Some Like It Hawk (2 page)

“It’s fine with me.” Having Eric babysit was fine, anyway. Should I feel guilty that my niece had broken her ankle chasing my sons? I’d worry about that later.

“And thank goodness you’re here to help out in time for the Fourth of July,” I said aloud. “Everything will get a lot easier after the Fourth.”

“I thought Caerphilly Days went on all summer,” Eric said. “What’s so special about the Fourth?”

“I haven’t told him,” Rose Noire said. “And evidently Natalie is very good at keeping a secret.”

“But he’s a resident now, at least for the time being,” I said. “Eric, do you swear you won’t tell a single soul what I am about to reveal?”

“Yes,” he said. “I mean, I swear by … um…”

“Cross your heart and hope to die?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Okay. Then it’s time we told you Caerphilly’s sinister secret.”

Chapter 2

“Sinister secret?” Eric repeated. I could tell I’d captured his attention.

“There’s nothing sinister about it,” Rose Noire said.

“It’s a little sinister,” I said. “And besides, I like the alliteration. So Eric, you heard about what happened with all the town buildings?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Mayor Pruitt mortgaged them and stole the money.”

“We don’t know for sure about the stealing part,” Rose Noire said. “It hasn’t been proven in court.”

“I know you’re reluctant to think ill of any other sentient being, even a Pruitt,” I said. “But if you want to make a bet on what the verdict will be if they finally manage to try the mayor for embezzlement…”

“Ex-mayor,” she said. “And no. But I still think we should be careful to say ‘alleged.’”

“If it makes you happy,” I said. “I’m sure our alleged horse thief of an ex-mayor will appreciate the consideration. Getting back to the secret—Eric, did you hear about Phineas K. Throckmorton?”

“You mean the crazy guy who refused to get out when the lender repossessed the town buildings? The one who barricaded himself in the courthouse basement?”

“Eric…” Rose Noire began.

“The allegedly crazy guy who allegedly barricaded himself,” Eric said quickly.

“Not crazy, just eccentric,” I said. “Reclusive. And there’s nothing alleged about the barricading. He’s been down there since April of last year.”

“Wow,” Eric said. “Over a year in the courthouse basement?”

I could see him turning the idea over in his mind. I wondered if he’d guess Mr. Throckmorton’s secret—for that matter, the town’s secret.

“He must reek by now,” Eric said finally. “I stink if I go a day without a shower. And—does he even have a toilet?”

“There’s a bathroom in the basement,” Rose Noire said.

“You mean like an outhouse?”

“A real bathroom,” I said. “Shower. Sink. Toilet. Running water. Installed in the forties, so it’s old, but quite functional.”

“And how fortunate that the town water system’s idiosyncratic,” Rose Noire said. “So that shutting down his water supply would mean shutting off the fire hydrants all around the town square.”

“And that the phone and Internet cables come in through the basement,” I said. “So they can’t cut his communications off without cutting off their own—not to mention excavating the courthouse lawn.”

“Still—he must be going stir-crazy there all by himself,” Eric said. “And in a tiny, cramped basement?”

“It’s not tiny,” I said. “He’s got the whole courthouse basement, except for the twenty-by-thirty-foot antechamber where the stairways come out. He barricaded the door from the antechamber into the main part of the basement where the archives are. I suppose you might call the archive area cramped—it’s certainly a maze of paper-filled rooms and corridors. But it covers a whole city block.”

“Okay, but what does he eat?” Eric went on. “ He can’t possibly have stashed away enough food to last all this time. What happens when he runs out?”

“He won’t,” I said. “Any more than he’s going to go stir-crazy from being by himself. That’s the town secret. Or rather, this is.”

I hoisted Josh onto my shoulder and walked to the back of the tent. I stopped just before I stepped from the children’s pen into the smaller pen containing Spike, our small and temperamental furball of a dog. Spike scrambled up as I approached, scampered to the front of the pen, and stood looking up expectantly.

“Bite me and you sleep in the barn for a week,” I said. “Maybe a month. And no play time with the twins.”

With Spike formally on notice, I stepped into his pen. Spike, wisely, stood aside. Eric, carrying Jamie, followed, clearly more anxious than me about the state of his ankles.

I strode to the back of the pen. It was flush with the side of the tent, just at the part where it backed up to the bandstand. I leaned down and, with a dramatic flourish, flipped up a low flap.

“Voila,” I said.

Eric stooped down to peer through the opening, then jumped back and looked up at me anxiously.

