When we got far enough away from the nearest blazing mound, I switched on my flashlight briefly. We were in the backyard, walking directly toward the henhouse. Should I check in on Ghost Guy and Delbert—not to mention Sophie? I decided against it. I couldn’t see any reason to upset the delicate balance of power that Sophie had no doubt established as soon as we closed the door. Besides, they’d probably appreciate my not getting her all riled up again. According to Sherman, Sophie was intimidating enough in a good mood; I’d hate to see her in a tizzy.
No sign of the other bad guys, so I had to think they were holed up in the house with Melanie and the other ladies. Only about a half hour had passed since I.B. or one of his henchmen intercepted my call to her, but it seemed like six weeks had crawled by. Lord, please be with her.
Every few seconds when the wind died down momentarily, I could see the other men slowly getting into position around the house. It looked to me like the snow had finally stopped falling; what was swirling around now was just whatever the wind managed to pick up and throw back into the air. At least we had that in our favor, although just exactly how that favored us, I had no idea. Just seemed like I should be grateful for something.
Emma stopped abruptly, and I nearly toppled over her as I drew up short. “What’s the matter?” I said. “You okay?”
She nodded and said, “I’m fine. We’re here.”
“Here? You mean we’re at the tunnel entrance?”
“Yep. It’s right over there, in fact.” I followed the direction she pointed.
I groaned.
She was pointing at the henhouse.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Melanie didn’t know what was worse: the fact that Emma wasn’t with them or wondering where she was. She decided those problems were one and the same and that her immediate tasks were to keep the men from discovering that one of the women was missing and not let any of the ladies spill the beans. She prayed that Emma wouldn’t try anything heroic.
White Suit was still down the hall presumably rummaging through the bathroom cupboard looking for bandages. Melanie looked around at the room they’d been herded into. It was the Adams Room, the one she’d given to Delbert Jackson just the night before. Was it just last night? Seemed like three weeks ago. He’d dumped his clothes from the suitcase to the bed where they lay strewn about in wrinkled piles; at least two pairs of dirty athletic socks were scattered about on the floor. The open suitcase lay on the floor, empty, as if he’d tossed it there in his haste to unpack, as it were, and settle in. What a slob. The bed hadn’t even been turned down. Melanie cringed to think of Mr. Jackson sprawling across her bedspread. Yes, it was a reproduction, but she still didn’t want it abused by a sloppy brute.
She could hear someone making his way back down the hall, his heavy snowmobile boots thumping on the hardwood floor. White Suit appeared at the doorway a few seconds later. “Who knows what they’re doing with gunshot wounds?”
The women looked at one another and as one, turned to give him a blank stare.
“Odd question, buddy,” Sadie spoke first. “Don’t look at any of us. Those kinds of shenanigans don’t happen very often here in Road’s End. ’Course, you bein’ from Gangsterland and all, you’re probably used to that kind of stuff, now aren’tcha?” She shrugged. “Guess you’ll just have to tend to your friend yourself. Don’t forget to wash up now. Wouldn’t want a few germs to kill your pal off after everything he’s been through, now would we? Losing your ride home, runnin’ around in this nasty weather, getting shot.” She shook her head and shrugged. “Now this.”
“Shut up, old lady. Just for that, you can do the honors.” He waved his gun at her. “Get up. Now!”
Sadie took her sweet time. “Hold your horses, fella. Just give me a minute.” She clamored to all fours. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t rile the person fixin’ to patch up your friend. Might just finish him off, you know?” She made a slashing motion with her finger across her neck and cackled. Francine, the hen, would have been proud. Sadie rose to her feet with an exaggerated grunt.
“Didn’t I tell you to shut your trap?”
Sadie faced him with her hands on her hips. “As I recall, your exact words were to shut up. Nothing about a trap. But that’s a real good idea. How do you know you’re not falling into our trap, that we’re not plotting some uprising?”
White Suit snorted. “Yeah, right. You and what army?”
Hazel raised her fist high, punctuated the air with several hearty thrusts, and said, “God’s army!”
