Chapter 9
“It’s got to be a tramp,” Mrs. Kent said at dinner, addressing the air over the stove.
The rest of us were crouched like rabbits hoping to avoid the hawk’s notice.
The pot pie she had made was spectacular, with a crust that melted like butter.
I wished that I was able to enjoy it. “No critter ever opened a lock like that.”
I cleared my throat nervously. “Raccoons can be very—”
“No way one could’ve lifted that bar. And I know I didn’t leave it unlocked.”
None of us were foolish enough to challenge this.
“No feathers either,” Mrs. Kent continued. “Just gone, same as last time.”
“Maybe it was blood thiefs got it,” Sally piped up.
Jackson winced. Mrs. Kent wheeled around, holding a wooden spoon like a sword. “Don’t you talk nonsense, girl! That old business is done and over and no need to bring it back up!”
Sally fled. Jackson silently produced his flask and poured us both out a measure. Mrs. Kent went back to staring at the air over the stove.
“I’ll go to town and buy you a padlock,” Jackson offered again.
“I don’t know what the world’s coming to, when you’ve got to padlock the henhouse.” Mrs. Kent finally abandoned her post at the stove and sank down at the table. She glared at the ceiling, possibly addressing God. “Dog didn’t even bark.”
“Dog’s getting old,” said Jackson reasonably. “I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s got any pups going begging.”
My desire to defend the poor hound’s honor was intense, but I bit my tongue hard.
Mrs. Kent put her forehead against her fist. “That dog’s only seven years old, and I’m not raising another pup until I have to. If a tramp steals a chicken, fine, but you get a chicken-killing dog in there…”
Jackson, very wisely, poured her a small quantity of whiskey and slid it across the table.
She sighed and her shoulders sagged. “Hatched every one of them out my own self,” she said gloomily.
I could have painted a portrait entirely in shades of Payne’s gray and ultramarine, and called it Discouraged Woman.
“Good layers, the lot. I don’t begrudge anybody a meal if they’re hungry, but if they were gonna steal chickens, couldn’t they have grabbed one of the young roosters? ”
I excused myself quietly. I could just about hold up to an angry Mrs. Kent, but a depressed Mrs. Kent was too much. Guilt gnawed at my guts like one of Halder’s screwworms. I wanted to tell her, but how?
All this angst over missing chickens, I thought, staring out the window.
Though it wasn’t really about the chickens, was it?
Mrs. Kent would have been annoyed if a fox had killed them, but not upset like this.
It was clearly the notion of a person taking them that was upsetting her view of things.
I could understand that. Either your neighbors were thieves, or there were strangers lurking in the woods who might not stop at chickens, and neither prospect was particularly appealing, was it?
I didn’t go out that night. Neither did Halder, judging by the lack of a light. Presumably neither of us wanted to take a couple of barrels of rock salt … although Halder didn’t have to, dammit, he owned the chickens, he could have just said …
You’ve been over this a dozen times already. You’re not going to figure it out with the information you have available.
Clearly what was needed was more information.
I went out early in the morning, carrying my sketchbook.
If Phelps was lurking around the shed—And why would he be lurking, what does he know, how can I find out?
—I would just tell him that I was sketching the building.
Drawing architecture is excellent practice for any illustrator, which is probably why I hate doing it.
Yes, you have to be precise with botanical illustration, but I’ve yet to meet an orchid with crown moldings and a dozen windows that need to be placed in correct perspective.
Still, I’d draw the damn shed if that’s what it took.
The air was cool and humid, but I knew the temperature wouldn’t last, even if the humidity did.
Cicadas were already beginning their ascending buzz, summoning the heat.
I threaded my way between head-high buckeyes, their flowers mostly spent and littering the ground beneath them with damp red trumpets.
No one awaited me as I approached the shed.
I looked around, half expecting Phelps to jump out at me, but the woods were empty.
I glanced over at the log that I’d hidden behind and felt a shudder that started at the hinge of my jaw and went down past my rib cage.
That wasn’t a hiding place in any sense of the word.
I had gotten absurdly lucky. Halder must have been distracted, or his night vision had been ruined by lantern light, or perhaps, as the headmistress used to say, God sometimes looks out for fools.
