Reflecting Love's Charms (Bellingwood Book 14)

by Diane Greenwood Muir

  "No. Henry is going to put lamps in here so we can see later on. He numbered them from the end. This one says 'two.'"

  "Why didn't you tell me that earlier?" Polly asked. "I could have been keeping track."

  "We weren't thinking," Henry said from far behind her. "I always forget that this happens to you."

  The tunnel grew wider and curved to Polly's left before opening into an even wider space in front of a wooden door.

  "Have you opened this?" Polly asked. "What's behind it?"

  "This is your adventure," Henry said, making his way through the kids. "I don't know what it's going to take to open the door, but I'm ready for anything."

  Polly put her hand on the doorway, then rapped on it with her knuckles. It sounded hollow, which gave her hope. "How do you know it wasn't closed up with cement or bricks behind it? What if there's nothing on the other side?"

  "This is where the kids from the university came in handy," Henry said. "They measured the house and the tunnel and know where it should come out. There's an extra room in the basement that's been closed up for all these years. Unless you’re looking for it, you'd never know the space was there. I wouldn't let them go in. This was your surprise." He chuckled. "I’m under strict orders to call them tomorrow and invite them back. The suspense is nearly killing them."

  "Did you try just turning the handle?" Polly asked, putting her hand on the old metal door handle. She turned it and when the door didn't open, shook the handle. The door moved a little, but refused to open.

  "That's why I wasn't too worried about concrete or bricks," he said. "The door isn’t attached to anything solid on the other side. We just have to figure out how to unlock it."

  "I don't suppose you have an old key on you, do you?"

  "Well," he said.

  'You're making it too easy. You could have just opened it and gone in."

  "But we didn't," Rebecca said.

  "You really have a key?" Polly asked.

  "I talked to an old locksmith in Des Moines and told him what we had." Henry said. "He told me to just drill the thing and break the lock."

  Polly furrowed her brow. "Break it?"

  "We can replace the lock, honey." He handed her a long key. "Unless you want to try to open it with this first."

  She grabbed the key from him and inserted it into the lock and twisted it. "That didn't work."

  "Try again. Jiggle it around in there. Mr. Gardner thought this key should match this door. He has a million of these things."

  Polly knelt down, handed her lamp up to Henry and then tugged on it to move it around in order to get better light on the lock. "Do you really have a drill?"

  "I can get it if necessary," he said. "Try again. Slowly this time."

  She inserted the key again and pushed it just a little deeper into the lock, then slowly turned it until she felt pressure. Polly took a deep breath and pushed the key through its revolution and stopped as she heard the lock snick open.

  "I think I did it." She looked up into the expectant faces of her family and turned the handle again, pushing the door forward. At the last minute, it occurred to Polly to worry about stale air, but what came out of the room smelled no worse than the old basement of the house.

  "Well?" Hayden asked.

  "I'm terrified of finding more bodies," she said. "Maybe one of you should go first."

  Henry pushed the door all the way open and held up the lamp. "Go on in. We're here for backup. This is your discovery."

  Polly grabbed Rebecca's arm and lifted it so the lamp would shine in front of them. "You're coming with me."

  "Haven't I had enough trauma this weekend?" Rebecca asked, a lilt in her voice.

  "Not yet. Come on." Polly tugged on her and the two of them stepped into the room, followed by Henry, Hayden and Heath. "This looks like an office of some sort," Polly said. She hardly knew where to look first.

  They had entered at the center point of a room that was about six feet wide and ten feet long. There was no perceptible door in any of the other walls, but someone had to have accessed this room at some point in the past. Heath had moved to the south end of the room and held his lamp so that she could see a large roll top desk with a chair pushed up in front of it. On either side were pedestals, each holding an oil lantern. The desk's tambour had been rolled closed and she wanted to know what was in it, but there was so much to take in.

  At the other end of the room were more shelves like those that had been in the underground room with the kegs.

  "Are those bottles full?" she asked.

