Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

  Not a latch. A hinge! Other side….

  Another car door opened and closed. Then a third. I was definitely outnumbered. I wondered whose eyebrows would raise the most when they ran my plate numbers.

  This bit of metal made no sense. No part reacted when I tried to lift, twist or pull. Whiteness blazed through the hairline crack between the shed’s doors.

  Push!

  That worked. Twin metallic snaps happened. They weren’t as loud as they seemed. The entire shelf assembly moved into the wall half an inch then swung toward me. I ducked into the lightless square opening behind it. Cops knocking on the shed door conveniently masked the tiny sounds of the shelves latching into place again.

  I could see because my phone was glowing through my jacket pocket. The micro-cameras in my car had activated. Or Rafferty was calling to ask why the hell my car was parked in the woods behind Hillbriar. There were reasons I typically turned the thing off before breaking and entering. I glanced quickly about to set my bearings and powered it down.

  A limestone passage, roughly six feet square, slanted up and away into blackness. While cops rapped tentatively on the shed’s exterior, I stooped and followed the tunnel with one hand cautiously over my head. The .45 stayed holstered. You can’t shoot what you can’t see.

  Stone connected with my elbow a couple dozen steps later. I was far enough from the disguised door in the shed to risk some light by now. Probably.

  The tunnel looked cruder now, with skull-cracker outcrops and wood posts straining against an uneven ceiling. Ruddy streaks discolored the walls. Iron ore, I guessed. What small-scale mining the region knew had faltered after the Civil War. Something told me this tunnel wasn’t that old. Noah Donovan had only acquired the mineral rights in 1928, and Sandra had mentioned his ancestors preferred above-ground crops.

  Around the corner was all the clarification anyone could need.

  The tunnel broadened into a flat-sided forest of posts under a low limestone sky. Cubes, spheres, corkscrews and diagonal braces cast fantastic shadows and gave the sensation I’d stepped into a middle-schooler’s geometry homework. A network of greened copper pipes reached from the ceiling to a corroded spigot about four feet off the cavern floor. A little stalagmite had formed beneath it, nurtured by decades of lethargic drips. The corkscrew shapes were copper, too, as were the cylinders to which they were connected. The cubes were wood shipping crates. Most wore stenciled labels for CORN, which was appropriate. All the crates had held when they left this place were bottles of corn liquor.

  No wonder Noah Donovan always had plenty of money.

  Old-fashioned electric lights dangled from the beams and crude hot plates collected dust under the stills. The wiring had rotted. Regularly spaced holes in the limestone suggested vents. All the same, it was a miracle the entire hill beneath Hillbriar had never blown sky high.

  Noah’s underground business venture not having been discovered with the sheriff’s house just down the road didn’t seem all that miraculous. Plenty of Prohibition Era authorities had a secret fondness for moonshine. Muriel Donovan had known the truth all along. Had JD?

  The penlight beam wavered. I had one set of spare batteries in my pocket. I also had a troupe of baffled policemen outside by my car and a more questions to answer before I tried to figure out how to deal with them. I kept going and swept the light along the cavern floor.

  More of the small footprints from the shed showed in the dust, traveling toward and away from me. The tracks went deeper into the cave. I followed them past crates of sin to the base of an iron spiral stair. The tunnel continued past the stairs but the footprints didn’t. I chanced a brief upward check with the light. Metal steps screwed up a lot farther than my light did. It’d be a hell of a climb to find someone waiting at the top to knock me back down.

  My first indication the stairs had an end was running water, not forgotten dripping, water moving through household plumbing. A faucet had been turned or a toilet flushed. I touched the pipes as the stairs twisted between them. Some were moist with condensation. Next came planed floor joists and I stepped up into a three-by-five windowless room.

  I traded the penlight for the Smith & Wesson. A thin glimmer etched a door’s outline in front of me. I felt for a doorknob and reminded myself not to step backward. If falling down forty twisting feet of stairs somehow didn’t kill me, I’d be in no shape to climb a second time.

