Текст книги "The Murder Pit"
Автор книги: Jeff Shelby
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The Murder Pit
By Jeff Shelby
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE MURDER PIT
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2014
cover design by Eden Crane Designs
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the expressed written consent of the author.
Books by Jeff Shelby
The Joe Tyler Novels
THREAD OF HOPE
THREAD OF SUSPICION
THREAD OF BETRAYAL
THREAD OF INNOCENCE
The Noah Braddock Novels
KILLER SWELL
WICKED BREAK
LIQUID SMOKE
DRIFT AWAY
The Moose River Mysteries
THE MURDER PIT
LAST RESORT (JUNE 2014)
The Deuce Winters Novels (Under the pseudonym Jeffrey Allen)
STAY AT HOME DEAD
POPPED OFF
FATHERS KNOWS DEATH
Short Story Collections
OUT OF TIME
ONE
I wanted an old house.
I did not want an old house with a dead body in it.
“Move the light a little,” Jake said.
It actually seemed more like his butt said it because at the moment, he was on his hands and knees, trying to fit into an elevated, three-and-a-half foot crawlspace that appeared to not have been entered in close to 150 years. Given that he was a little over six feet and two hundred pounds, he was…struggling.
And being stubborn.
“Why don’t you just let me get up there?” I said, trying to move the light to wherever he wanted it. “I’m half your size.”
“More to the left,” his butt said. “Because we have no idea what the hell is up here.”
“Well, we know there’s a frozen pipe up there,” I said.
He grunted, which I knew was his way of telling me that he didn’t think I was funny.
I got that a lot.
My husband of six months was in the crawlspace of our 150 year old home for a couple of reasons:
The aforementioned frozen pipe, which is more or less a regular thing when you have to deal with Minnesota winters.
And because we owned a 150 year old home.
When I got divorced, I also divorced myself of the 5,000 square foot modern monstrosity that had been forced upon me by first husband. I’d made mistakes in both husband and house choosing. So when we finally cut the cord, I decided I wanted a house with character. It took me two years to find the right house and during that time, I’d also found the right husband. Jake, the one boy I’d truly loved in high school had found his way back into my life and we’d picked up right where we’d left off twenty years earlier. And right before our wedding and merging our families, I’d found my house with character.
A century and a half old. (Have I mentioned that already?) Right next to the railroad tracks. One bathroom. A dilapidated garage. Doors that didn’t close properly. A hole in the roof. Bats in the attic. A much-rumored ghost.
Jake stood outside with the realtor the first time he saw it and said, “This might have…too much character, Daisy.”
But it didn’t. I’d fallen in love with the original wood floors and the narrow staircase and the small rooms and the stories that were lurking in the walls. I wanted it and when he saw how much I wanted it, he relented with a smile and a shake of his head.
And now he was trying to get a hairdryer close enough to a frozen pipe to thaw it out. I couldn’t see his face, but I was fairly certain there was no smile.
“I can’t reach it,” he said.
“Which is why I should be up there,” I reminded him.
He muttered something and slid himself backwards, his feet coming out first. He lowered himself down to the ground, easing his way over the concrete ledge that made up the floor of the crawl space. I tightened the elastic wrapped in my hair, tugging the pony tail to make sure it was tight.
“You look like one of those people,” I said to him.
He surveyed his dirt and dust covered body. “A coal miner?”
“No, one of those people in Pompeii. The ancient massive volcano?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“I know,” I said, taking the hair dryer from him. “But I still love you. Now boost me up.”
He lifted me up and I slithered into the dirty, concrete space. Spider webs clogged the wooden beams above my head and the dust lifted up into my eyes and mouth. I coughed and wiped at my eyes.
“Having fun yet?” Jake asked.
Pretty sure he was smiling now.
