Through the Hidden Door (8 page)

Snowy squinted through his awful glasses into the magnifier. “What are they?”

“What do they look like?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Tiny pieces of reddish-brown something. The top edge shiny and with some bluish ... paint?”

“Right. Now look at this.” I put another chip next to the others.

“Same thing. Paint, or whatever it is, is black, though.”

I pocketed both. “You know that fake Greek vase in the main hall, Snowy?”

“Yes, I know the one. How do you know it’s fake?”

“Are you kidding? A forty-gallon amphora, black figures on red, in perfect condition? The thing would be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art if it were real. They keep it full of dried cattails and straw flowers. Even Silks isn’t that dumb. If it were an antique, the school could sell it and buy two swimming pools and a domed stadium.”

“How do you know?”

“My dad’s an antiques dealer. He knows all about that stuff.”

“My dad’s a colonel in the Marine Corps.” Snowy growled, as if I had challenged him to a fight.

“Okay,” I said gently. Snowy looked angry. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t, so I went on. “Well, I just chipped a little off the back of it with my knife. The vase chip matches these. They’re both baked clay. Snowy, somewhere in that cave are remains of glazed pottery.”

“But where did you find the four little chips? When? Last night on your socks?”

“That’s the thing of it. There was nothing on last night’s socks. I checked them carefully before we left the cave. I would have seen these bits right away. They’re a different color from the sand. I found them when I washed my hands and they fell off in the sink.”

Snowy blindfolded me. We began our trek.

“What did you do before you washed your hands?”

“Took off my clothes. Threw ’em in the laundry pile. Listen, nothing could have stuck to my clothes. Only my socks, and my socks were clean. Just sand. I shook them out. There wasn’t anything.”

“Go over it again.”

I let out an impatient sigh. “Okay. I took off my socks. Right? Then my shirt. Covered with mud from the tunnel. Then my pants. That’s it.”

“And turned out the pockets like a good boy?” asked Snowy.

“What? Sure. Wait a minute ... pockets ...

“Was that the last thing you did before you washed your hands? Turned out the pockets of your pants?”

“Yes! Damn!” I said. “Except for another pair of socks ... I took them out of my parka pockets. The socks from the first day across the river. They were frozen, and I didn’t put them on again. Snowy, they came from somewhere in our very first squares. We didn’t walk long that day. I remember about where we were.”

“We’re on our way, Barney!” Snowy said. I could hear the smile in his voice.

We plowed through our original squares for nearly an hour and a half. By that time we had piled up a dozen sand mountains as high as our knees.

“Look at that,” said Snowy, panting and exhausted. “We’ve thrown sand over where we might want to dig next. How do we get the stupid piles out of the way?”

Worse, every hole filled in as quickly as we dug it. The swiftly collapsing sides kept slipping back into the pits. “Another complete loss!” Snowy grumbled, throwing his trowel away. “We should have brought shovels.”

I was about to suggest that next time he should order an Army Corps of Engineers bulldozer from the back pages of
Soldier of Fortune
when the tip of my trowel touched something hard at the very bottom of the hole. “At least it’s ground, if nothing else. The sand can’t go down forever,” I muttered.

Then we both dug fast and deep. “My knees are freezing,” said Snowy. We realized that to get any deeper, we’d have to dig very wide around where we wanted to go, to keep the sandy sides from falling in on themselves.

We cleared away as much sand as we could. Then we started pushing back the huge mound that lay all around us. I stopped with the trowel, lay on my belly, and felt with my fingers. It was just possible as the hole was the depth of my outstretched arm. I pulled my pocketknife from my jeans and, stomach pressed into the frigid sand, I jabbed the blade into the bottom of the pit. I wriggled my hand, working the point deeper into the sand.

“What is it? A dirt bottom? Clay? What do you feel?” Snowy asked.

“Wait a sec. Stone, it seems like.”

“Well, the whole cave’s made of rock,” said Snowy. “Don’t expect too much. It’s probably just the floor of the cave.”

“Damn it. I wish I did have a shovel.” Sand began trickling back into the opening.

“We’ll never make a dent in all this,” said Snowy. “It may be just three feet deep, but you might as well try to move the Sahara.”

I didn’t answer. I forced my hand down as far as it would go. Then I groped around in the icy sleeve of sand and slid my fingertip back and forth, to make sure I was right, and yanked out my arm. The entire hole caved in as if it had never been dug.

