The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(82)

Sophie, Rich Kobylt, and the entire work crew were waiting in the driveway when we pulled up to the Pinckney house, Sophie with a worried expression and Rich looking as if he was about to tell us again that he thought the house was haunted.

“Did you call Jayne?” I asked as Sophie approached.

She nodded. “She’s on her way. Mrs. Houlihan already left, so she had to wait for Jack to come home so she could leave the children.”

“Afternoon, Miz Trenholm, Miz Middleton,” Rich said as he approached. “My guys are a little unsettled and it’s already past quitting time, so I’m going to let them go home. But I’ll stick around in case you need help moving . . . the remains.”

“It’s only a cat,” I said. “I’m sure we can—”

“Thank you, Rich,” my mother said. “We’d appreciate it.” She turned her head to me and whispered, “I’m not touching it.”

Rich nodded, then returned to his crew, who began loading tools into the beds of their trucks. Jayne joined us, a little out of breath from her walk. “I’m not really sure I need to go in to see it,” she said. “I trust your judgment, Sophie. So if you just want to plaster it over . . .”

“Well,” Sophie said, drawing out the word, “it’s a little more complicated than that. Figured you should see it all yourself before deciding on how to proceed.”

Jayne looked up at the empty windows of the house, and I saw an almost imperceptible shudder go through her. She forced a smile. “All right. Let’s go, then.”

We walked upstairs single file, Sophie in the front. The tingling at the back of my neck that had begun while I stood outside had fled, leaving me with the unsettled feeling of knowing we were being watched, but unable to stare back. It was like being in a fistfight, except I wasn’t allowed to throw any punches. It was maddening, and frustrating, and not a little frightening.

I heard humming, and turned around to see Jayne, who seemed to be doing her best to stay calm. She’d told me a dozen times that she hated old houses, and I was sure we were about to expose a reason why so many people shared her opinion.

Heavy dust hung in the air from the recent construction work, where the worst water-saturated walls were being taken down to their studs. They had only gotten as far as the stairwell wall in the attic—although I didn’t know if they could have gone much farther with the murals and furniture still untouched in the room above. At least that meant most of the wall with the backward writing had been destroyed and I could pretend it had never been there.

I almost asked Jayne then what she was waiting for. She had yet to make any decision as to the distribution of the house’s contents, and I was getting tired of having Sophie bug me about it. It didn’t seem likely that some distant family member would contest the will and tell Jayne to go away—that would have happened by now. Maybe Jayne was hoping that by not dealing with it, the problem would just disappear. As a lifetime subscriber to that school of thought, I was tempted to agree. Except I knew from experience that it wouldn’t. Still, I found it oddly comforting that I wasn’t alone in my rather warped way of thinking. It was, I realized, one of the reasons why I liked Jayne. As if we were partners in a foxhole and our lives were trench warfare.

When we reached the doorway to the attic, Sophie stopped. A portable lamp had been placed on the steps to shine light into the dark opening of the adjacent wall, helped by the late-afternoon sun that poured in from the attic window.

Everybody seemed reluctant to move forward, so I did, not feeling brave at all but desperate to get this over with before nightfall. The days were still short and I had no intention of being caught in the attic after the sun set. The azure blue–painted walls where the words “Help me” had been scratched were gone, and all that remained were the darkened wood studs that looked like bones of the house with their flesh removed.

And there, between the studs, was a small doorway cut inside them, and beyond that a flight of wooden steps that led down into a dark abyss running almost parallel to the steps we stood on.

“The door was there all along,” Sophie said. “With a spring latch so there wasn’t a knob, and the seams hidden in the mural.”

“So it was there before the mural was painted,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Not necessarily.” Sophie’s face was pensive, and even in her ridiculous clothes she actually looked like the college professor she was. “The stairs are very old—I’m guessing they were part of the original house and these steps led down to a tunnel used for smuggling or other uses one might want to hide from the neighbors.” She glanced up as if we were students and she wanted to make sure we were following along.

“According to the copy of the renovation blueprints from 1930 that Jack and Melanie made for me, it doesn’t look like anyone was aware that this staircase existed. There’s nothing in the drawings, and no mention of it. The original doorway could have been plastered over when the bottom floor was filled in, and this doorway could have been added later, after the staircase was discovered accidentally—like we did.” She pointed to the ceiling above us. “From what I can tell, when they redesigned the roofline, they didn’t take into consideration rain drainage. My guess is that they’ve had a steady leak since the new roof was installed in 1930. Even though several patches have been made over the years, it never fixed what is basically a design flaw.”