I ignored him and crawled forward on my elbows, trying to get to the back wall where the offending pipe from the kitchen was located. He angled the flashlight for me and I saw the pipe up above me and next to the brick wall. I reached out to touch it and was glad my fingers weren’t wet. Because it was so icy cold, I was certain my flesh would have stuck permanently to the frozen metal. And there wasn’t enough room for Jake to come up and help me. I looked down, squinting in the darkened space, trying to locate the hairdryer. I saw it, the pearly gray barrel blending in seamlessly with the layer of dust and dirt.
But I saw something else, too.
“Did you see this?” I asked, my eyes zeroing in on the floor.
“See what?” he said. “My eyes were full of dirt.”
“This door. Did you see it?”
“Nooo. I was looking for the pipe.”
“There’s a door,” I told him. “Like, a wooden door. That opens up.”
“Excellent. Can you get the hair dryer up there now so the pipe doesn’t burst?”
But I was enamored with the door. It was about three feet by three feet, made of several two by fours. I used my hand to clear the dust from it. A splinter sliced into my palm and I winced but even that couldn’t deter me.
“There’s a hole,” I said. “To pull it up and open it.”
“Daisy,” he said sternly. “The pipe.”
“Just a second,” I said. I stuck my fingers into the hole and tried to lift it out, but it was too heavy. “Do you have a screwdriver?”
“No.”
“Liar. There’s one right there on the table.”
He sighed and a moment later, slid the screwdriver into the space. I reached back with my hand, grabbed it and brought it over to the door.
“If that pipe bursts…”
“Oh, please,” I said. “It’ll be fine. It’s been frozen for hours; a few more minutes isn’t going to hurt. Did you know there was a door here? Where would it go?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “To someplace beneath the crawl space?”
I’d never even thought about the crawl space actually being above something. It was just sort of…there, this elevated concrete space in our basement that, after studying for about half a second, I’d decided would be good for storing things. To me, it was like a bonus shelf, four feet off the basement floor. I’d already thought of putting valuable up there, off the floor that I’d been warned by our home inspector might be susceptible to flooding.
But the area underneath, the concrete tomb that the crawl space created? My mind was already spinning. I was thinking of secret tunnels and buried treasure and mementos left by previous residents. I didn’t want to see what was down there; I needed to see.
I wedged the screwdriver into the hole, set my elbow against the concrete and lifted the door up out of the ground. It lifted easily and I used my other hand to get it out of the square and slid it to the side.
“I got it!” I yelled. “It’s off!”
“Do not fall in, Daisy,” Jake said.
“Throw me the flashlight,” I said.
“You have one minute,” Jake said, rolling the flashlight toward me. “And then I want that hair dryer on the pipe before this basement fills with water and drains our bank account. Well, what’s left of our bank account.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, grabbing the light.
I propped myself up on my elbows and angled the light down into the now-open door. The drop down was about twelve feet and the walls were made entirely of metal. I felt a twinge of disappointment. It looked like an old coal chute. I did not see a tunnel. I did not see treasure.
“Daisy?” Jake asked. “What do you see?”
I angled the light again, searching every crevice of the space. The light flickered over something and my hand stilled before it began to tremble. I tried to steady the beam of light, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I swallowed hard and wiped at the cobwebs clinging to my face.
“I see…a pair of shoes,” I said.
“Shoes?” Jake asked.
“Yeah.” I swallowed again. “And someone’s in them.”
TWO
Footsteps clamored on the wood floor above me.
“Don’t say a word,” I hissed at Jake.
“Well, maybe if you hadn’t screamed after you told me about the shoes, they wouldn’t be running down here,” he said.
I frowned at him but I was still facing the kitchen wall and he couldn’t see me.
He tapped on my foot. “Get out of there so I can take a look.”
I managed to wiggle out of the crawl space just as all four kids crashed down into the basement, eyes wide, ears open.
Four kids. Three girls and a boy. Emily (fourteen, mine), Will (twelve, mine), Sophie (ten, his) and Grace (eight, mine). We’d managed to dispense with the mine and his, however, since all four lived with us ninety eight percent of the time and had morphed fairly easily into a modern day Brady Bunch, sans the even numbers and maid. We were a unit of six, a unit that had a combustible quality and a ferocious curiosity and an uncountable number of quirks.
