There was a thumping sound coming from the far wall, right next to the dead body. I had Kogan’s arm over my shoulder, ready to help him to his feet so that Heath and I could get him to the window, but all three of us were stopped short by that bizarre sound. It was as if someone was behind the wall, trying to pound their way out.
“My gun,” Kogan said into my ear. I looked at him and he dropped his gaze to the floor where I’d set down his firearm. I realized that he wanted me to get it and use it if necessary. What he didn’t realize was that a gun wouldn’t help us for what was about to crash through that hidden door behind the drywall. And I knew it was a door, because I’d seen the silver handle poking out of the Sheetrock.
So I shook my head at Kogan to let him know I wasn’t going to pick up his weapon, and then I motioned with my chin to Heath. We had to get the sheriff out before whatever was behind that door could get free. “Ready?” Heath said loudly to the large man.
Before Kogan had a chance to answer, however, there was a sort of cracking sound, like wood being splintered, and it rose above the slamming doors still shaking the house. Heath and I looked over our shoulders and we could see that the door leading to the hallway was being kicked in. “Something is trying to get in!” I shouted.
Heath’s expression became determined, and, still pressing firmly to the wound on Kogan’s abdomen, he pushed up with his legs and lifted Kogan off the ground. I barely had time to get up myself and balance Kogan between us before Heath was pulling us toward the window.
For his part Kogan was hissing and cursing through his teeth, and I couldn’t even imagine how painful it must have been for him to shuffle across the room. I had no idea how we were going to ease him through the window, which might not even be wide enough for the large man to fit through.
All around us the crashing and the slamming and the thumping and the splintering continued, and then, all of a sudden, with one last explosion of sound, it all stopped. The three of us paused again and I glanced tentatively over my shoulder. Beau stood in the doorway, gun drawn, dripping with sweat and wearing Gilley’s fishing vest.
Heath stopped pulling Kogan toward the window and we both craned our necks to take in the deputy, who was now rushing toward us. Before he got to us, however, he came up short and glanced at the wall where the hidden door had been.
I pulled my eyes forward too and nearly let go of my grip on Kogan when I saw the sight of the dead man littered with drywall and the secret door wide-open. And visible just inside the doorway was a skeletal hand.
Chapter 5
As we all stood there, staring at the open doorway and that skeletal hand, the sounds of sirens closing in reached our ears. “Em,” Heath said to get my attention. “Let’s set the sheriff down.”
We eased Kogan to the floor and leaned him against the wall for support to help him breathe. “Beau,” Heath said to the deputy, who was continuing to stand there slack-jawed. “Come here and put your hand over this wound.”
Beau shuffled numbly over. Still he did seem to have enough sense to skirt the dead guy on the floor by a wide margin and he also avoided getting too close to the newly open door.
Once Heath was free to stand up, he walked cautiously over to the doorway and peeked in. All of a sudden there was a sort of WHOOSH, and cold air came rushing out of the doorway. I saw Heath’s hair flutter back and immediately he put up his arms defensively as the cold seemed to envelop him before circling the room, as if it had a mind of its own. I felt it circle me too, but it didn’t linger and within another second or two it was out of the room by way of the smashed-in door to the corridor. As if it had never even entered, no lingering cold remained, and the room went back to feeling warm again.
Beau and Kogan looked at each other, then at me, as if to ask what the heck that was. I squeezed Kogan’s arm gently to reassure him, then got up and moved over to Heath, making sure to keep clear of Scoffland and the handcuffed and still-unconscious deputy. Heath almost reached for my hand, but his were smeared with blood, as were mine, so I stood close to him instead and both of us stepped forward to look through the jagged opening where the drywall had been, to gaze on the interior of what looked like a hidden room.
“Ohmigod!” I whispered, pressing my shoulder against Heath’s for comfort and reassurance. The skeletal hand belonged to the remains of what appeared to be a young man. He was still in his clothes—jeans and a striped shirt—and oddly, he still had some of his hair, a dust-coated ginger.
Beyond the skeletal remains was a small round table covered in pink cloth and in the center was a miniature porcelain tea set with little red roses. The table had been set for three.
Deeper into the room I saw dolls, games, and stuffed animals. The small room had obviously been a little girl’s playroom.
I shivered violently, even though the chill had definitely left the room. There was something terribly familiar about the setting, and my mind went back to my out-of-body experience when I’d met DeeDee, my eight-year-old mother. The tea set was something an eight-year-old might play with.
“Holy Mother of God,” came a voice behind us. Heath and I both turned to see two paramedics hovering in the doorway from the corridor. “Sheriff?” said the man on the right, hurrying toward the injured lawman. “What the hell happened?”
“Never mind that, Sam,” Kogan said, his breathing now quite labored. “Just get me the hell out of here.”
Heath and I stood close by the sheriff while the paramedics applied bandages, oxygen, and an IV before easing the sheriff flat onto a board. We then helped the paramedics and Beau get Kogan onto a stretcher. A second stretcher was brought in for the still-unconscious deputy, and I was starting to worry that I’d really hurt the man, but as he was being quickly put onto a gurney and wheeled away, his hands still cuffed behind him, Heath said, “You had no choice, Em. He would’ve killed me.”