  Beyond the door was another closet. The second was the real thing, with a rod for hangers and a door meant to be opened from outside. I paused to listen. Floorboards creaked, softly yet rapidly, followed by silence. I turned the knob and stepped out of a servants’ coat closet into the kitchen of Hillbriar’s boarded-up guest house.

  Very old Southern homes didn’t earn that status by including kitchens in their main floor plans. Before the Civil War, grease and open flames relegated cooking to separate structures from those where families ate and slept. Hillbriar’s first kitchen building had been gone so long nobody remembered it. The room I entered had marble counters, tiled floors and stainless steel appliances that looked surprisingly modern under nearly a decade of dust. The kitchen had entered dormancy sparkling. Muriel Donovan must have been killed between meals.

  What seemed bright through the door crack turned out to be the LED display on a microwave. The lights probably worked but whoever ran water and used the microwave had been careful to leave them off. What would daylight do here? I leaned over the sink and parted drawn blinds to find a window-sized expanse of plywood. I touched the faucet while there and caught cool drops on my finger. One of stainless steel refrigerator began to discreetly hum.

  Another floorboard squeaked.

  I moved along the kitchen’s perimeter, gun ready. Air moved through ducts. JD had kept the air-conditioning on since he buried his mother. It’s the little things that keep memories alive.

  The third squeak was farther away. I followed. Keeping my feet close to the walls lessened the chance of making haunted house noises myself. The corridor outside the kitchen was darker. Wood floors, slightly concave from centuries of shuffled feet, supplanted the tile. Cased openings yawned in front of me and on both sides, every option dark as hell. If somebody sneaked into my home, I would wait in a doorway like one of these. With a gun or a frying pan or a baseball bat or whatever was handy. I tried not to think about it.

  Footsteps—not mere squeaky boards—sounded directly ahead, quick steps, fleeing steps, rushing upward where I couldn’t see. I plunged forward.

  Ceilings and walls leaped away without my having to see their departure to realize they’d gone. The room through the archway was huge. Standing backlit in an opening wasn’t smart, so I darted to the right, dragging my left hand over the casework for reference. Smooth wood and rounded leather skipped beneath my palm: bookshelves. The footsteps pattered higher. I kept the .45 low in one hand, swept the shelves hurriedly with the other, seeking a switch.

  If there was a wall switch, it hid well. I could only come up with one harebrained solution. I snatched the penlight from my jacket, thumbed it on and sent it spinning out across the floor. It skittered and bounced and made its own dust cloud like a tiny cattle stampede. Shelves curved in both directions from where I crouched, flashing in and out of vision as the light whirled. Opposite me, a grand staircase floated upward in an arc of chiseled oak. Ponderous crystal hung between us, separating me from the person frozen in fear halfway to the second floor. The person was a woman. And I knew she was afraid because she screamed.

  She shot at me, too.

  Books a couple feet from my face burst into confetti. The flying bits echoed gyrating light from the floor and beneath them I spotted the switch. I dropped and rolled, came to my feet, snatched at the little ivory toggle on my way up.

  The chandelier blazed. Shards of faceted glass burned our dilated eyes like a noon sun. Seven years of cobwebs softened the edges but it was still jarringly bright

  “I’m not going to hurt you!” I said. M
y voice came louder than intended. I consciously lowered it. “Please put the gun down.”

  “Turn the light off!” she shrieked.

  “Put the gun down.”

  “I’ll shoot you!”

  “This place might fill up with more cops than the last time. How fast can you reload?”

  That got her thinking. I squinted and thought a human shape might be visible on the stairs. The shape stretched an arm out and set something that might be metal on a step beside it.

  “Okay,” she said. “Please?”

  An ivory knob jutted from the wall next to the switch. I twisted it. The chandelier dimmed to embers like sloppily snuffed candlewicks. Only a very faint orange-tinted aura lingered, unlikely to leak past plywood curtains but sufficient for the girl on the stairs and I to see each other. She had indeed set her pistol down. I lowered mine.

  Several of the balusters in front of her were broken, jagged, pointing weirdly. The wallpaper beyond, as well as the stair treads, looked as if somebody’d spilled a vat of chocolate sauce. It hadn’t happened recently. These were the stairs where Muriel Donovan had died.

