Chapter 6
Bobby ‘Bit’ Nowacki
Bit pulled the SUV to a stop near the stone steps and killed the engine.
He sat there for a moment with both hands on the wheel, staring up at the mansion through the windshield.
Two and a half stories of gray fieldstone.
The heavy columns framed the entrance, and the windows hadn’t been cleaned in what was clearly a very long time.
As for the ivy crawling up the front wall, it certainly wasn’t decorative.
He suppressed the urge to restart the engine and reverse his way out of the estate.
He’d never been fond of eerie places like this one, and maybe there was a chance he could convince the team to stay somewhere in town.
Unfortunately, the front door swung open before Bit had a chance to make a decision.
A man stepped out onto the portico, pausing long enough to slip his socked feet into work boots that had more dried mud on them than leather.
He then descended the stone steps with the unhurried gait of someone who had nowhere else to be and hadn’t for a very long time.
Late sixties, maybe early seventies, with a lean frame that suggested a lifetime of physical work.
His face was weathered and deeply lined around the eyes and mouth, his silver hair cropped close. He wore canvas work pants and a faded flannel shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. He stopped at the base of the steps and waited with his hands at his sides.
Bit climbed out of the SUV and adjusted his knitted cap, which had slipped during the drive.
The heat was punishing, and he could already sense the sweat forming along his hairline despite having been outside for approximately four seconds.
Cicadas droned from somewhere on the estate in a steady, pulsing wave, and the gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he walked toward the steps.
“Bobby Nowacki,” Bit greeted, extending his hand. “Everyone calls me Bit, though. I’m with S&E Investigations.”
“Porter Voss.” The man’s grip was dry and calloused. “I used to be the groundskeeper here, but now I just help Miss Ellingham with anything she needs.”
Porter’s voice was a bit raspy. He wasn’t unfriendly, but he wasn’t exactly welcoming, either. He occupied a middle ground that Bit associated with people who listened more than they spoke.
“The rest of my team is down at the greenhouse with the forensics lead,” Bit explained, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the crime scene tape he could just make out through the hedgerow around the corner of the mansion.
“I guess you could say that I’m the advance party.
I’ve got three equipment cases in the back and enough luggage for a week or two.
Would it be possible to get a quick tour of the house before I start hauling everything inside? I’d like to know the layout.”
“Of course.” Porter turned toward the front door but abruptly stopped before reaching the top step. Bit almost ran into him. “I should let you know that Miss Ellingham is not well. With everything she’s been through, she can be a bit…”
Porter paused, as if he couldn’t find the right words.
“Unsocial.” Porter cleared his throat, as if even he didn’t believe his description was accurate enough.
Bit had done his own research on the flight, pulling old articles about the Ellingham family from the local library's digital archives and newspapers. Gwenyth Ellingham was reclusive, and one reporter had even gone so far as to label her agoraphobic. “There are times when she can seem perfectly normal, and other times she won’t say a word. Not to me, not to anyone. It comes and goes.”
“Understood.”
“Please don’t be offended if she doesn’t acknowledge you.” Porter held Bit’s gaze a beat longer than necessary, as though to confirm that his message had been received loud and clear, before pushing open the weathered oak door. “It’s nothing personal.”
Bit stepped inside, wondering if he shouldn’t have listened to his instincts earlier.
The ceiling had to be at least fifteen feet high, and the dark hardwood floor swallowed every footstep, sending back an echo that had no business being that loud.
A staircase rose from the center of the foyer, splitting at a landing before continuing upward in both directions, like something out of a horror film that Bit would have turned off within the first twenty minutes.
If he were honest with himself, it was the wallpaper that disturbed him most. It had faded from what might have once been a deep burgundy into something closer to the color of dried blood. It didn’t help that the carved wood banister had darkened with age until it was nearly black.
The only saving grace was that the air inside was cool, a welcome relief, though it carried a stale scent from rooms that probably hadn’t been aired out properly in years.
There was an underlying odor of old wood and dust, layered over a faint, vaguely floral note.
Lavender, maybe, like the sachets his grandmother used to tuck into drawers.
Despite the age and the neglect, the house was clean.
Not sparkling, but decently maintained.
“The house has fourteen rooms, not including the bathrooms,” Porter explained as he led Bit through the foyer, not seeming to care about his muddy boots at all.
Odd, considering they had originally been sitting out on the portico.
“The kitchen is through the back hallway. I keep it stocked, so help yourselves to whatever you need. There’s a pantry off to the side with canned goods, and I make a run into town every few days for fresh supplies. ”
Porter continued the tour of the ground floor, though Bit doubted many people actually visited Gwenyth Ellingham.
The formal living room held furniture that looked as though no one had sat in it for years, the cushions still holding their shape, the heavy curtains drawn against the afternoon sun.
The library smelled of old paper and leather binding, a scent that might have been pleasant in a bookshop but carried a loneliness in a room where no one had probably pulled a volume from the shelf in years.
The kitchen was dated but functional, its stone floor worn smooth by decades of the same footsteps between the stove and the sink.
A pantry opened off to the side, its narrow shelves lined with canned goods and boxed food of rice and pasta.
There was even a utility room near the back that held cleaning supplies and tools.
