Dark Places: Edge of Reason

Part Five

They once more had their evening meal by the side of the stream. It was cooler there, in the shade of overhanging trees and with the little bit of water flowing past. They lingered there until twilight, reluctant to go back inside when it was so much more pleasant outside. As darkness loomed, they decided to go back.

Lost in conversation, Trixie and Honey let the others get away from them as they strolled back towards the place where they were staying. They were passing the laneway that led to the church when something caught Trixie’s eye.

“Stop!” Trixie’s voice was barely more than a breath. “Isn’t that someone up ahead?”

Honey peered through the gloom and nodded. “It’s not any of us, though. What do we do? Can we get back without passing him? Should we just walk past him and say hello?”

Pulling her friend’s arm, Trixie started backing away. “I’ve got a feeling about this. Let’s get out of here.”

They walked as quietly as they could, glancing over their shoulders as they went. Before they were out of sight, the strange man seemed to notice them and started following, his steps quick. Trixie ducked around a clump of bushes, pulling Honey with her. Just up ahead, the church loomed. As soon as they were out of the man’s sight, they picked up the pace, reaching the back door of the church and running up the steps. The unlocked back door opened easily and they ducked inside.

“Hide!” Trixie directed, pointing to a recess behind a door. She, in turn, scrambled onto the top shelf of a closet and tried to pull the door closed on herself, with limited success.

A few minutes passed. The church door opened slowly and Trixie could see a man’s silhouette through the gap in the closet doorway. He glanced around, seeming to dismiss Trixie’s closet as a potential hiding place, but taking a peek behind Honey’s door. To Trixie’s astonishment, there was no one there. After a few more moments, the man went into the next room and Trixie squirmed with impatience and discomfort.

She could hear his footsteps in the main part of the church and it sounded as if he were at the furthest end of the building. Taking the opportunity, she climbed down and went to see what had happened to her friend. She was in the process of staring at the blank wall when one of its panels shifted and Honey’s arm pulled her through the opening. Trixie looked up at the ladder which rose through the recess. Honey closed the concealed door, plunging them into darkness, fastened a latch and gave her friend a push.

As quietly as they could, the pair climbed the iron rungs, which were mounted on the wall. Trixie found a trapdoor at the top, which opened into the workings of the pipe organ. It was dim, but not so dark as it had been on the ladder. The pipes rose around them in row upon row, some looking rather worse for wear, but others still smooth and shiny. Honey led the way to another ladder and once more they climbed. The top chamber held still more pipes, smaller than those below. A high window let in some light, but deepened the shadows.

Honey pointed to a place through which they could see into the church below. Trixie peered through the little gap, trying to catch sight of the man. Every so often, she caught a glimpse of him as he passed through the patchwork of light and dark. He seemed to be searching the place, but for what she could not tell. For the first time, it occurred to her that perhaps he had not seen them at all, but was here for reasons of his own.

“What’s that?” Honey asked, her mouth close to Trixie’s ear. “Can you see something white in that crevice?”

Trixie craned her neck to see the place. She nodded. “I think it’s a piece of paper. I wonder how we could get it, without him seeing?”

Luck was not with them, however, for only a minute or two later the man found the paper and unfolded it. They watched him read, heard him swear, then he compared it to another paper from his pocket, took a pen and jotted what seemed to be some single letters onto various places on the sheet. A moment later, he replaced it where it had been and slunk out. They heard the rear door close.

“Stay still,” Trixie advised, in a low voice. “He might still be here.”

A few minutes passed, with no sign of the man’s continued presence.

“How long are we going to stay here?” Honey wondered, as time dragged out. “And how will we know that it’s safe to leave?”

They both froze, as the sound of a key in the lock told them that someone was nearby. They each relaxed as they recognised the voices of those entering the building.

“How many buildings are we going to have to search for those girls?” Mart was complaining. “You’d think they’d know to come back, without us having to go looking.”

“Maybe they’ve fallen in a hole and can’t get out.” Dan sounded quite cheerful. “Maybe they accidentally locked themselves in somewhere. Or, maybe, there’s a homicidal maniac wandering the town and he’s captured them.”

“Well, they’re not here,” Mart answered. “Let’s move on to the next place.”

Dan shook his head. “What kind of heathen are you, Belden? Don’t you know how many hiding-places there can be in a church?”

Mart let out an exasperated sound. “Obviously, there’s no one here.”

At that moment, while he was standing almost right below her, Trixie decided to say, “Boo!” Her brother almost jumped out of his skin, while Dan hooted with laughter.

“Where are you?” Mart demanded, angrily. “You come out here, Trixie.”

“Dan, can you check and see if anyone else is here, first?” she asked, knowing that he would take the matter more seriously than her brother would. “There was a man in here before and we’re not sure if he really left.”

