Eye of the Beholder (A Miss Henry Mystery Book 7) (Miss Henry Mystery Series) (3 page)

“This
is normal, right?” she whispered. “There hasn’t been a home invasion or a drunken frat party?”

“Normal for here,
I gather,” Jeffrey whispered back. The light from the fire painted Jeffrey’s face with unpleasant shadows. “Mr. Reich has been selling off furnishings for years. I just hadn’t thought that it was….” He trailed off, shaking his head.

And Mr. Markham had been buying the family treasures? Surely he didn’t come to visit the gothic ruin just for
auld lang syne
. But if he were there for property acquisition he must be disappointed because clearly nothing of value remained.

Juliet saw movement by the heavily draped window and turned abruptly, blinking away the
lingering smoke that plagued her eyes. Jeffrey gave a small gasp as a rat jumped out of the damaged plaster wall and ran up the rotting drapes beside him. Juliet would have gasped too but her breath wedged in her throat. She was used to wild animals and had even had a few pay a visit to her bungalow before Marley came to live with her, but the scurrying rodent with its shiny eyes made her shudder with horror.

She knew that the fear
growing in her imagination was more exhausting and debilitating than any real threat they were likely to face. And once terror had taken your hand in its icy grasp it was nearly impossible to make it let go. Fear was more loyal to the terrified than any lover or parent could ever be. She understood that she needed to shake off the horror at once and move into a better mental space. Like how about anger? Anger had its uses. It sprawled all over the mind and left little room for any other emotion.

She wasn’t afraid of old houses
, however dilapidated or filled with creatures that ate the wiring. The rat disgorging itself from the wall didn’t really frighten her. It was one gothic touch too many at the end of a stressful day, and she was tired of being ambushed by unwanted situations and unlooked-for mysteries, especially after a car ride that was a near-death experience in and of itself. All she wanted was a bed with marginally clean sheets, and heaven help anyone or anything that got in her way—and that included rodents.

Possibly feeling the same way,
Jeffrey pushed his way to the side of the room and flipped a switch whose face plate was missing, leaving wiring exposed. The bulb that lit up the low ceiling was dim, but it was electric and sane and helped rid the room of its haunted aura. The chamber no longer looked ghostly and became merely pathetic and fifty years overdue for a renovation.

In fact,
Juliet thought with a frown, the interior design completely eclipsed in her memory the gothic nightmare of the exterior. The collective awfulness did in fact resemble the set of a low-budget made-for-TV thriller. At one side of the room was a tiny staircase with a wrought-iron banister and worn wooden treads that led to what looked like a gallows but perhaps had at one time held a chandelier. The stair seemed unnecessary since even a small stepstool would put the old beam within reach. From the few strips of remaining wood, Juliet could see that the walls had once been paneled in more of the dark oak of the foyer, which would have been pretty in moderation, but had probably been gloomy when used to cover every last inch of the walls which were now badly damaged right down to the dusty and cracked black and white marble floor where a small pool of water was gathering, suggesting it was neither level nor watertight.

How could anyone live there?

Did anyone live there? Could they have come to the wrong house?  

A stray drop of
rainwater ran between her breasts, and Juliet looked down at her clothes which were still contributing to the puddle on the cracked floor. She was grateful for her coat. The cotton blouse beneath would be nearly see-through, wet as it was, and she was past the age for enjoying in anyway looking like a wet t-shirt contestant.

“I don’t like to be rude
.…”

“No, but obviously no one is up
to welcome you and see to your comfort,” Jeffrey finished. “Come on. We’ll find someplace to dry off. I don’t want to track water all over the house.”

As a tidy housekeeper,
Juliet appreciated the sentiment but doubted it would matter. She was beginning to notice that the walls, in addition to being vandalized, were also rather damp everywhere and had left small heaps of mildewed plaster on the floor. And that rather begged the question about whether the house was structurally sound. Based on appearances, that seemed unlikely. Perhaps it was time to count their losses and summon FEMA.

“This way,”
Jeffrey said and, she thought, chose a hall at random.

The dead animal motif continued as they made the
ir way to what was probably the old kitchen. There were numerous glassy-eyed, moth-eaten carcasses mounted on the walls, interspersed among what had to be bear traps and blunderbusses and other arcane and brutal hunting implements. Chill lay over everything like a winter fog, suggesting that there was no furnace.

In the kitchen, there w
as also rack after rack of deer and moose and elk antlers, stacked on the tilted floor like cordwood waiting for the oven. The prickly bone hedge was half-hiding a fireplace that would have housed a reasonable sized ox with room left over for bales of hay, but was instead being used as a stall for a worn Queen Anne settee and a broken grandfather clock with a gargoyle face. They were both coated with ash and fallen masonry from the collapsing chimney. If this was a fairytale, it was a dark one and going to wrack and ruin. Or rack and ruin, which was a more apt description.

Juliet got out her phone and snapped a picture. Esteban
and Raphael would never believe her without proof. She hoped that Mr. Reich was receiving the counseling and drug therapy he obviously needed to combat the hereditary madness that galloped through his family’s bloodlines.

Jeffrey
turned on a light, another lone bulb whose glass cover was missing, and politely handed her a kitchen towel which was threadbare sackcloth and smelled of mildew. Catching a whiff, Juliet wrinkled her nose and then handed it back.

“No thanks.”

Jeffrey, catching the scent of the rot, hastily set it back on the old, scarred table which was standing on three of its four legs. There were suggestive rust colored stains in the marred wood and the air smelled of long months of putrefaction and old blood.

“I apologize.” Though why he should be stuck doing it, Juliet couldn’t see.
He could not have predicted this horror of a house.

