by Dana Mentink
“Disgusting,” Victor said.
“But effective,” Brooke added. “We might as well check it out while we’re here.”
The elevators were not operational so they took the stairs, arriving in a massive space, bisected by neatly wrapped paintings and long rows of filing drawers.
“According to this map, there’s an entrance on the northwestern wall.”
The electric lights did not fully illuminate the space, which smelled of mold and disuse. Brooke’s heart beat fast with an excitement she had not felt since she was a part of a dance company. Could they really be inches away from a tunnel that hid her father’s priceless Tarkenton?
She moved ahead of the others, straining against the darkness to find the outline of a door, or some rusted sign that might point the way. Try as she might, she saw no sign of any such thing, only a solid row of file cabinets standing like soldiers against the walls. Pushing into the darkness, she stopped so suddenly Victor plowed into her from behind.
“What is it?”
“Feel.”
She took his hand and moved it to the level of her face.
“Cool air.”
“Yes.”
Victor moved closer to the wall, feeling for the draft. “It’s coming from behind these file cabinets. Move back and I’ll ease one out.”
Brooke pulled back into the darkness, the thrill of discovery pushing away her earlier worries. Stephanie held up a flashlight to help Victor maneuver. The drawers must have been filled because Victor strained, arms tensed as he wrestled the awkward bundle.
She moved back another few steps to give him more room when a hand came out of the darkness and clamped onto her shoulder.
She screamed.
Stephanie whirled the flashlight around and Victor let go of the filing cabinet so abruptly it toppled forward with a crash.
Tuney stared at them, wide-eyed. “Care to explain why you’re burgling university property?”
“You first,” Victor said, breathing hard. “Where have you been?”
“Just like I texted. Looking into some things. That’s what I’m paid to do. Took me a while to find you. So?” He pointed to the file cabinet. “Explanations?”
“Help me move it and you’ll see for yourself.”
Brooke exchanged a look with Stephanie as the two men heaved the file cabinet out of the way.
“Bring the light closer, Steph.”
Stephanie shone her flashlight directly on the wall previously covered by the file drawers.
“There,” Brooke said, excitement swelling inside. “You can see the outline. It’s a door.”
“No lock that I can see,” Victor said, pulling a penknife from his pocket and wedging it in the crack. It didn’t budge. Brooke noticed a small depression in the bottom edge, almost at floor level. “It’s meant to roll up.”
Victor stuck his fingers in the slot and heaved. Slowly, with a sound like a groan of pain, the door inched upward until Tuney had enough room to grab the bottom and add his strength. The door crept up and the four of them peered inside.
“I didn’t see that coming,” Stephanie said.
“Me, neither.” Victor wiped his hands. “It goes straight down.” He beamed his flashlight into the pitch-black shaft.
Brooke could just make out the shape of a rusty ladder, the lower parts lost in the darkness. “Does it go down to the tunnels?”
Tuney snorted. “Probably just leads to another collapsed passage. That ladder looks like it hasn’t been used for a couple of decades. It’s gonna collapse, and whoever is on it is going straight to the bottom.”
Stephanie leaned into the space and Victor grabbed her waist as she played the light closely over the ladder. “Looks sound enough. The rust is rubbed away in some places, maybe from a person’s feet.”
“Conjecture,” Tuney said.
“What’s the matter?” Stephanie said as she straightened. “Afraid of ladders?”
“No.” Tuney rolled his shoulders and Brooke saw the bead of sweat on his face. “Not so keen about closed-in places. This basement is bad enough.”
Brooke felt sorry for him, but she knew there was no way she would be discouraged from going down that ladder. “Why don’t you stay here?” she suggested. “You can call for help if we get into trouble.”
Tuney’s face was grim. “I’m coming. Might as well die falling off a ladder as any other way.”
Victor caught Brooke’s arm as she started to move past him. “Not a bad idea, about someone staying behind.”
“Would you?” she asked.
Face sober, eyes inscrutable in the weak light, he shook his head. “No, but I’m not always known for practicing restraint either.”
“My father’s only chance might be down there,” she said. “So right now I’m not worrying about restraint.”
Was it her imagination or did his hand linger on hers before he nodded and stepped away? Brooke saw Stephanie eyeing her with an odd expression.
Maybe it hadn’t been her imagination after all.
Ignoring the tickle in her spine, she took the headlamp Victor held out to her and made her way to the edge.
TEN
Victor snapped on his headlamp and lowered himself onto the rungs, ignoring the discontented sigh from his sister. “I’m heavier,” he explained again. “If the ladder is going to give way, we might as well find out about it sooner rather than later.”
The steel was cold under his fingers and slightly damp. It was what Victor imagined a sewer tunnel was like, only there was no bad smell, only the slight funk of moisture and a tang of metal. When he made it down fifteen or so rungs, he heard Brooke start down, then Stephanie, who had finished explaining to an incredulous Tuney a few select details about the clues in the doctored painting.
The scuffling of their feet echoed wildly in the long tube.
“Can’t see Colda poking around in the dark,” Tuney called, and Victor thought he caught suppressed tension in the man’s voice.
