CHAPTER SIX HUNDRED and SIXTY-FIVE

(part one)

Sunday morning — 9:05 a.m.

“Where are we going?” Fran asked Jacob as she, Ava, Leslie, and Nelson followed him across the main Castle living room.

“Down here again,” Jacob said.

They turned down the hallway where MJ and Honey’s apartment was located.

“Just a second,” Jacob said.

He jogged down the basement stairs and returned a few minutes later with a cordless power drill.

“We were already here,” Ava said, irritably.

“There’s another area,” Jacob said.

“Where?” Nelson asked, standing in front of the door of the apartment they’d already collected samples from.

“Good question,” Jacob said with a grin.

Jacob waved his hand so that Nelson would move. Jacob gave Nelson the power drill and took a screw driver out of his pocket. The wall to the right of the door to the apartment on the end of the hallway was covered in Fir paneling with small four inch squares of wainscoting covering the wall. The squares covered the entire wall.

Jacob went to one of the squares near the edge of the basement stairs. Using the screwdriver, he carefully pried up the wood to uncover a screw. Jacob held out his hand for the power drill. Nelson gave him the drill and he unscrewed the screw part way. Then, Jacob uncovered three other screw panels and unscrewed the panel. With Nelson’s help, Jacob took the entire paneling down revealing a short stairwell going up.

“More apartments?” Leslie asked. “The roof line is only a few feet above us.”

“It’s more like a storage area or an attic,” Jacob said. “The ceiling is at about five feet so we’ll have to bend over to get around.”

Everyone nodded.

“Shall we?” Jacob asked before heading up the stairs.

They reached a bend in the stairs and then went up two more stairs. There was a door with a deadbolt and a padlock on it.

“This area was full of junk,” Jacob said.

“What kind of junk?” Ava asked.

“Trash,” Jacob said. “We got rid of what we thought was just trash and left everything else.”

“Are there belongings?” Ava asked.

“Some,” Jacob said. “You’ll just have to see it. If I had my way, I would have just opened the wall and chucked everything. But Delphie thought that this might someday mean something to someone.”

Jacob shrugged.

“You might want to put your N95 masks on rather than the cloth ones,” Jacob said. “It was pretty gross the last time I was here. I can’t imagine a few years have changed it much.”

Ava dug into her backpack and passed out N95 masks for the team. They took a moment to get the masks on. When everyone was ready, Jacob unlocked the padlock and the deadbolts.

“We had a hard time keeping people out of this area,” Jacob said. “Even after Mom and Delphie lived here full time, people would creep up here.”

Bent at the waste, the team moved into the storage area.

“To do what?” Leslie asked.

“Drugs,” Fran said. She pointed to a glass crack pipe on the floor next to a bookshelf.

“It was kind of a shooting gallery,” Jacob said.

Denver Cereal continues tomorrow...