White Suit swung the gun toward Hazel. “You! Shut up!” He turned back to Sadie. “And you, quit stalling.” He brandished the gun toward the door, and stepped backward into the hallway. “Now get out here.” He turned to his buddy, whom Melanie had dubbed Marshmallow Man, and said, “Keep an eye on ’em.”
Melanie caught Sadie’s fleeting smile. She had a feeling that’s what her feisty neighbor wanted all along. Maybe if the women made enough trouble for them, the men would stay in the room with them and give Hugh and Bristol and the rest of them a chance to get into the house. Keeping the thugs upstairs and away from the doors and windows couldn’t do any harm.
“Oh good grief,” I said. “Are you serious, Emma? The tunnel entrance is here? In the henhouse?”
She nodded emphatically. “Yep. Right about where the camel is sitting, I would imagine, assuming she hasn’t moved since I last saw her. ’Course we’ve got those two guys tied up in there, too. Gotta figure out what to do with them.”
“But how …?”
“Never mind how. It is what it is. We’ll just have to move the camel, I guess.”
“That might be easier said than done.”
Sherman sidled up to me. “In here, huh? No kidding! Well, Sophie’s not gonna like this one little bit. No sirree.”
“We’ve been over that, Sherman. Can you help us out here? Watch Sophie while we go into the tunnel? I’ll have Joe stay with you to help guard the men. Tied up or not, those guys aren’t anyone to mess around with. Besides, we can’t have Sophie running off into this storm.” I looked Sherman in the eye. “Can you handle this, son?”
Nod, nod, nod. Why did I ever doubt him? “You bet, Pastor Foster. I’m on it. Me and Sophie’ll see that nobody gets out, nobody does nuthin’ bad. And a’course, Joe here, too. Couldn’t do it by myself, no sirree, but Joe here’ll be a big help.”
Three minutes later, we were inside the shed. Sherman sweet-talked Sophie into standing up and moving aside. The man in white and Jackson nearly suffocated one another trying to get out of her way. Joe and I kicked aside the piles of new hay I had so naively scattered about earlier in the day.
Lo and behold, beneath the hay, hidden for decades under alternate layers of older hay, debris, and dirt, was a trapdoor constructed from alternating lengths of pine flooring. The irregular pattern disguised the fact that it could be pulled upward by burrowing into handholds dug into the ground beneath a couple of the planks. Once you knew what you were doing, it raised easily.
“How on earth did you two girls ever find this?” I said. “I mean, once you knew it was here, I suppose it was easy enough to spot it again, but it blends right in with the rest of the floor.”
Emma smiled up at me. “We were adventuresses. We lived for danger!” She chuckled and looked a bit wistful. “Seriously, though, we’d heard stories and after a few hours at different times spent investigating this place, we happened upon it. Believe you me, you’re no more surprised, or thrilled, than we were.”
“Don’t blame you,” I said. The door was wide open now, leaning against the back wall of the henhouse. The musty odor of damp earth and rot spilled from the gaping black hole. “Just how deep is this thing?”
“Not very. Remember, it was a slave tunnel. Nothing fancy about it. There’s a ladder leaning against one of the walls—that one, I think. Do you want to do the honors?”
I waffled. To be perfectly honest, no, I wasn’t crazy about spending ti
me in a hole in the ground any sooner than the Lord intended, but I couldn’t very well ask an eighty-three-year-old woman to go ahead of me into the dark unknown. “Sure thing. Let’s get going. Time’s a wasting. Joe, Sherman, can you handle things up here?”
Sherman bobbed.
Joe nodded. “We’re on it, Hugh. You be careful down there, okay?”
I gave him a thumbs-up. “We’ll come to get you as soon as we get these other guys under control.” Here we go, Lord. Please be with us. And if it’s not too much to ask, please get any of Your spiders down there out of my way. I leaned over and put my foot on the top rung of the wooden ladder. “Please don’t crumble.” Thirty seconds later, I was standing on the dirt floor of an area about six feet square. Close quarters. My claustrophobia was going to get a workout tonight.
