Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [58]
The Doane house was located about two miles past town, up an unpaved drive that had once been well tended but was now little more than a rutted track. He drove cautiously, careful not to bottom out the Spyder in the hard-packed dirt. Dense stands of trees crowded in on both sides of the road, their skeletal branches lacing the night sky above their heads. D’Agosta, flung around in his seat until his teeth rattled, decided that even the Zambian Land Rover would have been preferable in these conditions.
Pendergast rounded a final bend and the house itself came into view in the headlights, the sky roiling with clouds above. D’Agosta stared at it in surprise. He had expected a large, elegant structure, as ornate as the rest of the town was plain. What he saw was large, all right, but it was hardly elegant. In fact, it looked more like a fort left over from the days of the Louisiana Purchase. Built out of huge, rough-edged beams, it sported tall towers at either end and a long, squat central façade with innumerable small windows. Atop this façade was the bizarre anachronism of a widow’s walk, surrounded by spiked iron railings. It stood alone on a small rise of land. Beyond to the east lay forest, dense and dark, leading to the vast Black Brake swamp. As D’Agosta stared at the structure, a tongue of lightning struck the woods behind, briefly silhouetting it in spectral yellow light.
“Looks like somebody tried to cross a castle with a log cabin,” he said.
“The original owner was a timber baron, after all.” Pendergast nodded at the widow’s walk. “No doubt he used that to survey his domain. I read that he personally owned sixty thousand acres of land—including much of the cypress forests in the Black Brake—before the government acquired it for the national forest and a wilderness area.”
He pulled up to the house and stopped. The agent glanced briefly in the rearview mirror before maneuvering the car around to the back and killing the engine.
“Expecting company?” D’Agosta asked.
“No point in attracting attention.”
Now the rain started: fat drops that drummed against the windshield and the fabric top. Pendergast got out, and D’Agosta quickly followed suit. They trotted over to the shelter of a rear porch. D’Agosta glanced up a little uneasily at the rambling structure. It was exactly the kind of eccentric residence that might attract a novelist. Every tiny window was carefully shuttered, and the door itself was secured with a padlock and chain. A riot of vegetation had grown up around the house, softening the rough lines of its foundation, while moss and lichens draped some of the beams.
Pendergast took a final look around, then turned his attention to the padlock. He held it by the hasp, turning it this way and that, and then passed his other hand, holding a small tool, over the cylinder housing. A quick fiddle and it snapped open with a loud creak. Pendergast removed the chain and let it drop to the ground. The door itself was also locked; Pendergast bent over it and swiftly defeated the mechanism with the same tool. Then he rose again and turned the knob, pushing the door open with a squeal of protesting hinges. Pulling a flashlight from his jacket, he stepped inside. D’Agosta had long ago learned, when working with Pendergast, to never get caught without two things: a gun and a flashlight. Now he pulled out his own light and followed Pendergast into the house.
They found themselves in a large, old-fashioned kitchen. In the center stood a wooden breakfast table, and an oven, refrigerator, and washing machine were arranged in a porcelain row along the far wall. Beyond that, any resemblance to a normal family kitchen ended. The cabinets were thrown open, and crockery