Page 13 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

Ten

Ben heads to my uncle’s cottage. It’s down the lane by the shed, and I suspect he’ll want to divert to the shed first. He does, and I follow, watching as he checks the lock and heads inside. He flicks the light switch on and off.

“That wasn’t working last night either,” I say.

He doesn’t even grunt an answer to that.

Just takes out his keychain and turns on a penlight.

I walk to where I saw the print, and I point at it, saying, “Here’s the footprint,” but he only shines the flashlight around the rest of the shed, searching and saying nothing.

Then he finally makes it over to where I am, as if getting there on his own.

He looks at the print. Then he puts his own foot beside it.

“Larger than yours,” I say. “What size are you, nine? That would make these … Ten, eleven maybe?”

He finally deigns to speak. “I was just showing you that it wasn’t me.”

“I never thought it was.”

He looks at the door. “You say it was latched?”

I nod, realize he can’t see that with his light shining the other way, so I say, “Yes. I put the key in and turned it, but I can’t say for sure it was locked. Definitely latched. I know that means someone couldn’t get in unless they were locked in. I didn’t see any other entry points.”

He walks to a spot and kicks at the dirt. When the light passes over it, I see a hole dug under the wall.

“Concrete’s crumbling here.” He points his light directly at the hole now. “Mentioned it to your grandfather. He never replied.”

“That looks small, though. I’m not sure even I could crawl through.”

The light shines up to my face. “You arguing against an explanation for how someone got in with the latch on?”

“No, I’d just rather…” I try not to fidget. “I know I saw someone, and I’d rather have a possibility that proves it.”

“Don’t need to prove it to me. You’re the boss. You say you saw someone? I follow up.” He rises and heads for the door. “I’ll fill that hole and replace the lock.”

“If you need to buy anything, I have money in the cottage.”

“There’s a petty cash account with the lawyer. I’ll bill for repair time. I need authorization for any big jobs, like hiring someone to repair the concrete. But I can handle this.”

He walks out. I follow, and he heads to my uncle’s cottage.

“I was told not to touch this,” Ben calls back as he jabs a finger at the cottage. “Not this one and not your grandfather’s.” He continues to the porch. “His exact words were that I wasn’t being paid to maintain them, which implies I could have, on my own time. Didn’t bother.”

“I don’t blame you.”

His shoulders tense. Okay, not the right thing to say. He isn’t explaining so I can absolve him. He’s just getting it in before I can make a Smits-style sarcastic comment.

I follow him onto the porch, and a board cracks under my weight.

“Watch your step,” he says without turning.

I narrow my eyes at him, well aware that he can’t see it. Then I get my first look at the cottage.

“It’s boarded up,” I say.

“Yeah. Years ago, people heard they were empty and decided that meant free lodgings. I got permission to board them up.”

“Even ours?”

He paces along the porch, checking the boards, and I think he isn’t going to answer. Then he says, “The windows on yours were boarded. Door had to be left open so I could clean it. I installed a few locks before I found one that kept people out.”

“The … redecorating,” I say carefully. “Putting it all back the way it was…”

“Not me,” he grunts. “The place was empty when I started working here. All I did was keep it clean. Then, the day after your grandfather died, I got a message from the lawyer to let a truck in. They must have put everything back.”

He passes me and heads back to the ground level. Then he circles the cottage, tugging at boards and peering at the nails holding them on.

“The boards are secure,” I say, “and the nails are old. That means no one has pried them off and reattached them.”

“I can open it up later, take a look inside, but I don’t see any sign that someone’s been in here.”

“Agreed.”

Without a word, he heads back up the road. We pass my family’s cottage and continue on to my grandfather’s. As soon as we draw near, I see it’s in the same condition as my uncle’s. The porch is rotted, but the windows and door are securely boarded.

This time, I wait as Ben circles. Then I hear a curse from the back and go around to find him pulling back the branches of a bush that’s grown up against the house. Under that bush, a window has been broken, boards pried off.

“That’s not recent,” I say. “Not if the bush grew over it.”

“I haven’t checked in a while,” Ben says. “It’s been years since anyone even tried breaking in.”

