Secrets of Harmony Grove (51 page)

Once we decided that, I gasped, a memory suddenly flooding into my brain. During the renovation, Troy and I had discovered something unusual about the stairs down there, but we hadn’t really known what we were seeing. I doubt that we would have spotted it at all if we hadn’t been working down there so much, faux-painting the newly walled-off corner of the basement to make it look like an old European wine cellar. When I was sanding the stairs for a coat of paint, I realized that the front of one stair, the part Troy had said was called the riser, was attached by hidden hinges, and it could be flipped open to reveal a secret cubby behind it. Checking each of the steps, we had found five in a row that had a false front and a hidden cubby. All five were empty except for the third one, which had a small latch on one side. We tried pulling the latch but it didn’t seem to do anything. Finally, we lost interest and gave up—and the whole thing had completely slipped my mind until now.

“Follow me,” I said, leading Heath down into the wine cellar as I explained. The space there was tight, about the size of an elevator, just enough for the wine racks and three or four people. Ignoring my claustrophobia, I held my gun at the ready while Heath pulled on the risers of each step, starting at the bottom and working his way up. When he got to the third one from the bottom, it popped open, just as I remembered.

“There’s the latch,” I whispered, pointing to the side of the cubby’s interior, where a small wooden handle just waited to be pulled down.

Heart pounding, I held out the gun toward the stairs.

“Should we wait for the police?” Heath whispered.

“I’m not waiting another second,” I replied.

Giving me a nod, he reached out and twisted the handle. Nothing happened at first, but I told him to keep trying, to push even harder. As he worked on that, I couldn’t help but quickly check the other cubbies, flipping them open just to make sure they were all still empty.

They weren’t.

Though the two bottom cubbies were empty, the top three were completely filled with cash—stacks and stacks of rubber-banded packets of bills.

“Whoa,” I whispered, wanting to reach out and grab a packet, just to look at it more closely, but I didn’t dare. Instead, we both just stood there and stared at all that money for a moment, and then we closed those cubby doors and returned our attention to the one with the latch. There would be time later to think about the cash, what it meant, and what to do about it.

Handing off the flashlight to me, Heath tried using both hands on the latch. Finally, with a big burst of strength, it gave, and with a metallic boing from somewhere deep inside, half of the staircase suddenly seemed to pop loose. Hinged at one side, it looked like the stairs were going to swing open like a door—a small, low door.

Taking what cover we could along one side of that door, Heath took back the flashlight and gave the stairs a single push open with his foot, both of us pulling back, cringing as the rusty hinges squealed in protest. As the crack widened, we were instantly enveloped in the musty stench of earth, loamy and stale. It was too dark to see anything inside. Holding my breath, I squinted into that darkness, but all I could make out were a few simple, wooden steps that descended into a deeper darkness below. Despite my trembling hands and wobbly knees, I knew we had no choice but to keep going.

The time for secrets was over.

Moving in front of me protectively, Heath clicked on the flashlight and played its beam around the cavernous interior. Just as the plans had shown, it looked like a single room, with a toilet and sink in the far corner.

There was a minimum of furniture in here, just a bed and a chair and a table. In the middle of the room was a stack of boxes, piled about six feet high and four feet wide.

As I clutched the gun in both hands and Heath shined his light on those boxes, a head suddenly emerged from behind, two eyes staring back at us in fear.

Floyd.

“Are they gone?” he whispered.

It took both of us a moment to grasp the reality of the situation. Floyd was here, hiding in this secret room that had been created by my grandfather. My mind filled with questions, starting with what was he doing in here and how had he known about this place. I spat out every question that came to mind, saying that I wasn’t going to budge until he gave me some solid answers.

So with our prisoner standing in the darkened room and Heath and I looking on from its entrance, Floyd launched into an explanation, starting with Troy’s arrival here at the B and B on Monday evening. According to Floyd, he and Troy had found this room quite by accident that night.

“You’re telling us that you and Troy ‘just happened’ to stumble on this room by accident? Heath and I almost couldn’t find it on purpose—even with a blueprint in our hands! What were you doing poking around in the wine cellar anyway?”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized exactly what they had been doing: fooling with the cash in the cubbies, which was part of their little money-laundering operation. I asked Floyd if that was correct, and after a brief hesitation, he nodded.

“Okay, yeah, we’ve been using these stairs for stashing the money. But we never dreamed there was another whole room behind them! When we found it by accident on Monday night, we were shocked. Came in, took a good look around. Couldn’t imagine what it was for. Then we thought maybe the boxes stacked here in the center contained some sort of hidden treasures. Why else would somebody build a secret room like this?” We didn’t answer, so he continued, saying that together he and Troy had gone through every box, but to no avail. All they held were an assortment of non-perishable foods and some camping supplies, along with a packet of cash and an envelope full of old papers.