I was closely followed by Emma, George, Dewey, Frank, and Leo. I’d gladly have left Frank with the others in the henhouse, but I was afraid he’d fall asleep in the corner, we’d forget all about him, and he’d freeze to death overnight. So to prevent him from dying in his sleep, I chose instead to place him in imminent danger of being shot. Nice trade-off, Hugh.
It was close quarters with all of us standing in the little area just below the ladder, but I dreaded heading into the tunnel any sooner than I had to. But Emma had other ideas. “Let’s get going, Pastor. The sooner we get those men away from your womenfolk, the better off everyone will be.”
I peeled off my right glove and tucked it under my arm, clicked on the flashlight, and aimed the beam into the tunnel. Not much to see. It was probably five feet in height, high enough to avoid crawling on my hands and knees, but not tall enough to stand upright. “How long is this thing, Emma?”
“Well, it runs to the basement of the inn, so I guess maybe a hundred feet or so? It makes a jog up here a little ways—probably to avoid the roots of that big oak tree you’ve got in your side yard—and then heads straight toward the inn. The last time I was in here, it was intact, but I can’t say for sure now. For all I know, the timbers could’ve come down, could’ve all caved in. Lot of years have passed since then.”
I thought about that. Emma and Rachel were wandering around this tunnel a good eighteen years before I was even born; it remained undetected and undisturbed ever since. I didn’t know if that was reassuring in some odd way, or just plain frightening.
We started out. I felt as though I was walking through wet cotton. Surprisingly, it was warmer down here than it was above ground, but then the ravages of the wind and snow wouldn’t reach these depths. Still, it was damp and close and dark and probably teeming with eight-legged spider demons and stomach-slithering Satan-wannabes. “Let’s get some more light down here, can we, fellas?” Three more beams appeared; George and Dewey vied with one another to see who could cast their light the farthest. The result was a hodge-podge of light rays snaking up and down the sides, floor, and ceiling of the tunnel. It was like some strange underground Hollywood opening night gala. “Whoa, guys. Hold them steady, will you? I’m getting nauseous here.”
“Sorry, Hugh,” one of them said.
We took a few more steps. The floor was fairly well packed, with no signs of recent disturbance. I played my flashlight beam over the tracks on the floor. “Are these yours, Emma?”
“Probably. Mine and my sister’s. We spent a considerable amount of time down here after we first found it. Looking back on it, it was stupid. Anyone could have put something on top of the trapdoor or shoved something heavy up against the entrance to the basement, and we’d have been lost forever. But that didn’t happen.” She fell silent, and I wondered if she was thinking that despite their luck while exploring underground, her sister had died anyway.
“Ever find any snakes down here, Emma?” I said as nonchalantly as I could.
“Nope. But that doesn’t mean we won’t find ’em, I suppose. Spiders, though. Man oh man, the spiders we found down here. Like to carry us off.”
“You realize you’re not helping much.”
“Yeah. I noticed your wife had to kill the spider in the kitchen last night. What’s up? A big man like you afraid of something a million times smaller?”
“Yep. Don’t know what it is, but I hate ’em. Every last creepy, crawly, beady-eyed, eight-legged one of them. And while I’m confessing, I might as well admit I’m also claustrophobic; I count constantly; I’m obsessively neat, and I’m a control freak to boot. So where am I? In utter confusion in a situation I can’t control in a dark underground tunnel with snakes and spiders all around me and men above me who want to shoot Bristol. Probably all the rest of us too.” I stopped and looked at her in the gloom. She looked determined somehow, confident, as if she were in her element. I’m glad somebody is. “Emma, how do I get myself into these things?”
We walked another few feet. “I don’t know, Hugh,” she said. “How do any of us get into the things we find ourselves mired in? Age, maybe? Bad luck? Bad decisions? Things happen that are beyond our control and then we can’t—or don’t, for one reason or another—take steps to correct them.” She was silent for a minute while she aimed her flashlight on a small handprint clearly embedded in the mud of the wall. “See that, Hugh? Now that’s an example of a child having things taken out of his or her control. Who knows? Maybe things worked out just fine eventually. After all, they were on their way to freedom if they were in this tunnel. But even free people have things go wrong. Make mistakes, hurt others, cause regret.” She walked a few more steps, then added, “And learn to live with it.”
