"I know just what you mean," I said, remembering my own experiences after the cat dancers case. This probably explained the slight limp I'd noticed when I was checking out those lovely legs.
"You'll have to tell me that story sometime," she said, "but as to a secret passage and someone messing around, it's probably some local teenagers checking out the new guy."
"What, no ghosts?"
"Trust me, Mr. Richter. By six tonight you will definitely have a ghost out here. Now let's go see what Tim found out about the wiring."
She was wrong about that. I went into town around five to get some groceries and ran into David Oatley in the Food Lion. He stopped me in the cereal aisle and wanted to make sure that the presence of a ghost would not affect the sale of the property. He seemed sincerely worried about it, so I told him that the wailing and howling from the old well didn't bother me much, and as long as it didn't come across the backyard with that big-ass flaming torch and the dead baby again, I'd go through with the deal. I watched his eyes go round. See what you think of that one, Carol Pollard, I thought. As it turned out, what she thought of it was that it would be harder to get certain contractors onto the project.
Ah, well, I thought, screw 'em if they can't take a joke.
The next day we went though the same drill with a heating and air-conditioning guy and then a plumber and the local well digger. After they left I still had a few hours of daylight, so I went exploring again with the shepherds, this time down the service lane behind the big house to the barns and equipment sheds. It was another clear spring day with a brisk northerly breeze coming up the hill from the river. The smell of thawing earth and new vegetation was strong, and I reminded myself to pursue the leasing of the big fields.
There were two ancient tractors, dating from the 1930s, up on blocks in one wooden shed, and some rusting agricultural equipment littering a long shed that had only a roof and a back wall, no sides. It was pretty obvious that no one had been down here for years, if not decades. So I was surprised when the shepherds suddenly started nosing around the ground and sniffing hard. There was obviously an interesting scent trail back here.
"Find it," I said. Frick put her nose to the ground, circled once, and then set off on a semistraight line through the weeds. Kitty followed, watching Frick. The dogs went about twenty feet, stopped at an area of discolored ground, walked around it, and then went over to explore what looked like a hatch cover. I saw a flash of red and then realized there was a ball cap wedged under the wooden platform. The shepherds, noses to the ground, hadn't seen it yet, so I went to retrieve it. Thinking that the discolored ground was probably the remains of an old manure pile, I went straight for it.
Big mistake.
Suddenly I was falling amid a small avalanche of dirt, sticks, and a brown tarp straight down into black, icy cold water.
I didn't have time to even squeak, or, for that matter, take a deep breath. I went under for what felt like several hundred feet and frantically clawed my way back up to the surface, scoring my knuckles on the rough stone wall of the well. I surfaced underneath the wet tarp, which didn't help my nearly paralyzing claustrophobia. When I finally got the tarp off and my breathing stabilized, I looked up to see two shepherd faces staring down at me from about twenty feet up against the late afternoon sky.
I was treading water in a stone-lined well, probably hand-dug back in the eighteenth century, from the looks of it. Close on the realization that I was trapped down here was the news that someone had set that trap, someone who knew I'd have the dogs with me, and what they and I might do when we saw the ball cap. The dogs had stepped around the discolored earth, and I'd missed that cue. What I had thought was the hatch cover was probably the well cover. I remembered Valeria warning me about abandoned wells.
Frick barked at me, as if trying to encourage me to get the hell out of there. I couldn't agree more, but there was the little matter of twenty vertical feet to overcome. The good news was that the walls were made of rough stones, not smooth concrete. That gave me a fighting chance.
I assumed the inchworm position in the water. There was barely room, and the first time I tried to move, my tennis shoes slipped off the mossy, wet stones. I kicked them off and then began heaving myself up the walls, pressing against my back and walking my feet up six inches, then pressing against my feet and shoving my back up six inches, while trying to stabilize my body with my hands. It's harder than it looks, especially when you get some daylight between you and the water below, and the rocks start making road-rash on the back of your shoulders. The problem came when I got to the top. There was nothing to grab onto.
