from that neighborhood, checking another time or two behind her and breathing a relieved sigh when she saw no sign of Bill’s apelike visage leering after her. It wasn’t until she reached Barry’s brownstone a few minutes later that the heat in her face finally faded and her heartbeat was back to normal. Even though it was still midafternoon, the angle of the sun through the surrounding buildings left this portion of the block in early shadow. She shivered a little as she surveyed the house from the sidewalk. Without Barry there to lend his placid company, the feel of the building had changed. Something about the place now set off her hinky meter.
No longer was it simply a once-charming Greek Revival bravely holding up under the excesses of time and the previous owners’ careless remodeling. Instead, the building had assumed an air of cold abandonment that dared anyone to cross its threshold. It wasn’t simply that a murder had occurred on its premises, though that was bad enough! Wrapped in afternoon shadows, it hunkered behind its single shielding oak, its few unboarded windows seeming to watch for the errant passersby who strayed too close and needed to be taught a lesson.
At that last thought, Darla gave herself a firm mental shake. Shades of The Haunting of Hill House, she told herself with grin at her overwrought imagination. The place might be a dump in its current state, but Barry had mentioned nothing about any sinister history connected to it. The only thing that walked in that house was a mouse or rat or two—and possibly a certain black feline.
She softly groaned. Way to psych yourself up, kid, would have been Jake’s grinning response to the situation. But Darla cheered herself by remembering that she needed only to do an exterior search. Barry would have locked the place before he left. With that thought, she stepped around the woven construction fencing and made her way to the basement windows. There, she knelt in the damp earth. Clutching the security bars, she peered through the dirty glass into the darkness.
Or, rather, what should have been darkness. From what little she could make out through the layer of black grime coating the window, most of the basement was cloaked in deep shadow, save for a small light that seemingly had been left burning in one corner beyond the boiler. She frowned, scrubbing at the glass with her hand in an attempt to clean it.
She succeeded only in smearing about the dirt so that her view of the basement was even murkier, if that were possible. Had the crime scene investigators forgotten one of their flashlights? Or else maybe neglected to turn off one of Barry’s clip-on lamps? But the light meant that if Hamlet was in the basement, with luck she would spy him, or, at least, maybe a stray beam would catch his wide green eyes.
“Hamlet! Hamlet, are you in there?”
She strained her ears for some sound in reply; then, hearing nothing, she scooted over to the next window. Squatting in front of the glass, she tried again. “Hamlet! Kitty, kitty, kitty! Come on out!”
Barely had the words left her mouth than she thought she saw through the window’s veil of dirt a shadow move within the deeper darkness of the basement. “Hamlet,” she called again, reaching through the bars to rap at the window, “are you in there? Come out like a good cat, would you?”
The shriek of metal hinges nearby made her jump. She gave a reflexive shriek of her own and fell backward, landing with an ungraceful thud into a sitting position there on the grass. Heart pounding wildly, she shot a quick look toward the porch. Someone was hanging out at what was supposed to be an empty brownstone!
Her view of the door was blocked by the pile of brick and its wrapping of orange construction fencing, so her imagination—already running full bore—had a few fleeting moments to conjure various scenarios. Perhaps she’d stumbled upon the scrap thieves in their work, and they didn’t want any witnesses. Maybe Bill had guessed she suspected him of Curt’s murder and followed her, planning to drag her into the empty house and kill her, too. Or it could be that Curt’s ghost was lonely with Barry out of town and was looking for some company.
She scrambled to her feet, not liking any of these possibilities and poised to take off at a dead run. If Hamlet was in the basement,