The Case of the Dirty Bird Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened?” Dunc whispered.
    “I took a step,” Amos said. “What do you
think
happened? You know grace isn’t my thing. I stepped on a rake, and I think I’ve got a broken nose.”
    Dunc sighed. “I’ll flash the light, you take a step, then another.”
    In a series of flashes Amos made his way across the basement through the junk.
    “It’s like a light show at a concert,” he said, finally standing alongside Dunc at the back of the basement. They were under the stairs. “Like a strobe.”
    “Be quiet—I thought I heard something.” Dunc held his hand over Amos’s mouth, and the two of them stood but there was no sound.
    “All right,” Dunc whispered. “Let’s go upstairs and see what we can find.”
    He led the way up the stairs, flicking the light in tiny bursts back down the stairwell so Amos could follow.
    At the top there was a door, but it wasn’t locked and opened easily.
    “Hmmm,” Dunc said.
    “What?”
    “The door—why didn’t it squeak?” He leaned down and flashed the light on the hinges. “Look—they’ve been oiled.”
    “So?”
    “So if this building is abandoned, who’s oiling the hinges?”
    “So we go home, right?”
    “Not yet—let’s find out what’s upstairs.”
    Dunc moved away from the stairwell door and into the middle of a large room. Along one side there was a counter, and above that were stacks of empty shelves that showed in the flashes of light.
    “Looks like an old store,” Amos said. He felt his nose and winced. “Man, a rake handle on top of the food processor—noses weren’t made for it.”
    “It might have been a ship chandler’s,” Dunc said.
    “What’s that?”
    “A store for nautical things. See, there’s grease on the shelves—maybe from engine parts. It sure wasn’t a tavern.”
    “Not now—but a long time ago. There might be something somewhere to show what it used to be before it was a chandler’s.” Amos pointed at the back wall in the darkness. “Shine back there.”
    Dunc flashed the light on the walls, but they had gone around the room twice before Amos spotted it. And then it was in an image two times before the one they were flashing on.
    “Back up one, then another one.”
    “What?”
    “Run the movie backward. I saw some writing.”
    On the back wall, near the right corner, there were some letters carved in the wood. They showed in the light, and Dunc closed his hand around the flashlight beam so that just a trickle of light came out and they moved into the corner.
    “ ‘D.H. 1857,’ ” Dunc read. The letters were carved into the old wood of the wall, across-board that might have been in back of a bar. “I’ll bet it stands for Devil’s Hammer. They carved it in the wall back of a bar.”
    “Yeah,” Amos said. “Or it might have been somebody named Donald Hamilton.”
    “Amos—”
    “I know. Be positive, right?”
    A sudden clunking sound froze both of them. Dunc turned the light off, and they stood listening, holding their breaths.
    There was no repeat of the sound.
    “It was a cat,” Dunc said.
    “Or a rat,” Amos said. “As big as a rhino, except that it eats meat. Human flesh. And it’s hungry.” Amos stopped as he realized he was alone again. “Dunc?”
    “Over here.” Dunc was moving along the wall, and he held his hand over the light again, letting a tiny stream out. “I’m looking for a tunnel or door. The back of the building is against the stone of the river-bank.”
    They felt along the wall, tapping, but there was no opening except for the doorway leading to the basement.
    “Maybe it’s downstairs,” Dunc whispered. “And we missed it.”
    He moved back down the steps and was halfway down when Amos landed on him in a heap that sent both of them tumbling down to the bottom.
    “Missed a step,” Amos whispered as they untangled themselves. “I was doing all right until that third one. My foot slid over it at a slight angle, and my body weight was past center. I still almost