The smell. She knew it would bring it all back. The first time she and her sister had walked though this tunnel, the smell had been overpowering—she supposed one would eventually grow accustomed to it, but Rachel never really did. Even today, though, over seventy years later, the scent of soil that hadn’t seen the light of day for centuries, maybe millennia, the odors of rotting wood, grass, trees, shrubs, weeds, dead animals—who knew what all—had, over time and in total darkness, merged into this distinctive odor.
Funny how a smell can bring the past into such sharp relief, she thought. She could almost hear her sister’s voice, feel her warm hand pressing into hers as they crept side by side and step by step along the tunnel’s shadowy, dank depths.
And then there was the cabin, of course. She’d often wondered if her experiences in the tunnel had done anything to propel her toward her life there. Perhaps, she thought, but maybe I’d have gravitated to a solitary life in the mountains even without traipsing through a dank, long-forgotten slave tunnel in my youth. Whatever events encouraged her to explore the depths of her own passions, to live at least some of her years in the way she would have—had her sister, so many years before, not tumbled out of her life and into death—were good ones. Emma was grateful for whatever measure of peace those days spent at the cabin had afforded her.
Of course, no one in the town knew, or even suspected, she surmised, just where she was or what she was doing during her long absences from Rivermanse and Road’s End. The men and women she’d hired over the years to maintain the grounds and keep the house tidy and squirrel-free during her absences assumed she was vacationing abroad or visiting friends elsewhere in the states, and she’d done nothing to dissuade them from their conclusions.
The truth of the matter, however, was that she boarded a train in Richmond and traveled to a small town not much bigger than Road’s End. From there she hired a local man to transport her and a few meager belongings—provisions mostly—to the edge of a long, winding, grassy path that led upward to a small clearing nestled among the deep pine forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, in a two-room log cabin, she spent her days and nights in quiet solitude among the plants and animals of the region, at one with both the earth and the stars.
She had no electricity, no indoor plumbing. The cabin rested on the edge of a bluff over a small river—unnamed, as far as she knew. Hers was the existence of the mountain range’s earliest residents—at least those of the last couple of
centuries—a primitive pattern spent in the simple pursuit of survival. She chopped wood, gathered brush, hauled water, planted, tended, and harvested a garden, then canned, dried or otherwise preserved her bounty. One year she even dug a root cellar to house her potatoes and carrots, parsnips, onions, and apples, as well as those jars of vegetables, jams, and jellies she put up over the years that didn’t fit in her cupboard upstairs.
Rather than wear her down, the back-breaking work re-energized her and she often credited her long hours of labor during the day for the deep and restful sleep she enjoyed each night. There in that rudimentary cabin nestled in the bosom of a lush, pine-covered mountain and surrounded by hundreds of miles of primordial forest, she lived the life she knew she was meant to live—not the one she had assigned to herself so many lonely years before. The rest of her life might be shrouded in twin clouds of deceit and misdirection, but here at River’s Bluff, the skies cleared and she could be herself.
“Emma? Did you hear me?” I stopped long enough to shine my light behind me. I was getting a backache, and my neck would never be the same after crouching for so long. Emma was there, all right, but seemed preoccupied. “You okay back there?”
“Sorry, Hugh,” she said. “Just deep in thought. Yes, I’m fine. Did you ask me something?
“Just wondering about the entrance to the basement. Have you seen it lately? I mean, how do we know it isn’t blocked with a refrigerator or something?”
“We don’t, I guess. But it’s in a tiny, separate area off the main room of the basement and I doubt they ever ran electricity to it. Of course, I haven’t seen it in over seventy years, so anything could’ve happened.” She stopped and pointed her flashlight to the roof and then beyond me into the tunnel. “We’re getting close now. Better tell those blabbermouths to hush, or they’ll give us away.”
Misstep (The Road's End Series Book 1) Page 20