“Holy cow,” he exclaimed. “What is that horrible thing?”

Horrible thing? I bent down to peer through the flap. A pair of unblinking eyes peered out of a tangle of gray fur to meet mine. I was startled for a second, but then I relaxed.

“Good girl, Tinkerbell,” I said. “It’s only Rob’s dog,” I said to Eric. “She’s an Irish Wolfhound. Not horrible at all—just big. Lie down, Tink.”

I moved aside so Eric could look through the flap again. Tinkerbell, satisfied that Eric was with me, curled back up on the ground beside the flap. Josh began wriggling, so I set him down inside the pen. Eric followed suit with Jamie, then peered through the flap again.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Eric asked, after a few moments.

“That’s the crawl space under the bandstand,” I said. “And that trapdoor—”

“Trapdoor?”

I bent down to look again. The crawl space was lit only by streaks of sunlight that came through cracks in the weathered floor of the bandstand overhead. Junk littered the entire area, including a huge heap of old tires, faded wooden crates, battered sawhorses, and other debris in the exact center of the space. Tinkerbell had curled up at the foot of the heap.

I turned back to Rose Noire. She was sniffing Josh’s diaper. In vain; I could tell just from his face that Jamie was the one who needed changing.

“Why is all the junk still on top of the trapdoor?” I asked. “Maybe it’s not Rob’s fault he’s still stuck in the courthouse.”

“Uncle Rob’s in the courthouse, too?” Eric asked.

“Only temporarily. And what if he came all the way through the tunnel only to find he couldn’t get it open?” I went on, turning back to Rose Noire.

“Tinkerbell would bark,” Rose Noire said.

“Tunnel?” Eric said. “You mean there’s a tunnel all the way into the courthouse?”

“I was waiting to uncover the trapdoor until I knew he was on his way,” Rose Noire said.

“Awesome!” Eric exclaimed. “Can I go through it?”

“Not now,” Rose Noire replied.

I’d have said not at all, but maybe she was right. An absolute prohibition would only make the tunnel more enticing. And I wasn’t about to distract Rose Noire when she was in the middle of changing Jamie.

“The trapdoor screeches like a wounded banshee,” she said over her shoulder. “We can’t open it without some kind of noise to cover it.”

“Like the calypso band that I thought was supposed to start playing at eleven,” I said. “Where’s the schedule?”

“I have it right there.” Rose Noire pointed a half-unfolded diaper at a well-worn clipboard lying on the ground nearby. “And that’s probably them now.”

Footsteps and a lot of dragging and thumping had begun happening up on the stage.

“They’re late,” I said.

“They’re on island time.” Rose Noire smiled indulgently.

“They’re not actually from the Caribbean, you know,” I said. “When they’re not playing in the band, they’re a bunch of CPAs from Richmond.”

“Well, in any case, they should be starting soon.” She glanced at her watch. “Eric, Rob was supposed to come out while your Aunt Meg was hammering so loudly on her iron.”

“Call him and tell him to get ready to come over as soon as the calypso band starts up,” I said.

“I’ll try,” she said. “But you know how spotty cell phone reception is over there.”

Spotty? It was virtually nonexistent. Most of the time we had to resort to sending text messages to Mr. Throckmorton’s computer.

“Awesome,” Eric said. “Did Mr. Throckmorton dig the tunnel?”

“No, it’s been there forever,” Rose Noire said. “No one knows how long.”

“Actually, we do have some idea,” I said. “The original courthouse was built during the 1780s and the trapdoor was mentioned in some documents from the 1840s, so presumably it was dug sometime between those two dates.”

“I thought the courthouse burned during the Civil War,” Eric said.

“Not by itself.” I nodded with approval when I saw that Rose Noire was rapidly texting on her phone. “The Union Army burned it on their way south. But that was only the building. The basement and the tunnel survived.”

“And it’s almost certainly proof that Caerphilly was a stop on the Underground Railroad,” Rose Noire said, looking up from her phone. “Why else would they dig such a tunnel?”

“So the early nineteenth-century mayors would have an escape route if the citizens showed up with tar and feathers,” I said.

“You mean there were Pruitts here back then?” Eric asked. Strange how even a teen who only summered here automatically associated tar and feathers with the family that had misruled Caerphilly for so long.

“No, the Pruitt family didn’t show up until Reconstruction,” I answered. “They’re not the only crooked politicians in the world. They don’t know about the tunnel, and we all have to be very careful not to let them find out.”

