“Well, hello there,” Mitch said, standing there stroking it while he waited for his resting pulse rate to dip back down below 185. It was a beautiful cat with startlingly bright blue eyes and the longest, softest fur Mitch had ever felt. A she, by the look of things. “What are you doing up here all by yourself, girl? You must be the lone-somest pussy cat around.” He put her back down on the dresser. Or tried to. She immediately jumped right back into his arms, scrambling up on top of his shoulder now, with her front paws thrown over onto his back.
Together, they moved deeper into the room. The mattress in here was bare, just as in the other rooms. But there was more than one bed in room 31. On the floor next to the bathroom doorway Mitch found a cat bed lined with blankets and chock-full of rubber mousy toys. The bathroom did not smell particularly fresh-the litter box in there needed emptying. Kibble and water dishes were positioned on a rubber bath mat. There were plastic storage tubs of kibble and kitty litter, a litter scoop.
There were also two hand towels on the towel rack. Both towels were damp, Mitch discovered. Somebody had been up here recently. Somebody had used these towels.
He moved back out into the bedroom with the cat in his arms and his wheels spinning. So this explained the footsteps that he and Carly had heard in the night. Someone must have been up here feeding this cat, which was living up here on the unheated third floor all alone because… well, why was she living up here all alone?
She was starting to wriggle around in his arms, so he put her down. She promptly began rubbing up against his leg and yowling at him.
“Well, you’re quite the little talker, aren’t you?”
In response, she darted toward the open closet and went inside. Mitch followed her, shining his flashlight around in there. Nothing. Just another empty closet. And yet the cat kept circling around and around in there, eager with anticipation.
“What is it, girl?”
She let out another yowl and began sharpening her claws on the carpet, her excitement mounting. The carpet in the closet was not the same as in the bedroom. It was newer and cheaper, made of some kind of synthetic material. Something that hadn’t been installed particularly well. Sections of it lifted away from the floor as the cat’s claws grabbed hold and pulled.
In fact, the far corner over against the wall hadn’t even been tacked down at all.
Mitch knelt there with the flashlight for a closer look. Strips of one-inch wooden molding were tacked in where the floor met the walls, anchoring the carpet in place. Or at least in theory. In reality, Mitch discovered that the molding strips were tacked to the wall but not to the floor-because the carpet slid right out from under them.
The big white cat was all over him now, most anxious to get into whatever he was getting into.
Mitch turned back enough of the carpet to expose a three-foot-square section of old, unpolished wooden flooring. Here he found a trapdoor with a recessed thumblatch. The trapdoor was about twenty-four inches square and reminded him very much of the one that was in the floor of his sleeping loft at home. His was there for ventilation. Why was this one here?
He grabbed on to the thumblatch and slowly lifted the trapdoor open, revealing utter darkness down below. He pointed his flashlight down there. He was looking into the closet of the room directly below this one. Its door was closed. Whose closet was it? He couldn’t tell. He could make out a couple of jackets hanging there, but from this angle he couldn’t determine if they belonged to a man or a woman. Briefly, he tried to count out where room 31 was in relation to the occupants of the second-floor rooms, but that just made his head start to throb again. So he flicked off the light and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
Tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth, Mitch gripped the edge of the floor with both hands and dropped down through the open trapdoor, hanging there in mid-air by his fingers, his legs waving wildly. Now all he had to do was let go. Which had sure looked a lot easier when Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat did it in The Crimson Pirate. Those two had landed with nimble, effortless grace. Just as that damned show-off of a cat proceeded to do while Mitch continued to hang there and hang there, wondering what in the hell he had been thinking. Then he said his silent “Geronimo!” and let go, touching down with a colossal, well-padded thud.
At the sound of him crashing to the closet floor the door immediately flew open, flooding the closet with natural light. Someone stood silhouetted there in the doorway, hands on hips.
Mitch scrambled to his feet and dusted himself off. Checked to see if his head had started to bleed again. It hadn’t. Then he smiled and said, “Hey, Spence, how’s it going?”
CHAPTER 14
It was the sound of Mitch touching down on the floor of Spence Sibley’s closet that brought Des running.
Not that she had even the remotest idea what had happened. Her first thought was that Astrid’s Castle had just taken a direct hit from a short-range ballistic missile. It shook the floorboards and sent everyone spilling out of their rooms into the hallway, terrified. Everyone except for Spence, that is. When Des heard two-count ’em, two-male voices coming out of his room, she pounded on Spence’s door and was greeted by none other than Mitch. Also by a huge white Maine coon cat that Des hadn’t realized was even around until that very second.
How did Mitch and that cat get inside of Spence’s locked room?
She didn’t know. She only knew that Spence looked very unhappy.
Mitch, meanwhile, was grinning at her like a gleeful, moon-faced boy. “There’s a trapdoor,” he explained, tugging her toward the closet so she could see for herself.
“Time out. Where did this damned cat come from?” Des demanded, utterly bewildered. She also didn’t like to be tugged. Never had.
“That’s Isabella,” Jory answered from the doorway, where she and the others were clustered. “She’s the castle’s unofficial mascot. Hey, Izzy. Here, girl…”
The big white cat padded right over to Jory, who bent over and picked her up. Isabella scrambled up onto her shoulder and perched there contentedly.
“She patrols the gardens most of the year,” Jory said, stroking her. “Just loves being outside, don’t you, girl? When it gets cold, she takes up residence on the third floor. We have a problem with mice up there. Plus Les couldn’t be around her. He was allergic to cats.”
“So she’s got food up there?”
“She’s got everything up there,” Mitch answered. “A bed, a litter box, hot and cold-running mousy toys.” He lowered his voice, adding, “The towels in her bathroom are damp, by the way,”
“Who takes care of her?” Des asked Jory.
“Norma did. Izzy was her cat, really.”
“Was Norma likely to go up there in the middle of the night?”
“If she was awake, sure.”
“Jory, why didn’t you mention this to me before?”
“I wouldn’t have let her starve or anything.” Jory stuck her chin out defensively. “It just seemed like you had more important things to worry about.”
“True, that,” Des conceded, studying the opening in Spence’s closet ceiling. “What can you tell me about this trapdoor?”
“It’s a fire escape. Most of the old three-story houses had them. Otherwise, folks could get trapped in their top-floor rooms if a fire broke out during the night. Actually, those trapdoors were the only fire escape system Astrid’s had when Jase and I were little. Remember, sweetie?”
Jase nodded his furry head.
“Then the fire code got stricter and they had to install a sprinkler system and fireproof steel doors to the back stairs.”
“Are you telling me that all of these second-floor rooms have trapdoors like this?”
“Well, yeah,” Jory replied. “They carpeted over them upstairs but the rugs are just kind of toenailed in. In an emergency, there’s no harm in having an extra way out.”