Abel was up to something, thought Kathy, and it wasn’t a workbench.
She hadn’t exactly counted the planks he brought in, because she had work to do, and sometimes it was hard to see how many the big strapping man was carrying. So she could only estimate. More than eighty, all ten feet long, and pretty wide, too. If you were building a workbench, you might want some wide planks like that, but you’d want some other kinds, too. They’d be different sizes, for different parts.
Of course, it’s none of my business, she told herself.
A little while later, Roxy chased Rover into Abel’s backyard. Well, if Abel didn’t mind, there was no reason for her to worry about it.
Then she had a thought. She looked down at her work, and decided none of it was urgent. She posted an out of office message, telling herself she’d work late to make up the time.
It’s really none of my business, she told herself.
But I want to know. Her childhood hero, Nancy Drew, would not have left a mystery alone.
She knew she probably wouldn’t be quite so curious if Abel didn’t have quite so many muscles. The way he moved those boards around so effortlessly had been enjoyable to watch. And he’d been the perfect host the other night, too, letting her drink his brandy, and then not taking advantage of her when she’d gotten a little tipsy. A hunk and a gentleman wrapped into one.
And yet, he was up to something. Bows and arrows. Some kind of big construction in his basement, more than a workbench. And there’d been something big and gold on his kitchen table that he hadn’t wanted her to see. She’d assumed it was just some sort of silly cosplay thing, probably went with the girl with the body paint, but if so, why hide it?
She put her laptop inside and then walked around the fence in the front yard, trying to act like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was, anyway. He’d told her she could come get her dogs any time they got over there. She didn’t see any sign of him in the house as she walked though the gate that divided his front yard from the back, where Roxy and Rover were. They’d used a gap in the fence that was a little too small for her, and there was always the worry that they’d scramble right back through it, so she went right to them.
“Roxy, Rover, stay,” she said.
The dogs looked confused, but they stayed. They’d never been ordered to ‘stay’ in the neighbor’s yard before.
Near the ground, in the backyard, were two small windows. They weren’t in particularly good shape, scratched up and dirty, and water tended to collect next to them when it rained heavily. Nor were they very clean. The sort of thing she figured Abel might replace at some point, if he was going to sell the house, and maybe do a little landscaping to stop the water from pooling. He’d gotten around to less of that sort of thing than she’d expected.
She got on her belly, and looked through the window into Abel’s basement. It even smelled musty, and she was probably getting grass stains on her blouse. She rubbed a little spot clear with her thumb, and then tried to wipe her thumb off on the nearby grass.
The planks were piled up there. Maybe there weren’t eighty of them, only sixty. But the weirdest thing was that Abel was there, only half of him visible, like he was standing in some kind of hole, or in a sub-basement. There was a big square dark area, and it didn’t look quite like a hole should look, to Kathy’s mind. It looked more like bad tile. But since he was standing in it, it must be a hole. He’d pick up a plank, and pull it down with him lengthwise, until it was gone. The planks were about ten feet long, so whatever hole Abel was in, it had to be at least that deep.
Why was there a hole in the basement?
There hadn’t been a hole before, when Mr. and Mrs. Grayson lived there.
He’d be at it for a while, based on the number of planks he had there. There was nothing else to see, really. Afraid of being spotted, she moved away from the window. There wouldn’t be much else to see for a while probably anyway, just Abel moving plank after plank. She’d always figured he was the type to do planks.
She cringed at herself. She’d inherited puns from her father, so at least she came by it honestly.
She walked over to Roxy and Rover. “Okay, you two, let’s get back home.”
She only paid half attention to the two cute terriers as they followed her back. Dealing with them could be automatic sometimes. Instead she tried to piece together what she’d seen. A giant hole in the basement, and some sort of construction project involving large planks.
The obvious answer, to her, was that the planks were being used to shore up some kind of mine. But what was there to mine? Maybe it was a tunnel, for robbing a bank. But they were in the middle of a residential neighborhood, and there were no banks nearby to rob. The people around were not poor, but they were middle class, and if you traveled a mile west you’d find houses of the same size for a couple hundred thousand dollars more. No one around Kathy’s house had anything worth building a tunnel to steal.
But he had something gold on the kitchen table, and while Kathy wasn’t sure what it was, she didn’t think it was just a random chunk pulled out of the ground. Maybe. Maybe instead of a mine or a tunnel, Abel was building a vault.
She wasn’t going to call the police on a neighbor unless she was absolutely sure. Or the city, even though one probably needed a permit to dig a hole in one’s basement, though, or to build a tunnel or a mine or a vault one needed to reinforce with all that lumber. She wasn’t the kind that tried to get the city to enforce every little rule. Why, just last year she’d had some electrical work done and the electrician had informed her that to get a permit she had to do all sorts of extra work costing a couple of thousand dollars, because the code had changed, and the city had adopted the new code, even if the county hadn’t. Or she could skip the permit. She’d skipped the permit. If the old code was good enough for people just a few miles away, it was good enough for her.
No, she wasn’t going to call the authorities. But she was going to keep a very close eye on Abel Thorson, and if that meant she was a nosy neighbor, so be it. It was just too big a mystery.