For a minute, Chandler forgot the purpose of her interrogation. She squeezed past Hank, skirted the offices to the left and right of her, and stepped into the open walkway.
“Careful.” Hank’s baritone vibrated in her ears. He was right. Chandler decided not to lean on the thick cherrywood rail that edged the walkway. There was no way to know if it was sturdy, and she didn’t relish the idea of falling to the floor below.
Lifting her eyes, she examined the large room to the right of the catwalk. “That must have been the communications room,” she mumbled. She was drawn to it, checking her footing to make sure the flooring was intact. On either side of the large double doors, circus posters were pasted to the brick wall. Though they were ripped and worn, faded from the years, Chandler could make out the silhouette of an elephant, posed on an oval podium, its trunk curled in a wave. On the other, a vogue Gibson-Girl type in a trapeze suit of purple, a mass of hair balanced on top of her head, and a brilliant smile with lips painted a shiny apple-red.
She sensed Hank behind her as she entered the room. Two more large windows graced the opposite wall. These were also cemented in, the room left dark from lack of sunlight. Three more posters were pasted to the walls, so aged she could hardly make out anything other than the words Bonaventure Circus and Clive the Small Man and something about a baby elephant named Lily. A table was positioned under the windows, but only its right side was standing. The left legs had collapsed after years of neglect and rot.
Hank pointed toward the table. “That’s where I found the necklace.”
Chandler eyed him suspiciously. “It’s weird that the necklace that strangled the fabled Patty Luchent was just lying in an empty room after years of people walking around, busy working here and there, and then closing the building for good?”
“I didn’t say it was lying in the middle of the floor.”
“Where was it, then?”
“Come, I’ll show you.” Hank crossed the room to the rotted table. He reached his hand beneath it and pulled on the edge. A small drawer slid open. It wasn’t necessarily meant to be a hidden drawer, Chandler noted, yet it wasn’t obvious a drawer was there unless a person put their hand beneath the table to feel for it on the hollowed underside. “I found it in here.”
“Why didn’t anyone else find it before—” Her question was cut short as Hank held up a hand. His eyes snapped with a green sharpness, and he turned his head toward the door.
“What?”
He held his finger to his lips to shush her.
Wariness blossomed in the pit of her stomach. It was daytime. There was no danger. There were no ghosts.
Hank was eyeing the doorway, the catwalk, and tipping up his chin like he could somehow see over the rail to the main-level floor. He crooked his finger at Chandler, and she approached him.
“Were you meeting anyone else here today?” he whispered in her ear.
Chandler gave him a wide-eyed shake of her head. She pushed her tortoiseshell glasses up her nose, as they’d slid down from the sudden motion. “Well, someone was coming to look at the foundation. I’m not sure if that was today yet. I was waiting for a callback.” She took out her phone to see if she had any missed calls.
Hank’s hand enveloped hers and stilled it.
Then Chandler heard it. A low moan. It was so soft, so vague, she wasn’t sure she would have ever heard it had Hank not stilled her.
“What is that?” she whispered. She stepped instinctively closer to the man’s muscled frame.
He held his fingers against his lips again.
Another moan. Almost a hum.
“In there.” Hank tugged on Chandler’s arm. He reached for a door adjacent to the table and opened it.
“What—?”
“Shh.”
It was a small closet. Hank pulled the door shut and it clicked softly into place. Chandler’s back was pressed against Hank’s chest. The closet was pitch-black and the dust thick. It tickled her nose and reached up into her sinuses.
“Why are we hiding?” Chandler whispered.
Hank’s hands came up to grasp her arms. Chandler shivered at his touch. His breath moved the hair at her ear as he whispered, “Don’t trust anyone, Chandler.”
“What are you talking about?” She twisted, facing him now. It was a mistake. Now they were chest to chest, her nose almost touching the hollow of his neck.
“Shh.”
“I’m not hiding from a ghost! Not in the daytime—!”
