The Girl and the Unlucky 13 (Emma Griffin™ FBI Mystery) A.J. Rivers (historical books to read TXT) 📖

take a closer look. “That’s not blood.” She touches her fingertips to it and looks back up at me. “I think it’s nail polish. It looks as though someone might have tried to get some of it up, but it had already dried.”

“What the hell happened here?” Dean asks.

“Call the police. Get the team out here. While we wait, I want to see the cellar,” I order.

Dean takes out his phone and starts the call while I head down the stairs. I put my gun away, confident no one else is in the house with us. I go to the kitchen and find the door I’m assuming goes to the cellar. There’s a heavy slide lock across it, but despite its aged and worn look, it moves easily when I slide it open. It’s obviously been used frequently.

I can hear Dean talking to the police on the floor above me as I start down the stairs. It’s incredibly dark beneath me, and I reach into my pocket for my phone. Before I can get it out, a beam of light appears over my shoulder. Glancing back, I see Ava standing on the step above me.

“Thanks,” I say.

She nods and I get my phone the rest of the way out, turning on the flashlight function so I can add more illumination to the space. There’s a heavy, musty smell down here. I can imagine there’s a section where the floor is still dirt. It’s very likely that if we did much exploring, we would find long-forgotten baskets of root vegetables shriveled and putrefied in a corner somewhere.

I get to the bottom of the steps and shine the light around. It picks up crates and wood shelving units stacked with dusty glass jars and canned goods from generations past. Some old tools take up one wall, while discarded lumber and scrap metal hulks in another corner.

“The police are on their way,” Dean announces, coming to the top of the steps. “Is there anything down there?”

“I’m not,” Xavier replies. “I am distinctly not down there.”

“It’s just a cellar,” I say. “Looks as if no one has been in it in a long time.” Dean starts down the steps and I continue my slow turn to take in everything around me. “Wait.”

Something isn’t right.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks.

I look around again, and Ava follows the path of my beam with hers so we can see more of the space at once.”

“This room,” I say. “There’s something off about it. The dimensions don’t seem right. It shouldn’t be this shallow.” Something clicks in my mind. “Ava, turn off your light.”

Her beam goes out and I turn off mine.

“Holy shit, that’s dark,” Dean mutters.

“Xavier, close the door up there,” I call up. “You can be on that side of it.”

“Thank you.”

The door closes, fully extinguishing all light.

“No,” I say. “That’s dark.”

“Emma, why are we standing in the dark?” Dean asks.

“The outside cellar door,” Ava says after a few seconds.

“Exactly,” I nod. “It’s sunny out there. Xavier stomped right through that door, which means there should be sunlight coming in. But there isn’t. Where’s the door?”

Forty-Seven

“How often did he make you go to that house?” I ask Ashley.

I expect her to look uncomfortable. Instead, she’s almost stoic.

“We’d only been going there for a few months. We’d go for a couple of days at a time and then he’d bring me back to the first house.”

“Where is the other house?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I was allowed to be in the car if we were going short distances, but when we were going to the second house, he kept me in the back of the truck.”

“In the bed of a pickup truck?” I ask.

She nods.

“If she was in the bed of a pickup truck, how did no one see her?” Misty asks. “I pass trucks all the time on the road, and I can see when there’s something in the bed.”

“Do you ever notice those big locked boxes that are supposed to hold tools?” Ashley asks.

“Yes,” Misty says.

“His didn’t hold tools.”

Misty stands, shaking her head. “Oh, my God. I can’t believe this.”

“The investigators found the passage between the upstairs bedroom and the walled-off section of the cellar behind the vanity. The wall was new, but that’s a feature of the house that had to be designed into it,” I say. “The structure and the stairs were built into it.”

Ashley nods. “Wolf told me it had always been used to hide and transport people.”

“So, he was familiar enough with the house to know about a hidden passage. He had to have known the family who owned it. That’s helpful. Did you only ever use that passage?”

“If I was at that house, I was in that room or in the cellar. I got ready upstairs, then went down the steps into the cellar. They didn’t let me go to the other parts of the house because they didn’t want me to get near the doors or windows I could get out of,” she explains.

“There’s a window in that room, though,” I say, all while silently noting that Ashley did indeed use ‘they’ instead of just ‘he’.

“I couldn’t get to it because of the bars.”

“There weren’t any bars.”

She looks confused. “Yes, there were. There was a cage of metal bars blocking the window. I couldn’t even open the curtains.”

“A cage of bars? Attached to the window frame?”

“The walls on either side.”

I get out my phone and call the detective in charge of the investigation still ongoing at the farmhouse.

“I need someone to go up to that room and put me on video,” I say.

I wait a few seconds as they transport the phone up the steps, then a shaky video image appears. It’s blurry and I can’t tell what I’m looking at for a few seconds before it stabilizes.

“Hello, Agent Griffin,” the officer says, waving at me.

I wave back. “Hello. Could you turn me so I can see the wall beside the window frame?”

“The wall?” he asks.

“Yes.