“What did you find?” Snowy asked.

“Just stone. But there’s something different about it.”

“What?”

“It’s not the same bumpy stone that’s in the rest of the cave. It’s as smooth as marble. But the funny thing is, there’s a crack in it.”

“So?”

“Well, the crack felt like a straight line. As if it was cut against a ruler. You know? Not some zigzag crack like you find anywhere. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe it’s nothing.”

Snowy dived headlong into the sand. He stuck his hand down as far as it would go, but his arm was too short to hit bottom. He took it out, and we watched the hole fill right up again. “Still, we’ve got something to dig for now,” he said. “Next time we’ll bring shovels. And blankets too, to kneel on.”

“Next week,” I said gloomily, “is Christmas vacation. You’ll be here, I guess. Exploring away.”

Snowy set his trowel down and brushed off his hands. “I’m supposed to go to my mother,” he said slowly.

“Where?” I asked.

“Out of the country,” he answered. “But I can always tell her I’m going to my uncle.”

“Where’s he?” I asked.

“I could tell my uncle, of course, that I’m going to mother’s. Neither of them would know, you see. They haven’t spoken to each other in years. So they won’t check. I’ll stay here,” he said, satisfied with this arrangement. “How about you?”

“I’m spending Christmas Day in Denver with my dad. On the twenty-sixth I’m supposed to go on to Aspen, where my cousins are skiing. My dad can’t ski because of his back, so he’s flying straight on to Europe for a big auction in London. Months ago, when my dad arranged this, he told me to bring a friend for two weeks of skiing. I was going to ask Rudy or Danny. Isn’t that a laugh! I think I still have to go skiing, though. I mean, my dad won’t be home, and there’s no place else for me to go.”

Snowy messed with some more sand, building a little castle. “I thought you hurt
your
back,” he said with a bland smile.

I grinned back broadly. “I forgot about that,” I said. “It’s not as if I’d disappoint anyone if I didn’t go skiing. My cousins are all older than I am. They think I’m just a cute little kid.” I cleared my throat. “Would the Finneys take me in too?” I asked.

“I’ll see what they say. I’ll drop a note in your box.”

O
N THE SECOND NIGHT
after Christmas the Finneys were polite but frosty. Finney himself watched me as if from a great height. I did the dishes, I brought in firewood, and I even walked the dog. I combed my hair three times an evening, made sure not to put my elbows on the table, and stood up like a jack-in-the-box when Dr. Dorothy came in the room.

On the fourth night I offered to strip and refinish a Georgian drum table. Finney said I should stop acting like a valet, as he was not General Zia. Then he showed me his wooden leg.

“It’s beautiful!” I blurted out before I thought about what to say.

Finney chuckled proudly. He’d pulled his pants leg up to the knee to display it. The leg was made of laminate—slivers of different-colored woods cemented together. They made as nice a calf, ankle, and foot as any cabinetmaker’s prize piece. “I had it done by a ship’s carpenter I know,” said Finney. “Over my dead body would the doctors make me wear some ugly thing from a drugstore that sells trusses to people at death’s door. I lemon-oil it once a week. Polish it with a chamois cloth.”

“Does it come off?” I asked.

“Sure it does,” Finney answered, “but if I took it off to show you, Dorothy’d have my head. She thinks it’s vulgar.”

Dr. Dorothy and Snowy had disappeared these two nights, after the supper dishes were cleared, into her enormous laboratory at the back of the house. There Dr. Dorothy bred and trained guinea pigs for Harvard University. There were mazes and levers and colored lights and bells for all kinds of intelligence tests. She owned at least fifty pigs. They all had names. There were several white rats too, without names. They interested me on a level with the economy of Latvia.

Snowy’s Christmas present from the Finneys was a white-and-brown guinea pig he called Rosie. At the Finneys’ house Snowy had gone nowhere without Rosie. She sat in her grapefruit carton at the dinner table while we ate, chewing her lettuce. She slept in her box by Snowy’s bed and next to the tub when he took a shower. She curled contentedly in his lap, gently nibbling his caressing fingers wherever else he was.

“So did you have a nice Christmas, Pennimen?” asked Finney, helping himself to a macaroon and settling back in his chair by the fire.

