Free A Game of Greed and Deception: A Mystery Drama by John Mathews

net from the hooks to have a look at it and see if it might be useful.
It was brittle to the touch and many of the strings that held it together were
broken. It was also discolored in some places with black stains. Then she bent
down and pulled the trunk out from under the table. It was small but heavy and
the wood felt thick and sturdy. There was a small loop in the front running
through a metal clasp with a padlock. She tried the skeleton key in the padlock
and it came right open. Tammy opened the trunk and a foul odor filled the room.
The interior walls were full of cut marks and indentations. There was a razor
sharp hunting knife with a nephrite jade handle inside that matched the shaft
of the dagger from the living room. The knife was stained with dried blood.
There was also a collection of sharp animal teeth, a neatly coiled section of
rope, and a tattered folded pair of camouflage pants.
    Someone has kept this room up perfectly.
It’s like a hunter’s showroom. Someone has been hunting or used this knife
rather recently to kill something. And these teeth must be from that animal
head on the wall. But who would kill an animal, chop off the head, and mount it
on the wall just before the arrival of the tenants? Wouldn’t the owner clean
the damn knife off after using it? And that net is old and brittle so I don’t
think anybody is gonna catch something in that.
    She
took the hunting knife and set it on the coffee table next to the dagger that
she removed from her pocket. This is
obviously an old set of hunting weapons, and not cheap ones either. Tammy
looked around to find out if anyone could get into the room from outside the
house. There were two tall windows rather high up on the wall and one was
slightly ajar. She reached up and pulled the window shut but was unable to lock
it as the mechanism had been broken. Anyone
could have come inside through that window. But the lock was broken from the
inside. How could someone be in this room already and break the window lock
from the inside? I need to make sure those damn windows stay closed.
    Tammy
took the rope from the trunk, cut a section of it with the hunting knife, and
pulled one of the wooden chairs over near the wall. She climbed on top of the
chair, wincing from the pain in her leg. Examining the windows better, she saw
that each one opened by sliding upwards. With the locking mechanism broken, she
decided to secure the windows with the section of rope. When she tried to close
the left window, it wouldn’t move all the way up – something seemed to be
blocking it. She opened the window and a folded piece of paper fell to the
floor. Then she closed the window again, and taking the piece of rope, tied it
to a metal clasp on top of the lower portion of the window. She pulled the rope
tight and tied it to the same clasp in the adjacent window. With the remaining
portion of rope, she pulled down hard and tied it to the hinge of the heavy
trunk, which she moved snug against the wall. Well it ain’t perfect but that should be damn hard to break if someone
tries to get in.
    Having
secured the windows as best she could, Tammy got down off the chair. She opened
the folded piece of paper. It was wrinkled and worn so she took care not to
tear it. It showed a hand-drawn sketch layout of the cabin. There were fuzzy
circles representing the trees and surrounding forest. There was a faded
outline of the living room and two bedrooms. A darker small square was drawn
for the den and a couple ovals for the bathrooms. There was another room drawn
adjacent to the master bedroom, which Tammy concluded was the one leading from
her walk-in closet. She decided the closet must have been added after this map
was drawn. There was also a series of dotted lines showing several connecting
rooms and passages below the ground line. Ok
so this is an old map that someone drew on after the den was added. That dotted
line must be the damn basement. But how do you get down there? Did someone try
to