Crooked River

46

It was a dark, quiet, rainy evening. The police barricades and bad weather had left Captiva Island feeling almost deserted. Turner Beach was still closed and the investigation had driven away most of the usual tourist traffic. A storm was rolling in.

North of Turner Beach, back from the water, sat the Mortlach House. Its whimsical Victorian lines stood against the dark sky. No lights gleamed in its tall windows, and no murmur of voices came from within. It stood among the sleeping dunes, and a curious no-man’s-land of saltwort and sea grapes separated it from the sprawling waterfront properties that began farther to the north. The only sound was the regular susurrus of breakers along the beach, and the occasional car crossing Blind Pass Bridge.

And then a figure rose from an observation point tucked away in the dunes: the figure of a bearded man carrying a canvas duffel, moving with the utmost care. Wearing a lumpy gray raincoat, he was barely visible, approaching slowly, furtively, from the north, weaving a path through the dunes.

The man crossed the plot of wild grasses and reached the side of the Mortlach House unseen. He paused for a long moment, listening and watching, and then moved on.

On the northern side of the house, invisible beneath a stand of cabbage palms, a three-foot piece of high-density polyethylene — painted brown to resemble the surrounding soil — lay on the ground, abutting the structure and pitched at a slight angle away from it. Once he reached it, the man stopped again to listen. There was no noise other than the low crackle of the police scanner that had been left on the porch. It had been there for days now, on twenty-four/seven, with or without any human listener. If anything, its low white-noise hiss had proven useful to him. His long observation had established that the house was quiet. One man had left several days ago with luggage and the pale man had left in the morning. The girl was still in the house, her shadowy figure seen against the gauze curtains in an upstairs bedroom, reading a book.

The man knelt, grabbed hold of the thick HDPE plastic, and slowly moved the edge up to expose a hole. The material was waterproof and virtually indestructible, and he was able to swivel it sideways with relative ease. He slipped carefully down into the black hole that yawned beneath, then pulled the covering back into place overhead, precisely where it had been before he arrived.

The entire operation had been completed without noise of any kind.

Now, beneath ground level and sheltered from the rain, the man crouched. He was no longer visible to anyone: a stray passerby, a cop riding an ATV... or an occupant of the house itself. And yet, his heart was beating fast with anxiety. The meticulously planned successes, the many failures, all combined with long periods of brooding and fearful speculation to make this a moment of triumph mixed with the greatest apprehension. It was this apprehension, in fact, that had caused him to move up this final moment to early evening, instead of his usual nocturnal hours: he simply could not wait any longer. Besides, it was so gloomy it might just as well have been midnight — and in any case, he was no longer visible.

Ahead of him, a rude brick-lined declivity descended into the ground, stopping abruptly at the foundation wall of the house about six feet ahead. The walls of bricks were heavily covered by verdure and old spiderwebs, and the ground beneath him — actually steps, roughed out but never finished — was a combination of clay, sand, and brackish water seeping in from the improvised covering above. It was a messy, nasty-smelling tunnel, but he’d been here many times before and no longer noticed. It had originally been intended as a stairway up from a basement exit, but the door had never been cut in the stem walls of the house and the project had been abandoned decades before.

The soft hush of the surf was more a sensation than a sound down here. Slowly he relaxed, heart returning to its normal rhythm.

He made his way down the unfinished stone stairs until he smelled, more than saw, the foundation of the house an inch or two before him. On the far side of this wall was the basement.

He let the canvas bag slip to the damp ground, then eased it open and removed the tools of his trade: a small chisel; a rubber mallet; an ice pick; and a large filleting knife: long, cruel, and very sharp. There were others, such as a pair of brake spring pliers: normally reserved for automotive work, whose curved jaw tips resembled the fangs of a rattlesnake. Many of these tools had served him well in the hours leading up to this.

Others would be of use to him once he was inside.

After arraying his tools on the lowest step, he straightened up. Turning his attention again to the foundation wall of the house, he stretched out his fingers and ran them along the lower edge of the mucky surface until he found what he was looking for: the cake of mud that concealed his painstaking efforts. With his nails, he plucked the fragments away, catching them in his other hand and letting them drop soundlessly at his feet.

Mud removed, he took a tiny penlight from his equipment, turned it to its lowest setting, and let it travel along the newly exposed brickwork. It revealed a course of old blocks of a curious blue color, stretchers alternating with headers in the ancient masonry pattern known as Flemish bond. The mortar between the bricks had been almost completely removed along the length of three feet over a total of six courses, each directly above another. He had done this work with a chisel over many nights. Working as silently as possible had of course made the work take longer. But what awaited him on the far side of that wall — on the inside of the house — would make it all worthwhile.

