Are You Haunted (part fifty-nine)

Are You Haunted

(part fifty-nine)

“Old Davis is a shell. He doesn’t know who you are, he didn’t order his son to hire you, and young Davis doesn’t either, I promise, know who you are.”

“That’s not the way we talk about the poor suffering.”

Chiding me, when I’m an adult and a married woman…

It had been her thought. “Grandad, they cannot need you for that night job, and that sucker’s pay they’d like to foist on you. You suit them, for some reason they’re lying to you about. Any money you want, Dennis and I…”

With a dire frown, he had shut her up. “I’m a fool, then. You among the Toveys, now, will make life a bed of roses for me. I see the sense of it.”

But no, he did not. Isobel, buffeted by her grandfather’s rebuke, counted this her error. Letting the rough language out. Mentioning money, mentioning Dennis. He saw her not his girl any longer; not arrived to walk with him along the river, spellbound by tales of Lettie, but to insist at him like a harpy, you are wrong, and you are alone.

He had cut her off. In Grandma’s time, there’d been another to listen.

Grandad had driven out to the mill, and deliberately on a foggy night. Before they could even repair the fence, all need for doing so had blown away.

Keegan hefted the sledgehammer, glanced behind and motioned Isobel to keep to the steps. Summers wore a hangdog look; Keegan’s face was grim. They had concluded what she feared herself. This noise, this monstrous clang of steel on brick, would have drawn shouts from the tunnel. No one was there.

Or no one able to make a sound.

“We’re through. You take a hand, Mr. Summers, and knock away more of that brick.”

Summers handed his flashlight to Isobel. To assist by the shining of it, she supposed…

But the hole Keegan had made was big enough, if the one trying it were small enough.

The tunnel was far worse than anything she could have visualized. She was in a low-ceilinged chamber, opposite a closed door, that scraped and balked as she tugged it. She worked herself through to a corridor.

She shined the light down one end; the passage died at another closed room. Down the other, she saw no exit. Keegan kicked the door wider, and came crook-kneed to crouch at her side. “Goes down to a sunk place. You might tell that smell coming up.”

“Should I go look, and you look the other way?”

“No, ma’am. I’ll take the tunnel. Safer for you to stay here and wait for Mr. Summers.”

She wasn’t sure Mr. Summers would fit.

But she had underestimated him. A great wrenching, and having overcome the door’s sticky habit, Summers by inches fed himself into the passage.

“Don’t feel lightheaded?”

“I hadn’t thought of it…and so, I guess, no.”

“You have the flashlight, Miss Gilshannon. Lead the way.”

58

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)