Will was first down. His blond hair flopped across his forehead and was in desperate need of a trim. “Why are you so dirty?” he asked accusingly.
“Because I was in the crawl space,” I said, trying to knock the dirt off my sweatshirt.
He peered up into the space, his eyes narrowing. He was the most observant of the four, the one we couldn’t pull anything over on. “What is Jake doing?”
Jake had shimmied into the crawl space the minute I’d eased myself out. “He’s…uh…unfreezing the pipe.”
“I don’t hear the hairdryer,” Emily said, her eyes, blue like her brother’s, just as narrow. “We heard screaming.”
Grace, the youngest, was attempting to climb onto a table to get a better look. “Are there snakes up there?” she yelled, her voice so loud that dust and cobwebs shook free from the rafters, raining down on us.
“Snakes? I want to see snakes!” Sophie said, pushing her glasses up on her nose so she could get a better look. “Daddy! Are there snakes?”
“No snakes,” Jake muttered. Then, “Oh. Huh. Wow.”
Will took a step closer, his eyes huge. “What? Is there a snake?”
“Nothing is wow,” I said, putting my arms out like a defender, keeping them from getting too close to the space. “We’re just working on the pipe. Head back upstairs.”
“Why did you scream?” Emily asked, squinting at me.
“I didn’t.”
She folded her arms across her chest. Her brown hair was so long, the ends brushed her hands. “You totally screamed,” she said.
“Cobwebs,” I said. “I got a cobweb in my mouth.” I wiped at my lips for emphasis. “Maybe even a spider. I don’t know.”
Her face paled. “Gross,” she said. She wasn’t fond of spiders. Or ladybugs. Or butterflies. Or anything else that remotely resembled an insect. Some days, this included her siblings.
“I don’t see any snakes,” Grace said, now standing on an old table and looking over my head.
“Aw man,” Sophie said, her face falling.
I grabbed Grace by the hips and set her back down on the basement floor. “All of you, back upstairs. Now. We’ll be up in just a bit.”
They all grumbled but headed back up the stairs. Will took one more look at me, then the space, then followed his sisters up to the main floor.
As soon as the door at the top of the stairs shut, I whispered, “You see?”
“I see,” Jake whispered back. “But I can’t get down there.”
“Well you aren’t going down there,” I said. “Because there is a body down there. But you see it, right?”
“I see it,” he said. “Pair of running shoes. Probably a guy’s. Dirty socks.”
I nodded. The shoes were blue with yellow stripes. And there were still feet in them.
I grabbed my phone off the table. “I’m calling the police.”
“Wait,” he said.
“Jake, we can’t wait,” I said, not believing that he thought we should do anything else. “There is…”
“Give me the hair dryer,” he said. “Before you call. So I can fix the damn pipe and create a little noise so four sets of ears don’t hear you on the phone telling someone that there’s a dead body in our new old house!”
I handed him the hair dryer. “What do I tell them?”
Jake twisted so he was on his back and tucked his chin to his chest so he could see me. His blue eyes were barely visible in the sea of dust covering his face. “Tell them that, because you insisted on buying an ancient house—despite neither yourself nor your husband having any technical expertise whatsoever which would allow us to, you know, fix things—we were up in a crawl space designed for really thin midgets because the jerry-rigged plumbing system from our kitchen froze because you refused all of my requests to move to Fiji so that we could be outside at least for a couple of days each winter without the fear of freezing our lips off. And because we can’t, you know, fix things, we were using your hair dryer to warm a century old pipe and in doing so, you happened to find a door that you thought led to Narnia but instead led to an old coal chute and in the coal chute you found what looks to be a…person. We don’t think it’s the Wicked Witch but we’re not totally sure.”
I stared at him for a long moment. I loved him so much it made my heart hurt sometimes. But there were other times when I wanted nothing more than to stick my foot in his giant, sarcastic mouth.
