Josef closed the book.
"How much?" he asked.
IV
"You didn't buy it?" Mark's voice rose to a squeal of outrage.
"For two hundred and fifty dollars?" Pat imitated his tone. Yet she felt defensive, and that angered her. "You act as if we had all the money in the world," she exclaimed. "From what we could see the book didn't have any personal material; it was written for publication, after all, so it must have been edited-"
"All right, I'm sorry," Mark muttered. He ran his fingers through his hair.
"I bought these," Pat said, proffering them like a propitiatory offering to an outraged deity. "This ragged little pamphlet cost me fifteen bucks. I mean, really, Mark-"
"I said I was sorry." Mark took the stack of books, like Jehovah accepting a less-than-perfect lamb. He tossed most of them aside with contempt, but the sight of the expensive pamphlet made his face brighten. "Hey, this looks good. ' Montgomery County Families of Distinction, and the War Between the States.' Maybe it mentions the Turnbulls."
"It does," Josef said. "We wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Your friend Peter…"
Mark wasn't listening. He had subsided onto the floor, cross-legged, his head bent over the little book. Kathy knelt beside him, her fair hair brushing his shoulder.
"Here it is," he said. " 'The Extinction of an old and honored family…' The old man was killed in 1863. In a cavalry skirmish, 'somewhere in Maryland.' His body was returned to his grieving family and interred with military honors in… Hey. Did you know you had a family graveyard, Mr. Friedrichs?"
"Forget it," Josef said promptly. "You are not going to excavate my backyard."
"Would you object if I just looked around for tombstones or-"
"Yes."
"Oh. Well, okay. The old man isn't the problem, anyway. It's Peter we… Oh, wow. Here it is. He was killed too."
Pat felt the same shock she would have felt at the news of the death of a personal acquaintance. In spite of Mark's conviction that Peter Turnbull was an arrogant, unpleasant young man who had become an even more unpleasant ghost, she found his death, at nineteen, tragic and disturbing.
Josef's reaction was less sentimental.
"So he did die violently in battle," he said. "Mark, how do you know these things, before we find written evidence? Are you holding out on us?"
Mark pretended not to hear the question. Perhaps it was not all pretense; he appeared to be genuinely puzzled as he read on.
"One of his men saw him fall. He was shot… It doesn't say where. But he fell over his horse's neck, and there was a lot of blood, and… That's it. The trooper who saw it was wounded too, he lost track of what was going on. He-the trooper-was picked up when reinforcements arrived and drove the Federal troops away." Mark stared raptly at the ceiling. "I wonder if his bones are still lying there, in the underbrush near White's Ferry…"
Pat let out an exclamation of disgust, but Kathy obviously found the idea more romantic than repulsive.
"Maybe that's what he wants," she suggested. "Burial in sanctified ground, with the rites of the church."
"You've been reading too many horror stories," her father said disagreeably. "I refuse to dig up half of Montgomery County looking for the remains of Peter Turnbull."
Rain pattered against the window. Pat reached up to turn on a lamp. It was already dark outside. An involuntary shiver ran through her. What would happen at one o'clock? Was Mark really determined to go through with the insane plan they had formulated earlier? She didn't want to ask. She was afraid of the answer.
"Food, anyone?" she asked.
"I made spaghetti sauce," Mark answered, his eyes still fixed on outer space, his expression remote.
"It smells as if it were burning," Josef said maliciously.
With an exclamation of distress Kathy leaped to her feet and ran out.
"What about a drink?" Josef asked.
Pat bit her lip. She had been about to suggest that this was no time for alcohol. But Josef's habits were none of her business. She revised her comment.
"What about some wine? I think there is some Chianti downstairs, in the wine bin-"
Mark snapped to attention.
"Wait, Mom, don't go down there. I mean-I'll get the wine. I mean-"
"I knew you were up to something," Pat said wearily. "What did you do this afternoon, Mark?"
Mark tried to look innocent.
"Now, Mom, what makes you think-"
"You're too clean," Pat said, inspecting his unspotted T-shirt and neatly creased jeans. "You changed your clothes before we got home. You wouldn't do that unless-"
"Ah, so that's your secret." Mark smiled at her, and her treacherous heart softened. "I'll know better after this."
Kathy came running back.
"It's all right," she announced cheerfully. "I turned it down and added some water. Was that all right, Mark?"
"Never mind the damned spaghetti sauce," Josef snapped. "What did you two do this afternoon? You've changed your clothes too, Kathy. What-"
Mark caught the implication and-to the surprise of his mother, who had thought him impervious to innuendos of that nature-turned bright red.
"It isn't what you think," he said angrily. "We got dirty, that's all. Cobwebs and mud and… We opened up the tunnel."
"Tunnel," Pat repeated blankly. "What tunnel?"
"The doorway Dad uncovered in the basement," Mark answered. His angry color had not subsided, and he avoided Josef's gaze. "He walled it up again, remember? The ceiling looked as if it were about to collapse, and you said it was dangerous, and-"
"That wasn't a tunnel, it was a room, a root cellar or-"
"It was a tunnel. The ceiling had fallen in, that's why we couldn't see how far it extended. Don't you get it, Mom? This house was a station on the Underground Railway. 'Freedom Hall,' Mr. Bates's abolitionist sympathies…"
"Show me," Josef said.
Pat never went into the cellar if she could help it. Unlike modern structures bearing the same name, or the more euphonious appellation of basement, the substructure of her house had never been designed for conversion into family rooms or game rooms. It was almost wholly subterranean, dank-smelling and dismal. The whitewashed stone walls had smears of green lichen, and water often oozed from the floor. Jerry had converted an old enclosed porch off the kitchen into a laundry room, so there was seldom any reason for Pat to go belowstairs. Though she was barely conscious of the fact, her dislike of the area was not based solely on its physical unattractiveness. Its unpleasant atmosphere went beyond damp and darkness.
Now, as she descended the wooden steps, she saw a gaping hole in the wall behind the furnace. The floor was littered with bits of mortar.
"What a mess!" she exclaimed angrily. "Mark, how could you?"
"I'll clean it up," Mark said. His voice sounded distant, muffled.
"What were you looking for?" Josef demanded, ducking to avoid braining himself on the pipes that traversed the low ceiling.
"I don't know. I just thought maybe…"
Pat started forward, picking her way delicately through the debris. A low, eerie moan made her stop and turn. She saw Jud squatting on the top step. His bulbous eyes were fixed on the dark hole in the wall. He looked perturbed. But then, Pat thought, he often did.
"He sat there and whined all the time we were working," Mark said, indicating the dog. "That must mean something."
"It means he doesn't like damp, cool places," Pat said. "He's always hated the cellar."
Yet as she approached the gap in the wall she was conscious of a chill that transcended the normal dampness of the place. Cool, wet air wafted out of the darkness, like a draft. But there could be no passage of air through the earth that filled the far end of the hole…