I realize he thinks I was blaming him for not seeing it. “I mean that no one is in there now.”

He still yanks the bushes off. Then he clears the broken glass, grabs the sill and heaves himself up and through. When he disappears inside, I move closer. It’s the spare bedroom, with a long window low enough for me to see inside. Or it would let me see inside if the interior weren’t pitch black.

I really do need to start carrying around my phone. Or ask Gail to grab me one of those keychain penlights like Ben has.

Speaking of Ben, he’s vanished into that darkness. I consider. Then I check that the sill is clear of glass and climb through. When I’m in, enough light filters through for me to see.

The spare room is as I remember it. Except, unlike our cottage, it’s been left to rot exactly as it was. There are two twin beds, with moldering quilts. Dust covers everything, and I stifle a sneeze as I walk in.

It looks like it did that last summer, right down to the paperbacks piled on the nightstand, left there for guests by my grandmother. I bend to read the titles: Eat Pray Love, Shopaholic, Twilight, The Time Traveler’s Wife.

All popular titles from around the time we were last here.

My grandparents never came back. They hadn’t been at the cottage when my father …

When it happened. They never spent the whole summer—the humidity was too much for my grandmother’s arthritis—and they’d been home in Syracuse.

This was how it looked when they left earlier that month … and they’d never returned.

I’m standing there, staring at that stack of books, when I remember something and ease open the nightstand drawer.

There’s a flashlight inside. All the cottages have them in the bedrooms, for the frequent power outages.

I’m sure the batteries are long since corroded, but I flick the switch and then startle when the light comes on.

I carefully shine the beam around the room, half expecting the light to flicker out with any movement, but it stays on, and I head into the next room.

All three cottages have the same floor plan.

There’s no bedroom hall—just the two bedrooms and bathroom coming off the main room, which stretches from the kitchen at one end, through the dining room, to the living room.

I enter just past the kitchen and look around for Ben.

There’s no sign of him, and I have a wild image of being trapped in here as he slipped out to board up that one open window.

That’s a testament to how spooked I am, however much I’m trying to hide it.

A light moving in the bathroom leads me to Ben, and he walks out, not seeming the least bit surprised to see me there.

“Nothing,” he says. “Someone obviously broke in, but it was years ago. I don’t even see tracks in the dust. Don’t see anything obviously missing either. Must have just been looking around.” He walks past me. “Got a lot of that a decade ago. All that urban-spelunking shit.”

“People exploring abandoned buildings.”

“Yeah. With the history here…?” He trails off with a shrug. “But it was a fad. They lost interest years ago.”

He heads back toward the spare room. I shine my light around. It lands on the door to my grandparents’ room. I glance toward Ben again. Then I push open the half-shut door. Footprints in the dust show where he’d walked in for a few steps, looked around, and then left.

I’m about to do the same when I spot an open book on the right-hand nightstand.

My grandmother’s side of the bed. I smile and walk over to see what she was reading.

Old-school historical romance with a classic clinch cover, a busty maiden in the arms of a half-dressed pirate.

That makes me laugh softly under my breath, old memories sweeping back, me tracking down Gail to find her in the forest, devouring one of my grandmother’s romance novels.

How she’d turn bright red when I caught her and stammer some explanation about liking history.

I reach to pick up the novel, my smile turning to a grin as I plot where I’ll leave this book and what Gail will say. But when I step toward it, my foot falls and I pitch forward, my knee knocking hard into the nightstand as I yelp.

By the time Ben arrives, I’m standing on one foot, cradling my knee.

“There’s a broken board,” I say. “I was grabbing that book.”

His flashlight beam lands on the cover. “Interesting choice.”

“I like pirates. Especially half-naked ones.”

“Not judging.” His light sweeps down. “Huh.”

“What?” I follow his beam and see that I was wrong. The board isn’t broken. It’s missing.

The light moves on, and when he gives another “Huh,” I track the beam to a second removed board at the foot of the bed. He carefully skirts it as he rounds to my grandfather’s side.

“Two more here,” he says.

“Someone looking for treasure,” I say. “Or more of my grandmother’s romance novels. I always did wonder where she stashed them. Gives a whole new meaning to pirate booty.” I pause. “Well, they already gave a whole new meaning to pirate booty, but that’s another story.”

