her face seemed to be pushing through her skin, her eye sockets
hollowing right in front of her. A centimeter of skin between her and
nothing. Her grand vision, the way out for them both, had suddenly
become a free fall of insane, dizzying proportion. Her wayward father
would have just packed up and fled into the night. What was his
daughter supposed to do?
CHAPTER 5
LEE PULLED OUT HIS PISTOL AND POINTED IT AHEAD of him as he moved
through the hallway. With his other hand he swung the flashlight in
slow, steady arcs.
The first room he peered into was the kitchen, containing a small
1950s-era refrigerator, GE electric range and tattered
black-and-yellow-checked linoleum flooring. The walls were discolored
in places by water damage. The ceiling was unfinished, the joists and
the subfloor above clearly visible. Lee gazed at the old copper pipes
and the newer grafts of PVC as they made a series of right angles
through the exposed, darkened wall studs.
There was no aroma of food here, only a smell of grease, presumably
hardened in the stove-top burners and in the bowels of the vent, along
with probably a few trillion bacteria. A chipped Formica table and
four bent-metal, vinyl-backed chairs stood in the center of the
kitchen. The counters were barren, no dishes visible. There were also
no towels, coffeemaker or condiment canisters, nor any other item or
personal touch that might have suggested the kitchen had been used in
the last decade or so. It was as though he had stepped back in time,
or happened upon a bomb shelter put into service during the hysteria of
the fifties.
The small dining room was across the hallway from the kitchen. Lee
looked at the waist-high wood paneling, darkened and cracked over the
years. He had a sudden chill, though the air was stale and oppressive
inside. The house apparently had no central heating, nor had Lee seen
any wall-mounted air conditioners. There had been no heating oil tank
outside either, at least aboveground. Lee eyed the chill-chasers
bolted along the bottom of the walls, their power cords plugged into
electrical outlets. As in the kitchen, the ceiling here was
unfinished. The electrical line to the dust-ridden chandelier ran
through holes bored in the exposed joists. Electricity, Lee deduced,
must have come to the home after it was first built.
As he moved down the hallway toward the front of the house, Lee was
unable to see the invisible trip beam, positioned at knee height, that
stretched across the hall. He pierced this security perimeter, and
from somewhere in the house a barely audible click was heard. Lee
jerked for a moment, pointing his gun in wide circles, and then
relaxed. It was an old house, and old houses made lots of noises. He
was just being jumpy, yet he had a right to be. The cottage and its
location were right the hell out of a Friday the 13th movie.
Lee entered one of the front rooms. There, under the sweep of his
flashlight, he saw that the furniture had been moved up against the
walls, and there were footprints and drag patterns in the layers of
dust on the floor. In the center of the room were a number of folding
chairs and a rectangular-shaped table. A stack of Styrofoam coffee
cups rested at one end of the table next to a coffeemaker. Packets of
coffee, creamer and sugar lay next to the coffeemaker.
Lee took all this in and jerked when he saw the windows. Not only were
the heavy drapes drawn tight, but also the windows had been boarded
over with big sheets of plywood, the drapes dangling from underneath
the wood.
“Shit,” Lee muttered. He quickly discovered that the small square
windows set in the front door had been covered over with cardboard. He
pulled out his camera and snapped some shots of all these puzzling
items.
Wanting to complete his search as soon as possible, Lee hurried up the
stairs to the second floor. He cautiously opened the door to the first
bedroom and peered in. The bed was small and made, and its smell of
mildew hit him immediately. The walls here were unfinished as well.