  The lithe, dark-haired girl on those death-stairs now had seen me before. She’d wrecked her blue roadster eluding me in the rain. She was Muriel’s granddaughter.

  “Hello, Jetta,” I said.

  Twenty-two

  She wouldn’t come down so I climbed to her. I kept my hand on the balustrade. None of the stairs in that place were safe. She leaned toward the step where she’d laid the gun.

  “Nuh-uh,” I said and she straightened again.

  Once that step was in reach I collected the warm pistol. It felt cheap and wobbly.

  “I don’t want to talk.” Her voice was wobbly as her gun.

  “Sure you do. You’ve been following me around for days.”

  “Everyone’s been following you.”

  “Most of them like to shoot at me, too, so we’d better get our conversation in now.”

  “Not here. Not in this light.”

  She accepted my hand and I drew her upright. Jetta Donovan was slightly built like her father. Her grip was firm and cool. She shared Sandra’s taste in perfume. On the ground floor, she waited while I retrieved the penlight and turned it off, then found my hand again. Minutes after meeting I sensed her intrinsic yearning to trust, a perilous childish nescience. I hadn’t hurt her yet, I must be a friend. Some people are just wired to learn the hard way.

  I knuckled the dimmer switch. Foyer, staircase, chandelier, everything popped into accustomed blackness. We hesitated, hand in hand, testing the silence. Contrary to my bluff, the house hadn’t filled with cops. There were no sounds except for our breathing. Massive old walls seemed to have kept our rough-housing contained. I wondered how anyone had known of Muriel’s fall. Vague green from the microwave down the hall and around the corner beckoned.

  We stepped through the secret door from the kitchen casually as if it were a regular exit. Jetta wasn’t used to sharing the way and missed the spiral stairs’ topmost step. I snatched her from the brink, fumbled in my pocket for the penlight. I was glad I’d stowed the .45, or it would’ve banged downstairs ahead of us. Jetta’s pale hand, clenched in my broader, darker fist, seemed oddly familiar. Serious eyes with sharply defined irises met mine. JD’s eyes.

  At the bottom of the stairs we turned away from Noah Donovan’s subterranean distillery into a passage with more polish. The floors were smoother, the timbers evenly spaced. These limestone walls had been carved after the original mine. Like the iron stairs to the surface, this passage was an extension of the home above, just windowless. Another cavern opened, smaller than the first yet large enough for hundreds more eighty-year-old crates with dishonest labels. Jetta had created a comfortable den among them, hidden from the tunnel, with carpet samples on the floor and magazine clippings of horses artfully tacked to the crates. A cot with folded blankets, stacked books from upstairs, and a fluorescent camp lantern completed the scene.

  Jetta fired up the lantern, sat on the cot and gestured for me to pull up whichever spot of floor I preferred. Glass clinked and liquid sloshed when I leaned against the crate behind me. Bottles peered between gaps in the planks all around us. The ‘39 Macallan Waldron and I had shared was newer than Noah Donovan’s last undelivered batch of corn liquor.

  “I wouldn’t smoke down here,” I said.

  The girl wrinkled her nose. Hers was a fugitive beauty, accentuated by wariness at the corners of her eyes. She might never have worn makeup and would still turn heads out where the sun shined. Too bad she lived in a hole full of rocket fuel.

  “I’m careful. Do you like it?” She seemed to have forgotten shooting at me.

  “Very quiet.”

  “This is my place. Not even Daddy’s been here. My secret since Gran showed me.”

  “Your grandmother Muriel?”

  The sparkle quit her eyes. She nodded. How young had Jetta been when Muriel died? Not too young. She’d chosen honeysuckle perfume for a reason. And her hands were familiar because I’d seen one of them in a photograph caressing Sandra’s tattoo.

  “Does Sandra know about this place?”

  Jetta’s eyes widened. She probably didn’t want to talk any more. But I hadn’t gotten up this early for nothing.

  “I’ve seen the pictures, Jetta.”

  “Oh God!” she murmured.