“Think they were killing the fatted calf
for us and got distracted … by something?” she muttered and then wanted to kick herself. “Sorry. If I had another foot to stick in my mouth, I probably would. But that is just fatigue talking. Don’t pay any attention to me.”

Exhaustion and disgust
with their surroundings. She really was repulsed and made an effort not to look too closely at anything lest she find cockroaches or some other insects breeding to gay abandon. She could face rats, but not cockroaches.

Jeffrey
turned to stare at her, consternation writ large on his face.

“Miss Henry
, this is….”

“Yes, it is a predicament,” Juliet agreed
before he could find the words to express his disbelief. She, too, was beginning to feel that the only way they would communicate with

someone in the house was if they used a
Ouija board. “And though I am exhausted and couldn’t be more wet if I fell in a lake, somehow I feel that we had best search the house and ascertain that Mr. Reich and Mr. Markham are actually here and safe. It seems unlikely. Once the rain started they might have sensibly decided to decamp to a nice bed and breakfast in town.”

Jeffrey
nodded, looking relieved that they had a plan and ready to believe her suggestion that his employer was somewhere less toxic. He turned about purposefully and walked briskly from the kitchen. If he hadn’t been dripping with every step he might have passed for a faithful retainer. The soggy squelching of his shoes rather ruined the effect. Juliet wasn’t complaining though. Her reserves of energy were getting low and she wanted to find the two missing men and then climb into something—anything—that resembled a bed. After she had used a bathroom. Her road-weary bladder was complaining about her neglect.

They were quiet as they squelched their way up the
groaning stairs. Not because they had nothing to say or because they were too tired to speak of their puzzling surroundings. They stayed silent because they were listening for sounds that did not belong to the storm. Sounds of monsters or serial killers or other things that might do worse than go bump in the night.

The house was empty. They decided against examining the attic and basement since neither was electrified.
And the storm was a deterrent from examining any outbuildings that might exist on the unfamiliar property. Juliet figured any sheds would have to be as dilapidated as the house and would be full of skunks and snakes and black widows sheltering from the storm.

A bathroom was discovered and put to use
, and then linens were found in an old cupboard that smelled heavily of mothballs. They gathered up smelly armfuls and then selected rooms for sleeping.

Juliet
closed the ill-fitting door of her chosen chamber and let herself sigh. She shrugged out of the ruins of her travel outfit and began mopping up with the provided towel. It was more like a rough linen sheet and very old. The creases had yellowed at the edges. On the damaged floor was a lone slipper, the leather curled and the marabou feathers molting until all she could think of was a dead parakeet.

She tried again to imagine what had happened but failed.

Next door she heard Jeffrey taking off his shoes and dropping them on the floor. A moment later the rusty box springs squeaked out their distress at being forced to their intended purpose.

Juliet turned and eyed her own mattress.
The bed in her room was another artifact and she judged from the pronounced sag that one wouldn’t sleep in it so much as wear it as a hotdog would a bun. But the sagging mattress was covered with what looked like clean if yellowed sheets and showed no sign of rodent or silverfish habitation, so a weary Juliet decided to risk it. Her springs whined only half as loudly as Jeffrey’s had.

It was a night for unpleasant sounds.
The wind moaned its frustration at being foiled by the window and forced to make its entry by stealth around the jambs and under doors. Juliet ignored it and finally fell asleep, and sometime in the night it went away.

That did not mean that the night was peaceful. Since Juliet’s faith in the government had gone belly up there were occasions when certain memories floated to the surface like the corpses of bloating fish. This happened in times of stress
, so she was not entirely surprised when she dreamed that she was trapped in her old building, running down endless corridors lined with locked doors and exit signs that only led her back into the company maze.

It was
a relief to open her eyes on a watery dawn and to abandon the hammock which smelled of past occupants and adventures. She heard Jeffrey stirring as well and dressed hastily. It would be a relief to depart the horror house.

But when they reached the kitchen they discovered two distressing and contradictory things. One, someone had made coffee. The pot was gone but the scent lingered in the air. Secondly, they had left a trail of blood out the back door of the kitchen. The path was easy enough to follow at first, but the ground was very wet and covered in varicolored shrubbery.

Juliet rather cravenly wished that whoever was dripping gore had refrained from making coffee. Without that she could have blamed this on nature doing its red-of-tooth-and-claw thing and not felt obliged to follow the crimson path.

“Jeffrey, do you carry a gun?” Juliet asked quietly as she tried her phone again and failed to get a signal.
She was really going to have to review her communication plan when she got home. Of course, she had a special chip in her wallet, one she could put in her phone that would put out a signal from almost anywhere and would be tracked by very special satellites, but she didn’t want to use that. The price of assistance was just too high.

“No, ma’am, and I have to admit that I am regretting it.
You?”

“Not when I’m flying.” Though she could have—if she had been willing to pay the price.

“That’s a shame. I would surely love to have one now.”

Juliet nodded agreement
, and they continued cautiously into the trees that were dripping moss and sticky water and who knew what else. Part of Juliet’s mind was taken up with imagining the ticks and chiggers that were probably burrowing into her body, but the rest of her was alert enough to find the occasional trace of blood and to eventually identify a building that might once have been a cottage or perhaps a storehouse for grain or other crops.

There were bloody footprints leading to and from the door.

Sometimes memories of the past that she had left safely stranded on an island washed up on the shores of her new life, usually in her dreams. But sometimes not. Sometimes they came in person, nightmares made flesh. It seemed to be happening again, as if blood truly would have blood and once you got it on your hands, it drew more death to you.