You Don't Want To Know - By Lisa Jackson Page 0,58
pajama set made to look like a tuxedo, and she had to blink away tears when she remembered propping him under the Christmas tree that first year and taking twenty or thirty pictures with the new camera they’d bought just for the occasion. She opened one of the plastic bags and smelled the scent of the special baby soap she’d used to wash his clothes.
“I miss you,” she said, then, hearing footsteps overhead, refolded the tux, slipped it into its plastic sleeve, and returned it to the tub. Clearing her throat, she crammed the lid onto the plastic bin and returned it to its shelf.
She couldn’t spend much more time down here or she’d be missed, and she didn’t want to explain herself.
Reaching into her pocket, she grabbed the key again and began searching for old lockboxes or desks or drawers, anything with a lock. It seemed a nearly impossible task, as a hundred years of broken, forgotten, or outgrown clutter surrounded her. Generation after generation of Churches had stored unused items between the old walls of the basement.
Starting at the far end near the ancient furnace with its huge ducts, she searched through the discarded junk and uncovered one lock after another.
First, she slipped the key into the lock of a rolltop desk.
No go.
Next, two trunks from another century.
Uh-uh, but there was evidence of mice or rats on the clothes from a long-ago era that smelled vaguely of mothballs.
Shuddering, she reminded herself to have this place cleaned.
She uncovered an attaché case and diary, both locked, but their keyholes were much too small, and as she walked through the dingy place, she became more and more creeped out. It was like picking her way through the ghosts of her ancestors, and a chill crawled up her spine, a chill that had nothing to do with the cool temperature within.
Don’t let your nerves get the better of you.
Spying a dusty secretary desk in the corner of a room that had only been framed in, she threaded the key into the lock. For a second she felt triumph, but the key wouldn’t budge one iota. “Useless,” she told herself. She’d been in the basement nearly an hour, and she still had no idea where the damned key belonged. Maybe it had nothing to do with Neptune’s Gate at all.
She stood in the middle of the room and tried to concentrate, to come up with a logical idea for what the key was used for.
“Nothing,” she said, the musty smell of the low-ceilinged room heavy in her nostrils. The damned key is probably just part of a prank. Right up Jewel-Anne’s alley.
“But why?” she wondered. Was the girl bored, or just mean-spirited?
Shaking her head, Ava moved on. She found a vanity with a mirror that folded out into three sections. Her image in the dusty, speckled glass appeared worried and wan, on edge. “Well, duh,” she whispered to the woman in the reflection. In her mind’s eye, she saw her grandmother, seated on this faded, padded bench in her bedroom on the second floor—the same bench where Wyatt had been known to crash—and looking at herself in the mirror. Grannie always wore her hair wound into a knot, a perfect twist of snow-white hair, but at night, she’d let it down and stroke it in front of the mirror, her white locks still thick as they curled past her bony shoulders. Ava had been allowed inside the room that smelled of Joy, an expensive jasmine and rose fragrance rumored to have been favored by Jacqueline Onassis, or so Grannie had bragged as she’d turned her head in the mirror to view her profile, then push up the bit of a sag beneath her chin. She’d also been allowed to brush Grannie’s hair, a privilege that wasn’t bestowed upon any of her other grandchildren.
A cool breath of stale air touched the back of her neck and Ava shivered. She could almost hear her grandmother whispering, Don’t give up, Ava. You’re a Church, a fighter. And don’t be played for a fool . . . oh, no, that would never do . . .
BANG!
Ava gave an involuntary cry and jumped from the bench at the sound. Something hard had fallen onto the concrete floor. Banging her knee on the vanity, shaking the mirror in the process, she dropped the key as she whipped around, looking through the shadowy, draped clusters of furniture.
“Who’s there?” she said, her heart thumping, her nerves as taut as bowstrings.