AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Glancing around the apartment, she decided the first item of business would be to make this place more her own. What little furniture there was had been shoved against each wall.
She grabbed the end of the couch and pulled it away from the wall and saw at once why it had been pushed against the wall as it had been.
There was a sizable hole in the wall behind it.
On closer inspection, she saw that the hole—four inches wide, a good foot high and seemingly endless in depth—had been chipped into the adobe wall. She couldn’t tell how deep it ran. Not without a flashlight.
As she straightened she noticed a scrap of paper on the floor near the hole. She picked it up and saw that it was a piece of a torn photograph. The piece appeared to be part of a face covered with something like a gauzy veil or a film of some kind.
She peered into the hole and thought she saw another piece of the torn photograph. How odd.
Vaulting over the couch she dug in her purse for the penlight on her key ring. In the kitchen she found a butter knife and returned to behind the couch.
Shining the tiny light into the hole, she began to dig out the pieces of the photo with the butter knife. She still couldn’t tell how deep the hole was—obviously too deep for her dim light. But there were more pieces of the photograph in there, as if they’d fallen down from the floor above.
Diligently she worked the pieces out until she couldn’t reach any more.
Just as she was starting to collect the scraps, a sliver of light sliced down through the top of the hole. Willa angled her gaze upward into the opening and saw light coming through what appeared to be a crack in floorboards upstairs.
She’d thought no one lived directly above her. She heard the creak of footsteps on the floor overhead. The light went out. She listened, but heard nothing more.
Taking the pieces of the photograph over to the small kitchen table, she pulled up a chair and began to fit the pieces together like a puzzle, curious after seeing the veiled face in the first piece.
The graphic artist who’d mentioned Cape Diablo had also been an avid photographer. Was it possible this was one of her photos? Or maybe that she’d even stayed in this very room?
The photograph began to take shape. Several of the edge pieces were missing but she was starting to see an image. What was it she was looking at?
She laid down the last piece and felt a jolt. It was a photo of the pool in the courtyard, the water murky and dark.
Funny, but the face that had spurred her curiosity enough to put the photograph back together in the first place seemed to have disappeared.
That was strange.
Carefully she turned the pieces of the photograph a hundred and eighty degrees and gasped.
A boy of about four was lying on the bottom of the pool in the deep end, the dark water like a mask over his face. There was no doubt that the child was dead.
CHAPTER FIVE
Abruptly Willa shoved back her chair and stumbled to her feet. Odell had said Andres Santiago’s only son had died here. Drowned in the pool? But that had been more than thirty years ago.
Her hands were shaking. How long had this photo been in the wall? If the shot had been taken by her friend, then it would have been just weeks ago.
Suddenly scared, Willa looked at the photograph again.
The body on the bottom of the pool was gone. So was the little boy’s terrified face.
She stared down at the photograph. Had she just imagined seeing the little boy? Could it have been a trick of the light? Or just her imagination after the terrible story Odell had told her?
She glanced toward the hole in the wall. But if it had just been a photograph of the murky pool, then why had someone torn the photograph into tiny pieces then hidden them in the wall?
Unable to suppress a shudder, Willa thought of the woman on the third floor and the light that had bled down from overhead as the woman moved around up there. Alma Garcia. She’d been the child’s nanny, Willa thought as her stomach knotted. Had she been caring for the little boy the day he drowned?
Willa glanced again at the photo, telling herself it was just a photograph of the pool. Nothing more.
Shivering from a nonexistent cold breeze that seemed to have crept into the room, Willa scooped up the pieces of photograph and dumped them into the trash can. She couldn’t keep seeing death everywhere she looked.
The curtains billowed in at the window, startling her. The tropical breeze was warm. The chill gone from the room again.