“I’m just gonna ask if they can send an officer over,” I said. “Continue thawing.”
THREE
Moose River is appropriately named in that there are moose around somewhere and the town sits on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Not a whole of creativity, but it was a very Minnesota-like name and offered the opportunity for a very cute town logo: a moose standing in the river. Smiling. It was forty five minutes north of Minneapolis, which meant it was close enough that we could get down there for our urban fix of museums and sports, but rural enough to get away with a name like Moose River. Despite being just a few miles away from the suburban sprawl of the Twin Cities, it somehow managed to maintain a small town feel with its Main Street businesses, local children’s theater, an American Legion hall that hosted fish frys and meat raffles, and a lake that housed an awful lot of ice houses in the winter. And when you owned one of the only century-old homes in town—and the only one a stone’s throw away from the Legion—you didn’t need to explain to the dispatcher where you’re located.
“That’s the old, white house on the train tracks, right, ma’am?” the dispatcher asked.
“We aren’t on the tracks,” I said. “We’re next to them.”
“Sure,” she said. “I know that place. I’m always at the Legion on Taco Thursday nights.”
“That right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she answered. “There’s karaoke, too.”
“We know. We can hear it.” I was pretty sure the Legion’s cracked asphalt parking lot had magical acoustics because there were nights where it felt like the town’s American Idol rejects were serenading us from our front porch.
“Oh really? Well, next time you hear Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker, you’ll know that’s me, then.”
“Terrific,” I said, nodding. More dust rained down from my ponytail. “Anyway. Can you send someone over?”
“Ted is already on his way, ma’am.”
I said thank you and goodbye and punched off the phone. “On their way, Jake.”
He didn’t say anything, focused on holding the hair dryer up into the crevice as high as he could.
I smacked his foot and he turned the dyer off. “What?”
“They’re on their way.”
“Oh. Alright.”
“How are you not freaking out about this?” I asked. I lowered my voice to an elevated whisper. “There’s a corpse in our home!”
“It’s not in our home,” he clarified, scooting out and off the ledge. His eyebrows and hair were caked with gray dust and I suddenly had a vision of him thirty years into the future…if he went gray and also decided to never wash his face again. “It’s in our coal chute. A coal chute we didn’t even know we had.”
“You know what I mean.”
He shrugged and set the hair dryer down. “Nothing to get excited about until we know what to get excited about.”
Typical Jake. One thing at a time. No hysteria, no dramatics, no concern. Steady. Deliberate.
Like the anti-me.
“How did it get in there?” I asked.
He shook his head and more dust lifted off him in a cloud. Maybe I was actually seeing an adult version of Pigpen. “No clue. I didn’t put it there.”
“Shouldn’t the inspector have looked in there when we bought the house?”
He shrugged again. “He probably didn’t see the door. He was looking for leaks and broken things. Which, if you remember, he found quite a few of…”
I remembered. The inspection report was nearly forty pages long and when he’d seen it, Jake was adamant that we could not buy the house, that it was a money pit and that we’d be kicking ourselves if we did it. Plumbing issues. Window issues. Electrical issues. Roofing issues. Everything issues.
But the moment I’d walked in, I’d felt a connection with the house, like I was supposed to own it. I didn’t care about the leaky pipes and the cracked windows and the old wiring and the missing shingles. I just wanted the house. The beautifully painted plaster walls and the rich mahogany that framed the windows and doors. The planked wooden floors that were scuffed and scarred from over a hundred years of mothers chasing toddlers and pets skittering through, and all of the nooks and crannies that I was still discovering. I wanted it all.
And since I was the self-appointed president of our family, I’d been the final decider on the house. Jake didn’t mind his vice-presidency too much, especially after I gave him a night of super hot sex the day we signed the papers.
Win-win.
Before I could say anything else, the doorbell chimed upstairs and a stampede of feet roared over us.
“And away they go,” Jake said, shaking his head, but smiling.
