Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [111]
“Jack.” Esperanza’s voice is soft but insistent.
I shut my eyes against the pain and concentrate on breathing. I force the anger to a place further back, where it can simmer instead of boil. And still I want to kill this man. Instead, I push myself up and then bring the butt of the gun down on his head. Breathing heavily, I turn and find Espy staring at me.
She puts a hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right?”
I nod, then point at Victor. “Can you do something with him?”
The front of George’s shirt is covered red, a trickle of blood still flowing from the wound. When I reach the chair, I see that the old man’s hand is moving. I bend down toward him and he grabs my forearm. It startles me so that I almost pull away. His lips are moving as tiny bubbles of frothy blood pool in the corners. I bring my ear close to his mouth.
“. . . keep them from Reese.” The next bit is incomprehensible. His eyes are closed, and I can see him fading, yet his hand on my arm remains strong. “They’re still here.”
“What?”
“The bones are here. . . .”
CHAPTER 24
I’ve always wanted a wine cellar. Not the brightly lit, modern, temperature-controlled variety favored by the upper middle class, the kind that exists solely so they can hold dinner parties and tell their guests they have to pop down to the wine cellar to select a nice Beaujolais. No, I fancy having a wine cellar like this one: the dark, dank, moldy kind lifted directly from a Poe story, with casks labeled by region, year, and vintner, and bottles of all kinds arranged in rows and columns crafted from wood dating back to the time of Columbus. To say that I am surrounded by a fortune in processed grapes would be a gross understatement. And such is my preoccupation that the wine goes mostly unnoticed.
My hand trembles as I run a finger along a cedar shelving unit well into the cellar against the south wall. The chamber was cut from the bedrock with such skill and care that the shelf structure abuts the wall with seamless precision. I push a thick layer of dust aside with my finger, and it falls from the wood like gray snow. I don’t feel anything, but I’m certain this is the place. Manheim said it twice, and I absorbed his words. If I live to be a hundred, I’ll still be able to repeat each and every syllable the dying man uttered. I take slow steps across the stone floor, letting my finger glide along the wood. I’m about to stop, retrace my steps, and try again, when I feel a hole in the frame.
I smile at Esperanza, who accompanies me with eagerness equal to my own. I reach into my pocket and pull out a ring, the one Manheim instructed me to remove from his finger. I hold it up to the light and it glints in the yellowish glow: the Manheim crest emblazoned in opal. I fumble for a moment until I can slip the ring’s gem into the hole, which accepts it as if it had been machined to the proper size.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it was more than the nothing that follows.
“So you’re going to be difficult,” I mutter, releasing the ring, allowing it to remain seated in the hole.
“What’s wrong?” Espy asks.
Hands on hips, I look around the room, searching for anything that might make this easier. “Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.”
Except that the room is clean. There’s not even a piece of wood lying around that I can jam into the seam—provided I can locate the seam. I move to the right and start to run my hand over the bedrock. Although likely hidden, there remains a seam somewhere along this length of wall, probably within eight inches of the shelving. That would have been common to any work done during the time period in which the cellar was built. The problem is that master craftsmen were hired for this job, and they hid the seam well. I close my eyes, relying on the sensitivity of my fingertips. I feel every stone, every rising and sinking of the surface, though nothing with the constancy of a seam. I open my eyes and step back.