I sighed and nodded and just before the paramedics wheeled Kogan out of the room, he waved to Beau, who immediately went to the sheriff’s side. Kogan seemed to be breathing a tiny bit better and he feebly removed the oxygen mask to say, “You’re in charge. Call for backup, but you’re running point on this.” And then the sheriff surprised me by turning to me. “Mary Jane?”
“Yes, Sheriff?”
“You and your man, stay with him, would you?”
For being so terribly injured, the sheriff was showing remarkable clarity. In his eyes I saw the true meaning of his words; he wanted me and Heath to stay with Beau to help protect him against whatever evil was still lurking in these walls.
It was a tall order, but I couldn’t abandon the poor deputy, who’d already had the worst scare of his life. And with two men clearly possessed by God knew what, there was no way I could leave him or any other lawmen who were going to show up to investigate the newly enlarged crime scene. “We’ll stay with him,” I vowed.
Kogan covered his mouth back up with the mask and closed his eyes. A moment later, he and the paramedics were gone.
Turning to Beau, I pointed to his vest. “That’ll keep you safe enough while you’re in here.”
The deputy looked down at the fishing vest. “Gilley said the same thing to me. What’s in these pockets anyway? This thing is heavy.”
“Magnets,” said Heath. “They screw with a spook’s electromagnetic frequency. They hate to be around magnets.”
Beau nodded, but I could see that he was still clearly rattled by all that’d taken place at the manor. “I called for backup,” he said, “but there’s an accident on I-eighty-four and dispatch has all other units out there. She’s trying to route me someone on call, but it could be a little while.” Beau then let his nervous gaze travel between the dead man on the floor and the playroom with the skeleton.
I edged over to him. “We can help,” I told him. I hadn’t been around a lot of murder scenes, but I’d seen enough
where I was a little more desensitized than most people my age. Plus, dead bodies didn’t much scare me. Dead souls were a different story; some of them had scared the pants off me.
Heath picked up a long black bag from the floor. I realized it was a body bag and grimaced. Motioning to Scoffland still lying facedown, Heath said, “We should get him in the bag, Beau. That way, he can’t cause us any more trouble.”
I liked the way Heath had said “us” over “you.” It was subtle, but it let Beau know that we believed his story.
Beau nodded and moved over to a duffel bag with the Valdosta sheriff’s logo on it. I hadn’t seen it in the room earlier, and I suspected that sometime between the paramedics loading Kogan and Deputy Cook into the ambulance, Beau had brought it in from the hallway. Unzipping the duffel, he pulled out two pairs of black latex gloves, tossing one to Heath and the other to me. “Try not to touch anything near the playroom, okay?”
Heath donned the gloves and moved toward the head of the victim. Beau looked relieved that he wouldn’t have to be near the guy’s face when they shuffled him into the body bag. “Who is he anyway?” Heath asked as they began to lay out the bag.
“Mike Scoffland,” Beau said. “He’s a contractor. Was a contractor. I knew him pretty well, actually. He was a good friend of my dad’s, and after Dad got sick, Mike used to go visit him every day at the hospital, and he even kept on visiting when Dad went to hospice. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Heath and Beau carefully rolled Scoffland onto his back, and I looked at the man’s face. He seemed to have been healthy and in good shape for a man I’d guess was in his midsixties. Then I looked again at Beau, who was probably in his late thirties. He’d said Scoffland had been a good friend of his dad’s. “How old was Scoffland?” I asked.
Beau glanced curiously at me. “I reckon he was the same age as Dad. They went to school together, so”—Beau paused to do the math—“probably around seventy-eight.”
My jaw dropped. “He was seventy-eight?”
Beau grunted as he and Heath lifted Scoffland into the center of the open bag. “I know. He looked good, didn’t he?” And then he seemed to realize he was looking directly at the elder man’s face and he quickly averted his eyes by zipping up the bag.
“So what happened?” Heath asked.
“You mean to Scoffland?” Heath nodded. “Best we can tell, one of his workers killed him with a nail gun.”
“The guy who was taken out on a stretcher?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Beau said. “We got a call that some worker at the Porter house had snapped and killed Mike. When we got here, Cisco—that was the guy on the stretcher, Ray Cisco—he was acting all crazy and poor Mike here was nailed to the wall.”
“Was there any history of animosity between the two?” I asked.
The deputy shook his head. “No. Not that I know of. We interviewed most of the crew and they all said that Mike was like a father to Ray. It didn’t make a lot of sense.”
I couldn’t tell if Beau was avoiding the fact that another deputy had basically done the same thing to the sheriff, without cause or provocation, and that maybe there was no reason other than that both men had become possessed by some kind of evil spirit.
I studied the deputy, who still appeared to be shaken by the day’s events, and he caught my eye but then looked away toward the open door to the playroom. “And now I have another scene to process.”
