The Other Side - J. D. Robb [85]
The possibilities kept him awake for hours.
Astra barked an ecstatic greeting when Angie came down the basement steps—Henry had left the outside door open for her. He abandoned the saw where it was, halfway through a plank, and went to greet her, smiling, not even thinking about hiding his gladness. “You’re late,” he said. He took both her hands, a purely spontaneous gesture—it felt as if he hadn’t seen her in days. “I haven’t seen you in days.”
“I know.” She beamed back, color dotting her cheeks, while Astra ran around her in circles. “I almost called you on the telephone last night, but we wouldn’t have had any privacy.” Both Smoak’s and Mrs. Mortimer’s telephones were in their respective communal living rooms. “Oh, it’s so nice and cool down here,” she said as she dabbed at moisture on her upper lip with her hankie. She must have come on her bicycle. She bent over to kiss Astra on the nose—nothing else would stop his frantic welcome. “What are you making?”
Henry led her over to his basement worktable. “The séance table has to be round, so I’m making these sort of half-moon extensions out of some wood I found in the shed. What do you think?”
“Hmm . . . ” She unpinned her hat and threw it on another table.
“Don’t forget, I’m a ghost detective, not a carpenter.”
“We’ll put a tablecloth over it,” she said kindly. “What room are we having the séance in?”
“Well, that’s our first decision. Is the music room too small? Course, we’d have to move the piano.”
“The music room? Why?”
“So we can use the secret stairs. Unless you think—”
“No, we can’t—everyone knows about the secret stairs.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Uh-oh. Does that ruin everything?”
“By no means. Plenty of ways to skin a cat.”
“Henry, have you really done this ‘many times’?”
He made a broad gesture with both arms. “What is ‘many’? Isn’t everything relative to everything else? In the grand scheme of things—”
“Henry.”
“Hm?”
“Have you ever been to a séance?”
“Angie.” He put his hand on his heart. “You wound me.” There, he’d made her laugh, his favorite pastime. “Right, then, we’ll use the dining room. Big room, big table, and it has two more valuable amenities.”
“What?”
“A wainscoting, behind which it will be child’s play to construct a sliding panel. Through the wall behind that alcove in the drawing room, which we can seal off with a bookcase.”
She looked thrilled. “And the other amenity?”
“Your grandfather’s ceiling trolley system.”
“I thought of that! What will we do with it?”
“I don’t know yet, but we’ll think of something. By the way, can you make the elevator go up and down without being anywhere near it?”
“I’ve been thinking of that, too!”
They grinned at each other for a while.
“I need to hammer a few nails in the dining room floor. Is that all right?” he asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“The floorboards squeak. There must be absolute silence when you’re moving around the room.”
“Will I be moving around the room?”
“I hope you’re going to be dancing.”
“Oh, Henry. This is going to be such fun.”
He went back to sawing while Angie put on an apron that was too big for her, probably her grandfather’s, and said she was going upstairs to oil the cable. “I’ve got an idea for the elevator, too. It might not work, but—”
“If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. We are nothing if not resourceful.”
“And ingenious,” she called back from the stairs.
“Versatile and adaptable.”
“Clever and adept!”
Half an hour later, she returned, carrying a small wooden box. “Look what I found in the attic.” She opened the lid, and inside, a tiny porcelain man held a violin and a tiny porcelain woman danced with her arms over her head. A music box. “It was mine when I was little, a present from my grandparents.”
“Does it work?”
“No, but I think I can fix it. It plays something from La Traviata . Which is 1850s, but I don’t think anyone will recognize it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was thinking we could