I wedged my body and took a breather, while both shepherds panted impatiently for me to finish the job. I knew that if I tried to flip my body around and grab for the lip of the well I'd probably fall. I should have come up the walls belly down and not up, but even if I had, I wasn't sure I had the strength to do the final pull-up that would be required to get my center of gravity over the lip. There was nothing to grab.
Kitty solved it for me. She leaned over the lip and licked my face. Frick, ever the jealousy queen, came around to join in. I let go of the walls and grabbed a dog collar in each hand.
Both shepherds were surprised and almost came over the lip, but then they dug in. If you've ever played tug-of-war with a hundred-pound German shepherd, you know they can pull you over if they want to. The two of them were pulling hard, but with nothing on which to brace themselves, they began losing the war. As I was about to let go of them and drop back down into the water, Cubby Johnson's face appeared over the hole. He grabbed my right arm with both hands. I still had a hold on Kitty's collar, so between the two of them, they pulled me out. I skinned both knees and both elbows and was delighted to do it. Cubby ended up sitting down hard on the ground.
I flopped down on the ground myself and did some deep breathing exercises while massaging my legs, which had started to cramp up. Cubby explained that Ms. Valeria had told him to see if there was anything I needed down at the cottage. He said he found my vehicle, but not me or the shepherds, so he'd walked over here. He'd heard the dogs barking frantically and had come to investigate.
"Somebody set a trap," I said.
"Say what?"
"There was a tarp pulled over that well, weeds and shit put on top of the tarp. The real cover's over there."
He looked over at the wooden hatch cover in surprise and then back at me.
"Any idea of who or why?" I asked.
He shook his head. "This place been empty for a long time, 'cept for the old lady, Ms. Tarrant, and she bein' housebound and all. We got kids now, come out to the country, mess around on some of the big farms, but this here-this was nasty."
I started shivering, so I got up and walked around to restore my circulation. Nasty was the word, all right. If the dogs hadn't been with me I might have simply drowned down there once the cold water worked its lethal magic. Then all the trapper would have to do was pull the cover back over and declare victory.
Victory over what, though? The candlestick business had felt like the opening chapter in a head game of some sort. This was quite an escalation. I'm going to make you go away, interloper, one way or another. I got the message, but I couldn't think of anyone I'd met so far who'd been anything but friendly and encouraging about the project. Even the Auntie Bellums across the way seemed disposed to let me proceed without objection.
It was starting to get dark. It had been a spring day but not a warm day. I was cold, wet, and in my stocking feet. I had walked over from Laurel Grove, and now I was going to have to walk back on the gravel drive. I went over to the hatch cover and, with Cubby's help, tipped it end for end back over the dark hole in the ground. I put the ball cap in my belt. If nothing else, I'd acquired some physical evidence of my intruder. Tomorrow I would come back over here and see what the mutts could scare up in the way of a trail.
As we started back toward the house, I wondered if this could possibly be my hit-man-
hiring ghost from Triboro. I didn't think so. Billie Ray did not have the resources to have found me out here this quickly. So either this was someone local, with a hate-on for strangers, or I had a new problem I didn't know about.
The back windows of the big house reflected the swaying branches of some of the bigger oaks, making it look like there were ghostly figures slipping past the windows inside. I think I would have preferred a couple of attic wailers to the sneaky bastard who had set the well trap.
My tracking exercise the next morning led to some interesting results. I followed the shepherds as they worked the barnyard area and then headed down toward the river bottoms. I had no way of knowing if they were on the scent I wanted them to follow, but we'd started with the ball cap, and Frick at least knew what I wanted. I had my trusty SIG. 45 with me this time, and if the trail happened to lead directly to an operational human I was going to introduce myself by shooting him.
Instead, the trail led down to the river. The dogs lost the scent at the junction of a creek coming down from my property and the main river. There was a tiny patch of sandy mud on the north side of the creek, a clear sign that a boat had been pulled up on the bank. There were muddy holes where footprints would have been.
