Grave Doubts Read Online Free PDF

appear, he thought, prowling the scene of a crime — cerebral and disengaged. He chuckled at the image as he admired Dr. Hubbard.
    Miranda coughed throatily, seemed to listen for something elusive, then coughed again. Then she announced, “I’m going to scream.”
    Morgan looked puzzled, tolerant.
    She shrieked wickedly in variable pitch.
    A racket from downstairs was followed by thumping footsteps, and Officer Naismith sprang through the doorway, her semi-automatic clasped in both hands. Everyone froze.
    For a moment even the bodies seemed part of an allegorical danse macabre , with Rachel cast in the role of Death.
    Then the tableau collapsed in laughter, much to the officer’s annoyance.
    “Sorry,” Miranda said. “I should have warned you.”
    Rachel looked down at her Glock semi-automatic, summoned an indignant smile, and tucked it back in its holster.
    “Bang bang,” she said.
    Good recovery, Morgan thought. He regarded Miranda with bewildered affection, and waited.
    “Listen,” Miranda said. “You can hear the emptiness.”
    Nice, thought Morgan, imagining the music of the spheres.
    “I noticed when we were in the kitchen — I’ve never figured out why people say the word echo to hear an echo. I wonder what they say in Chinese.”
    She had their attention.
    “Okay,” she said. “Listen.”
    She called, “Echo-echo-echo.”
    They could hear a faint reverberation in the walls.
    “There’s a laundry chute,” she said.
    Yes, Morgan thought. You can hear emptiness if you know what to listen for.
    “I remember the laundry chute in my grandmother’s house,” Miranda explained. “We’d holler up and down, and when they covered it over because they were afraid we’d climb in you could still hear where it was through the walls.”
    Morgan picked up a crowbar from the floor next to the hanging cupboard. He walked along the main supporting wall, tapping. They could hear chunks of plaster skitter behind thick layers of paper and sift between the lath down into the hidden depths.
    He stopped and looked out in the hallway. There was a brace at eye level supporting a brick chimney that rose intothe attic — all that remained of an abandoned heating system when stovepipes had snaked through the different rooms during the winter. Beneath the brace a thickening in the wall. Morgan rapped on the protrusion. There was a hollow thud.
    He went back into the bedroom, aligned himself precisely, and smashed the back of the crowbar against the wall. Shards of layered paper scattered, plaster flew, and lath shattered. Professor Birbalsingh muttered unhappily.
    Once a hole appeared at laundry-chute height, Miranda stepped forward and tried to peer into the cavity. Choking on the dust, she pulled lath and plaster away with her bare hands. Morgan interceded with the crowbar. Rachel Naismith helped, and soon they had an opening big enough a person could reach in up to the shoulder.
    Morgan set the crowbar down, preparing to explore, but Miranda shunted him aside.
    “This one is mine,” she said. “What’ll you bet there’s a board jammed across to stop things falling through to the cellar.”
    She extended her arm fully down into the hole, grimaced as she made contact with something, and carefully lifted her arm out of the chute. Her hand was entwined with long tendrils of human hair. Suspended from the hair was the mummified head of a young woman, skin taut against the skull, lips drawn in a haunting grimace, membranes in her eye sockets catching fragments of light.
    “Morgan,” she said. “Could you get the other one?”
    Morgan tried to look in but his own head cast a shadow. He reached down, blindly, careful not to rip his flesh on splintered lath, and suddenly flinched. Steeling himself, he grasped the short-cropped hair of the remaining skull. He pulled it upwards and through, into the room.
    Miranda was still holding the woman’s head cradled in the crook of her arm. Without exchanging words, both ofthem