The door was just as heavy as I remembered it, with the odd metal plates around the edges, and the cracks in the wood were still sealed up tight.
Of course, if you were running an experiment with insects, you wouldn’t want any to get in from outside, would you?
The wrong kind of wasp could be just as dangerous as a fox in a henhouse.
I stifled a sigh. I was probably going to be embarking on wasps next.
Halder had mentioned that I should keep an eye out for caterpillars with parasitic wasp larvae on them when I was out on the grounds.
Those would be almost impossible to preserve on a pin, no matter how many patented caterpillar inflaters you owned.
The lock on the door was still very large and very solid.
I stared at it for a long moment, feeling as if there was something important here that I was missing. Shed. Door. Hasp. Padlock.
The lock is on the outside.
I grimaced. Of course it’s on the outside, you nitwit, how else would Halder unlock it?
No, wait. If it had been a knob, not a padlock, he could have unlocked it from either side. He could lock it behind him when he went down. But he didn’t. Why not?
Memory flared of a stormy night, and the girls telling ghost stories, scaring themselves into panicky giggling.
The speaker with the candle held low in front of her, painting yellow-orange light on her chin and leaving her eyes dark, like empty sockets.
“And the little girl laid down in the trunk to hide … and no matter how hard everyone looked, they couldn’t find her.
Hours went by, then days, then weeks … Everyone was frantic.
It was like she vanished. They thought she must have been kidnapped and murdered …
her mother died of a broken heart … then one day, when they were cleaning the attic, they opened the trunk, and there she was!
When she closed the lid, the latch fell down and she was locked in.
Nobody heard her screaming and she died all alone in the dark and her ghost haunted the attic for years afterwards, pounding on the walls, whispering ‘Let me out…’”
Gasps and more terrified giggles greeted this, and then the practical girl had said, practically, “Come on, they’d have smelled her when she started to rot.”
Cries of “Ewww! Disgusting!” greeted this statement. The storyteller lowered her candle, annoyed. “They did not. It was cool in the attic and the lid kept the smell in.”
“Nothing keeps a smell like that in,” said the practical girl.
In the doorway, I had stifled a sigh. It was impossible to explain to her that some people didn’t want accuracy, they wanted a delicious frisson of terror.
I knew I couldn’t explain it, because I’d been like her myself.
Instead I went in and shooed everyone to bed in case the headmistress came by to check for lights under the doors.
Fear of the headmistress, at least, was far more real and solid than ghost stories.
Ghosts aside, the moral was clear about not closing doors that would lock behind you.
The gunpowder shed was not nearly so small and cramped as a trunk in the attic, but it would still be a dangerous place to be trapped.
It would be impossible to force the door with those metal plates.
You could yell for days and, unless somebody happened to come along at precisely the right moment, nobody would hear you.
But I’d heard Halder talking to someone in the shed. And then he closed the door and locked it, with a lock that couldn’t be opened from inside.
The second shudder went all the way down my spine, and I felt myself break out in gooseflesh despite the increasing warmth.
My god. What if he really does have a prisoner down there?
I took a step back from the door, holding my sketchbook up in front of me as if it were a talisman to ward off evil.
Could he … had he … could there be someone down there, right now, in the dark?
Stop that. I shook my head, summoning the spirit of that practical girl. You thought it sounded like he was talking to himself, remember? And if there was a person being held down there, you certainly wouldn’t throw live chickens to them every few nights. That’s not how you feed a human.
Besides, who would Halder want to keep prisoner?
My employer flew into rages, certainly, but unless Fitch the entomologist had come to visit, I couldn’t think of anyone.
Granted, that wasn’t proof. I had learned next to nothing about my employer, and certainly he could have murderous passions I didn’t know anything about, but …
Maybe it’s the previous illustrator, my treacherous imagination whispered.
Oh, come on. He isn’t Bluebeard. And the studio’s been empty for a year, Mrs. Kent said as much. Do you expect me to believe that he’s kept my predecessor alive in a shed for a year by throwing them occasional live chickens?
When I put it to myself in those terms, it did seem a bit ridiculous.