candles on a workbench. A box of matches lay next to them.
The match scraped to life, and I lit the candles and shut off my flashlight. The sound of the storm outside was muffled. I didn’t see any windows.
“Must be in the center of the house, maybe the attic,” I said aloud.
I felt a tickle on my cheek and I jerked, brushing at skin as I imagined a venomous spider caught in my hair. I pulled away the silky strands of spider web with a shudder.
“What am I doing?” I grimaced, eyes adjusting to the warm candlelight.
I’d expected to find something or someone causing all the bumping, but the undisturbed dust on the floor told me I hadn’t found where they’d been. I listened for a few minutes for the moan or the footfalls, but they had stopped. I shook my head, disappointed. Had whoever it was heard me? Maybe it was a good thing I didn’t run into them somewhere in the dark bowels of this old mansion. Shaking off the chill that skittered up my spine, I took in the dusty shapes.
Battered wood crates sat atop a workbench butted up against two of the walls. Remembering similar boxes in Simon’s workshop, I wondered if they contained any intriguing artifacts. I peered inside the closest one and found it filled with files.
“Not exactly King Tut’s treasure,” I muttered and grabbed a handful of the files.
Pulling a candle over, I found a stool, sat at the workbench and flipped through the old records. The file contained bills of sale and receipts for a place called The Lamplight Lodge . When I read the address, I realized that this house, Simon’s home, was a working hunting lodge in the 1800s. The dates of the receipts ran to 1910 and then stopped. That must have been when Simon’s grandfather converted the lodge to a home.
“That explains the pictures on the stairwell walls,” I said out loud, remembering the strung up deer carcasses and hunters with pith helmets.
Another file had letters from guests securing lodging for the summer months, requests for information, and bills of sale for everything from milk to tobacco imported from Europe.
I stuffed everything back into the file and pulled another from the crate. A cascade of yellowed clippings fell from the folder. They fluttered to the floor, and when I bent to pick them up, I spied a black-and-white photo of Davenport next to a yacht. It was an article written by the Seattle newspaper. The photographer had captured Davenport as a young father tossing a fair-haired boy into the air. The two faced each other, Simon’s arms and legs splayed out mid-air like a skydiver, pure glee on his face. The shot was snapped a second before he fell into his father’s waiting arms. The caption below read:
Davenport Hale and son at the inaugural voyage of The Lotus as it sets out for the dark continent. Hale, along with his wife and young son, mean to expand the reach of the Hale Exploration Conglomerate. Known for taking the privileged elite on legendary ventures into the unknown, Hale intends to push further than ever before.
I stared at the photograph, my mind churning. In all the stories Davenport told me about his travels, he’d never mentioned Simon being with him. Intrigued, I dove back into the files, the strange noises I followed up here forgotten. I found a pack of photos, the thick white edges yellowed with age. In them, I followed Simon through years of travel with his father and mother. I found one with him on an elephant, a jungle in the background. He smiled confidently at the camera, his small frame draped in a billowing white tunic, a fez on his head. Another snapshot: Simon sitting on his father’s knee, pyramids as a backdrop, and a camel crouched in the sand to his right.
In every photograph, Simon looked excited, at home amid settings I’d only read about in books. The last one in the stack showed Simon now older, the angle of his jaw stronger, more masculine. He stood next to another man on the shore of a body of water, an overturned
The match scraped to life, and I lit the candles and shut off my flashlight. The sound of the storm outside was muffled. I didn’t see any windows.
“Must be in the center of the house, maybe the attic,” I said aloud.
I felt a tickle on my cheek and I jerked, brushing at skin as I imagined a venomous spider caught in my hair. I pulled away the silky strands of spider web with a shudder.
“What am I doing?” I grimaced, eyes adjusting to the warm candlelight.
I’d expected to find something or someone causing all the bumping, but the undisturbed dust on the floor told me I hadn’t found where they’d been. I listened for a few minutes for the moan or the footfalls, but they had stopped. I shook my head, disappointed. Had whoever it was heard me? Maybe it was a good thing I didn’t run into them somewhere in the dark bowels of this old mansion. Shaking off the chill that skittered up my spine, I took in the dusty shapes.
Battered wood crates sat atop a workbench butted up against two of the walls. Remembering similar boxes in Simon’s workshop, I wondered if they contained any intriguing artifacts. I peered inside the closest one and found it filled with files.
“Not exactly King Tut’s treasure,” I muttered and grabbed a handful of the files.
Pulling a candle over, I found a stool, sat at the workbench and flipped through the old records. The file contained bills of sale and receipts for a place called The Lamplight Lodge . When I read the address, I realized that this house, Simon’s home, was a working hunting lodge in the 1800s. The dates of the receipts ran to 1910 and then stopped. That must have been when Simon’s grandfather converted the lodge to a home.
“That explains the pictures on the stairwell walls,” I said out loud, remembering the strung up deer carcasses and hunters with pith helmets.
Another file had letters from guests securing lodging for the summer months, requests for information, and bills of sale for everything from milk to tobacco imported from Europe.
I stuffed everything back into the file and pulled another from the crate. A cascade of yellowed clippings fell from the folder. They fluttered to the floor, and when I bent to pick them up, I spied a black-and-white photo of Davenport next to a yacht. It was an article written by the Seattle newspaper. The photographer had captured Davenport as a young father tossing a fair-haired boy into the air. The two faced each other, Simon’s arms and legs splayed out mid-air like a skydiver, pure glee on his face. The shot was snapped a second before he fell into his father’s waiting arms. The caption below read:
Davenport Hale and son at the inaugural voyage of The Lotus as it sets out for the dark continent. Hale, along with his wife and young son, mean to expand the reach of the Hale Exploration Conglomerate. Known for taking the privileged elite on legendary ventures into the unknown, Hale intends to push further than ever before.
I stared at the photograph, my mind churning. In all the stories Davenport told me about his travels, he’d never mentioned Simon being with him. Intrigued, I dove back into the files, the strange noises I followed up here forgotten. I found a pack of photos, the thick white edges yellowed with age. In them, I followed Simon through years of travel with his father and mother. I found one with him on an elephant, a jungle in the background. He smiled confidently at the camera, his small frame draped in a billowing white tunic, a fez on his head. Another snapshot: Simon sitting on his father’s knee, pyramids as a backdrop, and a camel crouched in the sand to his right.
In every photograph, Simon looked excited, at home amid settings I’d only read about in books. The last one in the stack showed Simon now older, the angle of his jaw stronger, more masculine. He stood next to another man on the shore of a body of water, an overturned
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