The Silent Hour

3

__________

I left the office a few minutes after Harrison did. I stood on the corner waiting to cross Rocky River and walk over to Gene’s Place for some lunch, trying to enjoy the warm breeze and the sun and not dwell on the fact that I’d just agreed to work for a murderer. Not even an accused murderer, which was the sort of thing defense investigators did regularly, but an admitted murderer, a guy who’d sat across the desk from me and talked about the man he’d killed with a knife.

I’d had him on his feet, headed toward the door, and now I was working for him. So what had changed? Why, after ordering him to leave, had I agreed to his request? I could pretend part of it was the story, the intriguing question he’d presented, but I knew that wasn’t enough.

You’re looking at me with distaste, he’d said, and he’d been right. I was disgusted by him when he walked into the office, disgusted by him when he wrote the first letter back in the winter. He was a killer. He’d ended a life, shed innocent blood. I was entitled to my disgust, wasn’t I? Then he’d looked at me and asked if I believed in his potential for rehabilitation, asked if I believed in the work I’d done with the police, and somehow in those questions he’d guaranteed himself my help. I didn’t want to refuse him on the grounds that he was a lost cause. Didn’t want to walk out of the office feeling like a smaller man than when I’d walked in.

The light changed, and I crossed the street and cut through the parking lot to the restaurant, thinking that Harrison was a clever son of a bitch. It had been a nice play, that final question about rehabilitation, and in the end it got him what he wanted. Part of me felt honorable for my decision; another part felt manipulated. Played.

Maybe I’d made a mistake. This wasn’t the sort of client I wanted on the books. Granted, we hadn’t signed anything, and I could always back out . . .

“Joe will be furious,” I said aloud, and then I managed a laugh. No, my partner was not going to be impressed with this story. I could hear him already, his voice rising in volume and exasperation as he explained to me the hundreds of obvious reasons why I shouldn’t have taken this case. That alone could justify taking it. I had a hell of a time getting under Joe’s skin now that he was in Florida. This one just might do it, though. This one just might have enough annoyance to bridge the miles.

It should be simple, too. I added that to the pro side of the list as I walked into Gene’s Place and down the brick steps beside the old popcorn machine that had greeted people just inside the doors for years. Honestly, it should take me no more than a day or two to determine where this Cantrell couple had gone. I’d give them a call or drop them a note and explain where Harrison was and what he wanted. If they agreed to contact him, fine, and if they didn’t, I would still have held up my end of the bargain—and, hopefully, would have satisfied Harrison into silence.

I ate a turkey club and drank black coffee and listened as people around me discussed what a beautiful day it was, how nice the sun felt. It had been a cold, angry April, with a late-season snowstorm that canceled the early baseball games and then settled into a few weeks of gray sky and chill rain. That looked to be behind us now, finally. Today’s weather seemed to be an official announcement, winter waving a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign at the city. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON sign, rather. It’d be back soon enough, as everyone in Cleveland knew.

Still, today it was gone, and staying indoors seemed like a crime, unappreciative. I had no real need to make the drive to see the Cantrell house—this thing could probably be wrapped up without leaving the office—but the day called for an outing of some sort, and this was the only one that had offered itself. I finished my lunch and left, walked back to Lorain and past the office and a few blocks down until I got to my building. I own a small twenty-four-hour gym and live in the apartment above it. The original plan when I got kicked off the police force was to make a living on the gym. Then Joe retired and coaxed me into the PI business, which was fairly easy to do based upon the meager profits the gym had been turning. A few short years later, Joe was gone indefinitely, and I was running the agency by myself. Man plans, God laughs.

I stopped in the gym long enough to say hello to Grace, my gym manager, and then I got into my truck and headed south for Hinckley. The Cantrell house was supposed to be just off 606, which was a winding two-lane highway that cut through small towns and farm country. I came onto it too far south and had to backtrack. Ten minutes and one more turnaround later, I located 3730, a beat-up metal box on a weathered wood pole, the painted numerals chipped and peeling. The pole sat at an unnatural angle that suggested previous contact with a car. I wasn’t surprised. Winter storms came in fast and hard out here, and the rural communities always had more roads than they had snowplows.

The mailbox was on the opposite side of the highway from the driveway, which was identified, as Harrison had promised, by a stone post calling it Whisper Ridge. I turned off the highway and drove past the sign onto the rutted gravel lane. Well, it had been a gravel lane, at least. Most of the stone had either washed away or been beaten into the dirt, and grass was beginning to reclaim the drive. I made it about fifty teeth-rattling feet before I saw the gate.

Parker Harrison hadn’t mentioned the set of steel bars at least eight feet tall blocking the rest of the driveway, outfitted with an electronic lock. On either side of the gate was a metal fence with barbed wire at the top.

I turned the engine off, climbed out of my truck, and studied the obstacle ahead. There was no need to risk setting off an alarm or angering a neighbor with an attempt at trespassing, but now that I was all the way out here I wanted to actually see the damn house. There had to be a way down to it; it just wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.

My first choice was to walk the fence line to the left, and that was a mistake. After battling through the undergrowth for about thirty feet, I ran into water. The fence went all the way to the edge of a creek that was maybe fifteen feet wide and at least a few feet deep. Wetter than I wanted to be, that was for sure. I backtracked and walked in the opposite direction only to find that on this side the fence ran into thickets of thorns and tangled brush. On second thought, the creek might not be that bad. It was closer to the drive, and Harrison had talked about the house looking out onto a pond and fountain, right? Well, the creek must feed the pond.