At some point, the kids had decided that anyone who came to our door was either a serial killer or a robber. A knock on the door or ring of the bell sent all of them diving for cover, hiding until…the UPS man handed me the package. I’d sympathized with the kids the first time it had happened—after all, the door did look directly into our kitchen, and the window on the porch offered a full view of our main living space. It could be a little scary, I told them, being so exposed in a new house, but we were fine. Jake had watched my explanation with an expression that told me he was five minutes away from locating a straight jacket. For me, not the kids.
Jake followed me up the stairs and I hustled to answer the door. Even though the house had a front door that opened to a beautiful, covered porch, no one used it. The back door faced the driveway and that was the door people came to.
“Look, it is a robber,” Jake remarked.
I opened the door and a thick-bodied man wearing a black face mask and a police uniform hurried inside. A blast of cold air assaulted my exposed skin and I shivered and slammed the door shut.
“Hey, Ted.”
He removed his mask and a pair of brown eyes squinted at me. “Hey, Daisy. Good to see you,” he said, wiping his boots on the mat. Chunks of snow littered the mat and bounced across the tile floor.
Moose River Officer Ted was already on a first-name basis with me, and not because we were friends. We weren’t enemies, either, but our previous interactions had been strictly professional in nature. He’d visited our house a few times since we’d moved in, and not because he was part of the Moose River welcome committee. His first visit had been to find out about some things the previous owner had reported stolen after putting them out for trash pick up. He’d walked in the open door unannounced—the movers were still there—and inspected the house, looking like he expected to find the missing items holed up inside. The second time, he’d stopped by to let us know that we needed a permit to burn leaves. As we burned leaves without a permit.
Oops.
“Jake, how are you?” Ted asked, reaching past me to shake hands.
“Been cleaner,” Jake said, shaking his hand, then reaching for the kitchen faucet. He lifted the handle and water poured from the spigot. He shut it off. “But better now.”
“Alright then,” Ted said, his fat cheeks pink and red. “Uh, so, dispatch said something about…”
“Downstairs,” I said quickly.
I glanced into the living room. Even though I couldn’t see them, I knew the kids were all close by, listening—and probably seconds away from a heart attack now that they knew a police officer was in the house. Again.
We led him down into the basement, navigating the steep, narrow staircase while Jake quietly explained what we’d found. Ted scratched his balding head, nodded a couple times, then hoisted himself up into the elevated crawl space. He grunted and groaned as he shimmied into position and, for one horrified moment, I thought he might meet the same fate as the person we’d just discovered. Because I wasn’t sure we’d be able to get him back out.
But he sucked in his gut and shifted and, with one more groan, managed to reach out and push the coal chute door aside. He stayed there for a minute or so, then slid back out of the space, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
His dark blue uniform was now the color of concrete. “Okay. Well, yeah, that sure looks like a body down in there.”
I glanced at Jake, then back to Ted. “Yeah, that’s what we thought, too.”
Ted scratched his head and his mouth twisted in a couple different directions. “Is there another entrance to that chute area?”
“No idea,” Jake said. “We didn’t even know it was down there until about half an hour ago.”
“How so?” he asked, his bushy eyebrows raised.
“We just moved in, remember?” I said. I waved my hand at the boxes still stacked in the basement. “We’re not even done unpacking.”
“Sure,” Ted said, nodding. “Well, huh. Alright. How about if we use the door to the outside at the top of the stairs? That way we don’t have to traipse in and our of your kitchen to get down here.”
One of the hundred quirks in the house was that there was another exterior door right at the top of the stairs, across from the door that connected to the kitchen to the basement stairs. We’d looked at sealing it up, but hadn’t gotten there yet. Our procrastination looked like a good thing now.
“Sure,” Jake said. “We’ll need to undo the deadbolts.”
Ted nodded. “Think that’ll just be the easiest way to get us down here so we can get into the chute.”
