McCann's Manor (10 page)

"See those windows on the second floor? That is my bedroom. And see those windows in the center of the house on both floors? That is the library.” She was puzzled. “So, what is behind that big expanse of windowless wall
below
my bedroom?” The two corners of her bedroom were well defined. Her windows were beside the library windows, then along the western side, there were no windows, just the huge closet. And beside the entryway to the house, there were no windows, just the wall where the room jutted from the main part of the building. The room on the first floor was apparent from the outside, if you thought about it, yet on the inside...?

She was certain she had never been in that room—
where was the entrance?
“My dear Watson, that room doesn't have a door—at least not one
I
have seen! Let's go see if we missed something before.” The Peke grunted as she put him down. He followed Liz to the door and skittered inside. Liz was just shutting the door when she heard a faint
meow
outside. She opened the door and there was Spooky, displaying his best dejected look. “Aw, there, there; it isn't that bad. I thought you wanted to stay out. I didn't realize you didn't want to be out alone. Come on, then."

The cat padded in and Liz shut the big door then locked it. She felt strange locking the house up so tight out here in the country, but she had promised John and Kim both she would lock herself in when she was alone. “A lot of good it does to lock the door if the ghosts in here are after me,” she said to herself as she walked down the hall. What she had noticed from the outside of the house—a rather large room at this end of the hall—was gnawing its way into her mind. Why hadn't she ever noticed the door into it?

Had she just missed the door, or was there no visible entrance into the room? She peered into the closet to the right of the entrance, then moved on down the hall, opened the second door on the right side of the hall and went into the back hall, turning on the light as she went. Sure enough, she found the staircase at the end of the hall leading up to the master bedroom suite as she remembered, but there were no doors on either side of the back hall. Did that mean there was a secret door which led to that room? Or had the Tatums sealed off that room when they refurbished the house? Why would they have done a thing like that?

She examined the wall, found nothing out of the ordinary. If there were a secret door, it
must
be there somewhere. The idea also occurred to her directly across the hall would be where the entrance to the secret passage to the library
had
to be. She studied that wall, found it to be devoid of any clues as well. She scrutinized the ceiling, which was low and felt too close to her as she looked for some hint of an apparatus that would open the door she was certain existed. Nothing.

She began to move down the wall, pushing here and there. It all seemed solid to her. Next, she examined the artifacts on the wall, all of which looked to be ancient and none of which could be budged. But as she examined them, she noticed something which looked like a button on one of the shields mounted there. Her heart jumped; she held her breath as she reached to touch the button. She pushed; it
gave
and a section of the seemingly solid wall slid without the least hint of noise out of the way to reveal an odd-shaped room beyond. She started in, but stopped. This room was a secret and wouldn't have been wired for electricity. If the door slid back into place once she stepped inside, it would be too dark to see how to find her way out. Kim's remark about her getting lost in a secret passage wasn't an appealing thought to her.

She sped to the kitchen, took a flashlight from the cabinet drawer, turned it on to check the batteries and hurried back to the newfound door. She took a deep breath and stepped inside. The room was larger than she had anticipated and a somewhat jagged crescent-shape, a peculiarity created by two walls of the octagonal library converging at this room's widest point. She estimated the room extended about twenty feet in either direction and was six to eight feet wide at its breadth. The wall to her left was lined with a deep bookshelf which had ancient-looking books stored on it. The shelves in this antechamber to the library were as high as the ceiling, which she assessed to be about twenty feet. The titles to most of them were unintelligible to her, being in a foreign language she guessed to be Celtic in origin. Others were on topics of occult interest, some of which were in German or French.

These books were far older and more rare than the ones in the library proper. McCann must have been a collector of rare old esoteric writings as well as antiquities. She wondered if this was how he spent the money he made working with Spencer, or if the collection had come with him from his youth. She wondered, too, about his keen interest on the subject of paranormal activity. Had this been one of the reasons his young bride had changed her mind about coming to him? Maybe Spencer had nothing to do with that part of the story. Constance could have become frightened of McCann and the tremendous occult knowledge he wielded.

She picked up one of the venerable volumes, held it close to her breast, tried to establish a
feel
for the man who had owned it. She received no impressions other than the ones she had already gleaned from his
visitation
earlier in the library. She thumbed through the brittle, time-marked pages, saw many handwritten notes and detailed pictures in margins and spaces where the typeset letters were absent. She stared at them until she felt light-headed, then closed the book and placed it back on the shelf. These books were older than McCann; she could tell by the energy surrounding them, they had indeed been with him much of his life.

Interesting that the collection in the library itself held a great number of weathered volumes, though none were as old as these. There, too, were more modern volumes on the occult, tomes that were from the last century. Had Leonard and Betty Tatum also been collectors of para-psychological books? Some of these volumes seemed almost as old as the printing press itself. What an incredible accumulation of information on the subject. What a
coincidence
she and Kim were also aficionados of the occult sciences. This might very well be the most complete library on paranormal sciences in the world, though she had heard some of the European libraries were fabulous. She had never seen so many books on one subject before in a private library.

But what was she thinking? There would be lots of time later to explore the library as well as this cache of priceless books. She was inside a
secret passage
that corroborated Missy's story of watching her father's murder from behind a hidden door to the library. What she needed to do now was to find the
key
to open that door. This wall, like the one outside the passage, was laden with artifacts, all of which looked hundreds of years old. How did McCann get all these? Were they stolen—part of the loot he and his partner smuggled? “Honestly, Liz!” she sighed, “keep your mind on the task at hand and ask questions later."