I clung to that belief as I set to work ruining a good pair of shoes. Originally I’d had hopes of jumping from stone to stone, but it turned out ol’ Lincoln wasn’t as nimble-footed as he remembered. I splashed my way around the fence, grumbling and cursing, and then battled through more of the brambles until I came back to the driveway, this time inside the gate.

From there it was an easy walk. It was a long driveway, at least a half mile, and it curved through a border of pine trees so that my truck was quickly hidden from sight. At one point a dirt offshoot led to the right, but I figured that probably led to some sort of outbuilding, so I stayed with the gravel, tramping along down the middle of the drive, stepping around the occasional hole or downed branch until it came to an end in a stone semicircle.

At first I couldn’t see anything but trees and ivy. It was very overgrown, and even though the sun was out, all the shade left it dark and gloomy back here. Then I saw the hill rising steeply in front of me, and the door in the middle of it.

Harrison’s description was dead-on. The door was a massive piece of oak encased in an arch of rough stone, and everything was so weathered and unused that it just blended right into the hillside.

There was one wide, flat stone inlaid beside the arched door frame, with words carved into it. I walked closer, pushed ivy aside, and read the words.

Whisper Ridge

Home to Dreams

October 2, 1992–April 12, 1996

An epitaph for a house? I ran my fingertips over the carved stone, then across the heavy wood of the door, and let out a breath that I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“Unreal,” I said, and it was. I’d never seen anything else like it. There was nothing here but a hill covered in ivy and groundcover and this single, solitary door with the words carved beside it. On a second read, I decided I was wrong—the epitaph wasn’t for the house, which, still standing, lived on. It was for the dreams.

I stepped away and looked around at the empty trees and the drive I’d just walked up. All right, the house was here, and he’d been honest about the door. Let’s see about the rest of it.

I walked up the side of the hill, which flattened out on top. A stone path was barely visible in the tall weeds, and I followed that until I came to the well house. It, like the door casing, seemed to be built out of hand-laid creek stone, and Harrison was right—it looked like it was two hundred years old. As I walked past I felt a strange, powerful need not to peer down into the well, as if something might come snarling out. I forced a laugh and shook my head and then went up to the edge and looked over, ignoring the prickle that climbed my spine.

The bottom was covered with plywood that was rotted and broken, weeds and mud caking the jagged edges of the boards. I leaned back and surveyed the hilltop. It looked like hell now, all the thickets and tall weeds threatening to take over, but I could imagine how beautiful it had been when Parker Harrison tended the grounds and kept the woods at bay. It was a solitary place, that was for damn sure. I couldn’t hear a sound except wind and birds. Even though the highway was less than a mile away, I couldn’t hear any traffic. That seemed impossible to me, so I listened harder and still couldn’t hear a car. Finally I gave up and walked away from the well.

At the far end of the hill there was a little ridge of stone, and once I got up to it I realized it was the top edge of the back of the house. I walked along it until I came to the end, and there I found a little path that led back down the side of the hill and emptied out behind the house.

It was just as Harrison had said—two stories of almost sheer glass looking out on the water. There was no fountain now, and the pond was covered with a skim of algae and leaves and hidden behind a cluster of dried, broken reeds, but I hardly cared about the water. The house held all my attention. It should have been gorgeous, but instead it was buried under a heavy layer of grime and disrepair. The windows were broken in several places and covered with dirt, but even so you could see what it must have been, what it could still be if only someone had taken care of it.

I walked up to the lower-level window and used my shirtsleeve to rub away some of the filth, then pressed my face to the glass, shielding my eyes with my hands like someone window-shopping at a store that had closed for the night.

A swimming pool was just inside, long and deep. A lap pool. Empty, of course, with stains and corrosion lining the cracked tank. Around the pool was a floor of Italian tile, many of the pieces broken, and behind that the thick plaster walls were bare. I could see two ornate columns rising behind the door that led into the next room, and a curving stone wall with a fireplace.

I stood there for a long time. Didn’t move until my breath began to fog the glass and I could no longer see. Then I stepped away and looked from the house to the silent pond and back again, suddenly feeling very ill at ease.

This was not normal. The housing market in Medina County wasn’t booming, but some people were willing to trade a long commute for a little country living, and the price tag on a place like this would have been mighty. So why not sell it? Why did you let a home like this sit empty and exposed to the elements for twelve years?

I walked away from the back of the house and up the other side of the hill. I found an angle that allowed me to look in at the second story, in at more beautiful but empty rooms. All the way around the hill was another entrance, a sunporch with almost all the glass broken out. I stepped over the jagged shards and walked to this door and repeated my face-to-the-window act. This time I saw a hallway bordered by a short partition that had recessed floodlights and doors opening to hidden rooms beyond. Back through the broken glass and into the woods, and now I was walking away from the house faster than I’d walked toward it, returning to my truck with a strange tightness in the middle of my back and sweat-dampened hair clinging to my forehead. I splashed back through the creek without a single muttered curse or a thought about my shoes and climbed up to the driveway.

People did not leave homes like this. I’d never seen anything like it, and maybe that was why it was affecting me in this way, why I felt almost relieved when I was back in the driver’s seat and had the engine going. It was just something . . . different, that was all. Felt a little off because, well, it was a little off. Abnormal. Still, I could figure out what had happened, and I could tell Harrison, and I could be done with it. I owed him that much, because his request certainly seemed genuine, convicted murderer or not. This much of the truth he had told me: The door was there in the earth, and the house beyond it was empty.