  Hayden walked over and held his lamp up so she could see. "Not all of them. They're all labeled like they're ready to go, but only a couple of them are full." He reached to the back and took out a bottle filled with a dark amber liquid. "This has been aged a while," he said with a laugh.

  "How many full bottles?" Henry asked, walking over to join him.

  "It looks like just three," Hayden said. "Unless you can see something I'm missing here."

  The long wall in front of Polly and Rebecca was covered with wooden pegboards of various sizes. "What in the world?" Polly asked, pulling Rebecca with her so she could look at them more closely. At the top of each board was a name; mostly last names, but some with an initial preceding them. "Whitney, Bradford, Carter..." She looked down at Rebecca. "Do you suppose that's a relative of Beryl's?"

  "What are these?" Rebecca asked.

  "I'll bet these are the tally marks for gallons of whiskey these people brought in for sale," Henry said. "If we're talking about illegal sales here."

  "It's the craziest way to keep a record, though," Polly said.

  Hayden ran his fingers through the holes on one of the boards. "Not really, if you think about it. It's better than keeping paper records that could be used against them. It's odd enough that if someone came into this room, they wouldn't know what it was. For all they knew it could be game scores of some kind." He pointed at the wall above the desk. "Darts, for instance. And who knows, maybe we're completely wrong and they are dart scores."

  "Have you got that desk open yet?" Polly asked Heath.

  "It's locked. All of the drawers are locked," he said. "I felt around underneath to see if I could find a hiding place for a key, but it's not here."

  The rest of the room was filled with crates and more barrels. Polly bent down to lift a lid off a crate at her feet. "Look at this," she said, pulling out a china plate. "Why would they have packed the china in here? And who shut this room up, by the way? And where's the door to the basement?"

  Henry had been working on something over at the shelving unit and came back to hand her a flat piece of metal. "Try this on the desk."

  "What do you mean?"

  He showed her a search he had done on his phone. "It says you should be able to open a desk drawer with this. Push it in all the way to the back, jiggle it up and down a little and turn it clockwise. Just like you did with the key on the main door."

  "You're funny," Polly said with a laugh. "Are you looking for the doorway?"

  "We'll look around. Come on, Hayden. Pat these walls. There has to be an opening here somewhere."

  Polly took the piece of metal he'd given to her over to the desk. "Do you want to try it?" she asked Heath.

  "Could I?"

  She laughed. "As long as lock-picking doesn't become something you plan to put on your resume."

  "Thanks." He took it from her and then turned back. "And I won't. I promise."

  She watched him work the lock on the top of the desk and in just a few minutes, he finally pushed the tambour up an inch.

  "Got it. But it doesn't want to go very easy."

  "It probably warped over the years," Henry said. "Just keep it straight and continue to work at it."

  "How about I do this and you try to unlock more of those drawers," Polly said. She stood at the center front of the desk and put her hands out to either edge of the tambour, working it upward. It was slow going, but about the time Heath ann
ounced that he had gotten the last drawer unlocked, she finally pushed the roll top open as far as it was going to go. Polly sank down into the chair. "That’s disappointing."

  "What?" Henry asked.

  "There's not much in here. Some old pens and an ink well. I have an empty tin and a bowl with more of those pegs. And here's a weird little bell." Polly rang it a couple of times. "It still works." She looked down at Heath, who was sitting on the floor. "Did you find anything?"

  "There might have been some papers in these drawers, but I can't read anything on them. They must have gotten wet. And there were mice in here, too," he said, wrinkling his nose.

  "Dang it. I was hoping for more information."

  He grinned up at her and reached into the bottom drawer. "Well, there's this." He handed her an old metal box.

  "It's locked," she said with a frustrated laugh.

  "But I have a key." He handed that up to her. "It was sitting on top of the box."

  Polly stuck the key in the box, turned it and opened it. "Bring your lamp up here," she said to him. "We have papers."

  "What is it?" Rebecca asked, running over to join them.

