He stepped in. Somehow, the house still seemed to have an aura of death about it.
He tried the light switch by the front door, but nothing happened. He turned on his flashlight, and the parlor was illuminated.
An odd whisper emanated through the house. In his mind’s eye, Liam thought about the layout of the house. The front door faced south and Old Town, Key West. Cutter’s library or office was to the left, and behind it was a workroom. The living room stretched the rest of the way in the front, with a doorway leading into the dining room. The kitchen stretched across the back of the house and could be entered through the dining room or the living room. In the center of the living room there was a grand stairway.
The staircase where Kelsey’s mother had died.
He hadn’t been there when it had happened; he had seen Kelsey after, at the funeral. Throughout the service, attended by most of the city, Kelsey had stood, pale and stoic, trying to be a rock for her father, and for Cutter.
Later, when the formal services had ended, they had come here.
Friends and neighbors had helped; food had been set on the buffets, and on the dining-room table, and people had talked. And one by one, their other friends had gone, and finally he had been alone with Kelsey, and they hadn’t said much; he had just held her while she sobbed, until she was so tired that she needed to be brought up to bed.
He had carried her. With her father’s permission. Cutter had suggested that they just wake her; he had been loath to do so. “She’s not heavy, sir,” he had assured Cutter. But when he had brought her up the stairs and laid her down, she had clung to him, and he had stayed beside her in the darkness and the shadows until the exhaustion of her grief had brought sleep mercifully to her once again, and only then had he tiptoed away.
It had been the last time he had seen her.
He couldn’t think about Kelsey or the past now. He wasn’t the same; he was sure Kelsey wasn’t the same. And the house certainly wasn’t the same. It seemed like a shell, the bones of a family and happiness that had once existed.
He owed it to Kelsey, though, to keep the miscreants and thieves away until she decided what she wanted.
Two archways sat on either side of the stairway, one leading to the dining room, the other leading to an area that was a family room—in Victorian days, the family had seldom used the proper living room or parlor. The fireplace was dual; a mantel sat on the other side in Cutter’s office. Though it was seldom that the temperature went below forty even in the dead of winter, it could be cold in the dampness of the semitropics. He had found Cutter in the rocker by the fireplace.
He cast the light over the parlor. It sat in still and brooding silence, boxes everywhere, the heads of long-dead animals staring down at him, spiderwebs reigning supreme along with the dust.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!”
The sound was coming from the kitchen. Frowning, Liam walked through the parlor and quietly continued, skirting boxes and crates and statues, until he reached the kitchen.
He cast the flare of his flashlight toward the far wall even as a bloodcurdling scream ripped through the air.
It startled and unnerved him; even Bartholomew gasped.
“What the hell…?”
“Oh, my God! You’re alive, you’re real!”
The light illuminated three people—three young people.
Teenagers, as he had suspected.
They looked like little Key deer caught in the head-lights, staring back at him with white faces and terrified stares.
“Yes, I’m alive,” Liam said irritably. “Who are you, and what are you doing here? You’re trespassing.”
There were two boys and one girl. It was the girl who worked her jaw and gasped out, “There are things in here! Things! Horrible things, shadow ghosts, they touch you…they try to kill you!”
She had been hunched in terror against the wall. She had a frying pan clutched in her hands. She was dressed in capri pants and a tank top that left her stomach, and her cute little belly-button ring, visible. She was as skinny as a twig, maybe fourteen.
The boys seemed to gain courage from her. They both stood as well, and were each about an inch shorter than she was. One of them held a copper dough roller. The other was clutching a deep dish pan. Strange weapons—gained from the racks that stretched out over the brick island in the center of the room. Liam was surprised that none of them had grabbed the fire poker.
“Sir! There’s something awful in here!” one of the boys said.
“Awful!” the other repeated.
“How did you get in here?” Liam asked.
“The door was open,” the girl said. She was shaking. “Please…please get us out of here. We’ll never come back, never!”
“You can take us to jail—it will be okay!” the boy with the roller clutched in his hands told him, his eyes still huge and panicked.
“Look, just stay here, and I’ll check out the place and—”
“No!” The wail came out of the three of them in a chorus.
Liam sighed. “Look, if the door was open, someone was in here ahead of you. I’ve got to find whoever it is and—”
“No, oh, God, oh, no! You can’t leave us here! Please?” the girl begged.
Liam pulled out his phone and called the station. Jack, on the desk, answered the phone.
“Get a car out to the Merlin place for me, will you, Jack? I’ve got some teenagers.”
“Sure. Are you arresting them?” Jack asked.
“No, I just want them taken home. But I think there’s still someone in the house. The lights are down. I need some backup.”
The three teens were still huddled in front of him. He hung up and asked their names. The girl was Jane Tracy, the boy with the roller was Hank Carlin and the last was Joshua Bell. They had just come in as a prank.
“You know, it’s like…it’s like a haunted house. Like at Disney World,” Hank said. “We just wanted to have some fun. We weren’t going to steal anything. Please, can we get out? It can kill you, too, Officer, you don’t know…it’s terrible!”
“The Addams family…the Munsters…,” Jane said. “We just wanted to see. They said he had all kinds of treasures…Can we just get out?” she begged again.
He didn’t blame them. There was something creepy about the house. The hanging utensils cast strange shadows in the glare of his flashlight, while a rocker by the fire seemed to move. Dust motes seemed like misted forms in the artificial light, as well.
“All right, come on.”
He turned, and the three came running up behind him like metal drawn to a magnet; he thought he’d trip, they were
