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rot, the crew was still stripping wallpaper and ripping out the old wiring.
    Fernando led me down the long hallway to the back. The floorboards squeaked ominously beneath our feet. We came at last to one of the small corner rooms. Water-browned wallpaper curled in sheets from the still-intact walls. The light fixture was hanging from the ceiling like a gouged-out eye. There were two double-hung windows, one with a view of the alley below and the other of the busy street to the south, where life went on as usual.

    An Adrien English Mystery: The Dark Tide

    21

    Fernando closed the door on the crowd in the hall, and I saw the pulled-up, battered planks stacked to the side of the window. Something lay inside the gaping hole in the floor. I walked over and looked down at the raggedly clothed skeleton.
    Introducing Jay Stevens?
    He'd been wedged between the deep wooden joists. Then the planks of flooring had been nailed down again. Pretty simple, really. Assuming you had a crowbar, a hammer, and a chunk of uninterrupted time. If it hadn't been for the mold staining the walls and creeping into the baseboards, the construction crew would have simply sanded the floors, refinished them, and moved on to the next room. He might have rested there for another fifty years.
    “Is there anything unusual about the room?”
    Fernando looked at me like I was insane.
    “Besides the dead guy in the floor.”
    “No.” He reminded me, “This level was sealed off. Nobody used it for years.”
    I nodded, unable to tear my gaze away from skeleton in the cavity at our feet: the empty, staring eye sockets, wispy, tarnished remnants of hair on the not-quite-clean skull, the yellowed and protruding teeth that gave the impression it—he—had been screaming when he died. Not an attractive sight. Natalie had been right about that.
    It would have been pleasant to take an academic view, to think of this like the twelve-thousand-year-old skeleton of a natufian shaman I'd been reading about at my cardiologist's office yesterday.
    “There's a suitcase in there too.” Fernando squatted down. He reached beneath and hauled out a long, flat suitcase before I could stop him. A fat spider scuttled toward my shoe, and I absently stepped on it.
    The shaman had been discovered with burial offerings that included fifty complete tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard, and a human foot. This skeleton had been walled up with a vintage Samsonite that bore faded labels for Delta-C&S Airlines and a couple of eastern hotels.
    Maybe it wasn't archeology, let alone forensics, but it sort of indicated to me that the dead man—man, based on the filthy remnants of the polka-dot shirt—was circa the 1950s.
    It looked more and more likely that this was Jay Stevens.
    Judging by his luggage, he had been a man who liked to travel.
    “What do you think happened to him?” Fernando asked in a hushed voice.
    “Nothing good.”
    It looked to me like there were dark stains on the upper shoulders of the ratty shirt, and I knelt to get a better look, although, frankly, I didn't want to get too close. He wasn't the sweetest-smelling artifact to come out of this old building. Still, he didn't smell as horrifying as something newly, freshly dead. All the same, I wondered how no one had…well…noticed him all these years? Even if the Huntsman's Lodge had been pretty run-down by that time, surely the odor of a decomposing body would have made its presence known?
    “He must have been here a long time.”
    “Fifty years,” I said, “if he's who I think he is.”
    “All this time he's been waiting here for us to find him.”

    22
    Josh Lanyon

    Happy thought. I opened my mouth to reply, but when Fernando had leaned over the broken floor to lift out the suitcase, he must have brushed against the bag of bones, because as we were studying it, the skeleton's jaw dropped as though he were about to speak. Fernando swore and stepped back. I sucked in a sharp breath.
    I turned to Fernando,