Who Killed Darius Drake?: A Mystery Page 9

  What happens is, Darius unhooks his effigy from the light fixture and tosses it aside like it’s nothing more than a bundle of laundry, which basically it is. “Warning noted,” he says dismissively. “I have no intention of stealing anything. If we locate the diamonds we’ll follow the letter of the law, agreed?”

  We all agree and then we get back to work, searching every dusty inch of the second floor. Darius doesn’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but he’ll recognize it when he sees it. “Think about deception,” he says. “An extraordinary thing disguised to look ordinary. Hiding in plain sight.”

  “Like the entrance to a secret tunnel disguised as a fireplace,” Deirdre suggests.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But there aren’t any fireplaces,” I point out.

  “It’s a concept,” Darius explains. “Go with the flow, Bash Man.”

  The flow means checking every floorboard, every light switch, every knob and handle. Looking for something, anything, that will lead us to the treasure.

  What do we find on the second floor besides the weird effigy thing? Nothing but dust. Sneezy, boring dust.

  “I never said this would be easy,” Darius says as we take a short break. “My grandfather searched this place for weeks and didn’t find anything.”

  “Maybe because there’s nothing here,” I say grumpily.

  “So you’re giving up?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Deirdre dusts off her hands. “I’ll bet there are spiders in the attic. Spiders as big as cats.” She looks pleased at the idea.

  “To the attic, then,” says Darius, nodding in agreement.

  We troop up the steep narrow stairway and open the creaky door. I’m expecting another surprise to leap out of the dimness, or swing from the roof rafters, but nothing does.

  It’s just an attic.

  There are a few spiders, but nothing bigger than the fingernail on my smallest finger. And lots of cobwebs that are not quite transparent in the glare of our flashlights. And more sneezy, boring dust.

  Other than that, the attic is wide-open and completely empty.

  Not that it stops Darius from searching. He pokes and prods the creaky floorboards, pushes and pulls every rafter, inspects along the edges where the roof meets the floor, and covers every last inch of the place.

  Nothing. Nada. Zippo.

  There’s only one more place to search.

  “We’ve been saving the best for last,” Darius announces. “I can’t promise giant spiders in the basement, but at the very least there should be some interesting mold.”

  Deirdre brightens at the idea. “Cool,” she says. “I was hoping we’d have a chance to use these.”

  From out of the backpack she produces three small walkie-talkies, hands them around, and gives Darius a challenging grin. “This way if we get separated and scream for help, you’ll hear us.”

  TO BE HONEST, basements and cellars spook me out. Anything underground gives me the creeps, okay? Worms and moles, that’s who belongs underground. But I don’t want to look like a weenie so I follow Darius and Deirdre down the basement steps even though it makes my stomach hurt. And no, it’s not because I’m hungry. The opposite. Doubt I could eat a cupcake even if it jumped into my mouth.

  Unlike the attic, the basement is loaded with junk. Jam-packed. Busted furniture, empty flowerpots and gardening tools, a table with a missing leg propped on a stack of moldering books. Dozens of cans of old paint and rusty tools and at least a hundred jars of screws and washers. Piles of saggy cardboard boxes crammed with clothing and shoes and boots and stuff. In the back corner there’s a stack of broken furniture, as if the owner couldn’t bear to throw anything away, no matter how useless. In another corner a collection of old appliances, including an ancient stove, a treadle sewing machine, an icebox with the doors removed, and some clunky old contraption with a tub and a brass handle. Along part of the back wall are precarious stacks of crates that contain files and folders from when Winston Brooks was searching for the Dunbar diamonds. A search that led him to this very house, which is starting to look like yet another dead end.

  Darius starts pulling old file folders from the crates.

  “Take this,” Deirdre says, handing me a chunk of iron pipe. “Keep tapping and listen for anything hollow.”

  We push through all the broken furniture and junk and work the outer edges, tapping on the foundation walls, Deirdre with her small hammer and me with the piece of pipe. Poured concrete, as Darius pointed out. The surface is hard and smooth, and there’s no way to conceal a door or entryway without us finding it, either by spotting a seam or by locating a hollow spot.

