LITMIR.BIZ

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through the opening at a stairway that angled steeply to a cellar beneath the service portion of the house. “Lovely,” she complained. “Spiders and cobwebs. This had better be good.”

      “It’s worth it,” Allison promised. “Jack, you will positively drool when you see.”

      “Must be a chained brontosaurus, then,” Stuart said gleefully.

      Allison led the way. They filed after her down into the shadowy cavity of the cellar that had been hewn out of the solid rock of the bluff. Lane was immediately aware of a mustiness in the air. Her eyes, adjusting to the dimness, made out the shape of the furnace crouching under the rafters like a squat beast. From somewhere overhead came the soft ping of a heating duct emitting air.

      Jack, still provocatively at her side, murmured an intimate aside. “Reminds me of those nights when we’d rent a fright movie and snuggle. Remember?”

      She didn’t answer him. It was too risky.

      “Over here,” Allison called, gathering them at one end of the cellar where a temporary plywood barrier had been erected against the rock wall.

      “The stones were crumbling here,” she explained, “and when the masons started to dig away all the rubble to set up a new, deeper wall, they found...well, you’ll see.”

      Lane could now recognize a door in the plywood barrier. It had been fitted with a hasp and a padlock. Allison produced a key and started to free the padlock. Then she stopped, her face wearing a frown of annoyance.

      “It’s already unlocked,” she said. “Not supposed to be. I wonder who forgot—”

      “Allison,” Hale urged, “let’s get on with it.”

      “All right, here we go. Hang on to your lamps, people.”

      Spreading the door wide, she revealed a gaping black hole in the rock. The fissure, merely a crack when discovered, she explained, had been widened by the masons to permit a narrow passage. Allison, head low, squeezed through the opening, the others trailing after her in anticipation tempered by apprehension.

      Lane felt a little like Alice in Wonderland when she stood erect on the other side, gazing in amazement around the natural cavern in which they found themselves. The oil lamps flung shadows over the limestone formations, intensifying the bizarre spell of the cave.

      Stuart whistled in the hollow stillness. “Man, where are the vampires?”

      The air was raw, and Ronnie shivered. “This is creepy. Let’s go back.”

      “Wait,” Allison insisted. “You haven’t seen the good stuff in the next chamber. It’s perfectly safe.”

      “Just how many chambers are there?” Jack wondered.

      “Could be a whole labyrinth of them,” Dan said. “The place has yet to be explored. Or there might be only the two chambers. Workers must have just missed discovering the whole thing when the cellar was first excavated.”

      “Now, if the tour will just step this way, please.” Allison directed them playfully as she led the way through another opening into a second, larger cavern.

      When they had collected down at one end of the chamber, the oil lamps casting flickering pools of light, she pointed with delight. “There! Didn’t I tell you it was something special?”

      Lane, along with the others, found herself gazing at a series of oblong depressions hacked out of the floor of the cave. Occupying each of the shallow, open pits was a skeleton curled on its side. The areas on either side of the human remains were rich with grave offerings. They could see implements of bone, copper beads, pots of assorted sizes and shapes, crumbling birch-bark baskets decorated with quill work and a variety of shell adornments.

      “Oh, my God,” Ronnie cried, “it’s a cemetery!”

      “An ancient one,” Allison said. “The state archaeologists can’t wait to get their hands on it.”

      Jack was impressed. “I don’t blame them. It’s not my field, but this looks to me like the Archaic Indian period, and that makes it a real treasure. Even better, it hasn’t been disturbed through the centuries.”

      “Probably,” Dan explained, “because the original way in was through the bluff face in the first chamber, and that was sealed off by a rock fall ages ago.”

      “And all this time,” Hale mumbled darkly, staring at the skeletons, “they were waiting here in the blackness.”

      Lane shuddered at his morbid observation.

      “The petroglyphs!” Allison exclaimed, remembering. “You have to see the petroglyphs on the walls! They’re wonderful! Bring the lamps over to this side.”

      The lights were carried to the other end of the chamber. And there they revealed something else waiting for them in the darkness. Something huddled down in the farthest corner that, once illuminated, brought them all to a horrified standstill.

      It was Ronnie’s strangled cry that echoed in the cave. A sick, croaking sound. The rest of them were silent with shock.

      “Teddy!” Allison whispered at last in disbelief. “Dear God, it’s Teddy Brewster!”

      The body had been propped against the wall, knees drawn up. An arrow protruded from the thin chest. Grisly enough. But what Lane found even more appalling was the sight of the young florist’s bared head. He had been scalped.

      Chapter Three

      The fir tree standing in the corner captured Lane’s attention as they gathered again in the lounge. The tall, symmetrical evergreen seemed to mock the stunned party. Lane knew that the tree would never be decorated now, just as she realized that there could be no wedding in the chapel tomorrow. She felt numb, unable to accept what they had discovered in the cave below.

      The rest of the group dealt with the horror in their own individual ways. Most of them were still silent with shock. Not surprisingly, Ronnie was the exception. She was near hysteria as she collapsed into the nearest easy chair.

      “Tell me it’s a joke!” she pleaded shrilly. “Someone tell me it’s all nothing but a hideous joke!”

      No one did, or could.

      “Stuie,” she wailed, “be an angel and get Mama a brandy. I know I saw a decanter in the library next door.”

      “Get your own booze,” he growled.

      “Little beast! How could you when I feel positively ill?”

      “I’ll get the brandy for you,” Lane offered quietly. Anything to escape the cruel irony of that Christmas tree. Besides, wasn’t she supposed to be able to satisfy difficult people and their demands in situations of crisis? It was a necessary skill she had developed in her hotel work.

      As she slipped into the adjoining library she hoped that ability wouldn’t fail her. Her hands were none too steady, however, as she poured a generous measure of brandy from the crystal decanter on the burnished tray. It was the sight of the weapons collection covering the walls of the library that unnerved her. She couldn’t help associating those gruesome artifacts with the obscenity in the cave.

      When she turned with the glass, she saw that Stuart had trailed her into the library. There was a sulky, defiant expression on his young mouth. He, too, gazed at the weapons. But with a difference. There was a gleam, almost of satisfaction, in his eyes. Lane shivered when she realized that his attention was fixed on a tomahawk.

      She passed him without a word and returned to the lounge. The brandy in her shaking hand was in danger of slopping over on the geometric patterns of the Scandinavian rug when Jack rescued the glass.

      “Here, I’ll take it,” he murmured.

      This was one time when she didn’t object to his assertiveness. She gladly surrendered the glass.

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