“Why not?” Stephanie said. “His students said he was perpetually curious, more interested in the campus and art history than his teaching duties.”
Victor called them to a stop. “Listen.”
They clung there, headlamps throwing the light around as they strained to see.
“Sounds like something moving,” Brooke whispered. “Down below.”
They listened for another moment until the sound stopped.
“An animal?” Stephanie suggested.
Victor didn’t reply. It wasn’t an animal that worried him. It was the man on the motorcycle, the one who might have killed a woman in the lobby or toppled the box of books from the catwalk. He didn’t even bother to try to discourage the others from continuing. The only one who might listen was Tuney, judging from his panicky breathing, but his stubborn streak was wide enough to keep him on the ladder.
Instead he continued on, holding each damp rung securely. Another four feet, and the temperature began to climb. It warmed to the point where he found himself stopping to unzip his jacket with one hand. The smell changed, too—now a hint of fetid stink tainted the air.
Without much warning the ladder ended and Victor dismounted onto a dry floor. He could not see the dimensions of the room at first as he assisted the others off the ladder.
Brooke flipped on a handheld flashlight. They were in a circular cement room with three openings leading out. None of them bore any kind of signage or a hint that they had been traveled anytime in the last hundred years.
Stephanie unrolled the map and peered at it with a penlight. “Map shows three tunnels, all right, but it’s unclear where they emerge.”
Brooke peered into each one. “Can’t see a thing.”
Tuney wiped a hand across his brow. “This is crazy. I’m not going into any of those. Leads to nothing but broken-down equipment. Colda never would have left a painting down here. Guy was an art nut. Putting it in this place would be like setting a match to it.”
B
rooke sighed. “He’s probably right. Without temperature controls and the proper protection, it would be ruined quickly.”
“Unless he didn’t intend to keep it here long,” Victor mused.
Brooke caught his eye. “As in he might have meant to come back for it?”
Victor nodded. “He was spooked by something, too spooked to meet with your father and aunt. He might have stashed it down here and figured on getting it that night or soon thereafter but…”
She finished slowly. “He never got the chance?”
Stephanie said, “If the police really do have a lead about his whereabouts, they can get the whole story.”
“But as it stands,” Tuney snapped, “we have no proof at all that Colda even set foot in this tunnel.”
Victor turned a slow circle, beaming his own light carefully on each of the passageways. Something caught his eye and he stopped, moved closer. Then he laughed.
All three looked at him as though he had lost his mind. “I think that we do have proof that Colda was here.”
“You’re crazy,” Tuney said. “What kind of proof could there be?”
Victor pointed to a small figure, no more than three inches high, drawn in permanent marker on the cement next to the farthest-right passage.
They crowded close to see.
“I don’t believe it,” Stephanie said. “The old professor is really something.”
“He certainly is,” Victor said, watching Tuney’s face as he saw the drawing of the little black pawn.
Tuney shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“Nope,” Brooke said cheerfully. “None of it does, but we know that Colda has been here and left a marker for himself.”
“Good enough for me,” Stephanie said, shouldering her pack. “Let’s go.”
Victor checked the time on his luminous watch.
Stephanie perused the map she’d borrowed from the room upstairs. “I don’t understand these markings. There are three squares scattered throughout the tunnel work but there’s no indication of what the squares represent.”
“Pumping stations, maybe?” Victor suggested.
Brooke nodded, and he could see the glitter of excitement in her eyes and knew his must reveal the same.
“This could actually be it,” she said, her voice hushed. “We could be close to finding my father’s Tarkenton.”
Or not, he thought. We could be one step closer to finding out your father had something to do with Colda’s disappearance. Or that Donald stole the painting from someone else and had to cover his tracks. If Donald was a thief, then there was every reason to believe he’d arranged for the theft four years prior and hired the thug who crashed into Jennifer’s car.
Then I’ll prove it.
I have to.
For Jennifer.
He looked into the endless hole before them, with the strange feeling that the world would be different when they emerged back into the light.
If he believed, if he could bend his heart to the faith that warmed Jennifer and seemed to sustain Brooke, he would pray for…what?
Vengeance, at long last?
Or something else?
He stepped toward the pitch-black passage.
* * *
Brooke felt as if she was being swallowed alive by the darkness as she followed Victor in. Their headlamps made small inroads, illuminating the curved walls that stretched before them. Pipes of various sizes snaked along the ceiling, dotted here and there with cobwebs.
Victor stopped every ten feet to spray a small arrow with his can of glow-in-the-dark paint. The arrows pointed the way out. Small comfort as they followed the passage along. The air was still warm, the floor dry, which encouraged Brooke.
Victor brought them suddenly to a halt when the tunnel split off in two. “Right or left?”
They looked closely, but it was Tuney who spotted the hand-drawn chess piece. “Left,” he said, jabbing a finger toward the pawn.
As the moved along, Brooke felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She stopped and looked around, shining her light into the dark crevices of the tunnel.
“See something?” Tuney said, voice tense.
“I guess not.”