  Meanwhile Darius keeps puttering around with the crates of moldy files, squinting in the dimness as he looks for clues. Reluctantly he closes the last file box and asks, “You guys find anything?”

  “Piles of stinky junk. Enough to fill ten Dumpsters.”

  “The foundation walls?”

  Tap tap.

  “Solid concrete.”

  Tap tap.

  “Keep looking! If James Rutgers built a secret passageway, it will be very, very clever. You’ll be looking right at it but you won’t see it.”

  “It’s not in the walls, that’s for sure,” Deirdre says, laying down her little hammer.

  Darius looks up at the dangling lightbulb. “That’s the only source of light, one fifteen-watt bulb?”

  “That and our flashlights.”

  “Hmmm. The electrical wiring in the rest of the house is more than adequate, even by modern standards,” Darius says. “So why is it so dim in the basement?”

  I say, “Maybe whatever we’re looking for is hiding in the shadows. In plain sight but, you know, hard to see. The dim light is on purpose.”

  He looks pleased. “Excellently induced, Bash Man. Your theory is plausible.”

  Inspired, Deirdre aims her powerful flashlight into the dim corners, bathing them with a bright, sweeping light. “Look! Did you see that? It gleams.”

  Darius peers around the stacks of file boxes. “Hold the beam steady, please.”

  Her flashlight illuminates the old tub with the big brass handle, partially obscured by the old icebox.

  “What is that thing?” Darius wants to know.

  “Wait,” says Deirdre, pushing through the stacks of junk, working her way closer. “Right, that’s what I thought. An old washing machine. Probably as old as the house. That thing at the top? That’s called a mangle, and you crank it by hand. The clothes went in the tub below, you added hot water that had been heated on a stove, then scrubbed the clothes on the scrub board, see, and finally you fed each item through the mangle to squeeze out the water. Took all day to do the laundry.”

  Darius sounds incredulous. “How do you know that?”

  “An American history course. Did you know that in the old days, before modern appliances, women used to spend more than sixty hours a week doing housework and preparing meals?”

  Darius sighs. “So it’s just an old washing machine. Probably too heavy to carry out of the basement. Not exactly an entrance to a secret passageway.”

  “No,” says Deirdre, getting close enough to the old machine to shine her light inside it. “But it makes me wonder, what was a man like James Rutgers doing with a washing machine?”

  “Explain,” Darius urges.

  “He was a bachelor, right? Married to his job. I very much doubt that any man of his position—the senior millwright in one of the world’s largest factories—was doing his own laundry. He’d have sent it out to be professionally laundered.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he liked to do it himself.”

  Deirdre laughs. “Are you serious? Have you ever done laundry by hand?” She pauses. “That’s what I thought. No, this machine doesn’t belong here.”

  I get busy, shoving crates and busted furniture around to make room so we can really look at the thing. When the area around the old washing machine is clear, I shine my f
lashlight along the floor under it. “No idea who used the thing, but it must belong here,” I say. “The legs are bolted into the concrete floor above a drain. Sorry, Deirdre, but it’s just another piece of junk, that’s all.”

  “I guess you’re right,” she says, disappointed.

  I start to stack the crates back in place.

  “Wait!” Darius says. “Hiding in plain sight, remember? You said that, Bash Man. We’re looking right at it but we don’t see it.”

  “Sorry, but all I see is a stinky old machine.”

  “Look again,” he urges. “You see an old washing machine. I see a very clever piece of engineering.”

  He reaches out, gripping one of the little levers above the tub. There’s a satisfying clunk! as it slips into place. He examines the mechanism that turns the tub, then carefully engages another lever, this time in the opposite direction.

  “That should do it, if my theory is correct. Deirdre, you noticed this old thing, so you get the honors. Try turning the handle on that cranking mechanism.”

  She does, and something astonishing happens.