  "It's filled with Franklin Bell's personal papers," Polly said, almost reverently. "Here's his will." She passed that to Rebecca. "And here is the note from the bank when he built this place." Polly took out a small notebook and handed that to Heath. "Look in there and see what it is." She took out three photographs and recognized Hiram Bell from pictures she'd seen when Beryl was going through her family's things. But in one of them he stood with a young boy. She assumed it was his son, Franklin. There was another picture of him with a rather severe looking woman who was holding a baby.

  "They didn't take happy pictures in those days." She showed it to Rebecca.

  "That woman looks mean."

  "She was probably very nice, but they didn't smile very often for photographs."

  "There's not much in here," Rebecca said. "He didn't have any family, but it says that if he died, all of his money was to go to pay off the hotel and then there's some guy named ..." Rebecca peered at the writing on the page. "It looks like Reginald Adams inherited the estate."

  "That name was on the abstract we pulled," Polly said. "And I've seen the Adams name before." She took out her phone and scanned through the notes program until she landed on one of Beryl's historical photographs. "Here. There was a Leonard Adams who founded the Bellingwood National Bank with Hiram Bell and some others."

  Heath put the little notebook in front of Polly on the desk, his fingers holding two pages open. "I think they had a fight," he said. "This says that Reg wanted to stop selling whiskey. He was worried about the government."

  "The revenue-ers," Henry said with a grin.

  "And Franklin didn't want to?" Polly asked.

  "They had a fist fight." Heath laughed. "He mentions the fountain upstairs in the lobby. That Reg pushed him into it in front of a big crowd of people. His father was there when it happened and he was embarrassed for them. There were bankers from all over the Midwest here at the time for a convention."

  Hayden and Henry had stopped searching for the door as they listened to Polly, Heath and Rebecca discuss their findings.

  "What else?" Hayden asked.

  Heath started reading. "I've asked Reg to meet me here in the office to discuss this as gentlemen. If we must shut down our still, I will accept that, but too many people in the county require sales of the whiskey they cook in order to pay their bills. Father knows what it is that I am doing and wholeheartedly approves, but Reg's mother has been going to that church down in Boone and believes whiskey will send a soul to hell. Old Mister Adams still has a lot of power in town, even though the bank board forced him to retire. He's instructed Reg to shut me down at any cost. I wonder what the cost will be."

  "That's the end of it," Heath said.

  "You don't think that ..." Rebecca started. She stopped and looked around. "Especially if his mother was really religious. He wouldn't become a killer, would he?"

  "Let's keep looking around the room," Henry said. "Open up more of these crates. I want to find that doorway out of here."

  Polly put the papers back into the lockbox and left the key in the lock. This had been exciting, but suddenly she felt the loss of someone who had once owned this building and from the looks of it had tried to do what he could to help people during a rough time in America's history. She took a deep breath and pulled the top off another crate. It was more china. She, Heath, and Rebecca worked on opening crates, finding glassware and china, until Rebecca stood up.

  "Ummm, guys?" Rebecca said.

  "What did you find?" Polly asked.

  Rebecca pointed into the crate. "I'm not touching that."

  Polly walked over and looked into the crate as the others joined her. "Henry, she found the gun, I'll bet."

  "Aaron will want to see this," Henry said. "It would be interesting if they find that it's the gun used to kill whoever was in that room. Heath, do you want to drag this crate over to the door of the tunnel?"

  Heath started dragging it away and Henry beckoned to Polly.

  "We're going to have to break through."

  "I can't believe there's no door," she said.

  "There used to be. Look here." He pointed at dark marks on the wall. "Those are old hinge marks."

  "What's on the other side of this?"

  "I can't tell you off the top of my head," he said. "My guess would be that it's the furnace." He tilted his head and lifted his eyebrows. "That would make sense if it was done by dear Reginald. He closed the room off, put a new furnace in and no one would have ever known this was here. Franklin was killed far enough away from the house for the smell to be contained and he went on as if nothing had changed. Didn't you say that everyone believed Franklin just took off?"

