Dark Places: Edge of Reason

Part Four

Just as Honey was about to run for help, Trixie exclaimed, “I’m going to get you for this, Daniel Mangan!”

Honey dashed through the doorway and thumped Dan on the arm with all her might.

“Hey!” he cried. “What was that for?”

She gave him another thump for his trouble. “For scaring me half to death,” she explained, still shaking with fright. “How did you do that?”

Dan grinned and gave a shrug. “Secret places, for keeping secrets.”

Nothing the two girls could do would make him tell where he had hidden.

Night was falling as the group made their way back to their lodgings. They had gradually come together into one group as the day had progressed, ending their explorations with a picnic on the banks of the stream and a tour of the old town hall. The town seemed eerily still and dark as the last hints of sunlight faded from the sky. Barely a light showed in any direction, save for the flashlight that Jim had had the foresight to bring along and a slight glow in the distance that they assumed belonged to the nearest farm. For a few moments, a motorcycle’s engine could be heard in the distance, then it, too, faded away. The gentle sounds of night-time creatures, and the crunch of their feet on the gravel, seemed loud to their ears as they walked.

Honey gave a shiver. “It’s kind of spooky here, now that it’s getting dark.”

“You get used to it,” Trixie answered. “My first night here, I hardly slept a wink, but now I don’t really mind. It’s peaceful.”

“It’s lonely,” Honey contradicted. “It seems wrong for all of these houses to be dark and vacant. There should be people inside, and lights shining out.”

Mart made a whooo-ing ghost sound and waved his hands at her, making her jump. “Maybe there are people inside. Why don’t you try a house or two and see if you can meet them?”

“No, thank you,” she replied, with dignity. “I’m not that anxious to meet the former occupants!”

He waggled his eyebrows. “You mean, the late occupants.”

Honey laughed. “I really do mean the former occupants. I’m pretty sure that they aren’t still here, but if they are I think I’ll keep out of their way. What I really meant was that I thought people should be living in these houses. Ghosts do not live and therefore they do not count when I’m talking about people living in houses.”

A long-drawn-out groaning sound made her stop dead in her tracks. Eyes wide, Honey whispered, “Did I speak too soon?”

Trixie shook her head and pointed to a nearby house, its front door ajar. “It happens a lot as it starts getting dark, or as the day warms up. Doors swing open or shut, things creak and groan and squeak. It’s just the temperature changing and making things move.”

Honey nodded, but looked sceptical. “Well, as I was saying, I think that people should live here, which is one of the reasons why it would be a great place for Jim’s school.”

“I’m not sure that makes all that much sense,” Jim objected.

“Of course it does,” his sister answered. “Eastedge needs people to live in it and your school needs somewhere to exist. They match perfectly.”

He smiled. “We’ll see. I was thinking of doing some exploration of the wider area while I’m here. When the rest of you go home, I’ll stay and do some research on North Dakota. I won’t know for sure whether this would be a good place for my school until I’ve done that.”

“It will be,” Honey assured him. “This is going to be your school. I can just tell.”

Early the next morning, the group set out on further explorations. Their first stop was the site of the house where the clerk John Nancarrow had once lived. It had been demolished long ago, but Abel had shown them where the house had once stood and Trixie thought it wise to check over the site and see if anything remained. The result was disappointing.

“There’s not even a cellar,” she complained. “When they tore down the house, they dug it up. There’s nothing here at all.”

“It was a little much to hope for anything else,” Brian pointed out.

Trixie frowned and poked her tongue out at him as soon as his back was turned. “Well, let’s go check on the business owner’s place,” she suggested. “At least that house is still standing.”

The group made their way to the house, which Honey had already tagged as the principal’s residence, chatting in twos and threes. Trixie and Mart had already explored it, as well as showing it to the others, but since discovering its connection to the crime, they had decided to go over it more carefully. Before long, they were all wandering through the house, poking in cupboards and opening doors.

“There’s an attic up here,” Jim mentioned. “Have you looked in it yet?”

Trixie shook her head and raced up the steep stairway. “Oh, woe,” she groaned as she played a flashlight around the small space. “It’s jam-packed. I’m going to have to spend hours in here, I think.”

“How about if you do that when we’re not here?” Di suggested, screwing up her nose. “I don’t want to spend my weekend clearing out someone else’s attic!”

Trixie nodded and went back down the stairs. “Well, let’s keep moving, then. I’ll come back here later.”

Soon, the group were exploring the town once more, focussing on the places that Trixie and Mart had not already checked. After some time, they divided into smaller groups once more. It was hard to keep the whole group together and it seemed a better use of time for them to split up. As the day progressed, they gravitated back to the main street and Trixie found some time to look around by herself.