“Yes. My dad and I had Christmas dinner at a big hotel in Denver. We had goose. I’d never eaten it before.”

“Your father called here, you know. Just to make sure everything was on the up and up.” Finney worried one of his molars with a metal toothpick. “He wants you to leave Winchester. He thinks Mr. Silks has treated you unfairly, and he thinks Rudy and the boys will hurt you one day.”

“I know he thinks that. It’s all we talked about, Christmas. I told him I want to stay.”

“I agree with your father. I also think Silks may find a way to keep you out of Hotchkiss even if you do nothing wrong from here on. From what I hear, Mr. Silks seems to think you are a ringleader and a troublemaker. Why do you want to stay here, Pennimen?”

“I just do.”

“A better answer, please.”

“The school Dad wants to send me to is Monterey Academy in California. It’s not ... like Winchester.”

“I know of the school. It has a certain reputation.”

I waited to see what kind of reputation, but Finney seemed to take my answer for what it was and did not blast Monterey out of the water. He clucked for his collie.

Like a shadow unfolding, the dog crept out from under her table and, slicing me with her eyes, put her muzzle on his good knee. “I’ve had boys do bad things, Pennimen,” Finney said, staring at the fire and petting the dog. “In the old days here at Winchester new boys were made to drink ink by the seniors. Then they had to piss blue in front of everyone. Boys have run cheating rings before, they have stolen the way you did, and sneaked in liquor and played pranks just the way you did. Most of those boys grew up to be decent men. But no boy I’ve ever had in thirty years would have attacked my dog like young Mr. Sader and his friends.” Finney shook his head. “They’ll try to get you, Pennimen. You should listen to your dad. Go to Monterey. Go away from here. You’ll make your way back into a good school the following year.”

I traced the pattern of the Persian carpet with a poker and tried to think of something to say. The fire hissed and popped. The collie purred, much like a cat. In Finney’s intelligent eyes the orange reflection of the flames danced. “It’s the cave, isn’t it, Pennimen?” Finney asked.

I nodded.

“Tell me what you’ve found.”

“I can’t. I promised Snowy. If I say anything, he’ll never take me back there.”

“You mean you don’t know where this bloody cave is? I thought you were down there every day working like an Egyptian hod carrier!”

“I am. But Snowy blindfolds me and walks me in circles first, so I don’t know where the entrance is.”

Finney digested this and another macaroon for a minute. “Poor Cobb,” he muttered at last. “Doesn’t trust a soul. He’s had a tough life. I expect you know about it.”

I wanted to know more, so I said casually, “His mom’s living in a foreign country?”

Finney gave the collie a macaroon. “His mother ... travels,” he said. “The father was a career Army man, I think. Stationed in the East somewhere. Been missing seven years. Cobb thinks he’s alive and working secretly for the CIA. The Army says he’s dead. Cobb has an uncle who brought him here. Dorothy and I have taken him in, you know. Cobb needs a home. He came to Dorothy and me because he was petrified of your former friends.” Finney said this with a half smile and a direct look in my eyes.

“I wish you were back as headmaster, Mr. Finney,” I said.

“Do you mean that, Pennimen? I punished you rather hard, as I remember.”

“I deserved it.”

“Do you mean that too?” His eyebrows rose, and I could feel the human lie detector again.

I nodded, catching his gaze.

“I’m too old to get another job as headmaster, you know,” he said sadly. “They want young blood out there. Not old academic fools like me.”

Sleet bristled against the windows, and the wind wailed like a far-off horn. I could feel the sadness in Finney, as I sometimes felt it across the room when my father was thinking of my mother. “Mr. Finney?”

“Yes, Pennimen.”

“What do you suppose will happen to those boys? Especially Rudy and Danny? What kind of men will they grow up to be?”

“Ha ha ha ha,” Finney laughed sourly.

I waited. There was no answer but the tumbling of a log onto the hearth. Then, quite suddenly, Mr. Finney spat into the fire.

S
NOWY AND I HAD
nearly two weeks of full days. We began at seven in the morning and left in the evening, when the bats flew out at five thirty through their roof window. It took two hours of digging with large spades to get to the bottom of our hole without the sand caving in. This time we made it big enough for both of us to get into. We created another waste mountain in doing this and promised each other we’d take turns hauling it away.