This told me a couple of things. One, I hadn't been indulging in paranoia about the setup in the barnyard. Someone had come by boat, beached it here, gone up to the barnyard, set his trap, and then come back. Two, my stalker was comfortable in the field. The Dan River is not a trifling stream. It's a good-sized river, fed from the mountains, with powerful currents and treacherous sandbars along its length in this area. It claimed a half-dozen humans a year, mainly kids who went playing along its banks, fell in, and were never seen again. A city boy would have come by car or truck, parked discreetly, and walked over the fields. This guy had come by small boat, and probably not from right across the river. He'd come looking to set up a trap that an unalerted ex-cop who always traveled with his dogs would not see. In fact, he'd used the dogs to lead me to that well.
I stood there, looking across the river. Billie Ray Breen was a red herring.
This was either someone from my personal past, someone who wanted to fuck with me for a while and then-what? Go away and leave me wondering when he'd be back? Or show himself and explain what his beef was? It pissed me off, especially since one of the reasons for coming out to the country was to get away from this kind of crap. The other explanation was that this was someone new, someone with an agenda I didn't know about.
I turned the dogs around, and we went back up the way we'd come. I scanned the ground, hoping, but not very hard, that he'd dropped something with his name and address on it. Something did catch my eye, over on that western ridge. Only the top line of the ridge was visible across the fields and behind the old rail line, but there was my horseman again, clearly silhouetted. I gauged that it was almost a half mile from me to the ridge, but I called back the dogs and changed course, cutting across the knee-high weeds of plowed ground and heading for the ridge. As soon as I did, he turned and disappeared behind the trees. I'd figured he wouldn't wait around, but his tracks might.
It took us forty-five minutes of hard going over the plowed ground and through the weeds, up and over the banks of the rail line, down across a troublesome creek, and then up the ridge on the other side through fairly dense pine trees and underbrush. I'd selected a tall poplar as my landmark and came up on that tree to discover three large boulders in a semicircle, with the smoldering remains of a small campfire in front of them. One of the boulders was shaped vaguely like a throne, and sitting on the throne, legs crossed and boots gleaming, was a Confederate cavalry officer, sipping something from a battered tin cup.
The shepherds closed in on me but did not seem to be very excited, which told me that this man wasn't emitting large volumes of adrenaline into the air. He was tall, and he looked like Valeria Lee, with the same aquiline nose and arched eyebrows over deeply pouched gray eyes. His dark hair was going to gray, and he sported a full salt-and-pepper beard that almost reached his chest, a gray wool jacket with two rows of buttons over gray trousers that had a single yellow stripe down their length, knee-high leather boots, and a broad-rimmed hat complete with a ratty feather pushed into the band. His saber was propped up on the rock in its scabbard, the leather and brass attachment straps dangling. He had a leather holster on his right hip that contained what looked like a period cap-and-ball pistol. Two gray gauntlets lay carelessly on the ground next to his boots.
He nodded at me when I appeared out of the underbrush but did not get up, possibly in deference to the two large shepherds who were watching him, although he didn't seem upset by the dogs. I spotted his horse behind the big rocks, standing to a ground tie and contentedly munching grass. I saw his eyes take in my own pistol strapped to my right hip, but he didn't seem bothered by it.
"Well, good morning-Colonel, is it?" I said.
"Major, suh. Major," he replied, lifting his hat with his left hand. I guessed that he was about fifty, but he had one of those tight, sallow complexions that make age estimation difficult. "Major Courtney Woodruff Lee, at your service, suh. Those are handsome animals with you."
"I'm Cameron Hartoff Richter," I said, unconsciously matching his own formality with some of my own.
"Had a cousin named Cameron," he said with a sniff. "Lost at Gettysburg, we're told. Not recovered. He was an adjutant with General Pickett, you see."
"I believe I saw you up here a few weeks ago."