So this was where Troy had stumbled upon my grandfather’s documents. No wonder none of us had ever seen them before! When Troy took a look at them, he must have seen a reference to ‘
die diamanten
’ in the journal, just as Nina had said, and decided to go on a treasure hunt—though obviously he didn’t share his find, or his plans, with his partner in crime, Floyd.

“So why were you in here now?” Heath demanded.

“Because when you guys were leaving earlier, I spotted the Nightmare Twins coming up the walk, and I knew I’d better hide somewhere they would never find me.”

“Why didn’t you want them to find you?”

“’Cause I was afraid they were here to kill me!”

That led to a whole host of new questions, which we both threw out. Floyd listened, his eyes lingering on the barrel of my gun, and then continued.

“Okay, well, you already figured out that we were laundering cash here at the B and B, right? What you didn’t know was that this wine cellar was all part of the original plan. Here was our idea: Once a month, Troy was
going to bring the cash, check into his regular room—this room with the wine cellar—and stash the money in the stairs. It would be my job to come down here each week, pull out some of that cash, and deposit it in the bank. As long as my records showed receipts equal to the amounts of my deposits, we didn’t think anybody would suspect a thing.”

I glanced at Heath, once again feeling utterly humiliated by the lying and manipulative Troy.

“See, before the B and B actually opened for business,” Floyd continued, “Troy and I thought we would need to have actual guests coming and staying once in a while to keep things looking legit. So that’s when Troy came up with the idea of walling off that section of the basement and turning it into a wine cellar, one that could be reached only through the Bay Laurel room. As long as I never put anyone in that room except Troy, it didn’t seem likely that our secret would ever be found out. As far as we knew, the only other person on the planet who was aware these cubbies existed was you. So all I had to do was remove the cash whenever I learned you were coming out, just in case. Lucky for me, you only came out once in a great while, and never for very long.”

“And what happened to all of the ‘actual guests’?” I asked.

Floyd shrugged.

“It didn’t take long to figure out that wasn’t going to be necessary. The whole cash in/cash out system worked great—you never showed up at all, and nobody was asking any questions, so it was just a lot easier not to fool with real guests.”

“So you really have been collecting your paycheck as the B and B’s manager for almost two years while all you’ve done is sit around in this big place all by yourself and take it easy.”

Floyd grinned and said, “Pretty sweet deal, huh? Can you blame me?”

Ignoring the question—for which I had one very strong answer—Heath asked why they hadn’t found the secret room before if they had been using the cubbyholes all along.

“We knew there was a lever in the third one, but Troy said it didn’t do anything. I guess we just didn’t pull on it hard enough to make the stairs pop open. I figured it was for an old furnace or a sump pump or something. Never thought about it again.”

“So what was different this time?” I asked, the skepticism clear in my voice. Frankly, this man had been lying to me so much for so long I wasn’t sure whether to believe anything that he was telling us now or not. That would be for the police to sort through.

Floyd asked if he could come out of the room into the wine cellar to demonstrate what happened that led them to discover the room. I stepped back, gripped the gun with both hands, and told him to come on out.

“Let me give you a little history first,” he said as he stepped forward and gingerly climbed through the opening. “See, about a month ago, a little problem cropped up. Somewhere between my bosses’ office in Atlantic City and here, some of the laundered cash started disappearing. At first, they accused me of skimming off the top, but it wasn’t me, which meant it had to be Troy. We all knew his gambling was getting out of control, so it wasn’t a big leap to assume that he had started helping himself to a little of the cash now and then.” Floyd stood up and brushed the dust from his sleeves as he continued. “Last week, the bosses told me they’d had enough. Troy had to go, and I had to be the one to do him.”

Heath and I looked at each other in alarm.

“I didn’t want to, you understand. The man was my friend. Not to mention that killing isn’t exactly my cup of tea, you know? I’ll do the money stuff, no problem, but don’t ask me to take a life. That’s a line I don’t like to cross.”

We both stared at Floyd, astonished at the matter-of-fact way he spoke about killing another human being! Before either of us could speak, he continued.

“Anyway, I kind of didn’t have a choice. They said if I didn’t take care of Troy, they would send somebody to handle both of us. So when Troy got here Monday night, I confronted him, told him he’d been found out. I expected him to deny it, of course, and he did. Kept swearing that he had put every cent in the cubbies, that maybe the money had fallen down behind the steps through the cracks or something. He insisted on bringing me down here and making a big show of pushing on the backs of the cubbies, pointing out the places where the bills could have fallen through. Then it happened. Here, I’ll show you.”

Floyd opened one of the cubby doors and began removing stacks of cash,
carelessly handing them off to us. Soon, both Heath and I were juggling gun and flashlight respectively as we cradled multiple packets of bills in our arms. I couldn’t begin to imagine how much this would all add up to!