Thomas immediately held out his hand to prevent us from moving forward. “Is there anybody here?” he called up the stairs. Stepping forward, he pulled his gun from his shoulder holster and began climbing. “I’m Detective Thomas Riley from the Charleston Police Department and I’m armed. Please show yourself.”
He motioned for us to stay back as he silently climbed the stairs two at a time. We listened as each door was thrown open, then waited as Thomas moved from room to room upstairs searching for an intruder. After several long minutes, he reappeared on the landing, his eyebrows knitted together. “It’s all clear. But, well, this is the dangedest thing I’ve seen in a while.”
Jayne and I nearly collided as we raced toward the stairs, then halted as we reached the upper hallway. The Thomas Edison doll, so fragile and valuable, stood by a half-open door at the end of the hallway, one of its arms reaching upward as if trying to grasp the doorknob. Or as if it had already opened the door.
“Those are the stairs to the attic,” Thomas provided.
“Do you think somebody’s trying to play a prank on me?” Jayne asked with a quavering voice.
Thomas returned his gun to the holster and approached Jayne. “I suppose we need to consider the possibility. It certainly doesn’t appear to be a burglary—nothing’s been ransacked, anyway. You might want to check with Miss Pinckney’s lawyers to see if they have an inventory of the house you can check against what’s here.” His eyes met mine for a moment over Jayne’s head. “Just in case, I would suggest changing the locks and installing a security system—there doesn’t seem to already be one. It’s an up-front expense, but from what Melanie has told me, there are a lot of valuable items inside the house.”
“Including that doll,” I said, indicating Chucky posed at the door.
Thomas gave an involuntary shudder. “Really? I’m glad you told me. Otherwise I would have offered to take it with me and toss it in a Dumpster on the way home.”
“It talks,” I said. “Although it’s not supposed to, but Sophie told us that it has to be wound up first and that the mechanism is too delicate for it to work now. And it only recites a single nursery rhyme.”
Our eyes met, recalling the two words we’d all heard. Help me. That wasn’t part of any nursery rhyme I knew. I swallowed. “I’m thinking Sophie got it wrong, but she’s arranging for an expert to take a look at it so we at least have an idea of its value.”
Jayne’s arms remained crossed tightly in front of her, with little half-moons dug into her skin where her fingernails were. “I’m wondering if there might be a secret entrance to the house or something. That might be where the stray cat gets in and out.”
Leaving the doll where it was—nobody volunteered to put it back in the rocking chair in Button Pinckney’s bedroom—Thomas led us toward the stairs. “I’ll walk around the house and give a thorough search for what might look like any hidden openings. Melanie—why don’t you call your friend Yvonne at the archives and see if she has any of the old blueprints from this house? You never know what you might find.”
You never know what you might find. “I’ll do that. Jack and I haven’t seen Yvonne in a while, so that will be nice.”
I noticed a large two-bell brass carriage clock—the metal splotched in places, giving the surface the appearance of reflected clouds—sitting on a narrow hall table at the top of the stairs. As we passed it, it began to chime. Out of habit I looked at my watch but was surprised to see that it was eleven twenty—not a time that would warrant a chime on any clock. I stopped to look at the face of the clock and stilled. Although it was still chiming, the hands of the clock weren’t moving, frozen on a time that was becoming frighteningly familiar. Ten minutes past four.
“Oomph.”
My head whipped around in time to see Jayne pitch forward on the stairs. She seemed to roll forward in slow motion, her body hitting the wall of the landing, before momentum flipped her head over heels down the rest of the stairs.
Thomas had already reached the foyer and was quick enough to break Jayne’s fall before she could hit the hard floor. I raced down after her, careful to hold on to the bannister, then crouched next to where Thomas had sat her on the bottom step. “Are you all right?”
She was rubbing her ankle. “I think so. But my ankle’s hurt.”
Thomas carefully removed her shoe and began gently pressing on her ankle. “Doesn’t seem to be broken, but I’m taking you to the hospital to be completely checked out. You hit your head pretty hard on the landing wall.”
“Really, that’s not necessary—”
“Yes, it is. Both professionally and personally. If my mother found out that I witnessed a pretty woman fall down the stairs and didn’t take her to the hospital, she’d hit me with a frying pan.”
Jayne’s cheeks flushed as she lifted her lips in a half smile, then looked back up the stairway. “That was the weirdest thing. . . .”
“What?” I asked uneasily. “How you tripped?” I felt like a liar, knowing full well she hadn’t tripped.