Hard Hat

by Bonnie Bryant

  The two girls hurried down the stairs, following their friends by only a few minutes. On the ground floor they turned the corner to the basement stairs, passing by a closed door on their way.

  “That’s the kitchen in there, isn’t it?” Stevie asked.

  “I guess. We’ve never been in there.”

  “I wonder if we could find a kitchen bucket,” said Stevie. “And if the water is running, which I think it must be, then we could take a bucket of water upstairs and slosh it across the floor.”

  “But if we do that, the men will know for sure that we’ve been here and they’ll lock up everything! We’ll never get back in.”

  Stevie couldn’t believe her ears. After all that had happened tonight, Regina was worried about hiding their tracks and being able to come back?

  “Are you nuts?” Stevie asked, trying to contain herself.

  “That was really stupid, wasn’t it?” Regina asked.

  Stevie didn’t answer her. She pulled open the door to the old kitchen and shone her flashlight around. It definitely had been the kitchen. There was a place where a stove had been, and there were a refrigerator and cabinets and a sink. Stevie stepped over to the sink and turned on the tap. Water came spouting out as if nothing had ever gone wrong in the place. Stevie laughed.

  “It works,” she declared. “Now all we need is a bucket—or something else to carry the water in.”

  The kitchen was scattered with reminders of its prior tenants, as well as of the slow-moving construction project. The sink’s drain board had become the resting place for two paper cups half filled with coffee. They didn’t seem like a practical way to wet the whole floor upstairs.

  Regina pulled open some cabinets near the sink and played her flashlight across them. Nothing. Underneath the sink they found some cleaning products, apparently considered unworthy of moving. Closer examination revealed evidence of mice as previous occupants.

  “Let’s just close that up,” she suggested, wrinkling her nose in distaste.

  Stevie put her hands on her hips and looked around. “There must be something.”

  “We don’t really have to do this, Stevie,” Regina said. “I’m pretty sure the fire’s out.”

  “We’re trespassing on someone else’s property,” Stevie reminded her. “We started a fire here and we didn’t want to call the fire department. I think we need to be one hundred percent sure it’s out.”

  Stevie looked around, shining her flashlight into the corner, trying to be sure she knew what everything was and hoping she’d see something that would carry water. On the other wall were signs of the former presence of a washing machine and dryer: water spigots and an exhaust hose. Next to those was a tall cabinet.

  “Broom closet!” Stevie said. Her mother always kept a bucket in the broom closet, because that’s where the mop was. If these people had left cleaning supplies under the sink, maybe they’d left a bucket.

  She stepped across the kitchen and reached for the broom closet door. She pulled it open and ran the flashlight around in it. When she looked down, she saw something that astonished her.

  “Regina! Come look at this!” said Stevie, gesturing with the flashlight.

  “What is it?”

  “Come see!” Stevie replied.

  Regina hurried over and looked where Stevie was pointing. Her jaw dropped.

  “Oh, isn’t it just like you to find—” she began. “What’s that?”

  Stevie felt a trembling beneath her feet. She reached out to grab Regina, who was already clutching her. In a split second she realized that the best thing to do wasn’t to get closer to Regina but farther away. The combined weight of the two girls had stressed the old floor beyond its capacity. The floorboards were crumbling!

  There was a horrible wrenching sound, a creak, and a snap, all within seconds of one another, and then the floor beneath them gave way.

  “Aaaaaah!” Regina screamed.

  “Uuuuurrgh!” yowled Stevie.

  The two girls fell.

  It seemed like they were in the air for an eternity. The girls clutched at each other on their downward journey. It didn’t, in fact, take very long. It just seemed that way.

  They landed in the basement, accompanied by the remains of some very weak floorboards and a fair amount of dust, which continued tumbling down for a while, landing on their heads and all around them.

  Stevie still held a flashlight in her hand, but it had turned off when she’d squeezed it in fright. She pushed the button to turn it back on. Obediently, a beam of light appeared.

  The girls looked around, orienting themselves.

  They were in the basement, all right. That was the only place to go from the ground floor. But they were in a part of the basement they’d never seen before.

  Stevie moved the light around to be sure she was seeing right, and then she knew she was. “Uh-oh …”

  “Oh no,” said Regina.

  They were in a small cramped room that was filled with stacks of boxes. Two walls were the familiar walls of the basement, constructed of rough concrete. Two others were clearly new plywood. They were inside the mysterious locked closet.

  “And to think this was so easy to get into all the time!” Stevie joked feebly.

  “Getting in was one thing,” said Regina.

  Stevie looked at the room again, absorbing the implications of what Regina had just said. The room was locked. Totally, utterly locked. The way they’d gotten in was above them—way above them. They couldn’t reach the ceiling, and even if they could, the whole floor above was so weak, they probably couldn’t get out.

  Stevie sank down onto a box.

  “What are you thinking?” Regina asked, clearly hoping it would be the answer to their most urgent question.

  “You know what they say,” Stevie said.

  “No, what?”

  “ ‘Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.’ ”

  Regina sat down on the box next to her with a sigh.

