Beth’s brow furrowed. “Why not? I just want to look.”
“Because it’s morbid,” Alan told her. He opened his lunchbox and pulled out a sandwich, offering Beth half. She shook her head.
“But all I want to do is see where it happened,” she pressed. “What’s wrong with that?”
Alan sighed, knowing there was really no way to explain it to her. If he’d been her age, he’d have been dying to see the spot where the accident had happened, too. This morning, as he’d expected, there had been a steady stream of kids coming by the mill, some of them stopping to stare, others trying to look as though the last thing in the world they had come to see was the place where someone had died the day before. “There isn’t any reason for you to see it,” he said. “There’s nothing there, anyway.”
“Not even any blood?” Beth asked with innocent curiosity.
Alan swallowed, then concentrated on the sandwich, though he was suddenly losing his appetite for it. “Why don’t we talk about something else? How’s everybody up at your house?” Beth’s eyes clouded, and Alan immediately knew that something had gone wrong that morning. “Want to talk about it?”
His daughter glanced at him, then shrugged. “It wasn’t any big deal,” she said. “I just had a fight with Tracy, that’s all.”
“Is that why you came down here? ’Cause things got too rough up there?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, there isn’t anyone home. They went over to the Baileys’.”
“All of them?”
“Mom and Uncle Phillip. Tracy’s got some friends over. And they’re all talking about what happened to Jeff.”
So much for changing the subject, Alan thought. And then, suddenly, he thought he understood. “Might be kind of neat if you could go back and tell ’em all what the spot looks like, hunh?”
Beth’s eyes widened slightly. “Could I? Could I go down there just for a minute?”
Helplessly, Alan gave in. “All right. After lunch, I’ll take you down. But just for a minute. Promise?”
Beth nodded solemnly. “I promise.”
With the darkness washed away by the blazing worklights, the basement looked nothing like it had before. It was simply a vast expanse of space, very much like the main floor, except that down here the space was broken by the many columns that supported the floor above. As she looked out into the basement, Beth could hardly remember how terrifying it had been when it was dark. Now there was nothing frightening about it at all.
Except for the spot on the floor.
It was a slightly reddish brown, and spread from a spot a few yards from the bottom of the stairs. It looked to Beth as though someone had tried to clean it up, but there was still a lot left, soaked into the wooden floor.
Still, if her father hadn’t told her what it was, she wasn’t sure she would have known. Somehow, she had sort of expected it to be bright red, and glistening.
She stared at the spot for several long seconds, searching her mind for a memory.
But all that was there was the memory of the dream.
Surely, if she had killed Jeff herself, seeing the place where she had done it would have brought it all back.
And then, as she was about to turn away, her eyes scanned the rear wall, under the stairs. She frowned, then tugged at her father’s arm. “What’s that?” she asked.
Alan’s eyes followed his daughter’s pointing finger. For a moment he saw nothing—just a blank wall. Then, as he looked again, he realized that under the stairs the wall wasn’t made out of concrete.
It looked to him like it was made out of metal.
He stepped into the shadows below the stairs, and took a closer look.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said softly.
“What is it, Daddy?” Beth asked. Suddenly her heart skipped a beat and she felt a slight thrill of anticipation.
“It looks like some kind of fire door,” Alan replied. He reached up and felt in the darkness, and his fingers found a rail bolted to the concrete behind the metal. Moving his hands along the rail, he came to a metal roller.
He pounded on the metal, and heard a low echoing sound.
“Is it hollow?” Beth asked.
Alan nodded. “It sure seems like it’s some kind of fire door. Give me a hand, and we’ll see if we can open it.”
Gingerly, Alan felt for the end of the door nearest the staircase, and curled his fingers around its edge. Then he leaned his weight into it, and tugged.