  "Yeah," Polly said. "That would have been an easy story for him to tell. When he never came back, Reginald claimed the estate. I wonder if he has any descendants still living in the area."

  "They’ll be hard to find," Henry said. He looked around. "Are you okay with leaving this as it is and we'll cut in from the other side when I have better tools and more workers?"

  "That's fine," Polly said. "Thank you for this adventure today." She hugged him. "And thanks for not letting those university kids take it away from me. This was a fun way to end my Mother's Day celebration."

  "Maybe we should go get the dogs and head home for a while," he said.

  Hayden nodded. "I need a few hours of study time."

  "I forgot," Polly said. "I'm sorry. We should have gotten you home earlier."

  He laughed. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world. My first final isn't until Tuesday afternoon, but I want to ace it."

  "We'll just leave that right there," Henry said, pointing to the crate with the gun sitting in it. "I'll bring Aaron down this afternoon when he's here for the party. Are you ready to go, Polly?"

  "How many numbers until I'm out of the tunnel?" she asked.

  "When you get to number ten, you're almost there."

  "Then let's go."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was unbelievable how exhausted everyone was. The stress of Rebecca's kidnapping, the late night, and the excitement of the morning showed on everyone's faces.

  "Who's up for a nap?" Polly asked as they climbed up the steps."

  "I'm too excited," Rebecca said. "I could stay awake for days. It's my birthday now!"

  "It's been your birthday all day, sweetie, but thanks for sharing the morning with me." Polly put her hand on Rebecca's back as they walked into the dining room.

  Hayden smiled. "I really need to study. But I'll be quiet."

  "Come on, my sweet teenager," Polly said, taking Rebecca's hand. "Lie down for just a few minutes. You've had a huge weekend so far and yawning while you're thanking people for gifts is really bad form."

  "Can I take Obiwan in with me?"

  Polly pulled Rebecca in for a hug and kissed her fo
rehead. "You can have as many animals as you'd like. Thank you for organizing my awesome gifts. You make me feel like a real mom."

  "You are a real mom," Rebecca said. "You just started different." She glanced around. "What if Heath and I played a game. We could play chess or something and be really quiet."

  Heath's face was drawn with fatigue. Polly wondered if he'd slept at all last night. He'd hovered over Rebecca from the moment they returned home, not letting her out of sight for a moment."

  "He's going to lie down," Polly said. She looked at the clock on the wall. "We have three hours before the party. Stay in your rooms for an hour. I don't care if you read, I just want you to rest."

  Heath glanced into Rebecca's bedroom and then back at the girl he was trying so hard to take care of.

  "She'll have the dogs, Heath," Polly said gently. "She’s safe. We're all right here."

  He nodded and went into his room.

  "Go on, Rebecca," Polly said, giving her daughter a push forward.

  Rebecca heaved a huge sigh and patted her leg for the dogs to follow her. Polly was absolutely positive that if anyone other than Rebecca tried to enter her bedroom, they would either trip on something and break their neck, or kick something and raise such a ruckus the whole world would know.

  "I need a nap," Polly said to Henry. "I'm pooped."

  They went into their room and she sat down on the edge of her bed and slipped her shoes off. "So what's up with the gazebo?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?" Henry stretched out on top of the covers, turned to face her and patted the bed.

  "I mean, I thought you were working on a little shed so Rebecca could have a studio."

  "Oh, that," he said with a grin. "The boys and I talked about it and we have a much better idea. Instead of an actual shed which she couldn’t use right now anyway because we don’t live over there…" He looked at Polly. "We’re giving her plans."

  "Plans. What does that mean?"

  He turned back over and grabbed his phone, then brought up an image of a small building.

  "Okay," she said. "It's a building."

  "It's the building we're going to erect over that hole in the ground." Henry swiped through a couple of pictures. "We'll put a stairway here and she can store all of her supplies in the lower level, leaving the upper level completely open for her to work. When there's bad weather, she can use the tunnel to access the studio."