Not long afterward, Dan thumped on the hidden door and called out that all was clear. They had, by then, climbed down to the bottom of the ladder and let themselves out. Trixie raced for the spot where the paper was hidden, ignoring her brother’s angered attempts to chastise her for scaring him. She stretched up to reach it, groping around a little before her fingers closed on it. It was revealed to contain a list of numbers, some of them crossed out and others with brief notations next to them. At the bottom of the sheet, messy writing proclaimed ‘Strangers in 16. Get rid of them.’

“I bet this means us,” Trixie told Honey, who had followed her. “But what is sixteen?”

“Have they given each of the buildings a number?” Honey mused, frowning over the paper. “Why are some of them crossed out? What do these letters mean, do you think?”

“The number 16 has an ‘L’ next to it, so I’d guess that ‘L’ might stand for locked,” Trixie answered. “But what about ‘R’ and ‘M’ and ‘T’?”

Honey groaned. “It could be anything. And since we don’t know which building has which number, other than ours, we can’t really figure it out.”

“Well, I’ll make a copy of it, if someone can find a piece of paper and a pencil. Maybe we’ll come across something else sometime and we’ll be able to get a bit further.”

Dan scrounged some paper and the stub of a pencil from a drawer in one of the back rooms and Trixie made her copy. Afterwards, they replaced the note where they had found it and went out into the fading light. Their feet seemed to make a lot of noise in the quiet of the night. Wild animals went into hiding as they passed, making the silence around them seem bigger. They did not see the man again, though, and began to relax when they got back to the place where they were staying.

“You found them.” Brian’s relief showed on his face as they entered the building.

“In the church,” Mart explained. “They were hiding from a strange man they saw.”

Brian nodded and locked the door. “We were just wondering whether we needed to send out another search party, to look for the first search party.”

“We’re fine,” Trixie told her brother, giving him a frown. “We didn’t need rescuing.”

“Sure you didn’t.” Dan turned to Brian. “Let’s make sure the place is secure. I don’t like the sound of what the girls saw out there tonight. We don’t want any night-time visitors.”

Past midnight, Trixie awoke with a jolt. A moment later, she heard a ghostly sound, which made her sit straight up in her bed. A smile began to spread over her face as she wondered how anyone could think that would be frightening. She reached over and poked Honey, who still appeared to be fast asleep.

“Wake up!” she whispered. “He’s come to try to scare us away!”

“What? Who? Just go back to sleep, Trixie.” Honey muttered, rolling over.

Trixie shook her again, then started waking the others. Dan and Jim had both awoken at the sound and they began to help.

“What’s the plan?” Jim asked, in a whisper, as most of the group gathered together. Honey stubbornly remained in bed.

Trixie grinned. “We scare him back. Only, we need to be scarier.”

Dan’s face lit up with a wicked grin. “I like how you’re thinking. Do you have anything more than that?”

She shrugged. “Something more subtle than fake ghost noises. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.”

Dan nodded and set off, beckoning Mart to come with him. They exited through the rear of the building and the others did not see where they went.

“What can we do while they’re gone?” Jim asked. “Should we pretend not to hear them?”

“I think we should make a show of actually being in here and not being scared,” Trixie considered. “We’ll give better cover to Mart and Dan that way.”

Brian frowned. “Most of us are leaving in the morning anyway,” he pointed out. “Maybe it would be better to let him think he’s scared us off.”

His sister shook her head. “It’s too late now. Mart and Dan should be up to something by now.”

Outside, the ghost noises they’d been hearing ceased, to be replaced by swearing in an unfamiliar male voice. It seemed that Dan and Mart were indeed up to something.

“Who’s there?” the man asked, sounding uncertain. “Show yourself.”

There was a long pause, then the man swore in a loud voice. Running footsteps faded away. A few minutes later, Mart and Dan returned, each wearing a grin.

“I think we’ve fixed him for the moment,” Dan noted. “He wasn’t too pleased about his own tricks being played on him.”

“Meaning?” Trixie prompted.

Dan began breathing heavily and scraped together a couple of bits of metal that he had in his hands, the long-drawn out sound giving his listeners shivers. “We’re better at pretending to be ghosts than he is.”

“Creepy,” Trixie agreed, grinning. “It really sounded like he wasn’t pleased with it.”

“He won’t be too pleased when he finds we’ve shut the window he’s been using, either,” Mart added. “That might teach him to come around messing with us.”

“We’ll hope so,” Brian replied. “But, for now, I think I’ll be getting back to bed. Most of us have to be up early in the morning.”

