Alaskan Mountain Pursuit Elizabeth Goddard (best short novels .TXT) 📖

The chair lay splintered on the floor. He was entirely too close, the masculine scent of him wrapping around her and making her dizzy. Making her feel things she didn’t want to feel.

“Yeah, but I think we might have woken the dead.”

“We don’t need to worry about them. It’s the living we should worry about. The guard, if there is one, outside the door.”

“Which brings me to a question I should have asked before we made this leap of faith down the laundry chute,” Will replied.

Sylvie studied the mess in the basement. What looked like old IKEA furniture was piled high, along with the wooden chair Will had just broken. Her spirits sank. She couldn’t imagine someone actually storing her mother’s things in the basement. “So what’s your question?”

“You climbed down here as a child. How did you get out? Because there’s no way we are climbing back up.”

“Oops. I hadn’t thought of that.” At Will’s grimace she laughed. “We go out the door. It’s locked from the outside to keep people from getting in. But it can be unlocked from the inside to prevent someone from accidentally being locked down here.”

Sheer relief registered on Will’s face, along with a day’s worth of stubble. His beard would grow thick and fast, by the looks of it, if he didn’t shave every day. Why was she thinking about that? She pulled her gaze from Will’s features in the dim lighting and glanced around the basement. Where to start?

“I remember it being much brighter down here when I used to play.” Now it was dark and gloomy. Cobwebs hung in every possible place. Where were the spiders that had left all these? Still alive and well? Her skin crawled. “There’s another light somewhere. You can be a hero now, Will, and find it. Knock down some of those webs, too.”

Something unseen skittered away in the corner. Sylvie froze. Locked gazes with Will. Humor shimmered in his warm eyes, but understanding gleamed there also. “I don’t like cold, dark spaces with spiderwebs, either, especially when other vermin can be heard vying for front-row seats.”

“Very funny.” She had no plans to entertain the rats.

“Why do you think I love to fly? You never see a web in the sky. Or spiders, for that matter.”

“No cobwebs in the water when I go diving.” But the thought reminded her of her mother’s plane and what it might look like with the passing years if no one discovered it. They had to get busy.

Sylvie had never been afraid of the dark, but she couldn’t shake the images of creepy creatures with any number of legs lurking in the shadowed corners. To his credit, Will grabbed a broom and scraped a few silken, dusty webs down. Since there was a small lamp on in the corner, Sylvie wondered who had been down here and why hadn’t they disturbed the webs. The lamp might mean that someone had, in fact, brought her mother’s things down.

Together they searched the basement, which seemed to go on forever. Someone needed to take this old rubbish to the Dumpster, and the decent furniture to the Salvation Army. Finally, she found some newer-looking plastic bins stacked among old cardboard boxes stained with rat droppings.

Her skin crawled again, and she sneezed. If Ashley had actually put all her mother’s things down here... Sylvie would be furious. Sylvie switched on an overhead light and started looking at the bins, hoping they were labeled. Will searched on the fringe with a flashlight he’d found.

The way dirt and dust had been disturbed, someone else had been here recently doing something more than turning on a lamp.

“I found something,” Will said.

Sylvie left the bin she was examining and made her way to him, bumping into the corner of an old desk. “What’d you find?”

He held up an old pocketknife.

The breath whooshed from her. “Can you be serious and help me?”

“You never know when one of these is going to come in handy. I lost the one I carried.”

The knob jiggled; keys jingled.

Sylvie stared at Will. Panic gripped her stomach. “What do we do?”

“Just tell them what we’re doing?”

“We can’t do that. You heard Marguerite. There are strangers in the house. We can’t trust them.” Sylvie grabbed Will’s hand and dragged him deeper, behind stacks of boxes. She yanked the chain, switching off the light in that part of the basement. The only light on now was the lamp near the door that had been on when they’d arrived. Backed into a dark corner, something tickled in her hair and she pushed down the scream threatening to erupt. Shoving away the webs she’d backed into and the possible spider that went with them, her skin crawled at the thought of the little creepers.

She’d give anything if she could run out of the basement screaming and shaking her hair free of creeping things. Sylvie dragged in the breaths before it was too late. In, out. In, out.

I can do this.

Spiders are just tiny animals. They don’t want to hurt me.

Will wrapped his arm around her and leaned in close. His warm breath fanned her hair. What? The webs didn’t bother him? Apparently not. She let his presence calm her nerves. Together they waited and watched. The door opened and heavy footsteps clomped around while larger-than-life shadows fell across the walls from the dim light of the lamp. The beam from a flashlight danced along the rafters and ceiling.

The laundry chute door hung open.

Sylvie almost gasped.

Would the man notice? Become suspicious?

Will was right. This was just plain stupid to hide like children who’d been caught. They should face this man head-on and get their answers. Sylvie would rather face him than stay in the spiderwebs. She started to move from Will’s grasp, but he held her in place. She glanced at him. He pressed a finger against his lips and motioned for her to look through a space between the boxes.

From there, she could see the man—he