone, she recognized it.
“You … are released?”
“Where are you?” He ignored her question—again.
“I am at home.” She stammered. It was partially correct because she didn’t mention whose home she was at.
“Come to the store immediately, and bring Sam as well.” He cut off the call.
She quickly put the book back in the display case and switched off the lights. She remembered the way she had come from and the arrows helped her also in finding the staircase again. It was not possible to go inside the catacomb of bookshelves and came out without getting lost if the floor signs were not there. Finding her way back, she wondered about the size of this place. It was easily twice as large as the house above it. The journey back to the bedroom was short, but still, after coming from the dark pit beneath it, it felt like a life time ago. She turned the key in the bonsai lock which put the wall back in whole and rushed towards the first floor wiping the sweat from her forehead.
Ken had said bring Sam as well which meant he knew they were together. If he knew somehow, they both were going to be in trouble. She found Sam upstairs reading comic books he had found in a carton.
By the time, they returned to the bookstore, the sun was taking its last breath of the day and street lamps were up to start their working hours. She took a peek from a side window before entering. Ken was sitting right in front of the entrance on a visitor’s sofa. He looked deep in thought. Alicia looked around but didn’t find any other workers in the store which meant he only called her.
“In case he knows about our breaking and entering, don’t speak a word. I will handle him.” She told Sam who nodded worriedly. After all, Sam went there on her insistence; it was her responsibility to keep his name clear.
They entered in the bookstore together. Ken looked at her as if weighing an animal before slaughter, and that look was enough to tell her that somehow—he knew.
Damn.
“In my office, Miss Stone.” He said and went upstairs.
Sam took a deep, relaxing, and loud breath and took off
his glasses. She looked at him as if she was sentenced to death to which he chuckled and patted her shoulder.
“You can handle him.”
Damn. Damn. Damn.
She chanted damn on every step of staircase to the godforsaken room. What excuse is acceptable for breaking in someone’s house? She entered the room hoping that it would be something else that made him angry. As she entered the room, Ken slid something towards her on the table.
“Explain it!”
It was a tablet showing CCTV camera stream and Alicia’s own face was visible fighting with branches of a tree and Sam giving her hand to jump to the balcony. She swallowed heavily and looked at him helplessly. He was looking surprisingly attractive at this time of the day. It was like he was gone to a spa for few hours instead of a police station.
“Any explanation?” He leaned forward and touched the tablet to stop the video.
“We … were … worried about you.”
“Why?” He took his seat while she stood like an accused in a court.
“We thought that we might be able to find a clue in your favor.” She bit her lips.
“That’s interesting.” He rubbed his chin with index finger. “If I am not wrong, it was you who provide my fingerprints to the police. Now you want to get clues in my favor?”
“We…” She emphasized. “We wanted to get clues.” His caustic comments were making her hate herself. It was a good thing that she didn’t used to crying.
“I understand Sam worrying about me, but you wanted to help the police without even asking me. Right?”
“I was not against you.” She protested helplessly. “I thought…”
“You thought what?” Ken’s voice was harsh for the first time in life.
“I thought you were innocent.” As soon as she said, she felt a huge burden getting off of her chest.
“If you thought I was innocent, you should have talked to me first,” His face grew sad again. He was not sad when he was grilling her but suddenly his face changed.
The Killing Scripture (Alicia Stone Series Book 1) Page 8
