At last, I could see light. It was at the bottom of a flight of stairs that opened up in front of me. I saw the glow illuminating the edges of plain board steps, and what looked like an earth floor beyond.
Halder’s voice drifted up the steps. “No. I don’t.”
I strained my ears, but couldn’t hear any reply, not even a murmur.
A large insect climbed over my hand where it held back the drape and I jerked away, biting down a yelp. It was too dark to make out what species it might be. I shook my hand violently and it flew away into the dark. Moth, probably, or a large beetle. I lifted the drape again.
Below the shed, Halder laughed abruptly. It wasn’t a nice laugh. As it died away, so did the calls of the frogs and the insects, leaving a dreadful, vulnerable silence.
I should probably have fled then, but my brain was churning with questions. What was Halder doing? Who was he talking to? What was going on underneath that shed?
Could there be apersondown there?
I waited too long. The light swung suddenly, and I actually saw the top of his head come into view at the foot of the stairs before I jerked back, letting the drape fall. I scrabbled backward, heart hammering, tried to rise—and felt my feet go out from under me.
Stairs creaked as Halder climbed. Panic painted the inside of my skull a numb white. I crab-walked backward, hit something that I recognized as a fallen log, and flung myself over it, dropping flat. There was a gap underneath where the log lay across another one. If Halder happened to glance down, six feet to his right, he would almost certainly see me, but I had no more time to run.
The drape opened and he stepped out. I could only see him from the knees down. I wouldn’t even know if he’d seen me until he shouted. Assuming he bothered to shout.
A katydid called, then another one, and suddenly the full night chorus was rising again.Oh good, I managed to think.Now I won’t evenhearhim coming.
His feet turned back toward the shed, and he set the lantern down. I heard him fumbling with the drape, then the door swung shut, but the woods were too loud to hear the key click in the lock.
Don’t look over here, I begged silently.Don’t look.My dress was dark, true, but the forest floor was the color of old pine needles and the fabric would stand out like an ink stain against it, with my hands and face horribly bright by comparison. My only hope was that he wouldn’t bother looking this way at all.
The songs of the frogs swelled louder as Halder bent down and picked up the lantern. I squeezed my eyes shut to stop any betraying reflection.Please be blind from looking at the light. Please have no night vision. Please go away.
A new sound threaded through the cacophony, thin but oddly tuneful. It took me a moment to realize that Halder was whistling.
Darkness touched the backs of my eyelids. I opened one a crack and saw the door of the gunpowder shed, closed and locked, bathed only in starlight. When I finally dared to lift my head, long after the whistling had faded away, I saw Halder’s lantern far off through the trees, heading back to the house.
Well, I thought as the light bobbed away from me. Nowwhat do I do?
Obviously I couldn’t tell Halder I’d seen him, and I wasn’t sure how to tell Mrs. Kent what had been happening to her chickens.Your employer is taking them at night without telling you and putting them in a shed that’s supposed to be full of gunpowder.How did I even start that conversation? How could I explain that I’d been following Halder around at night? Why should she even believe me? How could I prove it, short of dragging her out to watch with me?
Sally was far too young. I could tell Jackson, but he’d naturally tell his wife. I could have sworn him to secrecy, I supposed, but going around swearing other woman’s husbands to secrecy and asking them to come lurk in the shrubbery with me at night… No, that was not a road I wanted to start down.
I would have given a great deal for someone else to confide in. My friend Esther from the school hadn’t really understood my devotion to science, but she certainly understood secrecy. We’d covered for each other regularly—me when she had slipped out to visit the synagogue, and her when I snuck out to mail letters to potential employers. Esther would have understood how bizarre the situation was, and she certainly would never have told Halder. But Esther was two hundred miles away in Wilmington and I couldn’t think of anyone else to talk to.
Why on earth was Dr. Halder delivering hens to a small shed in the middle of the night? More importantly,who had he been talking to?
My mind seethed with possibilities, most of them bad. Maybe he was having a secret meeting with someone. The Klu Klux Klan had been active here for years, even if they were supposed to be as dead as the cougar now. I could just about believe Phelps was a Klan member, since plenty of the miserable bastards claimed to be religious, and that he and Halder were having a meeting, except that a meeting would take a lot more than five minutes and why would they need a live chicken?
It was possible that he could have been talking to himself. Plenty of people did. I did it myself, sometimes. He’dsoundedlike he was answering someone else, but it had been late and I had been very nervous. I might have misheard. “Worked a treat” was the sort of thing that you might say when you saw an experiment going well.
An experiment could explain what he was doing. He studied necrophagic insects, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he was laying out a dead chicken to see how long it took maggots to devour it, or even just to collect the insects themselves for his collection.
But why the secrecy? Everyone in the house knew about his work. He could just have ordered Jackson to kill a hen for him and done it in broad daylight. And why put it inside a shed, where it would be harder for the bugs to get at the body?
I rubbed my forehead. A comparison, maybe? Rate of decomposition in a closed space versus outside with more insects? But again, why the secrecy?
I could easily believe that Halder would decide that he had to test a theoryright this minute. Lord knows, Father would occasionally get an idea in the middle of the night, leap out of bed, and start rummaging through herbarium specimens. Halder was likely no different. And certainly having done so, it might not occur to Halder to tell Mrs. Kent, and leave her baffled as to where her chickens had gone.
But to keep going back at night? And taking even morechickens? Was he feeding something? A colony of dermestid beetles… no, that made no sense, you could feed them just as easily in daylight. Was Halder working with a nocturnal species that fed on carrion?
A large insecthadclimbed over my hand. It could have been a beetle. Or a moth. Were there any carrion-eating moths? It wouldn’t surprise me, actually; you see butterflies on carrion regularly, licking at salt. If there were necrophagic moths, Halder would be the person keeping them, Lord knows.
I could almost believe that Halder was keeping an insect colony down there, except for the way he kept looking over his shoulder when he went to the shed. He had moved like a man doing something illicit.
