They needn't have worried. Anna May was eager to describe her most recent discoveries. In all her years of researching the history of Bear Flats and Pinetop County, she said, she had never run into such | a treasure trove of bizarre and fascinating findings,
"This house," Anna May said, marveling, "is a twelve-year-old boy's dream. There's a secret passage from one bedroom to another; there are double attics and, of course, that hidden cellar. It's like a house built for the underground railroad." Her eyes took on an excited gleam. "Although when you read the diary, you'll find that Chester Williams-the first Chester Williams-was definitely not the kind of man who would have been involved with that."
Jolene shivered.
"I'll let you read it after I'm finished," Anna May said. "It's ..." She shook her head. "I can't even describe it. But there are big revelations in there. Major revelations."
"What happens?" Leslie asked. "Can't you even give us a hint?"
The old woman grinned. "Murder!" she whispered excitedly.
A file folder filled with papers slid from the slanted top of a box onto the floor, and all three of them jumped at the sound. Leslie laughed. "We're a brave bunch, aren't we?"
It was the opening Jolene needed. "How have you been able to work here all by yourself?" she asked Anna May. Her voice dropped. "Especially after what we found."
"I don't know," the old woman mused, seriously considering the question. "It is very ... spooky, I must admit. But it's so exciting that I suppose I forget and lose myself in the adventure of it all." She smiled broadly. "Do you want to see what I found this morning?"
"I don't know," Jolene said honestly. "Do I?"
"We do!" Leslie announced for both of them.
Anna May led them along a pathway between the stacked boxes to the parlor. She picked up something from atop an antique table that at first glance looked like the corpse of a baby tied up with string. "I found this in a closet behind one of the closets." She held up the object and for the first time they could see it clearly. It was a marionette. Made from glued-together body parts, mummified pieces of nose and toes wrapped in motley and attached by gutstring to cross-hatched sticks, the figure grinned at her, small white teeth, like the teeth of children, embedded in its upward-angled mouth.
Jolene's blood ran cold. The face of the marionette looked like the face that had peered in at her and Skylar through the window, down to the brown parchment skin, and she turned away from it, hoping the other two couldn't see the trembling in her hands. "I have to pick up my son from school," she said.
"You have forty-five minutes," Leslie told her. "The school's two minutes away."
"It is scary," Anna May admitted, putting the maronette back down on the table. "A lot of the items I've come across have been. And that diary ..." She shook her head. "I assume that's why you didn't come back after that first day?" she asked Jolene. "You got scared off?"
"I'm sorry," Jolene said. "Really. I meant to call you, and I feel so bad that I didn't, but ..."
"Don't worry about it." The old lady smiled. "Theo was frightened away, too. I don't blame either of you. I guess I just get so ... carried away with finding out new things, I just don't think about everything else around it. History's my life. I love it. The good, the bad and the ugly."
"The older generation's made of sterner stuff," Leslie jokingly offered.
"I think you're right," Jolene said seriously.
"Oh, pshaw," Anna May said, smiling.
Jolene wasn't sure she'd ever heard anyone actually say "pshaw" before.
"So what is it with all this?" Leslie asked. "Do you think Chester Williams' father or grandfather or whatever really was a serial killer? And why did the rest of the family keep all this stuff? You'd think they'd throw it away. I mean, I can see keeping quiet about an old relative and not wanting anyone to know you had a murderer in the family, but to hold on to these body parts as family heirlooms or something?" She shook her head. "We're talking Texas Chainsaw Massacre here. The Williamses had to be one seriously disturbed brood."
There was a thump from the floor above. "Hold on a moment," Anna May said. She moved quickly back between the boxes and up the stairs. "I'll be right back!" she called. Her footsteps stomped up the stairs.
"What do you think that was?" Jolene asked. Her first irrational thought was that Anna May had found something alive in some secret room in the house.
Or something not alive.
"Sounds like something fell," Leslie said simply.
Yes. That had to be it. Her friend was undoubtedly right. But as they walked slowly about the parlor, looking at artifacts and photographs, Jolene was acutely aware that she could hear no noise coming from upstairs, that aside from the sounds of their own movement, the house was silent.
Leslie tentatively touched the marionette. "God, that thing's creepy."
"Everything here is."
"Remember when we were kids, how old-man Williams seemed like such a tight ass? One of those upper-crust stiffs too good to associate with the likes of normal people? Who would've guessed he was sitting here with body parts in his mansion?"
Jolene nodded, feeling cold. "And his wife was dead by then, so he was all alone in here with these secret rooms and his hidden cellar and souvenirs from his family's kills. What do you think he did at night? I saw no TV; there aren't a lot of books. Maybe he just sat here and made things like that." She pointed to the marionette.
"It just goes to show: you never know what's going on behind other people's closed doors."
Jolene looked up at the ceiling. There was still no noise from upstairs, and the definition of "I'll be right back" had been stretched well beyond its limit. Something was wrong.
There was another thump on the ceiling above them, this one louder than the first. Much louder.
It sounded like a body falling to the floor.
"Anna May?" Jolene called.
No answer.
She and Leslie shared a quick glance; then the two of them were rushing between the boxes and up the stairs, pausing only for a second at the head of the hallway before pushing open doors and peeking into rooms.
"Oh, God!" Leslie screamed.
Jolene hurried across the hall to where her friend was staggering away from an open door. Even before she got there, she could see Anna May's brutally beaten body, could see the mushy mass of red that had been her face, the indented cavity that had been her chest, the spreading puddle of blood on the floor. But it was not until she was actually in the doorway that she could see the slashes across the old woman's legs, slashes so deep that the white of bone showed through the red of flesh. It was from these gashes that the bulk of the blood was flowing, and there still appeared to be the remnants of a rhythm to the outpouring of thick crimson, the dying throb of a pulse. She had to have been killed only seconds before.
Fingers dug deep and suddenly into Jolene's arm, and for a brief flash of an instant she thought she was about to be slaughtered as well, but it was Leslie. "Who did it?" her friend demanded, looking up and down the hallway. "Where are they?"
That's what she wanted to know, too. There was no one in the bedroom. No killer, either human or animal. But on the walls of the room was what appeared to be a creeping black mold. The consistency of the substance seemed more shadow than fungus, as though the mold was in the process of evolving or, more accurately, as though it was in that place, in that space, but on another plane or in another dimension and was trying to break through.