"Okay, okay, I get the point-but maybe we could profile the tech toys?"
He nodded. "That's more like it. His surveillance tags, his ability to send text messages from a clone phone, a flashbang, that sort of stuff might narrow it down."
"Do you have assets?"
"No, but the SBI does. Get your Mr. Bell to send us a laundry list of what you've come up against so far and I'll take it up with Raleigh."
"And we will go back out into the back country here and see what we can dig up. Or at least I will, until Tony gets back."
The sheriff looked up the hill toward the big house. "You sure he's not holed up in that thing? Some more secret passages, or a priest hole in the walls somewhere?"
"I guess I could burn it down, see what scuttles out," I said.
He laughed. "Try another search first, why don't you?"
After the cops left, I called Carol and suggested she bring lunch over to the big house here at Glory's End. "You fly, I buy," I said.
"Deal," she said.
I thought she and I might take another look at the house with an eye toward finding possible hiding places and maybe even that second escape route. Even my ghost had mentioned it. She was an expert in old houses and might be able to see something that we'd missed.
We sat up on the front porch to eat a somewhat elaborate picnic she'd acquired at the purple house restaurant. I was hungry after missing breakfast. The two shepherds had been banished to the steps, but they were begging shamelessly anyway. In their defense, Carol had failed to bring along any dog chow.
She looked good and obviously felt good, and I was comfortable being with her. In contrast, my run-in with the nighttime version of Valeria Lee had been disconcerting, almost a little scary. Yes, I'd reacted, but there'd been that little voice warning me to check out her canine teeth, just in case.
I told Carol about what had happened the night before and said that I needed to go through the house with a fine-toothed comb to see if I could find any more hidden places. She agreed to help, although she thought it was somewhat surreal for us to be sitting out there in the sunlight while my ghost might be crouching under the porch floorboards, listening to us. I said I could put a few rounds down through the floorboards if it would make her feel better. We pitched the scraps out onto the lawn for the shepherds and went inside to begin our search.
We started in the attic and worked our way down. The rooms were still mostly empty, and all the walls seemed to match up with the walls in the adjacent room. We thumped the built-in bookcases in both drawing rooms to no avail. I did look under the front porch, but it was just bare earth and lots of spiders. We poked around the kitchen and checked the base of that giant fireplace. It had a single lintel stone, which must have weighed two tons. It was covered in blackened plaster. Carol asked about the water supply to the house. I showed her the pantry alcove where the pressure tank lived and pointed out the window to the backyard area where there was no wellhead.
"That tank indicates a modern system," she said. "In the old days, the slaves would have carried water to the house from that springhouse."
"The pump is usually in the ground, though, down in the well. I don't see a well."
"Well, then, there has to be a connection between the water source and the house, maybe something to do with a cistern. Let's go look at the springhouse."
We did, and when we got to it I noticed something I hadn't seen before. I'd always assumed the spring was lower in elevation than the main house, but when I lay down on the ground and tried a sight line, I could see that it was actually higher than the partially submerged level of the house.
"Then this is the reservoir," she said. "They didn't need an outside cistern as long as this spring kept running."
She examined the broken latticework where Tony had gone through to escape the Dobermans. The water below was visibly flowing. The end wall that faced the house even had some decorative brickwork, with a flat lion's head medallion right in the middle. The other end had a set of steps leading down into the water, which Carol told me was used for retrieving cooling milk, meat, and eggs, which would have been stored in metal containers in the fifty-degree water.
"So somewhere back there is a pipe or other conduit that sends water back to the kitchen?"
"Yes," she said.
"And we care-why?"
"Because there ought to be water storage in the house, something larger than that little pressure tank. I didn't see one or even a place for one."
We went back to the house, down to the partially underground floor, and into the kitchen area again. I could just see the top of the springhouse from one of the windows, and it still looked like it was lower on the hill than where I was standing, even though now I knew it wasn't.
Carol found it a few minutes later, after banging the handle of a screwdriver on the interior walls of the walk-in cabinets. An entire set of shelves was hinged and latched to the wall. When we unlatched it, it swung back to reveal a doorway, behind which was a set of stone steps leading down into darkness.
"Just what I want to do, after last night," I said. "Go down into another damned tunnel."
I brought in both shepherds, put them on a down at the entrance, and told them to eat anyone who touched that swinging shelf. They lay down on the floor and watched attentively. After last night, they weren't coming with me no matter what I said.
I still had my flashlight, and Carol came along with me. This tunnel was very narrow, so much so that my shoulders almost touched the walls. It was straight, with no doglegs, and I was pretty sure it pointed in the direction of the springhouse. The walls were stone, not brick, and the ceiling was made up of heavy planks sheathed in what looked like copper. The floor was pounded red clay, and it was wet. A plain steel pipe ran along one side of the floor. When we got to the other end, there were five stone steps leading up to a short metal door. When I shone the light on that door, we could see that the bottom one-third of the door was perspiring.
"That moisture would indicate that the door opens into the spring," she said. "What good is this?"
"Something for a real emergency," I said. "Or they had a way to dump the spring from in here." I looked up and saw a badly rusted lever high up on the right-hand wall alongside the stone steps. "Like that."
I got down on one knee and shone the flashlight along the earthen floor. I could see our footprints, and what looked like other prints underneath ours. This was how my ghost had been getting in and out of the building, once we'd discovered the other tunnel.
We walked back to the house end of the tunnel, where I discovered tiny bits of wire and a bent connecting clip beside the steps. The shepherds were watching us now from the top of the steps, but they still weren't coming down. The debris was further evidence of my stalker: He'd probably wired the speakers down here before setting them out in the house. I still could not find any internal water storage system for the house, but maybe one old lady living here didn't need that much water. We went up the steps and back out into the kitchen.
"Okay," I said. "That's two tunnels. Suppose that's it?"
"That's two more than I expected," she said. "The question is, how in the world did your ghost, as you call him, know about these?"
"Excellent question," I said. "I think I'll ask Ms. Valeria Lee if she knows about any tunnels in this house."
"Why her?"
"She apparently had been taking care of the old lady who lived here, and she grew up here, according to her mother."
"Okay, that makes sense."