At the end of the street, a brick building stood all alone, its one-time neighbours either fallen down or demolished long ago. Its boarded-over windows gave it a strange, blank look, which intrigued Trixie greatly, though she had not yet taken the opportunity to look inside. Leaving the rest of the group behind, she went to explore. The keys jingled on their ring as she sorted through them and it took several tries before she found the one which opened the door.

The interior was dim and dusty, weighed down by the years of neglect. From the outside, Trixie had expected to be entering a store of some kind; once inside, she found that the building had last been used as a home. The front room, where she stood, was still partly furnished as a living room. There was something in the way the light and shadows fell that gave Trixie a mild thrill.

Coughing a little as the dust was stirred into the air, she began a slow exploration of the space. Crumbling papers still lay on a side table, illegible in the dimness. A row of books were slowly shedding their bindings on the shelf and a few ornaments looked forlorn with their heavy coating of dust. Curiosity overtaking her, Trixie pulled out one of the drawers in the side table and began to sort through the contents. The papers she found there were a jumble of old bills, receipts and letters, all addressed to Mrs. Ruby Gray. Finding nothing of interest, Trixie closed the drawer and tried the next room.

She pushed the door open to reveal what must once have been a storage area. At the time of its last occupation, it had been used as a makeshift kitchen, with a very basic portable stove, a basin for washing up and a battered old table and pair of chairs. There was a door to the outside in one wall and next to it hung a metal hip-bath. In one corner, a wooden staircase led to the upper level. Trixie looked all around but did not find anything of interest.

Another door led into an adjoining room. Entering this room, Trixie found herself in a tiny bedroom. The metal frame of the bed was rusty and the mattress mildew-stained and lumpy. In one corner, pushed hard against the bed stood a narrow closet. An ancient wooden chest of drawers filled most of the remaining space.

The search of this room did not take long, either. The closet still contained a number of garments, which appeared to have belonged to an elderly lady of diminutive size. The drawers revealed more clothes and nothing else.

Without a backward look, Trixie left the bedroom and headed up the stairs. The first room on the left had once been a bedroom. The metal bed frame remained, in pieces, neatly stacked against the wall, and there was a small closet, but there was no other furniture. A pile of cardboard boxes was stacked to one side, each marked ‘Sarah’s Things’.

Trixie lifted the flap of one box and peeked inside. Old clothes were slowly turning to dust, hastened slightly when Trixie touched them. She shut the lid and tried another box. This one contained a variety of miscellaneous objects, with a suggestion that there might be something more interesting underneath so she slid it onto the floor to take a closer look.

Most of the box’s contents she threw higgledy-piggledy onto the floor, until she was almost at the bottom. The last couple of inches were filled with yellowed and insect-stained papers. After a few moments of sifting through them, she did a double take. Lifting a particular page out of the pile, she laid it on the table and examined it more closely. One word – or, rather, one name – had caught her eye: Belden. Leaning close to make the best of the low light, she tried to quickly read the spidery handwriting of what was evidently a letter, addressed to Miss Sarah Belden and written by an older lady in a condemning style. It seemed that the Miss Belden of the letter, like Trixie herself, had an aunt who disapproved of some of her antics. Trixie felt a surge of thankfulness that Aunt Alicia had never gone quite as far as this woman.

Setting the unpleasant missive aside, she dug back into the pile of papers, soon pulling out a number of other letters to the same Miss Belden, from a variety of sources. An involuntary cry escaped her lips when she found one which mentioned Crabapple Farm. She sighed in frustration to find that there were no clues as to the relationship between the writer – who signed herself as Emma, and appeared to be living at Crabapple Farm at the time of writing – and the recipient.

She sorted through the papers more carefully now, scanning each one for clues. At the bottom of the pile, a dirty, crumpled letter bore the marks of tears. Trixie read it through several times, trying to pull all possible meaning from the words.

My dear Sarah,

By now you will have heard the terrible news about Will and I’m sure you are wondering what happened to him. He went out riding that horse he’s had such trouble with yesterday afternoon to inspect the farm and we expected him back in an hour or two. He was out such a long time that Auntie and I got worried and sent for Joe. He found poor Will against the big tree at the top of the next hill and it looked like he must have died as soon as he hit it, some hours before. The horse had fallen and broken a leg, so that is the end of that.

We will be burying Will this afternoon, right next to Papa and Mama. I am sorry that you and Ruby will not be here to see it. Auntie says that it serves you right for running away and Ruby for marrying a flighty, unsettled man. I told her that I’d like to run away and join you. She locked me in my room, but I climbed out the window and down the tree so that I could send you the news at once. Auntie will write as well, but I’d rather you heard what happened from me.