“Shhh!” He was insistent enough this time to put his fingers against Chandler’s mouth. She blinked, staring up at him, trying to make out his features in the darkness.
She couldn’t.
The floor outside the closet door creaked. Could ghosts make a floor creak?
A footstep.
The sound of the drawer in the table being pushed back into place.
A moan filtered through the crack at the bottom of the closet door. The kind of moan that either a male or a female might make, deep in the throat, in tired frustration.
More footsteps.
Hank’s fingers were still against her lips.
The closet was stifling.
Chandler sucked in a deep breath of stale air. She leaned her forehead into Hank’s chest. The spicy scent met her nose, a welcome reprieve. His fingers slipped from her mouth and trailed down her neck. Whether it was deliberate or not, Chandler couldn’t help but shiver.
She froze.
Hank’s fingers stopped at her collarbone.
The doorknob on the closet rattled.
A coolness overwhelmed Chandler. Cold. Bumps raised on her arms, and she shivered inadvertently. She could feel Hank’s muscles tense.
Then it was gone. The cold air, the sensation that time had suddenly stood still, and the footsteps. All of it. Gone.
They stood in silence for a few long moments. Hank finally lifted his fingers from her skin and drew back his hand. He reached for the doorknob to open it.
He twisted.
Paused.
Twisted again.
“Open it,” Chandler begged in a whisper. “Please.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Hank tilted his head down until his nose touched her forehead. “We’re locked in.”
Chapter twenty-one
Call someone,” Chandler hissed. Claustrophobia might not be the worst thing she battled, but right now it was closing in fast, especially since she could hardly move without bumping against Hank—which was equally delightful and unnerving.
“I don’t use a cellphone.”
Chandler stilled. “Are you for real?”
Silence.
She dug around in her messenger bag and tugged out her phone. Now, like in any movie scene, this would be the time her phone died, or her battery was low, or there was no signal. Chandler pushed the side button, and light blinded them.
“Ha!” she exclaimed victoriously and waved it in Hank’s face. “Welcome to the twenty-first century!”
“Don’t get too excited.” His voice was so deep that it rumbled his chest, and because she was so close to him, it rumbled in hers also.
“Why?” She dialed Margie’s number. “I’ll just call Margie. She can call someone to get us out of here.”
“Mm-hmm” was Hank’s only response.
Chandler held the phone to her ear as it started ringing. She heard Margie answer.
“Hey, Margie. I need your help . . .” Chandler heard Margie on the other end, but it was broken and robotic. “Margie, I—hello? Margie?”
The call dropped.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Chandler rammed the phone into Hank’s chest.
He wrenched it from her grasp. “You’re in an inside closet in a cemented-up and windowless brick building. Getting a signal will be sketchy.”
“You’re a gorilla. Bust down the door,” Chandler said, her voice rising.
Hank’s fingers squeezed her arm. “Hey, calm
down. We don’t know if we’re alone yet.”
Chandler flicked her phone light off. “What?” Her whisper was fierce. She wanted out. Out of this closet with Hank. Away from this haunted depot with creepy people and old necklaces from murder victims hidden in drawers.
“Just give it a bit more time.”
“A bit?” Chandler dropped her phone back in her bag. “A bit?” she repeated.
“And be quiet,” Hank advised.
Chandler bit her tongue.
Hank dropped his hand from her arm, and they stood at attention, chest to chest, face to neck. Breathing. Silent. Every nerve at attention.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Chandler whimpered.
The room was closing in even more. She could swear the closet’s walls were compressing. Like that garbage disposal room on the Death Star in Star Wars that had threatened to crush Han Solo and Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker and—
Chandler launched for the doorknob, twisting and rattling it. “Break this thing down. I need out of here.”
Hank’s arms surrounded her, holding her back. Again, his mouth was against her ear. “Chandler. Stop.”
She wriggled. “I don’t care. Patty Luchent’s ghost can eat me alive, I need out of this sweatbox.” She was seeing stars. Ringing in her ears. The room was spinning.