“How can we help?” I asked. I doubted we’d be allowed to participate in any way, given that we weren’t deputized, but I underestimated just how badly Beau seemed to want to get the heck out of Porter Manor.
“You could take pictures,” he said. “I have to document the scene and take a lot of notes. Whatever happened in that hidden room, it happened a long time ago by the looks of it.” Bending down, he picked up the camera, but before he handed it to me, he studied it for a moment and swore under his breath. “The battery’s dead.”
I pulled out my iPhone and was relieved to see that it still had a charge. “I can use this if you want.”
Beau nodded. “That’ll work.” Then he reached into the duffel bag again and pulled out a series of yellow crime scene tags, each of them numbered. “Heath, can you set one of these down whenever I point to something and then Mary Jane can take a picture of it?”
Heath and I nodded and then we got to the business of heading inside the playroom. “Oh, now I see,” I said, eyeing the architecture of the room. “It’s a hidden corner. You don’t realize there’s a room here from the outside because of the curve of the exterior wall.”
The first thing the deputy pointed to was the body. “We’ll need lots of photos of that,” he said. He then instructed me about how to frame the remains, and I began clicking away. The position of the skeleton was a bit odd, I thought. The young man was lying on the ground, his legs bent slightly, and one arm was tucked under the skull. I glanced toward the closest chair at the tea table, and walked to it, then looked back at the skeleton. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve said that the young man had fallen out of the chair and sprawled across the floor. I photographed that, even though Beau hadn’t instructed me on that yet, and then I peered into the teacup at that place setting.
I saw nothing but dust in the bottom of the cup.
“Who do you think it could be?” I heard Heath ask Beau as the two of them moved slowly about the room, placing numbers and jotting notes.
Beau stared hard at the skeleton. “I have no idea,” he admitted.
“Could it be Everett Sellers?” I asked.
Beau blinked at me. “Where’d you hear about Everett Sellers?”
“Mrs. Gillespie told . . .” At that moment I realized something and mentally smacked myself. “Gilley!”
Heath’s eyes went wide. “We left him out by the car.”
“He’ll be worried sick!” Quickly I switched over to the phone function on my cell and dialed Gil.
“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!!” he shouted by way of hello.
I winced, and was about to yell back when I realized he was crying. “Honey,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’ve been worried sick!” Gil wailed. “The paramedics left hours ago!”
I checked my watch. They’d maybe left fifteen minutes earlier, if that, but Gil was always one for theatrics.
“Honey,” I tried again.
“I’m so scared out here, M.J.!” he said. “Beau took my vest and I have nothing to protect me!”
I was all set to go running out the door to give Gilley my vest when I heard the rustling of paper. My brow lowered. “Gilley?”
He sniffled. “What?”
“Was that a wrapper I heard?”
The scrunching of paper was a bit farther away, as if he knew he’d been caught red-meat-handed. “No,” he said, but it was muffled, like he’d just stuffed his piehole with what remained of a burger.
“Are you even still out in the driveway? Or are you circling the parking lot of Burger King?”
“I’m in the driveway,” he snapped. “I merely ran down the street to get a quick snack.”
I didn’t say anything—I just stood there shaking my head.
“You know I eat when I get stressed!” Gilley shouted.
I remained silent.
“Okay, I’m sorry! Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
“We found another body.”
“No way!”
“Way. We’re helping Beau process the scene.”
“Shouldn’t there be other people doing that?”
“There’s an accident on I-eighty-four and every other deputy is tied up. We’re all that Beau has right now, so we’re helping out.”
“When are you coming out?”
I looked around the playroom. “Probably not for a
bit.” The sound of the engine starting came through the phone. “You’re headed back to the burger joint, aren’t you?”
“Might as well,” Gil said. “Their apple pie looked good.” Then he seemed to remember his manners. “Did you guys want anything?”
“No. I’ll call you when we’re through.” I hung up the phone, and when Heath looked curiously at me, I rolled my eyes and said, “He’s fine. Let’s get on with this.”
We spent an hour processing the scene, which, I almost hate to admit, was incredibly interesting. It was a bit like being in a time warp, because, save for the coating of dust, everything was in pristine condition. I had little doubt that almost immediately following that young man’s death, this room had been sealed and remained that way for the last fifty years.
And even though the day had been crazy stressful, I found myself actually intrigued by the crime scene. I wondered how the boy had died. I suspected that his end had involved something sinister, and that sinister had probably been at the hands of one of the Porters, because why else would the family have sealed him inside this room and pretended that he’d simply gone missing? It seemed likely that if the young man had had a seizure or had died of some other natural cause, or even by accident, the family would have reported it to the authorities. No, they’d sealed this room, and told the police that he’d wandered off, and as the Porters were such a well-respected family, of course the sheriff at the time had taken their word for it.
As I photographed every inch of that room, I was convincing myself that some older cousin or uncle had perhaps done something wicked to the poor young man, and perhaps he’d panicked and then he’d inadvertently killed Everett, and the wealthy family hadn’t wanted the scandal, so they’d covered it up.