“If you need a shovel, there’s one on the porch,” I offered. “Because the snow is probably a couple feet high at the back of the house.”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” he said, heading back up the stairs. “Be back in a few.”
We followed him up and all four kids were standing in the dining room.
“Why is he here?” Emily asked.
“Jake?” I asked, trying to inject some humor. “He’s your stepdad. He lives here.”
She rolled her eyes. “Duh. I meant Ted.”
“Officer Ted,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” she muttered, giving me another perfect eye roll. “You didn’t scream about cobwebs. What’s down there?”
“Now just calm down,” I said, holding my hands out. “Just relax.”
Jake sighed and shook his head. Because the minute I spoke those words, the three youngest tensed up. They glanced wildly at each other, their eyes as large as dinner plates.
“Is this about the ghost?” Grace asked, her hands digging into her brother’s back. “Did he find the ghost?”
“Get off,” Will said, shrugging her off. “And there is no ghost. Duh.”
“Yes there is,” Grace insisted. “Lolly is real.”
“Lolly,” Will muttered under his breath, shaking his head. At thirteen, his blossoming practicality was at constant war with his childlike neuroses.
“We didn’t see her in the closet,” Sophie chimed in. “That’s where we were hiding. But she’s here somewhere.”
I looked at Jake. I was firmly planted in the ‘Lolly is real’ camp. Our real estate agent had passed on the bit about Lolly being the ghost of the original owner of the home and that past residents had reported her presence due to various incidents. The one thing they’d all mentioned, however, was that she’d seemed friendly and helpful, as far as ghosts go. I was totally fine with a friendly and helpful ghost.
But I didn’t want to mention that right then because, as things were looking now, we seemed on the verge of having a new ghost taking up residency in our house.
“Ted is taking a look in our coal chute,” he said.
Will frowned. “Coal chute? We don’t have a coal chute.”
“Ah, but we do,” Jake said. “Didn’t you know? This is the house that keeps on giving.”
“Where is the coal chute?” Will asked, his face screwing up with confusion. “I want to see it. Is there coal in there? How big is it? What’s it made of?”
“Not now,” I told him.
Grace inched toward me and I scooped her up. She was the smallest of the bunch and not just because of her age. She was tiny, compact like me, but a bundle of passion and energy, a lot of it often misdirected. Like me.
“Why is he looking in there?” Emily asked, trying to peek around me so she could see out the window. “And why did you really scream? Because you aren’t afraid of cobwebs. I know you aren’t.”
Emily was the tenacious one. And she wasn’t going to stop asking until I gave her an answer that satisfied her.
“What’s a coal chute?” Sophie asked, wrinkling her nose. “Is that where Santa delivers coal to the bad people?”
“Ohhhhh, Will!!!” Grace shouted next to my ear. I winced and set her down. “Santa is gonna bring you coal! Because you’re such a meanie.”
Will faked a lunge at his youngest sister and I shot him a warning look. “Don’t even think about it.”
“He’s just checking things out,” Jake said. He brushed at the dust on his sweatshirt and specks fell to the floor, settling in the melted puddles of snow. I was going to need to mop. Soon. “We’ll see what he has to say when he comes back in. You guys can go…do whatever it was you were doing.”
They all stood there, staring back at him.
“Or just stay right there,” he said, sighing.
Three minutes later, Ted was back in the kitchen, snow clinging to his arms and legs. He’d neglected to put his face mask back on and his cheeks and nose were bright red, his eyes watering from the bitter cold.
“Well, okay. I made a path to that back door and got it open,” he said, wiping his feet on the mat once again. “We should be able to get everything we need to through that door so we can stay out of your way in here.”
Jake nodded. The kids stared at him, wide-eyed, their mouths open. I was pretty sure the two youngest were expecting him to say he’d found Santa.
“I was able to get my ladder down with me and got down into the chute,” he said, then nodded. “That’s a dead body down there, alright.”
He may have said something after that, but I couldn’t hear.
Because the kids were all screaming at the top of their lungs.
