"Stand still," Josef ordered, tightening his grasp. "Don't even speak loudly. Mark. Mark, are you there?"
At first there was no reply, only the rattle of subsiding debris', and Pat's racing heart stopped. The catastrophe-whatever its nature-had begun at the other end of the room. Mark had been closest… Then her son's voice came out of the dark and she went limp with relief.
"I'm here. Part of me, anyhow…"
"The flashlight?" Josef asked.
"Under a ton of dirt and stone."
"Hang on. I've got a lighter."
The flame flickered and flared. It was sufficient; there was little left for it to illumine. Half the room had vanished under a heap of earth. Mark's legs were buried up to the thigh and the face he turned toward them was streaked with blood from a dozen cuts. But his grin was broad and cheerful.
"Her last gesture," he remarked. "Dumb stunt."
"We're buried alive," Pat said. "Not so dumb."
"Don't be dramatic, Mom," Mark said coolly. "The part that collapsed was the wall where the tunnel was. The vibration dropped the trapdoor, but it's not barred or anything. We'll be out of here in five minutes."
His estimate was fairly accurate, but it seemed much longer to Pat. They didn't even need the stepladder, which was fortunate, since it was half buried under the earth slide. This proved to be quite stable, thanks to the clayey quality of the soil; Mark was able to climb the ramplike slope to a point where he could lift the trapdoor and pull himself out. The others followed. When he had lowered the trap again it was as if he had wiped out the past half hour. Pat might have thought she had dreamed the whole incredible episode had it not been for the grubby, disheveled state of her companions and her son's scratched face. She realized that Mark's eyes were fixed on her accusingly as he mopped the cuts with a dirty sleeve, and she was about to offer first aid and maternal concern when he said,
"I'm starved. What's for dinner?"
II
When they got back to their house, the telephone was ringing.
"Don't answer it," Mark ordered. "It's probably Mrs. Groft wanting to know what's been going on around here She must have noticed that the wall is down."
"I guess so." Pat felt as if she had put in eight hour of hard manual labor. Even her eyelids ached. With an el fort, she roused herself. "Mark, you had better shower and change clothes. Then I'll tend to those cuts."
"I can do that," Mark said. "You get something to eat."
"Mark," Josef said quietly.
"What?"
"My generation has hang-ups about hitting a man when he is off guard. Get your dukes up."
"Dukes," Mark repeated. His face went scarlet, and Pat realized that he was struggling desperately to keep from laughing. "Now, Mr. Friedrichs, you just take it easy. I don't want to hurt you. This is silly."
"Not at all. If your mother is going to render first aid, she may as well tend all your wounds."
For a variety of reasons, which she never bothered to analyze, Pat said nothing. Kathy moved forward as if to intervene, but she was too late; Josef's fist slid under Mark's raised hand and hit him hard on the chin. He fell backward into a chair, where he sprawled, his arms and legs at oblique angles.
"Do you know why I hit you?" Josef asked.
Mark's glazed eyes focused and a ghost of a twinkle appeared in their depths.
"It's a long list," he croaked, rubbing his jaw.
"No. I slugged you because you had the consummate gall to quote Shakespeare at us at a tense moment. 1 can't stand smart-aleck kids. Now go clean up. If you're hun gry, you and Kathy can go out for pizza or egg foo gai gunk, or whatever ghastly mess you fancy."
"Yes, sir." Mark struggled to his feet. "Right away, sir." He destroyed the effect by grinning and sketching an impudent imitation of a salute before heading toward the stairs.
"If you are going with him, you had better change," Josef said to his daughter.
"You're horrible," Kathy said. "I hate you!"
"Move."
He took a step toward her. Kathy scuttled after Mark.
Josef looked at Pat. Leaning against the wall, her arms folded, she regarded him unsmilingly.
"Crow," she said.
"What?"
"Flap your wings and crow. It's not going to be that easy, you know."
"My dear love, I am well aware of that. With your son, it is going to be a daily battle."
"If you can stand him, I guess I can put up with Kathy's giggling," Pat said.
Smiling, Josef reached out for her, and then contemplated his dirt-streaked sleeve in some dismay. "I'll meet you down here in ten minutes," he said. "And if we're lucky, the kids will take a long time getting the food."
III
They had half an hour alone before Mark and Kathy returned with pizza and spaghetti and other Italian delicacies. "Enough food for an army," Josef grumbled; but Mark managed to get rid of most of it. He refused to talk while he was eating, and Josef let him enjoy this small revenge. But when Mark had shoved the last bite of garlic bread into his mouth, the older man said, "Here's your chance to shine. Or are you going to sit around smirking while we make wild guesses?"
"It was so obvious," Mark said patronizingly.
"Not to me."
"Well, look. The ghost had to be one of the Turnbulls. All the Bateses died in their beds, after lives of sickening virtue. That isn't necessarily conclusive, I admit, but the suggestion of blue eyes confirmed my suspicion that we were dealing with a Turnbull. Mr. Turnbull was fair, and so was Peter. It wasn't unreasonable to suppose that Turnbull's daughter by his first marriage had also inherited his coloring.
"Mary Jane was a ghostly figure in every sense of the word. We knew nothing about her except for the occasional references in Susan's diary. Susan thought she was an old witch-she even called her that once. Well, a lot of kids think of bossy big sisters as witches. But I got to thinking-Mary Jane did seem to hassle the kids a lot, and there she was, a spinster at almost thirty, with a younger half brother who was the answer to a maiden's prayer- handsome, domineering, sexy…"
"Of all the cheap, slipshod, pseudo-Freudian nonsense," Josef exclaimed. "Why shouldn't the ghost have been Peter, as you first believed?"
Kathy stirred. She had changed into jeans and an over-sized tailored shirt. The masculine clothing only made her look more delicate. Her lowered eyes and clasped hands appeared demure, but something in her expression half prepared Pat for Mark's next statement.
"It was really Kath who figured it out," he said.
"You?" Kathy's father stared at her with unflattering surprise.
"I was the brains of the combination," Kathy said sweetly. "Mark was the muscle."
"Well, we sort of worked together," Mark said. "But Kath gave me the first… I mean, she had the hunch that it wasn't Peter after all. Like she said once, how could he do this if he was in love with the girl? I mean, that made sense, you know?"
"Not necessarily." Josef was still staring at his daughter. "If Peter was the domineering, arrogant young man we thought, and if he had died before he could get the girl he wanted-"
"All surmise," Mark interrupted. "Peter was probably pretty cocky; who wouldn't be, in his position, with everything going for him? But we didn't find out anything about him that would support the idea that he was wicked or demented. The atmosphere the ghost produced was sick-malevolent. We got to wondering, Kathy and I, if maybe it hadn't been that way in life. Sick, hating. Peter was a soldier, he didn't have to repress anything; he could take out his anger and frustration by fighting."