I set the box down and opened the four flaps on its top. There was another box inside it. "Damn it," I said, and jumped up to go to the front of the furnace.
"Find anything?" John was at the top of the stairs.
"I don't know," I said. I pulled down the handle and swung open the door.
"There's nothing upstairs. Just bare rooms." Every other stair groaned beneath his weight. "What are you doing?"
"Checking the furnace," I said. "I just found two empty boxes."
The interior of the furnace was about the size of a baby carriage. Fine white ash lay across the bottom of the furnace, and black soot coated the grate. John came up beside me.
"I think we lost them," I said.
"Hold on," John said. "He didn't burn anything here. See that stuff?" He pointed at a nearly invisible area on the furnace wall, a section slightly lighter in color than the rest of the interior that I had taken for some kind of stain. John reached into the furnace and dragged it down with his fingers—the ancient spiderweb pulled toward him, then broke and collapsed into a single dirty gray rope.
The boxes lay where I had left them, the flaps of the outer box open on the smooth side of the one inside it. When I shook them, something rattled. "Let's pull them a," I said.
John came forward and flattened his hands on the box. I thrust my fingers inside and tugged. The inner box slid smoothly out. The brown tape across its top flaps had been slit down the middle. I bent up the flaps. Another, smaller box was inside it. I pulled out the third box. About the size of a toaster, it too had been cut open before being inserted into the nest. When I shook it, a papery, slithery sound came from inside the box.
"Guess you found the easter egg," John said.
I righted the box on the floor and opened it. A square white envelope lay in the bottom of the carton. I picked it up. The envelope was thicker and heavier than I expected. I carried it to the light at the head of the stairs. John watched me open the flap.
"Pictures," he said.
The old square, white-bordered photographs looked tiny by contemporary standards. I took them out of the envelope and stared at the first one. Some Dumky child had scribbled over its surface. Beneath the crazy lines, the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn was still visible. I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next. At first, it looked like a copy of the photograph I had just seen. There were fewer scribbles on this one. Then I saw that the photographer had moved a few feet nearer the opening of the tunnel, and the fan of vertical bricks at the top of the arch showed more clearly through the overlay of scribbles. The next one showed a neatly made bed beneath a framed painting invisible behind the mirrored explosion of the flash. Beside the bed, half of a door filled the frame. A little Dumky had scratched XXXXXXXXXXX across the door and the wall. He had run out of patience before he got to the bed, and the X's broke down into scrawls and loops. "What's that?" John asked.
The next photograph was of the same bed and door taken from an angle that included the corner of a dressing table. The details of the room lay buried under a lot more scribbled ink.
"A picture of room 218 at the St. Alwyn," I said, and looked up at Ransom's face. "Bob Bandolier took pictures of the sites before he did the murders."
I uncovered the next image, scarcely touched by the little Dumkys. Here, rendered in soft brown tones, was the Livermore Avenue side of the Idle Hour, where Monty Leland had been murdered. The photograph beneath had been taken from a spot nearer the corner of South Sixth and showed more of the tavern's side. A zigzag of ink ran across the wooden boards like a bolt of lightning.
"The guy was an obsessive's obsessive. It was planned out, like a campaign."
I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and found myself looking at a photograph almost unreadable beneath inky loops and scratches. I lifted it nearer my face. It had to be a picture of Heinz Stenmitz's butcher shop, but something about the size or shape of the building buried beneath the ink bothered me.
The next was nearly as bad. The edge of a building that might equally have been the Taj Mahal, the White House, or the place where I lived on Grand Street dove beneath a hedge of scribbles.
"They worked that one over," John said.
I peered down at the picture, trying to figure out what troubled me about it. I could only barely remember the front of Stenmitz's shop. One side of the sign that projected out in a big V above the window read HOME-MADE SAUSAGES; the other side, QUALITY MEATS. Something like that seemed visible underneath the scrawls, but the proportions of the building seemed wrong.
"It must be the butcher shop, right?"
"I guess," I said.
"How come they're squirreled away in these boxes?"
"Fee must have found them in a drawer—wherever his father kept them. He put them down here to protect them—he must have thought that no one would ever find them."
"What do we do with them?"
I already had an idea about that.
I sorted through the photographs and chose the clearest of each pair. John took the envelope, and I passed him the others. He slid them into the envelope and tucked in the flap. Then he turned over the envelope and held it up close to his face, as I had done with the last photograph. "Well, well."
"What?"
"Take a look." He pointed to faint, spidery pencil marks on its top left-hand corner.
In faint, almost ladylike thin gray letters, the words blue rose appeared on the yellowing paper.
"Let's leave these here," I said, and put the envelope in the smallest box, folded the top shut, and slid the box into the next, and then inserted this one into the largest box, folded its flaps shut, and pushed if back behind the furnace.
"Why?" John asked.
"Because we know they're here." He frowned and pushed his eyebrows together, trying to figure it out. I said, "Someday, we might want to show that Bob Bandolier was Blue Rose. So we leave the envelope here."
"Okay, but where are the notes?"
I raised my shoulders. "They have to be somewhere."
"Great." John walked to the end of the basement, as if trying to make the boxes of notes materialize out of the shadows and concrete blocks. After he passed out of sight behind the furnace, I heard him coming up on the far side of the basement. "Maybe he hid them under the furnace grate."
We went back around to the front of the furnace. John opened the door and stuck his head inside. "Ugh." He reached inside and tried to pick up the grate. "Stuck." He withdrew his hand, which was streaked with gray and black on the back and completely blackened on the palm. The sleeve of the blue silk jacket had a vertical black stripe just below the elbow. John grimaced at the mess on his hand. "Well, I don't think they're in here."
"No," I said. "They're probably still in the boxes. He doesn't know that we know they exist."
I took another, pointless look around the basement.
John said, "What the hell, let's go home."
We went upstairs and back out into the fog. John locked the door behind us.
I got lost somewhere north of the valley and nearly ran into a car backing out of a driveway. It took me nearly two hours to get back to Ely Place, and when we pulled up in front of his house, John said, "Got any other great ideas?"
I didn't remind him that the idea had been his.
8
"What do we do now?" John asked. We were in the kitchen, eating a big salad I had made out of a tired head of lettuce, half of an onion, some old Monterey jack cheese, and cut-up slices of the remaining luncheon meat.