The next day saw most of the Bob-Whites leave, either to return to their jobs, or in Jim’s case, to do some research elsewhere in the state. Trixie, Mart and Dan remained behind, getting down to work on a number of things that needed doing, including an entirely unfruitful search of Nathaniel West’s former attic. They spent a quiet day, not seeing any sign of the man who had bothered them in the night. By evening, Trixie was wearying of the company of the two men and wanted nothing more than to go off by herself and do some investigation on her own private interests.

The sun was edging lower in the sky as she hurried down the street towards the brick building at the edge of town. Every so often, she cast a furtive glance over her shoulder, but neither of them seemed to have noticed her absence. She fitted the key in the lock and slipped inside, easing the door closed after her. Without stopping on the lower level, which she had already searched as much as she wanted, she went straight upstairs to the room she had classified in her mind as the master bedroom. The room had a disused look, as if it had been unoccupied for some time longer than other areas of the house and Trixie wondered whether the elderly occupant had found the stairs too difficult.

After glancing around to size the place up, Trixie went to the closet and pulled it open. The hanging space was bare, save for a solitary hanger, but a number of items were scattered across the bottom. Impatiently, Trixie sorted through them, putting aside old shoes, a long-handled brush that shed most of its bristles when she picked it up, several cloth-bound novels and an assortment of other junk. Nothing taking her interest, she tried her luck on the upper shelf, where knitted garments had begun to disintegrate. With a cry of triumph, Trixie pulled out another bundle of letters, this one loosely held together with a strand of pale blue ribbon.

She gave the ribbon a gentle tug so that it came undone and began examining the letters within. They turned out to be love letters from Ruby’s soon-to-be husband and Trixie screwed up her nose at the sickly-sweet tone. She was about to put the bundle back when she noticed another letter at the bottom of the bundle was not within the bounds of the ribbon.

The letter in question was from the disapproving aunt back home at Crabapple Farm and made a brief mention of someone’s, presumably Sarah’s, engagement:

As for the news of the engagement you so thoughtlessly fling at me, I cannot and will not approve of the proposed match. It is of no consequence whether the man is a cousin of your husband’s, my dear niece, as that young man is hardly suitable in any case. I shall never give approval for your sister to marry such a person and she had best get the idea out of her head.

For a few moments, she considered what this might have to do with Sarah later leaving town, then returned to the task at hand. The search of the rest of the room took little time and she had soon moved on the other bedroom. This one had piles of boxes, like the one where she had found Sarah’s discarded belongings, but they had three other names on them: Jack, Bella and Robert. Like the first room she had searched, it held little in the way of furniture, just a bed frame and chest of drawers, which turned out to be empty.

The search was long and dusty, yielding nothing much of interest. She was about to leave when a thought occurred to her. Screwing up her nose, she pulled out one of the drawers and felt around the cavity revealed. Behind the draw stops was a deep recess and she felt along its length. Her fingers closed on something hard and circular, with a hole in the middle and she pulled out what appeared to be a diamond engagement ring. She favoured it with a long, thoughtful look before placing it in her pocket. Returning to the same spot, she felt around some more, having only reached two-thirds of the way across. The next thing she pulled out was an old watch, its glass broken. Trixie shrugged and put it in her pocket, too. She continued to search, but found nothing else of interest.

Why hide a ring and never retrieve it? Trixie wondered as she walked back to the place where she had left her friends. And who did the ring belong to? Was it Ruby Gray’s? Did she hide it after her husband died, the way that Jim’s great uncle had hidden his wife’s ring? Or, perhaps, did it belong to someone else? The questions were piling up, one atop another, with no way to answer them. Trixie knew that she needed more information and that it was time to go out and find it. She also knew that her official investigation needed to come first.

The archives of the town paper had been taken over by the library of a town fifty miles away, but Trixie felt it would be worth the trip to see if she could find any more information about the robbery. She set out early, so as to arrive at the library’s opening time. A gut instinct told her that she would be spending the entire day there, so she wanted to give herself as much time as possible.

It did not take her long to gauge the measure of the town paper – its gossipy tone was so like the Sleepyside Sun that she felt an instant connection with the long-ago journalists. Over and over, she found herself sidetracked by interesting snippets on the town’s residents, some of whom she began to feel as if she knew. Every now and again, she came across something about her relatives and she soon had a page of jotted notes.

The account of the robbery gave only a few details that she had not known. An interview with the victim revealed that he had only recently started locking his safe, even though there had been a few items kept there for safekeeping for a number of years. A few weeks before the robbery, he had begun to suspect that someone had been interfering with items in the safe. Nothing seemed to be missing, but some things had been displaced. As a result, he had become more conscious of security. Trixie was glad to know these little details, but did not feel as if they got her much further in her inquiry.

