Read Online Airtight Case by Beverly Connor - Free Book Online Page B

She started to get back out.
    “Yes—wait—yes. You’ll take me?”
    “Hop in.”
    He climbed in and settled into the seat. Lindsay “started the engine before he had a chance to change his mind, or catch site of anyone on the porch.
    “I’m going to report my truck stolen.”
    “I doubt it’s been stolen.” Lindsay drove out of the gravel parking area and over the bridge. “It’s probably parked somewhere where it can’t do any more damage. And before you say it was only rocks and holes, it wasn’t. That’s like saying the original Declaration of Independence is only paper. You may not understand it or care, but we get information from what we’re finding in those holes. The kind of rocks those are and how they are placed, plus their shapes and sizes, tell us how foundations were built here a hundred years ago, the size of the structures, and if the materials were hauled in, quarried nearby, or were simply found at the site. And rocks aren’t the only thing. Just under the surface there are bones, dish sherds, and the remains of farm implements.”
    “I’ll bet you’re a lot of fun at a party. Look, lady, you’re right. I don’t appreciate what you all are doing. I appreciate my truck. It cost me $35,000.”
    Having recently had to purchase a new vehicle herself, Lindsay was sympathetic, but not enough to stop trying to press her point home.
    “And that may have been a cemetery you drove over. You may have broken irreplaceable headstones with inscriptions.”
    Moore looked at Lindsay wide-eyed. “A cemetery. Oh, damn.” He shook his head back and forth. “Oh damn. What the hell are you all doing digging in a cemetery?”
    “We’re identifying all the features of the farmstead that used to be here. And I don’t know that it was a cemetery. It may have been.”
    “You going to disturb the dead?”
    Lindsay regretted saying anything. She only wanted to make him understand the impact of his behavior, and now she may have simply made it worse.
    “I just said it might be. I don’t know. If we find gravestones, we’ll probably leave it alone.”
    “You’d better. Living in Gallows House and digging up the dead to boot . . . I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. No, sirree, that’s just asking for trouble.”
    “What about the house?”
    “It’s haunted. Everybody knows that. That’s why Cal Strickland can’t sell it. How long you say you been here?”
    “Just a few days.”
    “Maybe you ain’t heard or seen nothing yet, but I’ll guarantee you, before the month’s out, something’ll happen that’ll make you wish you was someplace else.”
    I wish that already, thought Lindsay. The single-lane dirt road leading from Knave’s Seat Cove was shaded by the dense crowns of old hardwoods. After a mile it widened to two lanes and the heavy forest thinned out to a sparser woods. She drove on about five miles before the dirt road intersected with Highway 129.
    “I’m taking you to Kelley’s Chase.”
    “That’s fine. There’s a diner on the way owned by my cousin. I’ll borrow her car. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
    “Why do people say the Gallows House is haunted?”
    Lindsay liked the ride into Kelley’s Chase. She enjoyed looking at the peaceful, cool waters of the Little Tennessee River running alongside the highway and the mountains rising from the bank on the other side. It reminded her of the poem Hiawatha .
    “Because it is. You watch the road and not the scenery.”
    “Have you ever seen anything?”
    “In the house? Not me. I won’t go near the place, leastwise at night. Didn’t want to today.”
    “How do you know it’s haunted?”
    “Everybody knows. People’s seen things in that cove for over a hundred years.”
    “The house is about a hundred years old. Are you saying the ghosts predate the house?”
    “I’m saying it’s a bad place.”
    “How do you think it got that way?”
    “Some people say the cove’s an Indian burial ground.”
    “I’ve worked