They continued on until she felt it again, a faint stirring in the air, or perhaps her imagination. There’s nothing here that can hurt me, she thought, and whispered a prayer for courage.
Stephanie edged next to her, reaching up to tap on the metal beams above their heads. “These things haven’t been tended to in decades.”
Brooke looked above at the cracks running through the surface. “Looks like stone up there.”
Tuney suddenly turned. “I heard it. A groaning sound. You don’t think…?”
Victor turned his light into the tunnel ahead and they all saw reflected back at them a dozen sets of eyes. Then the rats were upon them, skittering over the pipes, rushing along the floor in a moving pack.
Brooke screamed and jerked back, as did Stephanie. Victor pressed through the furry bodies and joined them, flattening himself against the wall as best he could. “Something scared them,” he yelled over the noise.
Tuney leaped up onto one of the pipes that jutted from above and hung there, monkeylike, as the rats continued to course by, pattering across his fingers. Over the sound of their nails whisking over the floor came a louder noise as the tunnel seemed to groan around them.
“It’s coming down,” Victor yelled.
The ceiling was trembling now, bits of rock flying through the air. Tuney hung there in the tumult, his face frozen in shock, until the heavy piping began to tear loose from the ceiling.
With it came an enormous chunk of stone that crashed down, scattering the rats and shaking the tunnel around them.
Tuney dropped and rolled.
Brooke temporarily lost sight of him as she tried to stay upright against the trembling that threatened to knock her over. A choking cloud of dust enveloped her.
She felt Victor grabbing her hand in a death grip and then she was being hauled farther down the tunnel. “Come on,” he shouted. “This way.”
They ran as best they could, the floor rocking underneath them. A piece of rock flew into Brooke’s face, cutting her cheek. She fought to stay upright as they ran over a floor littered with debris before they made it to a tunnel that branched off from the main. Victor pulled Brooke and Stephanie close to the wall. Brooke found herself pressed in, her face touching the warm skin of Victor’s neck. She heard the breath shuddering through him, felt the taut muscles in his neck and chest. The sound of collapse grew so loud she thought her eardrums would explode.
All at once it stopped, gradually petering away until there was only the slight trickling of rock fragments and then nothing at all. Dust thick as ash swirled through the air.
The silence was almost more terrifying than the noise. Victor lifted her chin. “All right?” he asked.
She nodded, numbed by the close call and the gentle way his thumb reached up to stroke her chin, wiping away some of the dust. He turned to make sure Stephanie was unhurt.
Stephanie nodded at Victor. “That was exciting.”
“Tuney’s weight on the pipe must have caused a collapse,” Victor said.
They came to the realization at the same moment. “Where’s Tuney?” Brooke whispered, her heart constricting. Victor took off back toward the main tunnel and she followed him, heart pounding in her throat.
“Lord, please,” she breathed as she ran, nameless dread coursing through her veins. He was her enemy, bent on destroying her father, but she did not want to find him broken and bleeding.
Victor stopped short at the connection to the main tunnel. The entrance was completely obscured by a tangle of fallen pipes and chunks of debris. “Tuney,” he yelled.
There was no answer.
All three of them began to yell until their voices echoed wildly through the dust swirled air.
“Quit yelling,” came the faint reply. “I’m going deaf.”<
br />
“Tuney,” Brooke cried. “You’re okay?”
“Banged up, and I don’t see any way to get to where you are.”
Victor tried to dig away at the debris but the effort only caused more shifting in the towering mass. He wiped a filthy hand over his face. “Can you get back out?”
After a moment, Tuney grumbled his answer. “Yeah. Think I can see your glow marks. Can’t get any cell coverage down here so I’ll have to go get help.”
“You sure you’ll be all right?” Brooke said.
“What choice do I have? I followed you crazy people down here and now I’ve got to get you out or let you all die down here with the rats. I told you this was a ridiculous idea.”
Brooke, Stephanie and Victor exchanged smiles. Tuney’s stream of complaints grew fainter as he moved away. “And I told them I didn’t like dark places. See what happens in dark places? Things fall on you, and there are rats. Bucket loads of ’em.”
Victor exhaled. “At least he seems unharmed, judging by the complaining.”
Stephanie beamed her flashlight around. “And at least the rats have gone.”
Brooke shivered, remembering the feel of the rats brushing the top of her head. “What caused them to run?”
“Maybe they felt an earthquake?”
“Did we disturb them with our movements?” Stephanie asked.
Victor looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure.”
They were in a short section of tunnel, a tight cube of pipes occupying one corner. The far end was blocked by a metal grate, similar to the one they’d seen in the basement of the women’s dorm. Victor’s tug revealed the lock was sound, the metal bars that crisscrossed the opening too sturdy to break through.
Brooke felt a tingle of panic. “Looks like we’re trapped here.”
“Only until Tuney gets out,” Stephanie said.
“He’ll get out, won’t he?” Brooke asked.
Victor nodded. “He’ll find a way. He’s tenacious.”
Stephanie sat down on the floor and crossed her legs. Her face was sweat-streaked, a coating of dirt marring the normal shine of her dark hair. “Still, if he doesn’t, it could pose a problem.”