The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(58)
“Fascinating.” I repeated the word, but I made my inflection different from Sophie’s, hoping she’d take the hint. She didn’t.
“Sadly, Meghan dropped it on her foot and broke it. I hate to say it, but at least her foot broke the fall, so the machine is okay. But she’s in no shape to crawl in and out of a cistern for a while. And my other grad students are too busy working on their theses or helping me here. We’ll just have to wait until she’s up and about for the excavation to continue.” She said this last with her nose practically pressed against the wall, studying something I couldn’t and didn’t care to see.
“That’s lovely. Hopefully it will all be done before the children graduate from high school. I’d hate for one of them to fall in.”
She was relieved from saying anything by her phone ringing out “Imagine” by John Lennon. I couldn’t hear the other person, but from the horrified look on her face and furtive glances in my direction, I knew two things: It was something that involved me, and it wasn’t good news.
“I’ll call you back,” she said before hanging up the phone and looking at me with wide eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure. Remember my friend John Nolan—the antique toy expert who knows a lot about the Edison dolls?”
“Yes. He came and picked up the doll last week. Does he have good news?”
She clamped her lips shut and shook her head. “I’m afraid not. The doll appears to be missing.”
“Missing? As in he misplaced it?”
“He’s not sure. He’s positive he brought it to his office and locked it in the safe he has there for valuable items like that. He remembers very clearly doing it. But it’s gone.”
“Maybe a coworker took it. Or he put it somewhere else and doesn’t remember.”
She shook her head again. “He told me that he noticed it missing yesterday and has spent the last twenty-four hours looking for it and asking people who might have seen it. Apparently, he’s the only one who knows the combination to the safe, and it was still locked when he went to go check on the doll.”
Our gazes met for a long moment, as if each of us was daring the other person to speak first.
A man’s shout followed by a loud thump, as if something heavy had been dropped on the floor above us, jerked our heads toward the stairs. A flash of white flitted past my field of vision, disappearing around the corner by the landing.
“Did you see that?” I asked quietly.
“See what?”
I felt what I could only call relief. I had seen an apparition, and it hadn’t been blocked—but neither had the dark, oppressive feeling that weighed down my shoulders now, pressing my feet into the floor and making them hard to move.
“Everything all right up there?” Sophie called.
When there was no answer, she headed up the stairs and I followed, not because I wanted to but because I didn’t want to be left alone. We paused near the top of the stairs, trying to gauge the situation.
A workman wearing a white Hard Rock Foundations T-shirt stood in the hallway, his back pressed against the wall, a hammer lying in the middle of the floor. The color of his face matched his shirt. As if afraid to lift his hand from the wall, he pointed to the end of the hallway with his chin. “It wasn’t there ten minutes ago when I went down to the kitchen to get my hammer. But I know the door was closed, because it was locked and I figured I’d have to jimmy it with my hammer.”
I knew what I’d see even before I turned my head and caught sight of what had alarmed the workman. The Edison doll, its face blank and its eyes as wide and staring as before, stood inside the door on the bottom step that led to the attic, its head facing us with unblinking creepiness.
The high trills of a little girl’s laughter echoed around the hallway, its origins unclear. The dark presence I’d felt downstairs was behind us now, passing through us toward the open door. We all shivered, but only I knew why. “I’ll get the doll,” I said, my voice cracked and dry.
General Lee barked and then came bounding down the attic stairs without the cat, and sat at my feet watching the progression of the cold mass of air moving toward the door and the steps. He stayed where he was, the little coward, when I moved forward. I strained to make out the shape of the dark stain of air that seemed to stretch and shrink in front of me. The stench was unbearable, like the smell of rotting meat, reminding me of my conversation with Rich Kobylt about the cat.
It surged ahead of me, up the attic stairs, hovering halfway up. Without taking my eyes off it, I took another step forward within grabbing distance of the doll. I reached out my hand, ready to snatch the hair and yank it toward me regardless of how valuable and rare it was. The doll didn’t belong on those stairs, and I resented it thinking that it did. My fingers brushed only air, falling short of the doll’s head, and before I could try again, the door slammed in front of me, narrowly missing my hand.
Sophie uttered a small expletive completely out of character for her, and I was sure the workman would have said even worse if he’d not already run downstairs, leaving his hammer behind and a promise that he would never come back.
Without taking my eyes off the door, I reached down and picked up General Lee, feeling his little body quivering in my arms. A loud meow came from the other side of the door, making the three of us jump.