“Chandler.”
She jerked her arms up, apparently surprising Hank, and spun as if she were in a large room instead of a small closet. Her toe connected with the tip of Hank’s boot and she tripped forward, her shoulder ramming against the back wall of the closet opposite the door. The wall gave beneath the impact.
Chandler heard the crack of the old wallboard. Dust puffed in her face as her temple hit the wall and her shoulder pushed through into the framework. She screamed, muffled because her face was against the wood, and she brought her other arm up to push herself out of the wall’s interior but only succeeded in pushing in more of the deteriorating wall.
Something cold and damp fell against her, even as Chandler pulled back into Hank’s body. It was hard and thin but with many pieces all tangling around her. Something soft brushed her neck. Like coarse hair. Long and stringy. Part of the object fell against her arm. It was long, like another arm, only fleshless, cold bone. Skeletal.
Hank must have found her phone in her bag as it swung to her other side. The light flooded the small closet, and Chandler blinked. Squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them. Deep pits stared back at her. The skeletal remains leaning into her like a corpse freed from its secret coffin. Patches of decaying hair brushed Chandler’s neck.
Her scream would have awakened the dead—if the dead wasn’t already staring at her with a vacant expression.
The room was blurry. Chandler lay flat on her back, the hard floor beneath her and the dark ceiling of the telegraph room staring down at her. She squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them, willing her vision to clear.
“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” she muttered, scrambling into a sitting position as the memory of the skeleton’s attack created an onslaught to her senses.
Hank must have broken through the door to the closet. It hung askew on its hinges. The debris from Chandler’s stumble into the wall lay scattered on the floor, along with . . .
Chandler let out a half sob and half laugh. Hank turned from where he stood, hands on his waist, back to her, staring into the closet. He looked stunned, disbelief painting its way into every crevice of his face.
She peered beyond him, trying to avoid the shattered skeleton, dark gray with age, spread on the floor.
“Did you call the cops?” Chandler pushed out between the rapidly increasing tremors in her body.
“That’s your answer to everything,” Hank muttered and turned away from her. “You’ve got to see this.”
Chandler pushed herself up and rose onto wobbling feet. She steadied herself, willing her weakness to take a backseat to the urgency of the moment. “I’ve already seen it.”
“No. Not that.” Hank motioned to the skeleton. “That.” He pointed.
Chandler came up beside him and stared.
Neither of them spoke. The image before them was too astounding. Too shocking.
Finally, Chandler managed to push words from her mouth. “What—what is that?”
Hank shook his head and stepped closer.
The opposite wall was shattered from Chandler’s fall. Boards had been busted and pulled away, and with the skeleton’s careening embrace into Chandler, it had only taken more of the mess with it. Behind the wall, hidden between the old framework, were small torn sections of circus poster. The eye and ear of a zebra ripped and pasted onto the wall. The foot of what must have been a trapeze artist, based on the tilt of the slippered foot and the rope wrapped around the ankle. There was a section of poster with Bona-something printed on it, leaving to the imagination as to the completion of the word. On top of that was pasted another portion, of an elephant’s trunk reaching up, a purple ball balanced on the end of its trunk.
Nails were hammered into the poster backdrops. Rough-looking nails, handmade, like they’d been forged on an anvil. From each nail, something hung. A remnant. A . . .
“Souvenir.” Hank finished Chandler’s thought.
“A-are those locks of hair?” she stammered. The locks, nine in total, were tied in the middle and the ribbon looped to hang off the nail. Brunette, a faded auburn, dark blond . . . dry and brittle with age.
Chandler gagged and whirled from the sight, covering her mouth with her hand. As she hustled away, Hank moved toward it. His voice offered commentary to what Chandler could no longer look at.
“There are necklaces here too. All of them women’s. Gold, one is a locket. And then—crap—that’s sick.”