And that brings me to the next problem. Auntie insists that the only thing to be done is sell the farm. Please come home, Sarah. I need you to help me stop her. I don’t care if the place where Will died is sold, but I could not stand to leave the farm like this. I think our only chance is to convince Robert to take up the farm when he marries Miss Van Elderen. I know that he doesn’t want to, but he has missed you so much and I hope that if you come home and promise to stay here that we can make him change his mind. Auntie, of course, still sticks by what she said before you left, but if Robert is married she will have no reason to stay and we can be rid of her. You must understand that she objects to Robert’s and Jessie’s and Ruby’s existence just as much as to yours and mine! It was horrible of her to say it, and I don’t expect you to forgive her, but even if we didn’t exist, it wouldn’t bring Mama back, so can we please put it aside for the duration?

Until we see each other again,

Your loving sister,

Emma

A frown creased Trixie’s face as she wondered just who these people were, how they might be related to her and what the last few sentences could possibly mean. None of the names seemed at all familiar, from the little she knew of her family history. She was visited by an urge to go out to the car, drive off in search of the nearest place with cell phone reception and call her father immediately, but squashed it down in favour of searching for further clues where she was.

She had sorted through the rest of the papers and started looking through the other boxes when footsteps warned her that someone was approaching. Looking towards the door, she was dazzled by the bright daylight shining through the west-facing window of the opposite room, after concentrating so long on the papers. The silhouette of a man filled the doorway and it took her a few heart-stopping moments to realise it was her eldest brother.

“So this is where you’ve gotten to.” His voice, as well as his passage across the floor, sounded loud after her long isolation. “Did you find something interesting?”

She nodded vigorously, sending her curls bouncing. “Just take a look at these old letters. They’re to a woman called Miss Sarah Belden and one of the people who wrote to her lived at Crabapple Farm, and she was called Emma, and was Sarah’s sister, and someone called Will was killed in a horse-riding accident and their aunt wanted to sell the farm, only the letters stop there and I think it was because Sarah went home like they asked her to, so do you know of anyone in the family a long time ago called Sarah or Emma or Will or any of these other names she mentions, or do I need to go and call Dad right now?”

Brian gave her a long, meditative look. “Do you practice circular breathing?” he asked, apparently in all seriousness.

“Brian!” she warned.

He was unrepentant. “It is beneficial to the human brain to receive oxygen at regular intervals.” He continued, over her exasperated objection to his comment. “As it happens, I think I might be able to help you with this point of family history. I don’t recall the specific names you mentioned – and I’m not certain that Dad ever told me the names of the people concerned – but I think the incident of the death happened on what is now part of the Manor House grounds, near where the house is now. It certainly was sold and, I believe, never farmed again. I don’t know of any member of the family living in North Dakota, but I understand from Dad that over the generations the family has had more than its fair share of rebels and wanderers. It’s entirely possible that a relative of ours might have been in any given state in the union over the last four or five generations.”

He took the letter from her hand and carefully read it through. “Ah, I see,” he murmured a few minutes later. “I’m fairly sure that the Robert mentioned here was Dad’s grandfather. I think Miss Van Elderen must be Dad’s grandmother’s maiden name – her first name was Martina, you know. They’re the ones that Mart and Bobby are named for. Robert was one of the youngest in the family and should never have gotten the farm, except that the older brother who had it died without dependants and I think there might have been some other brothers who didn’t want it.”

She nodded, digesting this snippet of information. “What about the last part? What does that mean?”

Brian shook his head. “Anything I said about that would only be a guess.” He gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Come on; everyone’s wondering where you’ve gotten to. How about if you get back to the mystery you’re being paid to solve and leave this one for another time?”

Trixie’s shoulders slumped, but she followed him out of the building. “So, where is everyone?” she asked, as they walked together.

“The building where we’re staying. We were thinking it might help to talk through the problem.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. I should have thought of that myself.”

“Ah! The prodigal returns,” Mart announced, as his siblings arrived. “Come inside and join the discussion. We’re speculating on methods of making holes in brick walls.”

“Have you got anything, yet?” Trixie asked, as she took a seat next to Di. “Any good theories?”

“Only that it would have been easier if they’d used explosives – and since there were mines in the area, you’d think that explosives would be easy enough to get,” Honey explained, “only that would have made a lot of noise and mess, which would probably raise the alarm before you can steal anything, and so that’s probably why they didn’t use them.”

“So, we’re thinking,” Dan continued, “that it was done slowly and quietly.”

Trixie nodded. “That is a bit of a problem. Slowly and quietly would mean over a few days, at least, I’d guess. The thing that I can’t get, though, is where the safe went. It was huge, it was heavy and it must have been a whole lot of trouble to move. So, why did no one ever find it?” She got up and started to pace as she thought. “I’m guessing that it wasn’t taken too far, but where could you hide a safe?”

