“I love playing in the dirt.” Abby smiled way, way up at her tall daddy. “It smells like worms and mud pies. Do worms eat the mud? Do they like getting dirty? I like getting dirty, but I know better than to eat mud.”
“I know you do.” Her dad brushed the dirt away from Abby’s nose. “You don’t look much like my princess with mud on your face. But no matter; you still get a princess kiss from me.”
Abby turned her cheek for the kiss. Her head hurt. She groaned and rolled onto her back. Her eyes opened to semi-darkness.
“Abby, Abby, are you alive? Oh, jeez, this is awful.”
Morton’s voice echoed in the space around Abby. She reached up to touch her forehead; her fingers felt sticky when they dropped back. Her stomach protested at the odor of blood; vomit rose in her throat. She swallowed, hard.
“I’m okay.” She lay there for a moment longer, trying to savor the warmth of being with her dad again. Had the happiness in her life become only the stuff of dreams and visions?
“Talk to me.” Morton’s voice went up an octave. “What should I do? Are you hurt? Should I call 9-1-1? Oh man, this is terrible.” The rapid crunching of M&M’s followed his statement.
Abby sat up, and after the room spun around several times, only a headache remained. “I’m okay. Shine your flashlight down here; mine broke.”
With Morton waving the beam around, the pinpoint of light did little to alleviate the darkness. It intensified the headache instead. “Focus it on me. I’m going to get up and walk, and you follow me with the light. I want to see if there’s a way out of here.” She stood and explored the perimeter of the area in the meager glow.
“It’s just a small room. I can’t find a door. There’s some kind of shelf, but no exit. Go back up to the third floor. We have a ladder stored in the attic. And be careful.”
“Sure thing.” Morton raced up the steps, his wheezing audible.
Once the noise of his departure faded, it seemed very quiet and even darker. No outside noise penetrated the stillness. Under the smell of soil an unpleasant odor lurked, non-specific but foul, a dank stench. Abby wrinkled her nose. A soft sound above her head broke the silence.
Like a silhouette on a Halloween painting, Kitty perched on the edge of the broken step, looking down.
“Kitty, stay.”
At the sound of Abby’s voice, the cat sniffed the opening and leaped, landing on her feet. Abby scooped her up. “You goofy cat, you could have been hurt.” Abby inhaled her furry warmth and reveled in her solid, real presence. “You did better than I did getting in here. Now how do we both get out?”
“Are you talking to yourself?” Morton’s voice came from far above. “Don’t lose it; I’m coming. Oh man, she’s losing it all right. I found the ladder. Hang in there.”
With much banging and muttering, Morton got the aluminum ladder down the narrow staircase. “Abs, I got a lantern from the attic, too, and some matches. I’m coming to get you.”
Morton lowered the six-foot ladder into the room below, eased his bulk onto the top platform, then climbed down to Abby. He lit the lantern, jumping when he saw the cat.
“Morton, meet Kitty. I found her last night behind the wall. That’s how all of this started.” Abby took the lantern and held the light aloft. “Let’s see what’s here.”
Morton peered at Abby’s forehead. “You’re bleeding. We need to get you some help.”
“I appreciate the Boy Scout thing, but this won’t take long.” Abby gazed around. “It’s a really small space.”
“Yeah,” Morton paced the area. “It can’t be more than about eight square feet.”
Abby walked to the wall. “Look at the narrow shelf. It’s a wooden plank of some kind. This must have been a root cellar. There’s another shelf on the other side.” She shined the light at Morton. “What does that expression mean?”
Morton examined the platforms. “Who makes a root cellar that’s hidden? Or a storage room with only single shelves? They couldn’t have stored much here.”
“It’s old and boarded up, not hidden. And it’s close to the kitchen so they could get the jars or whatever out of here when they needed them. When they got a refrigerator, it wasn’t useful so it got closed up. There’s nothing else it could be.” She hesitated. “But you’re right; why not more shelves? And why so inaccessible? There’s no evidence of a door.”
Morton licked his lips. “What if it’s a secret room they used to hide runaway slaves? I saw a picture in a book one time with a room like this, from a safe house in Indiana. The boards were where people slept. I’ll bet your house used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
Abby laughed. “Get real. You told me people ‘think’ there ‘might’ be places like this in Boston, but no one ever found one. That’s called an urban legend.”
“Still …” Morton surveyed the enclosure. “Nothing else makes any sense.”
Abby frowned. “I don’t know. It seems weak to me—root cellar to slave hideout. So for right now, let’s not tell anyone, okay? At least not until it’s noticed.”
“Why not? This could be huge.”
“I don’t know. It’s a feeling. Didn’t you ever do something just because of a feeling?”
Morton thought. “Nope. But girls do that stuff, I guess, and I can keep a secret as good as a girl. C’mon—let’s get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”
Abby turned in a circle. “Just a minute. Help me look for a blocked-off doorway. There has to be some other way to get in and out of here.” She ran her hands along the two walls without shelves, searching for evidence of an exit. “There are some indentations, but I can’t find a frame like the one at the top of the stairs.”
“If it hid slaves, it would have been crude,” Morton said. “Not much finishing work went into hiding places. Maybe there’s a tunnel to somewhere else, but after all these years it’d be hard to find.”
“Aren’t you even curious?” Abby said.
“Yeah, well, curiosity killed the cat.” Morton cringed when he looked at Kitty. “Sorry. Okay, but can we make it fast?”
He pried Abby’s pink flashlight out of his pocket and pointed it at random spots.
“Under the shelves it’s stone, but the top walls look like packed dirt.” Abby ran a ragged fingernail over the surface, shearing off a curl of brown earth. “It’s more like a pit dug in the ground than a room.”
The tiny flashlight flickered. “Abs, we have to go,” Morton said. “I don’t want to be down here without a light. I know you have the lantern, but I want light of my own to get back up the ladder and the steps.”
“Shake it; that helps.”
Morton shook the flashlight. It got brighter. He shook it again, lost his grip, and it went flying into a dark corner of the room.
Abby stood still and mentally counted to ten. “My dad bought me that.” She handed the lantern to Morton. “Hold the light over here. I have to find it.”
Getting down on her hands and knees, Abby reached under the waist-high shelf and felt in the shadowed corner. Her fingers curled around her flashlight. She shuddered when a delicate tickle ran across her forearm. As she jerked, her hand brushed against something cold and hard, protruding from under the packed earth floor. “I found something else. It’s partially buried.”
Abby grasped at the metal and pulled. It didn’t budge. “I’ll have to come back and dig it up. Whatever it is must have been here for a long time, so a little longer won’t matter. I’d rather find the entryway.”
“Wait, use this.” Morton handed Abby a penknife. “Dig around with the blade.”
“Always the Boy Scout.” Abby jabbed the point of the knife into the dirt around the object’s edge. A little at a time, she could feel it being exposed. After digging for several minutes, she handed the knife to Morton and pulled at the article with both hands. The clank of metal echoed in the confined space as she held it up.
Morton gasped.
Abby dropped the cold metal as if it burned her fingers.
They stared in silence as the sputtering oil lantern illuminated the horrific sight.