"I reconnoiter daily, suh," he said, apparently not terribly impressed with the recitation of all my names. "General Sherman is reported to be at large in the low country, and we expect him to join Butcher Grant any day now. Any day."
I thought for a moment that this guy had to be putting me on, but then I caught the briefest glint of true madness in his eyes. Major Lee. Was this the crazy brother rumored to be locked up in the attic at Laurel Grove, and, if so, who'd let him out?
"You are armed but not in uniform, suh," he observed, looking me up and down. I was wearing khaki field trousers and a long-sleeved red and black Pendleton shirt over Bean boots. "Are you perchance a spy?"
"No, um, Major," I said. "I own this property." Or almost own it, I thought.
"Rubbish." He snorted. "The Lees own this property. All of it, as far as the eye can see. Owned it for many score years. Who are you, suh? What are you doing here?"
I didn't know what to say, and he was now regarding me with a suspicious eye. I wasn't sure what I'd do if he reached for that horse pistol. There wasn't the slightest hint of humor in his eyes, and, if he was as nuts as he seemed, I could have a problem here. I tried some playacting of my own.
"Well, of course I don't really own this property," I said. "I'm the new overseer. We have a slave on the run, and we're in pursuit, my dogs and I."
"Ah," he said, visibly relieved. "I shall be on the lookout as soon as I've finished my coffee." He looked down into the cup, made a face, and threw the contents, a noxious-looking brown brew of some kind, into the fire. "Acorns, barley, moss, God knows what else," he said. "Haven't had decent coffee since '62. Damned blockade, you know."
I nodded, feeling faintly ridiculous talking to a lunatic as if this conversation were completely normal. I wondered what the gangbangers down in South Triboro would make of this guy if he came riding down past one of their corners.
"Well," he said, getting up and stretching to full height, which was impressive. "Get on with it, man. Watch the railroad bridge. That's where they go, if they're able. Can't abide water, you know. Those dogs, now, they look capable indeed."
He touched the brim of his big hat in my direction, gathered up his cavalry accoutrements, kicked some dirt into the ashes, and went over to the horse. He mounted in one easy, graceful movement, clucked quietly to the horse, and moved off into the trees. In a moment his broad, ramrod-straight back disappeared into the Virginia pines without a sound.
I blew out a long exhalation. Then I took th
e dogs over to where the horse had been standing, just to make sure I hadn't been hallucinating. There were definitely tracks. I went back to the campfire and kicked some dirt of my own onto it, because the countryside was extremely dry. The well-blackened stones indicated it had been used before. As I looked around, I noticed that several of the nearby trees had been blasted by lightning over the years and recognized what southerners call a lightning patch. Something in the ground, a concentration of iron, perhaps, invited lightning to make repeat appearances, and the trees nearby caught absolute hell.
I was pretty sure about who my horseman was, and either he was a consummate actor who enjoyed dressing up and doing some horseback reenacting, or he actually believed he was a Confederate cavalry officer living back in those dark days just before Appomattox and the end of the Glorious Cause. The latter would fit right in with the Hester and Valeria household, but not with deathtraps set in the barnyard. I'd have to ask Cubby Johnson about the major.
"Okay, muttskis," I announced. "Let's go down to the river and recapture Eliza."
I caught up with Cubby Johnson after lunch in the barns behind the Laurel Grove house. The outbuildings were similar to the ones across the road, but in much better shape. Cubby was head deep in the inner workings of a round baler when the dogs and I showed up. He seemed ready to take a break. I told him about my encounter with the major.
He smiled, shook his head, and then explained that the major was something of an open secret in the local neighborhood. He was surprised that the rider had spoken to me, as he had a reputation for not acknowledging the presence of other humans he encountered.
"He's related to the ladies up there?" I asked, indicating the big house.
He nodded. "Been like that since Patience and I've been here. He don't bother nobody, closes farm gates behind him, that sort of thing, but he's well and truly gone around."
"This the crazy relative supposedly locked away in the attic I've heard about?"
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