She looked at the two walls for a sign. Half of the wall in front of her was unadorned. She studied the pieces on either side of the bare expanse of wall, found nothing resembling the
button
she had pushed to gain entrance to this room. At last she reached to touch the wall—it moved; she felt it slip open toward her, released by some unseen spring mechanism. The resultant crack was large enough to peer through the bookshelf, over the books and into the other room. From this vantage point, one could see and hear anything that went on in the vicinity of the desk.

On closer examination, she noticed the panel she had opened could swing all the way into the crescent-shaped room; on her side of the third shelf of the bookshelf was a small lever, which she pressed. There was a faint click and the entire section of shelving glided several feet, opening like a door into the library, leaving a portal through which she could pass into the other room.

The crescent room was flooded with luminosity from the window-walls of the library, leaving Liz to blink back the bright light. That was when she noticed the dark stains on the wall of the crescent room. They were the shape of a hand about the same size as hers. Liz felt her stomach churn when she placed her hand in the print on the wall, then jerked away from the warm, wet-feeling stain. But it wasn't wet. Why did she have that sensation?

She took a deep breath and put her hand again on the stain. It was
blood
. She had recoiled because the flash of recognition had hit her when she first touched the spot. Now she allowed herself a full exploration of the sensation. The hand print was Missy's. When Ptarmigan left the house after shooting her father, Missy must have opened the wall, just as Liz had done and gone into the library. Missy was in shock. Liz
saw
Missy touch her father's face; thereby getting his blood on her hands. When it started to sink in that her father was dead, Missy knew she had to wake her mother, but she didn't want to tell anyone about the secret room; it was the one special secret she shared with no one.

She must have gone out through the hidden portal and closed it, then up the stairs to awaken her mother. Touching the walls to close the entrance to the library had left the telltale stains behind in the crescent room; stains which no one had ever seen. Missy might have never gone into that room again, never realized she had left stains on the wall. Of course, it still didn't prove Ptarmigan had killed her father, but it did suggest she had been watching whatever
had
happened from the crescent room. Liz could still see the possibility that Leonard had shot himself; Missy could have invented the part about Ptarmigan to protect her father's image, if only in her own eyes.

Yet the fact Missy herself had been murdered for something she knew suggested her story about Leonard was on the mark. What else could she have known that would have merited her death? Come to think of it, knowing Ptarmigan murdered Leonard wouldn't have been enough in itself. It would have been necessary for her to prove her story and she hadn't been able to prove anything. Had she also stumbled onto the true reason Leonard was being blackmailed, or was Missy's memory of the event clouded by something Liz hadn't been able to discover as yet? Liz retraced her steps to the crescent room, closed the entrance. These blots would remain intact until they needed to be investigated by the proper authorities. She left the crescent room, walked back into the hall. To her surprise, the door slid back into place behind her. What she wanted to know now was how to get into the hidden first floor room across the hall.

Kim knocked on the door of Wade's lake cabin. She had some misgivings about meeting him at his private cabin for lunch, but he had explained he had to be home until four o'clock to see the man who was subletting the cabin for the fall. Besides, he didn't like to go out in public since people were starting to recognize him and cause scenes when he went out, even in his own hometown.

Wade answered the door wearing a broad grin and a very skimpy Tasmanian Devil Speedo that looked more like getup for a porn flick than an actual garment. Kim rolled her eyes, shook her head. “Oh,” Wade said, “I was just on my way to change out of this. Come on in and have a seat while I go change, won't you? I didn't expect you for another fifteen minutes at least. You know your way around, don't you?"

Kim pursed her lips, closed the door behind her as she stepped inside. “Yeah, sure, don't worry about me. But you
are
liable to catch your death running around like that. You'd better go change right away."

Wade disappeared around the corner as she let her eyes accustom themselves to the interior of the cabin. “Lunch is just about ready,” he called back over his shoulder. “You don't mind tossing the salad, do you? All the ingredients are there in the sink."

She pitched her purse onto the sofa, headed toward the kitchen to wash her hands and start the salad. “No, of
course
not,” she affirmed under her breath. “Nothing like that."

In a flash Wade returned, sliding in behind her as she dried her hands. He slipped his hands around her waist, breathed in a deep whiff of her hair. She wrested his hands from around her middle, turned to face him. He was barefoot with tight black trousers and a white silk shirt he hadn't bothered to button. She bit her lip to stifle the laugh she felt coming. Somehow, it always made her want to laugh when Wade tried to play sexy. He was more convincing when he didn't try so hard. Maybe it was just that she'd have thought him sexier if she didn't know him so well. Maybe he just too much like Frank.

She busied herself buttoning his shirt then she looked up at him. “There you go. Want to tell me what this last farewell is all about?"

He took her hand, pressed it to his lips. “Later. I'll tell you in a little bit. Right now, let's just get this salad together and sit down to a nice, quiet little meal, shall we?"

"Sure. You want to set the table while I finish the salad?"

"Yeah, right. No problem. You're handy around the kitchen, aren't you?"

She smiled. “No more than the average woman, I think."

He laughed. “Well, maybe that's true. Most of the women I know in California aren't your
average
Texas women, though, and I tend to forget what a real, down-to-earth woman is like. Sure makes me appreciative of you, though."

"I guess that makes sense. Hadn't thought about it that way before. I suppose most of us
down-to-earth
types tend to think of those California girls as being
more
appreciated by men. I assume it is all in what you're used to, though.” She tore the leafy green lettuce into small pieces and added cherry tomatoes, alfalfa sprouts and pecans, then she tossed them with the raspberry chipotle vinaigrette dressing she found on the counter.

"To this man, the girl next door is much more appreciated. You always will be.” He grinned at her from the dining room, where he had just turned on the music system. Celtic harp music flowed through the room.