Knowing this, Marcus had gotten into his studded boots fast, and by the time I got up top of the wall he had a good grip on the rope and was ready for me to descend. I looped the thing around my waist, then started to walk backward down the Hunters’ side of the partition. Once on the ground, I shot over to one of the back windows of the house, testing the bars: they were solid, all right, but now we would use that fact to our advantage. I looped the rope in and out of the three-quarter-inch iron strips, then tied it off and gave it a few good tugs: the bars’d stand Marcus’s weight easily. I went back over to the wall and snapped my fingers a few times.
It’d been Marcus who’d identified the murderer John Beecham as an expert mountain climber during that case, and in the process he’d become pretty good at the sport himself. So I wasn’t all that surprised when he made barely a sound getting to the top of the brick wall, then lowered himself down and dropped into a flower bed-one what was mostly dirt-just as quietly. Neither of us paused too long to catch our breath or examine the backyard; but even rushed as we were, we couldn’t help but be a little struck by the barren feel of the place. It was the height of the growing season, but that yard-made up of flagstone walkways and a few flower and herb patches, along with some struggling ivy on the brick wall-formed a picture what was straight out of early March.
“It ain’t natural,” I whispered. “There oughtta be weeds, anyway…”
Marcus made a noise of agreement, then shivered once and touched my arm. He nodded toward the window, getting the bar spreader out of his satchel and handing it to me. It was made up of two metal mounts driven by steel rods geared to a big central screw, one what was driven by placing the crowbar through a steel eye at its end and turning it. I got the thing into position nice and snug and gave it the first few turns, watching the bars on the window start to move apart; but once the first set of iron rails hit those outside them (the gaps between each were just five or six inches) Marcus had to step in and give the crowbar a few good cranks.
“You’re breaking the law, you know, Detective Sergeant,” I whispered with a small smile.
“I know,” he answered, returning the quick grin. “But there are laws and there are laws…”
The bars made a few painful creaks that sounded awfully loud in that quiet, dead yard; but then some firecrackers went off about a half a block to the west, so loud that I realized we still weren’t making any real noise. Another twenty seconds, and there was an opening big enough for me to get my head and shoulders through. That was all I needed.
“Okay,” I whispered, and before Marcus had even laid the spreader on the ground I was halfway into the house. I stopped, though, when he touched my shoulder.
“Remember, don’t go upstairs, but anything you can find that looks interesting-”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Oh, and don’t forget the secretary in the front room-it was covered when we were there.”
“Detective Sergeant-we been over all this.”
Marcus drew a heavy breath, nodded, and then retreated into a shadowy corner nearby. As he did, I finished squeezing through the bars, then brought Mike along carefully behind me. Finally, I turned to find myself standing in Elspeth Hunter’s kitchen.
The first thing I noticed was the smell: a stale, slightly rotten odor, not strong enough to be sickening, but disturbing just the same. Unhealthy, you might say-a general air of uncleanliness, such as even many of the poorest immigrant mothers I’d known on the Lower East Side wouldn’t have allowed. A bucket filled with garbage, uncovered, stood in one corner, insects flying around it even in the near-darkness. Passing by the stained sink, I looked up at some pots and pans that hung over it, then reached up to touch them. Each was covered with a thin layer of grease-again, not dirty, exactly, but not clean, either. Wiping my fingers on my pants, I kept on going.
The others had told me that there was a narrow hallway between the kitchen and the front room, with a doorway cut under the front staircase: that figured to be the way down to the basement. I made my way to the front room, which was furnished with just a few old items: an easy chair, a sofa, and a rocker. A beat-up wooden mantelpiece stood over the small fireplace, and a dusty, stained rug covered the floor. Just to the left of the doorway I’d entered through was the secretary Marcus had mentioned, a cheaply veneered job scarred with chips and scratches. But it wasn’t covered up, and I could see in the half-light of the street lamps what filtered through from outside that behind the glass-paned doors of its top half were a few books, along with some old photographs: faded daguerreotype portraits of a wrinkled man and woman, along with a batch of newer, neatly framed prints of young children. Some of these last were individual pictures of infants, while one was a group portrait of three older kids.
None of them was smiling.
I pulled at the lid of the lower half of the secretary but found that it was locked. The skeleton keyhole at the top of the lid was inviting-it wouldn’t have taken but a minute to pick-but I figured I’d better get to the more serious business first. Across the room were the front stairs, and underneath them a doorway: the entrance to the basement. I stepped lightly over to the staircase, glancing up to make sure that all was quiet, and then pulled a small vial of machine oil out of my shirt pocket. Coating the basement door’s hinges, I put the vial back into my pocket, wiped my hands once again on my pants, then grabbed the doorknob, turned it, and pulled the door back without a sound.
The stairs stretched away into darkness before me. I hadn’t wanted to bring a bulky lamp along, as Mike was trouble enough, though I did have a candle and matches; but we’d noted that the light over the front doorway on the outside of the house was electrical, and figured that the whole structure, being so small, was probably wired, too. So I put one hand to the wall and slowly made my way down into the blackness, my eyes steadily adjusting and searching for any lighting fixtures. About halfway down I spotted one: right by the stairs and screwed into the basement’s ceiling, easy to reach from where I was standing. Moving back up to shut the door, I bent down and switched the light on, then kept going to the bottom of the stairs.
I’d scarcely hit the dirty floor before Mike’s movements inside the satchel became more agitated and he began to make little squeaking sounds.
“Okay, Mike,” I whispered, “just gimme a minute.”
Glancing around I saw that Mr. Moore’s sketch of the basement had been pretty well on the money: about the only things to be seen were a furnace, which stood behind a load-bearing brick dividing wall; some cabinets containing what looked like old cans of paint; a few garden tools (rusty ones, which came as no big surprise); some chairs and a table what were in even worse shape than the ones upstairs; a small collection of picture frames, all empty; and a big wooden rack full of jars of preserves. The only thing he’d gotten wrong was the floor, and his mistake was easy to understand: though the thing was concrete, it was covered in a layer of soot and dirt so thick that it could easily have been mistaken for bare earth.
But there was no sign of any baby, and no indication that one’d ever been there.
Mike was by now pitching a positive fit in the satchel, and I looked down to see his snout pushing out from between two buckled fasteners. “Okay, Mike, okay, this is your time, son,” I said, moving to undo the buckles on the satchel. I’d only managed to get one open before he shot out of the thing and onto the floor, moving as he’d done the first time I’d seen him: like he was made out of liquid. He got down my leg and onto the floor, held his nose up above his spread-out forepaws, then raced once around the big furnace. Pausing for just a second, he got up on his hind legs, the little dark eyes taking in the whole room in just a second or two. Then he shot behind and around the pieces of furniture, through the picture frames, and up the side of one old cabinet.