He doesn’t even crack a smile. Just crouches to shine his beam into one of the holes. I do the same with another board. Underneath the wooden plank, there’s just a gap with joists before the solid layer of the structural floor.

“There’s a crawl space underneath,” I say.

“Yes. I know. I’m the caretaker.”

“I just mean that I don’t know what someone would be looking for under the floorboards. Any storage would be down below.”

“That’s hidden and locked.” He rises and goes into the bathroom. I follow, and he pushes aside the moldering mat to show the crawl space hatch. There’s a built-in lock, just like the one in our cottage.

“What’s down there?” I ask.

“No idea. I don’t have the key.” He rises from checking it. “And before you ask, I did mention it to your grandfather. Just like I mentioned clearing all this shit out before it rotted. He never answered.”

“I wouldn’t have asked why you never went down there,” I say. “I know Sheriff Smits…”

I trail off, not sure how to finish that.

“Smits thinks I’m a lazy kid who can’t bother doing more than I absolutely have to.” He brushes past me. “I don’t much care what he thinks of me. We had run-ins when I was a teen, and that fixed his opinion for eternity.”

“Does anyone know…?” I struggle for the right words. “The, uh, terms of your employment.”

“No one’s business. I told you because it’s your business, being the new owner.” He slows, as if realizing something. “It’s between us. Smits is the only one who expects me to be grateful for my job here and, like I said, his opinion isn’t changing.”

“Okay.”

He’s moving fast, and I need to jog to keep up as he heads back into the spare room.

When he reaches the window, he turns, considering before saying, “That stuff with Smits, back when I was a kid, it had nothing to do with my job here.” Another pause.

“Also nothing violent. Just angry teenager shit.”

“Got it.” I glance back. “But about that crawl space. I have the key for ours, and it probably works in that one. Should we open it?”

“For what?”

“See what someone might have been searching for.”

He snorts. “Knock yourself out. I’ve got work to do.” With that, he climbs through the window and walks away, leaving me behind.

When we reach the cottage, Gail’s back and panicking because she didn’t find me inside, where I was supposed to be. Seeing me with Ben doesn’t exactly calm her fears. Nor does the fact that he just walks past her without even a greeting and continues down the road.

“What was that about?” she asks when he’s gone.

“Ben heard about the guy I saw in the shed. He wanted to check it out. Then we looked in the other cottages, to be sure no one was squatting in them.”

“And?”

I grab a grocery bag from the hatchback. “Uncle Mark’s place is boarded up. So is Grandpa and Grandma’s. Except theirs had the boards removed from a window.”

She stiffens.

“It wasn’t recent,” I say as I pick up a second bag. “A bush had grown over the opening. We still went inside. No sign of anyone in there for years, but when someone did break in, they’d torn up floorboards in the bedroom.”

She frowns over at me as we head to the cottage. “Looking for what?”

“No idea. I thought you might know.”

“I can’t even imagine.” She waits as I balance a bag on my knee while I open the door. “No, I can imagine actually. Someone probably thought your grandfather stashed money there and didn’t come back for it. Everyone around here figured the Paynes were rich.”

“Uh, they kinda were. Still are, compared to the locals.”

She flushes. “Right. That was insensitive.”

I hold open the door for her. “No, I get what you mean. They thought the Paynes were still loaded rather than middle class stretching toward upper. It might not even have been locals. The whole town is named after us, after all. Someone hears the Paynes abandoned their cottages in a hurry, after a family tragedy, and they might think we left something valuable behind. But whoever went looking, Ben thinks it’d have been years ago, which means it’s not connected to our trespasser. ”

“Good. Now if you want to get dinner going, I’ll do a little more work and then give you a shooting lesson.”

“Sure.”

She eyes me. “Is that a ‘yes’ kind of sure, or an ‘I’m agreeing but plan to distract you later’ kind of sure?”

“It’s a yes. At the very least, the sound of gunshots should scare off anyone on the property.”

“Good point. All right then. Dinner. Shooting. Bonfire. Our evening is planned.”