A Vineyard Killing by Philip R. Craig

nest and walked to the cellar hole. It looked exactly as it had before, half filled with a jumble of stones and rotting wood. There was no sign of John.
    I sat on my heels and studied the site. Leaning haphazardly against the far wall was a pile of broken and apparently rotting boards and timbers, seemingly the collapsed remains of what had once been the floor of the long-disappeared building above the cellar hole.
    John had to have gone somewhere, and there was nowhere else he could have gone. Since, as Holmes observed, when all other possibilities have been eliminated, what remains must be true, John had gone behind that pile of lumber.
    I climbed down and crossed to the jumble of rotten pieces of wood.
    It was not, of course, a jumble of rotten pieces of wood but a carefully constructed doorway made to look like a jumble of rotten pieces of wood. When I looked where I figured there had to be hinges, there were hinges. When I looked harder I found what served as a door latch. I tried it. Nothing moved. Locked from the inside, certainly.
    I put an ear to the door. I could hear nothing. I knocked.
    Nothing.
    I knocked again, harder this time. After a while I heard a slight noise above my head and looked up in time to see a hole close in a beam above the doorway. I waited, then knocked a third time. Finally I heard a slight noise from the other side of the door. I stepped back. The peephole quickly opened and shut once again. Then, silently, the door latch turned and the door swung open.
    John Reilley stood there, looking out at me. His expression was one of resignation.
    â€œWell,” he said. “I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. Are there more of you?”
    â€œJust me,” I said.
    He looked beyond me and, seeing no one else, he nodded. “No matter,” he said, “one tongue is enough.”
    â€œOnly if it flaps,” I said. “Are you going to invite me in?”
    â€œWhy not? Come in, J.W. Shut the door behind you, if you will.” He turned and led me down a short, low hallway and into a small room lit by electric lamps. A bunk bed was against one wall and a table and chair against another. A doorway led to another room in which I could see a camp stove and some storage shelves. The walls and the ceiling of the cave were made of lumber scraps of various widths. He sat on the bunk and waved to the chair. “Sit there. I have only that single chair because I never have guests. Until now, that is.”
    I sat down and looked about me. “Nice,” I said. “Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Where do you get your electricity?”
    He seemed willing to talk about his underground house. “There’s a construction company just off the Vineyard Haven–Edgartown road. I’ve tapped into their line. They don’t notice what little I use. I get fresh air from a pipe I ran up inside that tall stump you probably noticed. I’ve got a chemical toilet and I bring in water for cooking. I use the Laundromat for my clothes and I sneak showers after work in the houses I help to build. There aren’t many public rest rooms on this island, but I know where every one of them is and I use them to keep clean between showers. I get my books from yard sales and the libraries and I have a TV and radio. The antennas are in trees. You can see them if you know where to look.”
    â€œI didn’t notice them. How long did it take you to build this place?”
    â€œThree years, and it would have taken longer if I hadn’t been able to borrow a pickup to haul the wood I needed. When I started, I was living in Vineyard Haven in an apartment that I had to be out of by summer, so I spent all my free hours that winter digging this first room and lining it with timber so it wouldn’t collapse. It was hard work, especially hauling those two-by-tens I used for the ceiling, but by spring I could live here. I enlarged it for a couple of more years until I