Kiss the Girls

the original Snyder cellar might have been. I was also trying to brace myself—in case we found something I didn’t want to find.
    “We’re probably looking for a very old trapdoor,” I told Sampson. “There isn’t anything specific marked on Freed’s map. The cellar is supposed to be forty to fifty feet west of those sycamores. I think those are the right trees, and we should be right over the cellar now. But where the hell is the door?”
    “Probably where nobody would walk on it by mistake,” Sampson figured. He was making a path into the thicker, wilder undergrowth.
    Beyond the tangle of vines there was an open field or meadow, where tobacco had once been planted and grown. Beyond that was more thick woods. The air was hot and still. Sampson was getting impatient, and he knocked down honeysuckle with a vengeance. He was stamping his feet, trying to locate the hidden door. He listened for a hollow sound, some kind of wood or metal under the tall grass and thickly tangled weeds.
    “This was originally a very large cellar on two levels. Casanova might have even expanded it. Built something grander for his house of horror,” I said as I searched through the heavy undergrowth.
    I thought of Naomi kept underneath the ground for so long. She had been my obsession all these days and weeks. She still was. Sampson had been right about these woods. They were eerie, and I felt we were standing at an evil place where forbidden, secretive things had been done. Naomi could be somewhere close by, underneath the ground.
    “You’re getting hoodoo-spooky on me again. Trying to think like this nutty squirrel. You sure Dr. Emeritus Sachs isn’t Casanova?” Sampson asked as he worked.
    “No, I’m not. But I don’t know why the Durham PD arrested him, either. How did they just happen to find out the underwear was there? How did the underwear get in his house in the first place?”
    “Because maybe he is Casanova, Sugar. Because maybe he put the victims’ underwear there so he could sniff it on rainy afternoons. FBI and Durham crime-fighters going to close down the case now?”
    “If there isn’t another killing or abduction for a while. Once they shut the case, the real Casanova can relax, plan for the future.”
    Sampson stood up tall and stretched his long neck. He sighed, and then he moaned loudly. His T-shirt was soaked through with sweat. He peered up at the overhanging vines. “We got a long walk back to the car. Long, dark, hot, buggy walk.”
    “Not yet. Stick with me on this.”
    I didn’t want to leave and stop our search for the day. Having Sampson around again was a major plus. There were still three more farms on Dr. Freed’s map. Two of them sounded promising; the other seemed as if it might be too small. So maybe that was the very one Casanova had chosen for his hideaway. He was a contrarian, wasn’t he?
    So was I. I wanted to keep searching through the night, dark woods or not, black snakes and copperheads or not, twin killers or not.
    I remembered Kate’s terrifying stories about the disappearing house and what went on inside. What had really happened to Kate the day she escaped? If the house wasn’t in these woods—where in God’s name was it? It had to be underground. Nothing else made sense…
    Nothing made any goddamn sense yet.
    Unless someone had purposely cleared away every last remnant of the farm.
    Unless someone had used the old wood for other building purposes.
    I finally took out my pistol and searched around for something, anything, to shoot at. Sampson watched me out of the comer of his eye. Curious, but not saying anything yet.
    I needed to get some anger out. Release some venom, some stress. Right here and now. There was nothing to target-shoot at, though. No underground house of horror.
    But also
no rotting planks from the farmhouse or barn.
Not one remnant that I had seen.
    I finally fired a round at the knobby trunk of a nearby tree. In my incipient craziness, a knot in the tree resembled the head of a man. A man like Casanova. I fired again and again. All direct hits, dead-solid perfect. I had killed Casanova!
    “Feel better now?” Sampson peered over the top of his Ray-Ban sunglasses at me. “You hit the bogeyman in his evil eye?”
    “I feel a little better. Not much.” I showed him my thumb and forefinger, spread about a millimeter apart.
    Sampson leaned against a small tree that looked like a human skeleton. The little sapling wasn’t getting enough light.