"Anyone down there?" a woman's voice called from above. It sounded like Carol Pollard.
"Yeah, it's me, Cam Richter," I called. A moment later, a shapely pair of stockinged legs in a knee-length skirt came down the steps into the cone of my flashlight.
"What in the world are you doing down in this black hole?" she asked as she stepped onto the dirt floor.
"Just looking," I said, deciding to keep the mystery of the moving candlestick to myself for the moment. She joined me and blinked in the light from my Maglite.
"Checking out the woodwork?" she asked, indicating the hand-hewn floor joists above our heads. Then I realized they were whole tree trunks.
"Yes, and the general layout of the house. I didn't expect a basement with that lower floor halfway underground. Certainly not this deep, either."
"You're right," she said. "The whole point of the lower floor was 'coolth' in the hot summers. That's why the kitchens and the main dining room are down there. Look at that wine rack!"
"Missing one important commodity," I said.
"Can't have everything," she said with a bright smile. "I saw the front gates open and decided to come in to see who's here. Your shepherds are waiting at the front door, by the way."
We decided to go back upstairs into the daylight. I followed Carol up, exercising as much chivalry as I could with the Maglite. When I dropped the trapdoor into the basement, I saw an external latch, which I discreetly slid into the locked position.
In the light of the kitchen I noticed that she seemed to be dressed for a party, with a lot more makeup than I'd seen before. She caught me checking her out.
"A retirement party for Judge Corey," she said. "He's a kindly old gentleman who's been very nice to the library in town. Oh, and I have a lease for you to sign in my briefcase outside. David Oatley asked me to get it to you."
"Great," I said. "Does that mean I can move in across the way?"
"I think so," she said as we went up the front stairs and then to the front door. There were two sets of shepherd ears silhouetted against the wavy glass of the door's side windows. We went outside, and I executed the lease agreement.
"I was thinking," she said. "When you get settled in next door, perhaps you'd like to take a ride around the property. I've got a husband-horse I could bring for you, and it really is a great way to see the whole property."
"A husband-horse?"
She laughed. "That's a horse-world term for a perfectly docile horse that even the nonriding husband can ride. You would be riding on, as opposed to actually riding."
"Got it," I said. "Sure, why not? What could go wrong?"
She laughed again, and I found myself warming to her sunny personality, among other attributes. "Not much, actually, not on Goober, anyway."
"Goober."
"You'll see," she said. "I'll call you."
After she left, I considered the possibility that the stop-by had been dual-purposed. Get the lease signed, and give me a look at Carol when she cleaned up and invested in a little powder and paint. I also considered the possibility that the entire female universe might not actually revolve around me. God, I hoped that wasn't so.
I went back into the house with the mutts to pursue the matter of the light-footed candlestick. The first problem I encountered was that it was back on its table in the kitchen.
The trapdoor was still down and latched. I didn't remember bringing it back up, and nor had Carol.
No way, I thought. I went over and tugged at the handle of the door; it did not move. The latch held. So no one who could have been hiding in that basement could have moved the candlestick.
"C'mon, you guys," I said. "We're going exploring."
We went through the house, starting with another quick look down in the basement and then through every floor right up to the attic, which was accessed through a ceiling hatch at the back of the upstairs main hall. I'd found an antique wooden ladder stored in the hall closet, which allowed me to get up into the attic.
There was nothing up there but cold air, lots of spiderwebs, and a great look at the original construction timbers, which were, for the most part, more whole trees that had been squared off where needed and then fit into a roof truss structure with wooden dowels. There were no lights in the attic, but some light came in through air vents at the eaves, and it was fully floored. There were no chained trunks of hidden treasure, no wardrobes full of antique clothes, and absolutely no place for anyone to hide. The inside walls of the massive brick chimneys were exposed on four sides, and the mortar actually looked to be in pretty good shape. There were no water stains on the floor, so the roof was intact as well.
I climbed back down the ladder to where the shepherds were waiting and reset the hatch cover as I came down. We explored each of the main rooms, the few remaining armoires upstairs, and even the single bathroom grafted onto the drawing room downstairs. I'd taken some time going through the reception room on the main floor, which the old lady had converted to her bedroom in her declining days. As was customary in nineteenth-century homes, freestanding wardrobes and armoires were used in place of closets. There was a smallish canopied bed, two armoires, a ratty-looking oriental rug, and some chairs and tables.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
I listened once again for rattling chains, low moans in the walls, or other ghostly noises, but mostly what I heard was the sound of two shepherds panting.
Someone had moved the frigging candlestick. Someone had been in the house when Carol and I had gone out to her car. That same someone had done his or her poltergeist thing and still managed to get out of the house, unseen and unheard, before I came back in and started looking around in earnest. The shepherds were relaxed, which told me that said someone wasn't here anymore. Ergo, no point in us sitting here waiting for something to happen.
We went back outside and walked around to the back of the house, which faced generally northwest. Here the bricks were in less good shape, and I could discern a definite starboard list on the back wall chimney structure. There was a set of stone steps leading up from the semisubmerged kitchen area, but they were covered in a thin film of moss and didn't bear signs of recent use. The backyard was actually a pebbled driveway area, surrounded by some ancient outbuildings. I reconsidered my mystery. There was one way it could have been done.
Someone hidden in the basement walls could have heard us go upstairs and then out the front door, grabbed the candlestick, come out into this back drive area through some secret passage, gone down those steps into the kitchen, replaced the candlestick, and then beat feet back outside to a hidey-hole before I got back inside. I had not looked outside once I started my tour, and I also had gone back down into the basement. If my mystery guest had heard me down there, he could have had time to get out of the secret passage and simply depart the premises.
So: Secret passage, where are you? It had to have something to do with that one set of shelves down there that had the solid wooden back. I decided to look through the old outbuildings to see if I could find any indications of foot traffic.
Thirty minutes later I'd discovered nothing useful. One building was indeed a smokehouse, a second looked like it had been a blacksmith shop of some kind, and the third was a long, low springhouse, complete with a pool of icy water laced with watercress. All of the buildings were made of the same handmade, oversized brick as the main house. All the fittings were wrought iron and looked original. A tiny brook headed downhill from the springhouse, but nothing else moved on the grounds except for an occasional and now respectfully distant squirrel.
Still and all, I thought, that had to be how it was done, excluding the duty ghostly spirit. Some kind of subterranean access had to be behind that set of shelves. The real question was why someone was screwing around in the first place. Was I supposed to be scared off? I decided to wait for further exploration until I had a crew here working, and then we'd disassemble that wooden shelf structure, with a backhoe if necessary, and find out where the secrets lay. In the meantime, I might still have a real ghost to deal with, back in Summerfield, if the demise of his hired killer failed to deter him. On that dismal possibility, I needed to get going on my move to the country. That meant a second visit to the stone cottage, and then a U-Haul operation.