“What?” Chandler asked, muffled behind her hand.
“A circus token. Drilled out so they could slide a piece of ribbon through it.”
“A circus token?” Chandler didn’t know what Hank meant, but she didn’t want to return to the gruesome sight to check it out.
“Yeah. Like a ticket to get into the circus, only it’s a wooden token.” He didn’t touch them, instead raising Chandler’s phone to shine the screen’s light on them. “Yeah. 1922—Chicago. 1927—Des Moines. 1928—St. Louis.”
“Is this a . . . ?” Chandler swallowed bile that rose in her throat. Burning, acidic bile that refused to go back down all the way. She struggled for breath and then managed to whisper, “Is this like a serial killer’s stash? Did we just find the Watchman’s lair?”
Hank didn’t answer directly. He clicked off the phone light and stepped cautiously around the skeleton. “Chandler, go ahead.”
“What?” She raised her brows.
“Do what you like to do. Call the police.”
“For real?” Oh, blessed relief!
“Yeah.” He eyed the skeleton. “I think we have more than one crime from one decade here.”
Chandler stilled. “What do you mean?”
Hank locked eyes with her. “I think we just found Linda Pike.”
Chapter twenty-Two
PIPPA
Cousin Franny had already donned the yellow sash of Georgiana Farnsworth’s cause and made quite the spectacle as she exited the manor to the protests of her mother and Victoria Ripley. With the scandal of Franny joining ranks with the protesters, it would only lend credence to Georgiana’s accusations and implicate Father as a liar when he stood in the circus’s defense. The circus wasn’t a good place, the circus did harm the community, and if Richard Ripley’s own niece was willing to stand against it, what part did the town have in supporting wickedness? The novelty of the circus was wearing off. People were tired of dodging the menagerie on the square. In what other town did you find yourself walking behind a row of zebras, have to skirt a four-ton elephant, or tip your hat to a camel before carrying on about your business? What was once a phenomenon was risking being relegated to worse than an annoyance. It was an offense.
What P
ippa always took for granted was that Bluff River knew Bonaventure Circus as she did. As a place to hide, a place where the rest of the vast world diminished. Where curiosities became normal, and where normal became simply . . . a far-off place.
“You have to let me go with you.” Pippa surprised herself by her grip on Forrest’s wrist as he moved to swing himself into the car. He shook off her hand and looked at her with repulsion at her uncustomary defiance.
“You’re not going anywhere near that place.” His eyes smoldered, and not in a way that would cause a woman’s heart to flutter. She felt him rake a distasteful glare at her bobbed hair.
Admit it. You like it. The rebellious thought crossed Pippa’s mind but not her tongue. It was something Patty Luchent would say, not Pippa Ripley.
Penn nudged her leg, a high-pitched whine of question in her throat.
“I need to stop Franny,” Pippa argued. “She’ll listen to me. She is my cousin after all.” Which really meant nothing, and Forrest knew that. No one listened to Pippa. Had that been true, Pippa could have stopped Franny before she ever headed downtown toward the circus and Georgiana’s protest.
Forrest settled on the bench seat. “Let your father deal with Franny. You can’t do anything.”
It was painful to hear. Like a wax seal on an envelope to indicate the subject was closed. But she needed to stop Franny, to stop Georgiana, for reasons altogether different from Forrest’s. If the Watchman noted her cousin’s involvement against the circus, it might drive him further from Pippa. Further from trusting her. In turn, it would pit her more and more against the very place she longed to be. A place just out of reach.
Pippa hurried around to the other side of the motorcar. She snapped her fingers, and Penn scrambled up by Forrest’s feet.
“What are you . . . ?” Forrest expelled an exasperated breath. He shook his head, and it was apparent he was unsure how to deal with Pippa’s sudden act of obstinance. “Not the dog.” His growl rivaled the dog’s.
Pippa did Forrest the favor of ignoring him, more because her insides were quaking at her unforgivable defiance.
The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus Page 18
