He stopped, turned back. “Tool department’s back here, or it used to be.”
“I don’t want to go back there.”
“I can get the wrench all by myself.”
She didn’t much want to stay where she was alone, either, but couldn’t bring herself to admit it. “Well, keep talking. And don’t make any stupid gagging or choking or screaming sounds. I won’t be impressed.”
“If the basement monster attacks, I’ll fight him off in silence.”
“Just keep talking,” she insisted as he walked deeper into the dark. “When did you lose your virginity?”
“What?”
“It’s the first thing that came to my mind. I don’t know why. I’ll go first. The night of my senior prom. It’s a cliché for a reason. I thought it was forever, Trevor Bennington and I. It was two and a half months, six if you count pre-sex. . . . Eli?”
“Right here. Who dumped whom?”
“We just drifted apart, which is unsatisfying. We should’ve had some drama, some deception and fury.”
“Not all it’s cracked up to be.” His voice echoed eerily, making Abra turn to ujjayi breathing as she skimmed her flashlight around the area.
She heard a kind of thump, a curse. “Eli?”
“Damn it, what’s that doing here?”
“Don’t be funny.”
“I just rapped my damn shin on a damn wheelbarrow because it’s sitting in the middle of the damn floor. And . . .”
“Are you hurt? Eli . . .”
“Come back here, Abra.”
“I don’t wanna.”
“There’s no spiders. I need you to see this.”
“Oh God.” She inched her way along. “Is it alive?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“If this is a stupid boy trick, I’m going to be very unamused.” She breathed easier when her light hit him. “What is it?”
“It’s that.” He pointed with his light.
The floor, a combination of packed earth and stone, gaped open. The trench ran nearly wall to wall, as wide as six feet, as deep as three.
“What . . . was something buried there?”
“Somebody obviously thinks so.”
“Like . . . a body?”
“I’d say a body’s more likely to be buried than disinterred in a basement.”
“Why would anyone dig down here? Hester never said anything about excavation.” She ran her light over a pickax, shovels, buckets, a sledgehammer. “It would take forever to dig in this ground with hand tools.”
“Power tools make noise.”
“Yes, but . . . Oh my God. That’s what this was about tonight? Coming down here to dig for . . . whatever. The legend? Esmeralda’s Dowry? That’s ridiculous—and that has to be it.”
“Then he’s wasting time and effort. For Christ’s sake, if there was treasure, don’t you think we’d know, or have found it by now?”
“I’m not saying—”
“Sorry—sorry.” He paced away. “All this wasn’t done just tonight. This is weeks of work, a few hours at a time.”
“Then he’s been down here before. But he cut the power, jimmied the door. Hester changed the alarm code,” Abra remembered. “She asked me to change the code when she got out of the hospital. She was upset, and it didn’t make any sense at the time, but she insisted. A new code, and to rekey the locks. I just did it, about a week before you moved in.”
“She didn’t just fall.” The sudden certainty of it punched like a fist. “The son of a bitch. Did he push her, trip her, just scare her so she lost her footing? Then he left her there. He left her on the floor.”
“We need to call Vinnie.”
“It can wait till morning. This isn’t going anywhere. I turned the wrong way. To get the wrench. I got mixed up. It’s been years since I’ve been down here, and I went the wrong way. We used to scare ourselves spitless in here when we were kids. It’s the oldest part of the house. Listen.”
When he fell silent, she heard it clearly. The grumble of wave over rock, the moan of wind.
“Sounds like people—dead people, we’d think. Pirate ghosts, and dead witches from Salem, whatever. I can’t remember the last time I was back this far. Gran wouldn’t come back here. She didn’t keep anything back here. I just turned the wrong way, otherwise I might never have found this.”
“Let’s get out of here, Eli.”
“Yeah.” He led her out, stopped before the first turn to pluck an old adjustable wrench from a shelf.
“It’s the jewels, Eli,” she insisted as they picked their way back to the generator. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. You don’t have to believe they exist. He does.