The kitchen. There were kerosene lanterns in the kitchen. If he could just find that passageway that Hangtown had led him down… Yes, here it was. This one… Okay, good, and here was the other spiral staircase, the one that led up to that secret corridor behind the upstairs bedrooms. On the other end of that corridor was the old service staircase to the kitchen. It was a plan. He could do this.
Mitch felt his way up the winding stairs from the cellar to the second floor in almost total darkness. His flashlight was barely giving off a glow now. Groping the wall for balance, he heard a door slam. And then Hangtown’s voice cry out, “You won’t get away from me! You will never get away!” And Takai shriek, “Father, you don’t know what you’re doing!” Both of their voices seemed only inches away from him. But all he could see was blackness.
Where were they? Where?
Now he stumbled. There were no more stairs. He had reached that narrow second-floor corridor. He’d forgotten just how low the ceiling was. He ran headfirst into the cobwebs, his face covered with them. A spider moved across his cheek en route to his mouth. He swiped it away, his skin crawling, and felt his way blindly around one sharp corner, then another…
Until suddenly he came upon blessed, golden light. It was the secret doors in back of the bedroom closets. They’d been flung open, the bedroom lights flooding the passageway with illumination. Blinking, Mitch halted at the first room he came to and parted the clothing that hung there in the closet before him. The entire room had been trashed. Furniture was overturned, bedding strewn.
Now he heard a tremendous crash from the room next door, followed by a shriek.
And Takai was streaking down the narrow corridor toward him, her face stricken with terror. Takai’s white silk blouse was ripped to shreds, her gray flannel slacks torn at the knees. And she was limping. One shoe was off, her bare foot bleeding. “Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God!” she cried as she ran smack into Mitch, hugging and kissing him madly, hysterically. She was absolutely out of control, her breath sour and hot as she clutched him, great sobs coming from her throat. “You’re here! You’re really here! Oh, thank God!”
Mitch could hear glass being smashed in the next bedroom, heavy footsteps thudding on the floor. “Where are you, princess?!” Hangtown roared. “I’ll find you! I’ll kill you!”
“What’s happened?” Mitch demanded, shaking Takai by the shoulders. “Tell me!”
“Where’s your gun?” she sobbed. “You must… you’ve got to shoot him!”
“I have no gun. Try to get a hold of yourself. What’s going on?”
“He’s gone c-completely mad!” Takai managed to get out. “First he shot the cop at the gate. Now he’s trying to shoot me. He’s been chasing me all over this crazy house. H-he has the Barrett, Mitch. That giant shotgun he used on Moose.”
“I’ll kill you!” Hangtown’s footsteps were coming closer now. “You can’t get away from me!”
Takai let out a scream. Mitch grabbed her by the hand and yanked her roughly back down the corridor into the darkness.
“Mitch, I can’t see!” she protested breathlessly, stumbling against him as they descended the spiral staircase blindly.
“Just hold on to me,” he whispered, Hangtown’s footsteps growing fainter as they escaped farther back down into the blackness, Takai’s slim hand cold and clammy in his. “He shot Moose, is that it?”
“Yes, Mitch. God knows why. He loved her. He needed her. He…” Takai’s voice trailed off in the darkness, her breathing shallow and uneven. “He keeps mumbling something about his damned will, of all things.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know. He’s making no sense… God!”
“Do you know where he keeps it?”
“What difference does that make? We have got to get out of here before he kills us both!”
“My truck’s down at the gate. So is my cell phone, I’m afraid. Your phone is out.”
“I know-he cut the outside wires. And stole my cell phone out of my shoulder bag.”
“Does he keep his will in that wall safe in the living room?”
“I think so,” she replied, as they inched their way down the staircase, step by step. “But I don’t know the combination. No one does, except for Father.”
“Okay, that’s not a problem.”
“Are you saying he told you the combination?”
“He didn’t have to-I know how his mind works.”
“I’ve known that awful man my whole life and not once have I known him. How can you even say that?”
Because he was certain, that was how. In fact, Mitch had never been as certain of anything in his whole life.
They reached the passageway at the bottom of the staircase now, standing there in the blackness as Mitch tried to regain his bearings. “I don’t suppose you can find your way back to the living room from here, can you?”
“With my eyes closed,” she replied. “We used to play down here when we were kids.”
Now she was the one leading Mitch. Slowly and surely, she led him back through the darkness of the catacombs toward the rickety wooden staircase. Up they climbed, back toward that secret doorway next to the fireplace, back into the living room. They stood there hand in hand, blinking from the lights. Listening for Hangtown. Hearing only silence. Takai suddenly becoming aware of how revealing her torn blouse was. She folded her arms primly in front of her exposed, taut left nipple, her bare shoulders scratched and bleeding, one cheek scraped raw. Her bare foot still oozed blood.
Mitch started toward the big rolltop desk over by the windows and pushed the button under the center drawer, triggering the panel of bookcases that hid the wall safe. “The combination will be taped underneath one of the other drawers,” he told her.
“How do you know that?” Takai demanded, sticking close to him.
“Because that’s where it is in every old movie I’ve ever seen-more important, he’s ever seen.”
“Make it fast,” she said urgently. “We’ve got to get out of here before he finds us.”
Quickly, Mitch knelt before the desk and started yanking out its drawers, dumping their contents out onto the floor and flipping them over, one after another after another… until, sure enough, there it was, on the underside of the bottom left-hand drawer, scrawled in pencil on a piece of masking tape: R16-L18-R26-L08.
Mitch tore it off and headed for the wall safe with it, Takai gaping at him in amazement. After spinning the dial a couple of times he carefully entered the correct combination, paused and yanked the safe open.
The first thing he found inside was cash. Lots of cash. Stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in rubber bands.
“My God,” Takai gasped, piling them onto the desk. “That crazy old man must have a hundred thousand bucks in there.”
“You didn’t know about it?”
“Are you kidding me? If I had, I would have told him to put it in the damned bank.”
Deeper inside the safe, Mitch found a metal strongbox. It was unlocked. He found a fistful of stock certificates and legal papers inside. But it was the folded legal brief right on top that was of greatest interest, the one proclaiming itself “The Last Will and Testament of Wendell Frye.”
It was not an old document. It was on crisp new paper that still smelled of fresh ink. In fact, it was dated only three days ago, Mitch noticed. “He must have changed his will,” he mused aloud. “Sure, that must be what he meant.”
“Here, let me see that…” Takai snatched it away from him, her eyes scanning it quickly. And growing narrower and narrower as she began to comprehend the details. “Oh, that bastard!” she hissed. “He will never get away with this!”
“Oh, yes, I will, princess,” a heavy voice spoke up from the front hallway.
It was Hangtown, standing there in the doorway with the huge. 50-caliber Barrett propped against his shoulder. It looked something Rambo might have used to shoot a chopper out of the sky. As for the aged artist, he seemed exhausted and disheveled, but calm.