Page 49 of Crazy Spooky Love
He nods across the darkness of the cellar. “Over there to the left of the chimney breast.”
“Coal chute over by the chimney,” I relay to the others, using my phone as a torch again to scan the wall. We all squint as we bump and squeeze our way across the dark, cluttered room.
“There, look,” Artie says, pointing up toward the ceiling. “Is that it?”
“It latches from bolts on the inside, I think,” Isaac says, frowning. Artie stretches up, but his fingers are a good few inches short.
“Thereused to be an old red ladder around here,” Douglas says, surveying the walls behind the heaped-up crates, the tea chests, and the old suitcases.
“Ladders?” I use shorthand to pass the message on, but none of us can see them anywhere. Douglas died in 1910; it was a big ask that they’d still be down here.
Artie drags a wooden tea chest over, huffing and puffing as he goes round the other side and shoves it into place beneath the hatch. “This is heavier than it looks,” he pants, then clambers up on it and reaches for the bolts. “Got it,” he says, quiet and triumphant at finding the hatch, then works the old bolts free and shoves both of his hands hard against the closed trapdoors. Sunlight floods in, making us all blink furiously, and a second later the tea-chest lid creaks and Artie’s foot goes straight throughit.
“Crap. Artie, are you okay?” Marina and I leap forward and grab an arm each to steady him, but he just grins, one leg buried up to the knee in the wooden chest.
“I did it, didn’t I?” His smile outshines the sunbeams shafting across the cellar.
“You did,” I say softly. “You’ve earned that egg sandwich, Artie Elliott.”
“I might even make you a cup of tea without grumbling,” Marina adds.
I look around the cellar, which isn’t anywhere near so frightening now that it’s not pitch black. “We’re going to need something more secure to stand on than that chest.”
Artie wriggles his leg free, and as he begins to push the chest out of the way I glance inside it at the exposed contents. Dropping to my knees on the cold flagstone floor, I pick out the pieces of shattered wooden lid and lay them aside.
“What’s in there?” Marina says, peering over as I lift out several beautiful encyclopedias.
“Books,” I say, piling them up carefully beside the crate. “And these.” I pick up a stack of smaller books tied together with packing string. The dark blue snakeskin-effect cover of the top volume is made from fine, paper-thin leather, faded gold numbers stamped on the front. 1908. Diaries. My heart starts to thump as I look at the bundle. Ten years’ worth, probably more. Isaac’s words come back to me about Lloyd.“Quite the obsessive diarist…”
Back at the office, Iget straight on the phone to Leo. It comes as little surprise when it goes straight to voicemail. I’m about to leave a furious message when someone taps the door, and Artie opens it to reveal the creepy twins standing outside.
Marina’s out of her chair and across the room in a flash, so I click my phone off and make a dash to hold her back. Artie and I link arms with her on either side in the doorway, and I can’t be certain but I think her feet leave the floor for a few seconds and cycle in the air.
“Ladies,” I say.
Their eyes flicker nervously from one of us to the other. “We’re sorry,” says the one on the left, wringing her hands.
Marina surges between us with her fists balled and we struggle to keep hold of her.
“Really, very sorry,” the other twin says, batting her outlandishly long false lashes and sounding anguished. “We did a bad thing.”
“A very, very bad thing,” Twin One adds more gravitas.
“We could have died down there!” Marina growls. “I could be…I don’t know, I could have diabetes and not have had my diabetic stabby thing with me! And Melody’s afraid of the dark! You could have given her an actual heart attack.”
I waver. I’m not entirely sure I appreciate being made to sound like such a scaredy-cat but I hold my tongue because she plainly isn’t finished yet.
“And Artie could have…fallen down the steps and broken his leg! In fact, he very nearly did. Show them, Artie, show them your limp!”
Artie looks conflicted. He clearly wants to back up Marina, but when he lifts his trouser leg it’s obvious that the tiny skin graze is not going to trouble him much.
“You two did that. Are you proud of yourselves now?”
The twins shake their heads and look at the floor, and a tear drips from one of their faces onto the cobbles outside the office door. “We went back an hour later to let you out again but you’d gone,” one of them whispers.
“That’s quite lucky for you, to be honest,” Artie says, without a hint of malice. “Because Marina wanted to wring your turkey necks until your eyes popped out of your heads.” He glances down at Marina. “Did I get that right?”
She nods, inhaling deeply and then blowing out again in slow, measured breaths. I recognize it as a sign that she’s trying to calm herself down so I slowly, experimentally, let go of her arm. After a couple of uneventful seconds, I nod toward Artie to do the same and I’m relieved to see that Marina has cooled her jets enough to not storm forward and hurl herself on the twins. I love her passion, but it’s landed her, and me by association, in more than our fair share of trouble over the years. Let’s just say the local police officers know us by our first names, although less so in recent years, thankfully. That breathing technique is something she picked up on one of the mandatory anger management classes she attended in lieu of a probation order.