It was, indeed, late in the day when she hit real paydirt. It came in the form of a news article from 1923 about John Nancarrow’s death. Abel had cast the clerk in the role of chief suspect for the crime, but the paper seemed to suggest that he was an innocent bystander, tragically killed by coincidence. She now learned that Nancarrow was engaged to Sarah Belden, and that he had left town without leaving a forwarding address or telling his intended that he was leaving. As Abel had said, the young man’s body had been found three years later right next to the building where he had once worked, but the newspaper told that he was half-buried by a collapsing brick wall. The article also revealed that before taking the job with the robbery victim, Nathaniel West, the young man had arrived in town alone from out of state and that it was unclear exactly where he had come from. Some connection to a now-deceased member of the community was hinted at, but that individual was not named.

A few issues later, Trixie found a report on the investigation into Nancarrow’s death. She smiled at some of the gossipy descriptions of the witnesses and their testimony. It shed more light on the character of the townsfolk than on the victim, but did give a few hints as to the lay of the land. One witness, an elderly lady who kept house for the dead man’s employer, showed a distinct bias against the young man. A middle-aged storekeeper reported having walked along the side of the building, exactly where the body was found, only a few hours prior to the discovery. He had seen nothing suspicious and no indication that a collapse was imminent.

The very end of the article intimated that the death had been ruled accidental, with a recommendation from the man who had inspected the site of the death that building owners should have structural inspections carried out regularly. The journalist had added a comment to the effect that abandoned buildings were a danger to the community and that someone should do something about them.

Nothing of further use to the inquiry came to light, so Trixie took copies of the relevant articles and made her way outside. Just before she went back to the town, she dropped into a jeweller’s shop to enquire about the ring.

“No, not a real diamond,” the man told her, after a brief examination under magnification. “The ring is gold, but I’d say that this is not the original stone. It looks to be well over a hundred years old, by the style and the shape of the cut – you’re looking at mid- to late nineteenth century, I would say. If this was estate jewellery, I’d guess that the stone was lost many, many years ago and replaced with a paste replica. After a generation or two, no one remembers what even happened to it. Or, of course, the owner sold it and never told anyone. I think that probably happened sometimes, too.”

“Well, I guess I don’t have to worry too much about finding the owner, then,” Trixie answered, smiling. “I guess, if it had been real, it would have been worth a lot of money.”

He nodded. “It would depend on the quality of the stone, of course, but by the look of the setting, it must have been a very expensive ring for its day. It could well have been worth thousands now. As it is, you’re just looking at the value of the gold.” He paused, then added, “If you were looking for the owner, the inscription might help identify it. You did notice it was inscribed, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I had wondered about that. I guess, if someone comes looking for it, that will help me know that they’re for real.”

Trixie talked to him for a few moments longer, before taking her leave. As she drove, she dwelt upon the new information she had gathered, trying to fit it into the pattern which had started to emerge. That the collapse was related to the robbery in some way she did not doubt, but she had to wonder what the man was doing there for the wall to collapse upon him. She had not had time to study all of the articles in detail before she left, but hoped that some of the information in them would be helpful.

The day spent driving and reading had wearied her much more than one of exploring the town had and she did nothing more that night than drop into bed before it was even fully dark.

The following morning, Trixie was working on some of her cover tasks when it came to her attention that they were not alone in the town again. She gestured to Mart to be quiet and pointed out of the window of the house they were checking over. A man – and she was sure it was not the same one that she and Honey had seen in the church – was walking down the street outside, peering into the houses as he went.

“There’s someone here,” she mouthed.

Her brother nodded, pulling her further into the shadows. Once the man had passed by, Mart spoke. “I think we need to be careful. I’d rather that he didn’t see what we were doing, or find out that we have all of these keys.”

Trixie nodded and peeked out through the window, trying to catch sight of the man. She watched as he forced open the window of one of the houses and climbed through. The temptation was great to get closer and try to see what he was doing in there, but she managed to resist. What seemed like a long time, but was in fact a few minutes later, they saw him leave the same way that he had entered the house and continue down the street.

Pushing down the temptation to follow him, Trixie headed in the opposite direction, trying to keep out of sight. When they had put some distance between themselves and the man, Mart asked her what she was doing.

“I’m going to the church to see if the paper’s still there and, if it is, if there’ve been any changes to it since I saw it last.” She urged him to walk faster as they crossed an open area. “I should have thought of this before.”

They reached the church, entering by the back door, and soon found the paper. Trixie compared it to the copy she had taken, nodding in satisfaction. “Look – there are more letters written on here. I think we should come back tomorrow and see if there are any changes then. It might give us a clue as to what it means, if we can see what he changes after what we saw him do today.” She quickly marked the changes and they left the building together, taking care to not be seen by anyone who might be around.

Continue to part 6.