  Some silences are best left to cure themselves. I kept busy changing the penlight batteries. Jetta’s relinquished sidearm furnished additional diversion. The cylinder fell open on its own. She must have bought it at a pawn shop for five dollars and a wink. It made the proper loud noise but would require all six shots to put any holes in a man-sized target at ten yards.

  “He….he said they’d be gone forever,” she finally stammered.

  I shook five live rounds and one empty onto my palm and looked hard at the girl. “Forever’s longer than anyone should promise. Who promised it?”

  “The detective. Daddy hired him.”

  “DeBreaux.”

  Jetta nodded soberly.

  “Look, the sooner you fill in the blanks, the sooner I’ll leave and you can get back to whatever you do for fun around here.”

  Jetta stared more then, softly: “Mr. DeBreaux found Ellis. He…he promised not to tell Daddy. He made Ellis give him all the film. He hurt Ellis pretty bad. I begged him not to tell Daddy. God, he’d have been so upset! So angry….” Her voice dwindled like the end of a song on the radio, fading to nothing.

  “No digital images?” I pressed.

  “Ellis couldn’t afford that kind of camera. But he took pictures all the time.”

  I bet he did. Enough pictures like those and Ellis Ball could’ve found money for more than just camera equipment. Clarence DeBreaux—or Barr, or whatever his name was—must have stuck to his promise, at least till recently. Even such a disciplined character as JD’s couldn’t conceal that kind of outrage. But DeBreaux plainly hadn’t destroyed all the film.

  “Sandra agreed to this?”

  There the girl went again. Staring.

  “Jetta?”

  Jetta had her daddy’s eyes, but she did something with them I couldn’t see JD ever doing. A glassy tear twinkled in the corner of each. “She…she didn’t know Ellis was taking pictures.”

  My expression wasn’t hard to read, apparently.

  “It was awful of me.”

  “Right up there with sleeping with your stepmom,” I said.

  I’m smoother when I’m not tired. Jetta and Sandra weren’t blood relatives, nor were their ages or social standings that far apart. Loneliness can make the best of us try what we’d otherwise never consider. Had I been the only other keeper of their secret I could’ve lived without asking for more. But I wasn’t, and my odds of living very long weren’t bankable.

  “Why?”

  Dark lashes batted back tears. “Why does anyone get close? Daddy is a busy man, even more so after Mama died. I’m used to it. Not Sandra. The
day Daddy brought her back, he wanted nothing to do with her. She was so beautiful, so excited! We had trouble getting along at first—my fault, childish crap—but she tried to be my friend and….and I felt so sorry for her.”

  Jetta reached inward briefly to manage feelings not meant to be displayed. My question had only pertained to why she’d tricked Sandra into being photographed. But who else did Jetta have to talk to? If she wanted to start at the beginning, so be it.

  “Gran paid us attention.” Her voice brightened as Sandra’s had when mentioning JD’s mother. “She insisted we visit her here, every free moment we had, Sandra and I. To keep the peace. She’d have Hambone bring us sweet tea and tell us stories from when she was a girl—”

  “Hambone?”

  “Gran’s manservant. Like Waldron, just older and not in charge. ‘Hambone’ wasn’t his real name. Gran gave silly nicknames to people. She brought him when she moved back to Hillbriar after Granddaddy passed. Daddy didn’t want him, but Gran insisted. He was never anything but sweet to anyone.”

  Hambone must have been the butler blamed for shoving Muriel to her death. Rico’s bullet in Hambone’s skull meant things were more complicated than vigilante justice. And in my experience, a butler hadn’t yet done it.

  “Gran knew Sandra and I didn’t hate each other. We were just lonely. Gran showed us the tunnels one day. We could come here whenever we wanted. No one would know. She made us promise to keep them secret, though Daddy knew about some of them. He hid this place from the world to protect the family name. Sandra and I sneaked down a lot...”

  Her smile wasn’t too faint to spot. The cot squeaked as she rocked to and fro. She seemed to enjoy the sound. When she remembered me, she stopped and looked serious.

  “She gets inside you, doesn’t she?”

  Jetta’s directness unsettled me. How closely had she followed me? Honeysuckle smelled different on Jetta’s skin than on Sandra’s, but the scent still stirred a hunger. I didn’t respond.