7 Never Haunt a Historian Read Online Free PDF Page A

below. The step she was sitting on was a concrete block. She opened the door to the tool shed and stepped inside. It looked exactly as it had earlier in the afternoon—barren, dusty, and unused. The sounds had disappeared.
    Leigh let out a frustrated breath and returned to her step. Her mind was going. Period. Maura wasn’t the only one behind on sleep—she herself hadn’t gotten eight hours straight in at least a week. She owed that to the crackpot who ran Rinnamon Industries, with whom her advertising agency had so foolishly embroiled itself, despite knowing his reputation. The man went through advertising firms like she went through leftover Halloween candy, chewing up copywriters as fast as their proposals could be wadded up and hefted into the nearest trashcan. He had turned down six of her ideas so far… she had been working on the seventh when she had fallen asleep in her hammock this afternoon. Which would never have happened if she hadn’t already sat up half the night trying yet again to make pottery crocks sound “traditional, reliable, and sensational” at the same time.
    Her left temple began to throb.
    No sooner had Leigh closed her eyes than the high-pitched squeaks started up again. This time she rose and attempted to follow the sound. It seemed to stay with her as she rounded the corner of the shed, but she saw only a primitive stone and clay-chink foundation covered with sprawling weeds. As she moved around the next corner, however, her gaze halted. Midway along the back wall lay a set of slanted wooden doors, one loose on its hinges and hanging askew, both half covered by the overhanging bushes.
    “A cellar?” she mumbled out loud, suddenly embarrassed that neither she nor Cara had recognized the rotting planks for what they were when they had walked this way earlier. But in their defense, they had been distracted by what had looked like a trampled spot in the weeds nearby, and besides—who would expect to find a cellar under a tool shed? But a cellar door it definitely was, and the foundation under the building, she realized, was very old. Much older, in fact, than the wooden structure built atop it.
    She moved closer to the doors. The squeals grew louder.
    Her pulse rate increased. She knew that sound. But what was it?
    Her hand moved to the door that hung askew. It was barely connected to the doorframe, hanging by a single screw anchoring one rusty hinge. A quarter of the original door was gone entirely, rotted off to leave a sizable hole.
    She started to pull the door to the side. Then she stopped.
    “Maura?” she called feebly. The detective was nowhere in sight.
    Leigh cursed under her breath. Should she… or shouldn’t she? The sounds she heard weren’t particularly frightening. In fact, for some odd reason they made her think of—
    At last, a light bulb flashed in her weary brain.
    She grabbed the doors with both hands and lifted them open.
    The dim light of early evening shone through the opening, illuminating little more than the top few of a flight of stone steps leading away beneath. But the fierce growling that now echoed upward confirmed Leigh’s suspicions.
    “What you got, Koslow?” asked Maura, who had appeared behind Leigh’s right shoulder.
    Leigh turned around and held out a hand. “Do you have a flashlight on you?”
    Maura reached down and unclipped the mini LED attached to her belt. “Be careful,” she said, handing it over. “Sounds like you’re not too welcome down there.”
    “You think?” Leigh flipped on the light and leaned down into the opening. She cast the bright white beam down the empty stairs and then swept the space beyond.
    From the floor of the stone cellar, in the midst of what appeared to be a pile of rags, gleamed two bright eyes and a set of sharp white teeth. The growling intensified.
    “It’s all right,” Leigh soothed, making no move to go closer.
    Maura leaned in for a look of her own as Leigh swept the light beam over a