“If this is a stupid boy trick, I’m going to be very unamused.” She breathed easier when her light hit him. “What is it?”
“It’s that.” He pointed with his light.
The floor, a combination of packed earth and stone, gaped open. The trench ran nearly wall to wall, as wide as six feet, as deep as three.
“What . . . was something buried there?”
“Somebody obviously thinks so.”
“Like . . . a body?”
“I’d say a body’s more likely to be buried than disinterred in a basement.”
“Why would anyone dig down here? Hester never said anything about excavation.” She ran her light over a pickax, shovels, buckets, a sledgehammer. “It would take forever to dig in this ground with hand tools.”
“Power tools make noise.”
“Yes, but . . . Oh my God. That’s what this was about tonight? Coming down here to dig for . . . whatever. The legend? Esmeralda’s Dowry? That’s ridiculous—and that has to be it.”
“Then he’s wasting time and effort. For Christ’s sake, if there was treasure, don’t you think we’d know, or have found it by now?”
“I’m not saying—”
“Sorry—sorry.” He paced away. “All this wasn’t done just tonight. This is weeks of work, a few hours at a time.”
“Then he’s been down here before. But he cut the power, jimmied the door. Hester changed the alarm code,” Abra remembered. “She asked me to change the code when she got out of the hospital. She was upset, and it didn’t make any sense at the time, but she insisted. A new code, and to rekey the locks. I just did it, about a week before you moved in.”
“She didn’t just fall.” The sudden certainty of it punched like a fist. “The son of a bitch. Did he push her, trip her, just scare her so she lost her footing? Then he left her there. He left her on the floor.”
“We need to call Vinnie.”
“It can wait till morning. This isn’t going anywhere. I turned the wrong way. To get the wrench. I got mixed up. It’s been years since I’ve been down here, and I went the wrong way. We used to scare ourselves spitless in here when we were kids. It’s the oldest part of the house. Listen.”
When he fell silent, she heard it clearly. The grumble of wave over rock, the moan of wind.
“Sounds like people—dead people, we’d think. Pirate ghosts, and dead witches from Salem, whatever. I can’t remember the last time I was back this far. Gran wouldn’t come back here. She didn’t keep anything back here. I just turned the wrong way, otherwise I might never have found this.”
“Let’s get out of here, Eli.”
“Yeah.” He led her out, stopped before the first turn to pluck an old adjustable wrench from a shelf.
“It’s the jewels, Eli,” she insisted as they picked their way back to the generator. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. You don’t have to believe they exist. He does. Legend deems them priceless. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds—flawless, magical, exquisite. And gold. A queen’s ransom.”
“A rich duke’s daughter’s ransom, if you want to be accurate.” He fought off the gas cap with the wrench. “They existed, and would probably be worth a few million, a lot of millions at this point. They’re also somewhere at the bottom of the ocean with the ship, the crew and the rest of the booty.” He peered in, shining the light. “Dry as an old virgin’s . . . as dust,” he corrected. “Sorry.”
“You were about to be very vulgar.”
She held the light while he filled the tank. Picked up her glass and held the light while he fiddled with switches, some kind of gauge.
He punched the power button. The machine belched, farted, coughed. Eli went through the routine again, then a third time—and it caught.
“Let there be light,” she announced.
“In a few well-selected locations.” He took the glass she offered him, and his hand brushed hers. “Jesus, Abra, you’re freezing.”
“Imagine that, in a damp, unheated basement.”
“Let’s get upstairs. I’ll get a fire started.” Instinctively he wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
And instinctively, she leaned into him as they walked.
“Eli? I don’t want to believe it, but could whoever did this be local? They had to know you weren’t at home. They couldn’t have risked cutting the power and breaking in if you were here. It was early, really. Not long after nine-thirty.”
“I don’t know the locals the way I used to. But I know there’s a PI at one of the local B-and-Bs. It’d be his job to know I wasn’t here.”