  “WE’RE STUCK,” SAID Regina.

  “For good,” said Stevie.

  They sat glumly on their boxes, elbows on their knees and chins on their hands.

  “Did you get hurt?” Stevie asked.

  “I think just a scrape,” said Regina. “You?”

  “Same,” said Stevie. “Well, maybe a bruise, too.” She rubbed her sore bottom and pointed her flashlight up at the ceiling. The beam of light above her showed how far they’d traveled. “I guess we’re lucky.”

  “Some luck,” said Regina.

  Stevie didn’t have a response to that. She used the flashlight to scan the room again. Maybe the secret closet held another secret, like a way out.

  No such thing. It did, however, have a switch on the wall.

  She flipped the switch and a fluorescent light flickered on.

  “That’s better,” Stevie said, turning off her flashlight.

  She sat down again.

  “I wonder how long we can survive down here without food and water,” Regina said.

  Stevie thought the comment was a mark of just how upset Regina was. “First of all, we are not without food and water,” she said. “You’ve got the backpack with all our goodies in it, right?”

  “Okay, so how long can we survive on”—she burrowed in the backpack—“chocolate milk, marshmallows, cheese crackers, raisins, and diet soda?”

  “Sounds like the major food groups to me!” quipped Stevie. Even to her, the joke sounded weak. “But anyway, the other thing is that it can’t take too long before someone notices we’re gone. Morning at the latest, I’d say. Our moms are going to freak out.”

  “I’ll be grounded until I’m twenty-five,” said Regina.

  “Me too,” said Stevie. “If my parents don’t completely disown me first.”

  Their prospects were grim. Stevie had known from the very start that what they were doing was wrong. Breaking into someone else’s house was considered against the law everywhere in the civilized wor
ld. New York City was not going to be an exception. If it hadn’t been for Regina …

  “Maybe we can escape first,” said Regina.

  “We’re going to need wings to do it,” said Stevie, glancing back up at the ceiling.

  “If only you hadn’t had the bright idea of putting water on the floor to douse the fire.”

  “Me? You think this is my fault?” Stevie asked.

  “Well, what got us down here?” said Regina.

  “It isn’t what got us down here that’s the problem,” said Stevie. “It was coming to this house in the first place. I mean, once those guys started nailing us inside this afternoon, you might have taken the hint that we shouldn’t be here.”

  “I didn’t exactly have to talk you into it,” said Regina.

  “I came because I wanted to be sure you wouldn’t get into any trouble!” said Stevie.

  “And a swell job you did of that,” Regina retorted.

  It was going to take Stevie a few minutes to think of a good answer to that one. She shifted her weight on the box where she sat and tried to think of a bright side to their predicament. It was a challenge.

  “And if you weren’t such a goody-goody, we could have left with the other guys!” Regina blurted out.

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. Stevie had never, ever, in her whole life been called a goody-goody. Miserable as their situation was—scraped, bruised, humiliated, facing a lifetime of being grounded, subject to starvation (except for marshmallows and raisins)—there was something totally bizarre about Regina referring to her as a goody-goody. She tried to stifle her reaction, but there was no way around it. She started laughing and couldn’t stop. Regina joined in. The two of them sat in the stuffy closet, with the dust still settling from the broken ceiling above, laughing as hard as they ever had.

  Stevie wiped away some tears. Regina snorted, and they both laughed again until they were exhausted. Then they just sat, each contemplating their considerable predicament.

  “I guess I kind of liked the idea of being sure the fire was out,” Regina conceded, handing Stevie a cracker.

  “And I kind of liked the idea of wowing you and your friends with my cool ghost stories,” said Stevie.

  “Quite a pair, aren’t we?” Regina asked.

  “I think maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t meet until now. We’d already be grounded for life, and I would hate to have missed this! I just wish Lisa and Carole were here. They’d know what to do.”

  “They would have known better than to get into this situation—from what you tell me.”

  “You know, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get into this room,” said Stevie.

  “Why didn’t we think of the magnificent collapsing floor entry before?” teased Regina.

  “Too easy,” said Stevie. “Anyway, I’m still wondering why this place is locked so tight. Since we’re here, we ought to take a look at what’s inside these boxes.”

  Regina stood up and looked at the box she’d been sitting on. It was a simple dark brown carton with a lift-off lid, the kind her mother used for storing papers.

  She removed the lid and looked inside.

  “Paper,” she said.

  “Like for a printer?” asked Stevie, peering in.

  “No, used paper,” said Regina. “Stuff that’s already been through a printer. Files.”

  Stevie crouched and looked for herself. Regina was right. The entire box was filled with all kinds of papers, clipped and stapled together. Most of it looked like receipts for things and lists of supplies that had been ordered and delivered.

  “Drywall,” Stevie read, looking at one of the receipts.

  “What’s that?”

  “The stuff they use to make walls, like to divide a big room into smaller ones,” said Stevie. She knew about it because the contractors had used drywall when they’d redone the Lakes’ kitchen. She looked at the receipt again. “A lot of drywall,” she said.

  “I guess you need a lot of drywall when you’re renovating a house like this.”