“They’d tell the Evil Lender, you know,” Rose Noire said. “The Pruitts are the ones who brought the Evil Lender to Caerphilly in the first place.”

“So don’t brag about knowing where the tunnel is if any Pruitts are listening,” Eric said. “Got it.”

“Only a few people in town knew about the tunnel when the siege began,” I said. “In fact, for most of the twentieth century, only the county clerks knew it had ever existed. After all, it was in the courthouse basement, and there’s nothing worth stealing down there. Never has been anything down there except the clerk—currently Mr. Throckmorton—and over two centuries’ worth of gently crumbling town and county records.”

“For the first few weeks of the siege, we kept pretty busy hauling in supplies,” Rose Noire said. “We all expected that sooner or later the Pruitts would remember about the tunnel and find a way to shut it down.”

“We?” Eric repeated.

“A lot of townspeople are in on the secret,” I said.

A cheer went up overhead. Eric had opened his mouth and was saying something, but he was drowned out by the thunder of half a dozen steel drums.

Eric drew closer.

“So this whole time everyone in town has been just strolling through the tunnel with supplies?” he asked. He had to shout to be heard.

“Heavens, no,” Rose Noire said, with a shudder.

“It’s no stroll,” I said. “Here, I’ll show you. Help me move this stuff.”

Rose Noire went back to the front of the tent to keep watch. Eric and I crawled under the bandstand, where he helped me pull aside the tires and boxes to reveal an ancient-looking iron trapdoor with oversized hinges on one side and a huge, slightly rusty ring on the other. It was set into a wide slab of eighteenth-century stonework, heavily patched with early twentieth-century concrete. Overhead, the steel drums had subsided and we could hear the drama student who served as today’s emcee formally introducing the band, his words punctuated by random notes from the drums or guitars.

“Grab the ring,” I said. “Get ready to pull. But wait until the music starts.”

The calypso players launched into their first number. I nodded to Eric and we heaved on the ring. The trapdoor rose with a screech that would have alerted half the county if the musicians above hadn’t been playing their hearts out, with occasional deliberate squawks of feedback.

We peered down into the tunnel, a three-by-three-foot shaft lined with stone for the first six feet and then with boards. A flimsy-looking ladder was nailed along one side. In the dim light, we couldn’t see the bottom.

We gazed in silence for several long moments.

“Wow,” Eric said finally. “How deep is that anyway?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“Must be a hundred feet.”

Actually, it was more like twenty-five or thirty, but if he thought it was a hundred, all the better. I was worried that he’d scamper down the ladder and disappear into the tunnel, but he stood looking down into the entrance with a slightly anxious expression on his face. Maybe Eric felt the same way about the tunnel as I did.

“Don’t go down there,” I said. “It’s pretty narrow, and Rob’s due out any minute, and you don’t want to get in his way.”

“Okay.” He managed a fairly credible air of disappointment. “I guess they had to keep the entrance narrow so people couldn’t find it as easily.”

“The tunnel’s even smaller,” I said. “Not much over two feet high and wide. Remember, they didn’t have power tools back then. It was all dug by hand.”

“Amazing that it hasn’t caved in after all these years.”

“At least half of it was partly caved in when this whole thing started,” I said. “But we dug it out and now we have it pretty well shored up. We’ve only actually had three substantial cave-ins, and one of those was last year during the big earthquake. We’ve always managed to get people dug out pretty quickly.”

From the look on Eric’s face, I had a feeling I’d eliminated the danger that he’d try to sneak into the tunnel.

If only I could eliminate my own constant anxiety that all the little cave-ins were warning signs that a great big one was coming. And my not entirely irrational dread that when—make that if—it happened, Rob would get caught in it.

“And the big deal about Fourth of July is that we’re going to replace the trapdoor then,” I said.

“You couldn’t just try oiling it?” Eric asked.

“We do,” I said. “Daily. Doesn’t help much. So we’re replacing it. Actually, the Shiffleys tried once before, but apparently back in the nineteen-twenties someone—possibly bootleggers—did some repair work. The trapdoor doesn’t just sit on the slab—it’s anchored by a whole lot of steel bars going down into the stone and concrete. They figured out they’ll have to hack the whole thing apart with jackhammers and blowtorches. It’ll make a hell of a racket. So they’re going to do it under cover of the college orchestra concert, which will end with a bravura performance of
The 1812 Overture,
complete with cannons and fireworks.”