The bricks above and below the section he’d worked on were the regular deep reddish color. He had intentionally chosen to work on the courses of Staffordshire blue brick — used to contain rising damp — because they were not load bearing. Nevertheless, he’d removed the mortar from between so many bricks that he’d decided to insert wooden shims to keep the wall from sagging. He’d cut the shims short so they would not show through his layer of mud, and the pliers would be necessary to pull them out. With the penlight, he carefully scrutinized the wall, wiping off mud here and there, using the edge of the chisel to pick out bits of remaining mortar, making sure everything was in readiness. Then he turned, put down the chisel, and picked up the pliers. He’d been waiting for this moment a long, long time.

Carefully, quietly, he used the pliers to pull out every other shim between the lowest two courses of bricks. Then, moving up a course, he pulled out alternating shims once again, even more carefully this time, making sure not to remove two shims from the same vertical section of brick face. Finally, he stepped back to survey his work. No sign of settling or movement. More quickly now, he removed alternating shims from the upper courses until he’d reached the sixth.

By his calculations, he had, over his nights of cautious toil, removed all but the final eighth inch of mortar from between the bricks. What remained deep within the courses — what would look, from inside the basement, like a normal brick wall — was, in reality, just an illusion of solidity. Only the night before, he’d removed the mortar from between the last few bricks, stealing away with it in the predawn hours and mixing it with beach sand, as usual, so it would not be noticed. Now that he’d removed the shims from between the damp-proofing bricks, all that remained was to knock out the remaining skin of mortar.

Using a tool he’d designed himself — a thin shaft of iron about two feet long with an angled rectangle of steel, sharpened on all sides, welded to its end — he pushed his way into the spaces between the bricks and, when he encountered resistance, gently prodded the last thin crust of mortar out through the crack formed on the far side. A faint sound echoed back through the opening — bits of old mortar falling to the basement floor — but it was barely louder than sand streaming through an hourglass. Now he moved the instrument along the lowest course of unsecured bricks, steadily pushing out the thin section of mortar at the other end as he went. It would be making a mess on the basement floor, of course, but the mortar was dry and he could deal with that later.

Once he’d finished with the first course, he used a prybar to pull the bricks away from the low foundation row beneath them. Carefully, silently, he stacked the bricks to one side of the unfinished stairway.

The second course went faster, and the third faster still. He put each brick aside until at last all the courses had been removed and six piles of bricks lay around him, outside the foundation, hidden — as he was — beneath the rain diffuser. Quickly, just in case the brickwork above the newly made opening began to sag, he removed a pair of portable steel load bars from his canvas bag, set them securely on bricks at either side of the base, then ratcheted them quietly up until they supported the upper edge of the hole.

The warm air of the basement, smelling of dust and old paper, washed over him. It was as if the house were slowly exhaling.

For a minute he crouched, motionless. At long last — after so many nights of secretive labor, unexpected delays, endless surveillance — his work was complete.

Almost complete. The most important part, the part he’d worked so hard for, lay ahead.

As he crouched, he listened. The house had remained completely still, oblivious to his labors. Now he exchanged the tools he’d been using for others: the ice pick; the rubber mallet; piano wire; a long, clear piece of tube. He pulled a 9-millimeter handgun out of the pack and stuffed it into his belt. He turned off his penlight, and the basement was plunged into almost complete darkness. He removed a Fenix 850 nm infrared flashlight. Lastly, he placed a third-generation white phosphor night-vision monocular on his head and adjusted the straps. And then, taking a deep breath, he switched on the flashlight, picked up his tools, and ducked inside.

He stepped carefully over the ragged line of mortar debris, then rose to his full height and looked around — slowly, slowly. It was now dark outside and the cellar was, of course, unlit. As he took in the features of the basement, he involuntarily expelled a deep, husky breath. There they were, repainted but unmistakable: the workbench; the storage alcove; the boiler... and the stairs leading up to the inhabited part of the house.

He realized that his heartbeat had accelerated during this penetration of the basement, and he waited another moment, allowing it to slow. As it did so, he looked around again — this time, with a single purpose. A tall, wide column, wavering slightly in the greenish shadows of the monocular, stood like a sentinel before him. Taking a firm grip on his tools, he took a step forward.

...And it was then that he felt a sylphlike limb slide up from behind his right shoulder, with a movement that was so smooth, so unexpected, he wondered briefly if he was dreaming. But there was nothing dreamlike about the way the arm suddenly tightened, viselike, beneath his jaw, or how a second arm darted in with snakelike rapidity, a short and terribly sharp blade in its hand, gleaming in his IR goggles for just an instant before pricking its point in the soft tissue above his Adam’s apple.

Just when he was most confused and terrified, uncertain what was real and what was nightmare, the voice came: unmistakably feminine, but deep and strange, with an undertone of feral yet somehow courtly menace.

“Good evening, Mr. Wilkinson. Before you react in any way, allow me to offer you a choice. If you drop the gun, and then follow it with your flashlight and that ridiculous helmet, I will take my knife from your neck. If you resist, I will sever the four extrinsic muscles of your tongue, in preparation for piercing your carotid artery. It’s your choice, but in your situation I would recommend the former option. You will find it much easier to explain all of this to me with your hyoglossus intact.”