“There are possibly a lot of abandoned mines around here,” Brian suggested. “What’s to say what you might find in an old mine shaft?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Too far away. I’m thinking it must be closer – so close that we’ve probably passed it by as we were searching.”

“A storm cellar? An abandoned building? In the foundations of a fallen-down house?” Honey looked doubtful and sounded the same. “Couldn’t it be something like that?”

Trixie shook her head. “They weren’t abandoned, back then. It could have been dropped into a cellar, but I can’t see how it would have stayed undiscovered.”

A thoughtful look settled on Mart’s face. “Have you got the keys?” he asked his sister. “I think I’d like to take another look at the scene of the disappearance.”

Curiosity caused the rest of the group to trail behind as Mart entered the dilapidated building. They watched him lift the hatch that led into the cellar and some of them followed as he climbed down. Diana, Honey and Brian remained in the dusty room above.

“I thought so,” Mart muttered, as he shone his flashlight around the cluttered room. “The floor in here isn’t level and they’ve boxed off the part that must have been too low to be useful. What if the reason they took out the back wall wasn’t to take the safe out, but to make people think they had taken the safe out? What if they actually took out some of the floorboards and dropped the safe down into the void back there?”

“One way to find out,” Trixie cried, with glee. She scrambled over the debris and started looking for a hand-hold in the end wall.

“What do you think you’re doing?” her brother asked, scratching his head. “Do you think you can rip down walls with your bare hands?”

In answer, Trixie pulled on the board she was holding and extracted it with a loud screeching sound.

“What’s going on down there?” Brian demanded from above.

“It’s just Trixie doing some demolition work,” Dan replied, obviously amused.

While this exchange was going on, Mart and Trixie were shining a light into the space and both trying to see at the same time. As soon as they managed to achieve this, they both let out a cry of triumph.

“The safe!” Trixie announced to the world at large. “It’s in there!”

“Maybe we can lift some floorboards upstairs,” Mart suggested. “I’d guess that’s how it got down here in the first place and it would probably be easier than dismantling the wall.”

The pair raced back upstairs and began searching on hands and knees. Before long, Trixie cried out in triumph and they both started lifting one long board. Some of its neighbours soon followed, but others must have been re-nailed at some point and they held fast. At the end of ten minutes, they had created a hole large enough to squeeze through and an impression of what the entire hole must have been. Several of the joists which held the floor showed joins corresponding to the same area and there were also extra pieces of bracing visible that were not part of the original structure.

“How are you intending to open it once you’re down there?” Brian asked, as Trixie made to climb down. “I don’t suppose you have the combination, and even if you did there’s no telling whether it would still work after all these years.”

She shrugged away the difficulty and clambered down into the hole. After a few moments, her voice came up to the others. “It’s part-sunk into the ground. When they got the hole made, they must have just pushed it through and let it fall. It’s kind of lop-sided, too, like one side went in first. And I don’t have to open it myself, when I can just call someone professional to do it for me. I’m not fourteen now, Brian – I do know that sometimes I need help with this kind of thing. I’ll call Mr. Wheeler right away and it’ll be arranged in a jiffy.”

“I guess that will be when most of us aren’t here.” Honey’s voice showed her disappointment. “I wish I could be here to see what’s inside.”

“Well, you’re the one who went and got a job that you need to go back to,” Trixie teased. With some help from the others, she managed to climb out of the hole. “If you all weren’t such responsible people, you could all stay here and see it.”

“Or, you could be like me,” Mart added, “and have a job that gives you summers off.”

Honey smiled at him, but shook her head. “I think I like my job better than I’d like yours, thank you, even if I have to work all summer.”

“Your loss,” he answered. “So, what do we do now? That’s the mystery practically solved, isn’t it?”

“Hardly,” his sister replied. “We may know where the safe went, but we’re not much further ahead on why it’s there.”

Mart frowned. “You have a point, there. I mean, it’s closed, isn’t it? Which suggests that whatever was in there is still in there. Why steal a safe if you’re not going to take the contents?”

“But the safe wasn’t really stolen, was it?” Brian put in. “It was just hidden. Why would someone go to all that effort?”

“I guess we’ll find that out when it’s opened,” Trixie suggested. “I think it’s going to come down to what’s not in there, rather than what is.”

“You mean, the theft happened before the safe disappeared?” Honey clarified.

“It’s one theory,” Trixie explained with a shrug. “One of the best theories, I think, but we won’t know until it’s opened. It’s all speculation until then.”

Continue to part 5.