  “Not really,” said Stevie. “I think they build houses differently now from the way they did. All these walls are plaster. They wouldn’t replace them with drywall.”

  She picked up another receipt. “Four hundred thousand tiles,” she read.

  “For the bathroom?” Regina asked.

  “Only if it’s the bathroom in Grand Central Station,” said Stevie. “That’s almost half a million tiles. If they were going to tile this entire house, maybe—and on the outside, too.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “This guy must be working on a lot of places at the same time,” Stevie reasoned.

  “Maybe,” said Regina.

  Stevie noticed then that there were filing cabinets around them. She pulled open a drawer. More paper. And the one next to it. More paper.

  “Weird,” said Stevie.

  Regina agreed.

  “This is one busy contractor,” said Stevie. Then she pulled open the next drawer. The only thing in it was a notebook. Stevie picked it up to look inside, but there was a lock on it. She started thinking about what kind of information needed to be kept in a locked notebook in a locked room in an empty house. It all seemed very odd and, she decided again, none of her business. She wished she’d never wondered about it at all.

  “This is so dumb!” said Regina. “Boring, I mean. I wish we’d never even thought of looking in here.”

  “Me too,” said Stevie, knowing she meant that very sincerely.

  Stevie had the weird sensation that between her and Regina, she was the one with some common sense and she was going to need to draw on it to get them out of the house in one piece. She thought about Carole and Lisa. Although they weren’t there, there seemed to be ways they were always with her. So, what would Carole do? The answer was obvious. Carole would find a way to get a horse to rescue them. That seemed highly unlikely. Lisa, on the other hand, would very sensibly say that the thing to do was relax. They would be rescued.

  “So, what have we got with us?” Stevie asked, eyeing the backpack.

  Regina rummaged again and handed Stevie the bag of raisins and a warm can of diet soda. It didn’t look like much of a meal, but Stevie opened the raisin bag and chewed on a couple pieces of the dried fruit.

  “What else?”

  Regina stuck her hand in again. “I’ve still got the stethoscope,” she said. “It didn’t do us much good on the other side of the wall; I don’t know that it’ll be helpful in here.”

  “Probably not, but we can listen to each other’s hearts. Let me have that a second.”

  Stevie stuck the earpieces in her ear and held the other end to her own heart. It was beating, all right. She thought it was probably beating faster than it usually did, and it had already had quite a workout that night.

  Listening to her heart beat was not going to be a full-time occupation. She stood up and put the stethoscope against the wooden wall above a filing cabinet. There were no sounds at all at first, and then she thought she heard a sort of scurrying sound. She definitely did not want to know what that was.

  She took the stethoscope over to the concrete wall she knew was part of the front of the house, facing the street. There she could hear lots of sounds.

  “Water running,” she said.

  “Could be a water main or a sewer,” Regina suggested.

  Stevie hoped it was a water main. “There’s a subway!” she said. She pulled the earpieces out of her ears and could hear nothing. Back against the wall with the stethoscope, it was clear as could be.

  “It’s just a block from here. Sometimes I notice it late at night,” Regina confirmed.

  “Well, it’s definitely there,” Stevie said.

  She listened some more. She could hear people walking by out on the street. There was the sure and sharp clicking of a woman’s high heels. Stevie wondered where she’d been that night. Theater, dance? Maybe a fancy restaurant? Not that it mattered, but
it was something to think about.

  Then there was another sound, something she never expected to hear.

  “Hooves!” she declared. “It’s a horse!”

  “Give me a break,” said Regina.

  “No, for real,” said Stevie, offering the stethoscope to Regina, who took it and listened.

  “Clip-clop, definitely a horse,” she said.

  “Who would go for a ride at this hour and in this place?” Stevie asked.

  “It must be a police horse,” said Regina. “There is a stable here—”

  “Yeah, but it’s way over on the West Side,” said Stevie. If there was one thing she knew about New York City, it was where she could find a stable. “And I doubt they let riders go out at night.”

  “So it’s definitely a police horse,” said Regina.

  “Just what we need!” Stevie told her. Then she turned toward the wall they’d been listening to and cried, “Help!” She put the stethoscope to the wall again to see if there was any response. Nothing. “Help!” she screamed louder. Again, no response. “Come on, help me here,” she said to Regina, who was looking at her very doubtfully. Regina shrugged. Together the two of them screamed as loud as they could: “HELP!” Then they listened again, Stevie with the stethoscope, Regina with her ear pressed against the wall. The only sound they heard was the sound of hoofbeats receding.

  Stevie shook her head. For just a few minutes she’d been sure that the Carole system of rescue was going to work—that there would be a horse to come to their aid. But that wasn’t happening.

  She listened some more at the wall. If the policeman hadn’t been able to hear them, it was very doubtful that anybody else would. It turned out not to make a difference, though. There were no other sounds from outside. Stevie glanced at her watch. It was nearly midnight. Nobody was out on the street in the city that never sleeps.

  And then there was another sound. It was the clip-clop of horseshoes on asphalt again. Only this time there were more clips and clops.