Are You Haunted (part fifty-eight)

Are You Haunted

(part fifty-eight)

“We’re stopping over on Sycamore, little street off Canal. The Keegans live just at the corner, practically neighbors of Mrs. Drybrook’s. I told Keegan I was curious to know why he happened to be around the place yesterday. We’re gonna swing by and pick him up.”

Keegan waited at the curb with a wooden toolbox, and on their heads beside him, a steel mallet and sledgehammer.

He called out, as Summers slammed the driver’s door. “Mister, what you were asking about…”

“Have a seat in back. Room for your tools. I want Miss Gilshannon to hear all this, too.”

Keegan noticed her with surprise. Two clanks then, the settling onto a seat and a smell of mudded canvas. “What I fixed on there is only the cover from an old coal chute. I was keeping it special, cause Mr. Guy’s been worrying vandals’d get at the grate. I put em both bolted down.”

“Would you say the fit’s snug?”

“Mr. Guy came by when I was finishing up, and said shovel some dirt on, so it don’t look like anything. I’d say so, snug. You want me to take that off first thing.”

“I do, Keegan. Safety first. Still, that wall’s gotta come down.”

Isobel, thinking of Summers’s warning to Guy, felt sickened. “Powell must not have stayed inside. Dennis said…”

If Guy didn’t see him go in the tunnel, I don’t know what he was looking at. Kenzie came to me first with all this spooks and hoodoo. He had the…

Dennis had stopped, before the ears of Summers, the lie Isobel didn’t need to hear either. Powell would have done the prying; Dennis was just strolling by.

Summers turned them onto Mill Road. “I’ve seen a plan of the tunnel complex. I’ve seen most of the papers they kept copies of at the Drybrook office. I’d have to say, it depends… What Kenzie might think he was there to be doing. But don’t overlook, ma’am, someone else could have got in.”

Isobel saw the rusted water tower, the one indomitable survivor blindly standing. But long before the tower fell, the trust would order it knocked over—this to herself, and Dennis, and any of the other stubborn truth-seekers, a slap in the face. “But why should Mr. Rohdl want to go in the tunnel?”

“Mr. Rohdl has done nothing but try to get in there.”

Ba-bump.

The noise of the floorboard was echoed by a thud from below. Muted in this upstairs bedroom, where Isobel paused in her search, knowing Powell was not here, and Rohdl would not be here. She moved to the window and looked again, from high on the hill, at the water tower.

57

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)