“Oh, no,” Mabel said. “No, no, no!”
“Please, Mabesie. I need to do this.” She broke down and told Mabel everything she hadn’t about the murder investigation—about holding Ruta’s buckle, the whistling, Naughty John’s connection to Knowles’ End, and Memphis Campbell’s strange, brief visit to the museum in which he said the house seemed lived in.
“Jeepers, Evie,” Mabel said, shivering, and then she was thinking. Evie knew Mabel’s thinking expressions; the old girl was coming up with a plan. “We are not heading in there without taking precautions.” Mabel signaled for Evie to follow her as she marched down the hill and back to the boys tossing the baseball. “Do you know that old house on the hill?”
“Yes, Miss,” they said.
“Does anyone live there? Have you seen anyone coming or going?”
“Don’t nobody go in there. Not even for dares,” one boy said emphatically.
Mabel looked at Evie as if to say You see?
“Well, we are going in. It’s… a dare. For our sorority,” Mabel informed them.
The other boy shook his head. “That’s your funeral, Miss.”
“How would you fellas like to make ten cents?”
The boys followed them to the corner, which was as far as their mothers would allow them to go, they said.
“If Miss O’Neill and I are not out in thirty minutes, bring the law,” Mabel instructed.
“We don’t get the law for nobody. They’re as bad as the house.”
“How about if we’re not out in thirty minutes, you throw that baseball at the window as hard as you can, then run for your mothers. Can you do that?”
“It’s our only baseball.”
“Fifty cents,” Evie said.
“For fifty cents? Miss, I’ll throw like Babe Ruth.”
“Spiffy!” Evie placed a quarter in each of their hands. “Now, we’re trusting you to be on the square as a couple of regular fellas and keep watch. You are knights entrusted with a quest.”
“Huh?”
“Just keep your peepers on that dive, and don’t you dare breeze,” Evie said. She made them spit and swear on it, and then, arm in arm, she and Mabel walked toward the looming ruin of Knowles’ End.
The house had surely been a beauty in its day, with its grand turrets, the terrace, two small chimneys and one very fat one, and the arched windows. But now those windows were boarded over and the only two remaining shutters each hung by a nail, threatening to fall. The double oak doors had grayed with age. Metal scars marked the spot where a large knocker had been, but it was gone now—probably sold or stolen. The door was locked.
“There has to be a way in. Look around the side,” Evie said. She tripped over something in the yard and saw that it was a child’s doll. Its porcelain face was cracked and mold had settled along the scarlike seams.
At the back was a servants’ entrance. Evie removed a hairpin and worked it into the simple lock, springing it. The door creaked open and they found themselves inside a butler’s pantry with tall cabinets. It smelled of rot and dust. Weak bars of sunlight showed through the shutters’ slats.
Evie drew a flashlight from her pocketbook and the beam showed cracked tin ceilings and dust motes.
“What the devil are you looking for in here, Evie?”
She wasn’t sure, exactly. She needed something that would give her a read. “See if you can find an old pendant with a pentacle on the front.”
“Pentacle, as in Pentacle Killer?” Mabel said warily.
“It’s just a pendant,” Evie lied. “Steady, old girl. Oh, my…”
Evie swept into what surely must have been a ballroom in its day. Some of the furniture had been draped in sheets, making it seem more like a graveyard than a home. Beside a large hearth was a velvet settee gone to mold, its stuffing piling onto the floor. Filthy yellow wallpaper hung from the walls in strips. In spots, it had worn away entirely, exposing the rotting beams underneath. Whatever had been of value had been removed from the home long ago. There were no books or silver or knickknacks, nothing to help Evie. Even the light fixtures were gone. A cobweb-strewn grand piano with a handful of keys missing anchored one corner. Evie plinked one and it rang shrilly in the dead space. A small black spider crawled out from between two keys and Evie yanked her hand away. On the far wall hung a cracked mirror. It reflected the room in a fractured tableau. For a moment, Evie thought she saw movement in one of the shards and jumped.