Upstairs, there were six bedrooms. Porter identified four that had been prepared for the team with clean linens. He then gestured toward a corridor that branched off to the left at the top of the staircase.
“That hallway leads to Miss Ellingham’s private suite. Her bedroom, her sitting room, and her private bath. That entire wing is off-limits.”
“Absolutely,” Bit agreed without hesitation.
“This room here has the best mattress,” Porter said, opening a door at the far end of the second-floor hallway. “Ms. Sloane should take this one, considering.”
“Considering what?”
Porter’s expression didn’t change.
“Considering she’s the one in charge.”
Bit decided not to push it. He was reasonably certain Porter had noticed Brook’s pregnancy, probably from a window, but the man was polite enough to leave it alone.
They moved back down the hallway toward the staircase, the floorboards protesting with each footfall.
Bit found himself instinctively indexing which step creaked and which remained silent.
Porter stopped in the middle before resting one hand on the banister. His voice dropped lower than it had been during the rest of the tour, and Bit shifted with unease.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Is it true that they found more than one set of remains in the greenhouse?” Porter turned his head, his gaze steady on Bit.
“I overheard the sheriff speaking with Dale Ellingham. They were standing in the driveway, and Dale was asking if Nestor was one of the bodies. The sheriff told him he couldn’t comment, but the fact that Dale was asking the question at all tells me there’s more than one. ”
Bit considered how to respond to the man’s question. Porter lived on this property. The man deserved more than a deflection.
“Yes, there is more than one body,” Bit replied as he mulled over Porter’s tone when speaking Dale Ellingham’s name. It was with a flatness that carried its own kind of opinion. “The forensics team has a lot of work ahead of them.”
Porter nodded slowly, as though the answer had confirmed what he already suspected. He descended several steps before speaking again, his back to Bit now. He continued to follow Porter down the staircase without interrupting. Bit could be a good listener, too.
“Nestor Ellingham was a good man. I know what people in town say about him. That he was strange, that he lost his mind after Claudine died, that he cared more about his plants and research than his own daughter.” Porter shook his head as they reached the landing where the staircase split.
“None of that is true. He was grieving. He was trying to find a cure for the disease that killed his wife so that it wouldn’t kill anyone else. That’s not madness. That’s love.”
“It sounds as if the two of you were close.”
“He was my employer.” Porter came to a complete stop on the higher landing.
“But he always treated me with respect. He was quiet, yes. Kept to himself more than most. But he was gentle. Patient. The kind of man who’d spend an hour helping me repair a leaky pipe and never once mention that he had three degrees hanging on his wall. ”
This wasn’t a man defending an employer. This was a man defending someone he’d admired. Bit wasn’t sure how to respond, but he was saved from speaking when Porter continued down the stairs.
The tour had circled back to the ground floor.
As they descended into the foyer, Bit studied the dining room to the right once more.
A long wooden table that could easily seat twelve occupied the center of the room.
Two slender candles in brass candelabras sat atop a faded runner, their wax long since dripped and hardened.
The curtains were drawn, but that didn’t stop a thin blade of light from slipping between the panels.
“Would it be alright if I set up my equipment in there?” Bit asked before he glanced in Porter’s direction. “The room is large enough for what I need, and the table would save me from having to bring in folding ones.”
“I don’t see why not. No one’s used it in years.”
Bit was already mentally mapping the power outlet locations and the proximity to the nearest window for his router placement when he caught movement at the top of the staircase. He turned with the intention of introducing himself, but the words got stuck in the back of his throat.
A woman stood on the upper landing, just to the left of where the banister curved. She was thin, almost gaunt, and she wore a long gray cardigan that hung past her knees. Her hair was dark, falling straight and uncombed past her shoulders. She was motionless, both hands gripping the banister rail.
She slowly tilted her head, as if studying him.
Bit took an involuntary step backward, and his elbow connected with a vase on the small table behind him.
He spun and caught it with both hands before it hit the floor, his fingers closing around the porcelain with the kind of reflexive desperation usually reserved for catching a phone over a toilet.
He set the vase back on the table with exaggerated care, steadied it until he was confident it wasn’t going to topple, and then turned back toward the staircase.
The landing was empty.
She was gone. No footsteps. No creak of a floorboard. No sound of a door closing. She had simply been there and then not been there, as though the house had absorbed her back into itself.
Bit couldn’t tear his gaze from the empty landing.
This was it. This was how he died. Not at the hands of Jacob Walsh, not in some catastrophic drone malfunction during a surveillance op, not even from the amount of sugar he consumed on an hourly basis.
He was going to be murdered in a crumbling Indiana mansion by some woman in a long cardigan that matched the color of his knitted beanie.
Porter cleared his throat. Bit reluctantly switched his focus, finding that the man was now standing beside the front door with his hands in his pockets, entirely untroubled.
“That was Miss Ellingham?”
“That was her.”
Bit nodded slowly. He sure hoped that Theo and the others would join him soon. One thing was for sure…he wasn’t leaving the lower level until everyone else decided to retire for the night.
“I’m going to go get those cases now.”
Bit walked toward the front door, paused, and turned back to glance at the top of the staircase one more time.
Still empty.
He was definitely going to need a bigger monitoring station.