  AS DEIRDRE CRANKS the big brass handle with both hands, the old washing machine slowly but surely lifts up from the floor and begins to swing to one side. Underneath the machine is a large drain grate. Darius falls to his knees, hooks his skinny fingers in the heavy grate, and drags it out of the way.

  “Flashlight!”

  I aim the flashlight into the exposed hole beneath the grate—easily big enough for a person, even one as wide as me—and see the glint of a curved iron staircase descending into the darkness below.

  “That’s it!” Darius cries out. “We did it! We found the secret passage!”

  Looking back on it, we should have told someone we were about to explore a tunnel under the house on Rutgers Road. But we don’t. We’re so excited by our discovery that we grab our flashlights and clamber down the narrow, curving stairway into the tunnel below.

  Me first, then Deirdre, then Darius.

  Thirteen steps bring us to a smooth concrete floor, and into air so stale and dank it’s as if no one has breathed it in a hundred years. Ahead of us a tunnel, invisible in the overwhelming darkness, leads to who-knows-where.

  “What do we do now?” Deirdre whispers.

  Something about the place makes us all whisper. Maybe because we’re nervous about not knowing what happens next. Or maybe because when it comes right down to it, we don’t want to disturb the dead.

  Darius decides it’s a teaching moment. “Bash Man, given what we observed about the level of construction in the house itself, what logical induction might we make about the construction of this tunnel?”

  I think about it for a moment. “That it’s pretty much the same?”

  “Exactly!” he says, delighted at my response. “Stay where you are,” he cautions us. “This will only take a minute, if my theory is correct.”

  He moves to the side of the tunnel and begins to run his hands along the wall. “Just as I thought. Ready, Deirdre?”

  “Ready.”

  “Ready, Bash Man?”

  “I guess.”

  “Here goes,” Darius says, flipping a switch. “Let there be light!”

  It begins as a faint glow, and then one by one a long string of overhead lightbulbs blink into life, illuminating a concrete-lined tunnel that seems to end, far in the distance, in a blank wall.

  The lightbulbs are so old they could have been made by Thomas Edison, but they still function.

  “Wow,” says Deirdre, marveling at the string of lights. “This is so cool.”

  “It ends in a blank wall,” I point out. “Maybe they never finished the project.”

  “Only one way to find out,” says Darius, leading the way.

  Turns out the blank wall is an optical illusion, caused by the play of shadows. The tunnel doesn’t end in a blank wall, it turns ninety degrees to the right. Darius locates another ancient light switch, and the next leg of the tunnel is illuminated. Which once again looks like it ends in a blank wall.

  Except it doesn’t. Tucked into the final corner is a black iron door with no handle, and no obvious hinges.

  This is it, the door to a tomb.

  Nobody says anything. It’s as if all along we’ve been concentrating on finding the diamonds, and now that we’re nearly there, we’re suddenly thinking about what it means to enter such a place. What it will likely contain, treasure or no treasure: coffins, bones, skeletons, remains of the dead.

  Do we really want to go there?

  Deirdre grimly plays her flashlight over the door, revealing some sort of bronze insignia brazed into the iron plating. The shape of a heart enclosing three sets of letters.

  Deirdre sighs and says, “Lucy Dare and Donald Dunbar, rest in peace.”

  WHEN I WAS little there used to be this deliciously scary show I really liked, Tales from the Crypt, even though it scared the poo out of me. Well, not really, but you know what I mean. Each episode was introduced by the Crypt Keeper, a ghoul who popped up from a coffin with a screaming laugh. For a long time I thought the Crypt Keeper was real, even if the stories were made up, but when I got a little older it became obvious it was only a puppet.

  Which is why to this day I’m scared of puppets. And skeletons and coffins and crypts.

  “Maybe we ought to think about this,” I say, glancing uneasily at the black iron door.

  Darius points a flashlight in my face, as if to say, Just checking. “Really? You think it might be booby-trapped?”

  “No. I don’t know, maybe. It’s more like, this is a grave, right? A final resting place?”

  “We won’t know for sure until we open the door.”

  “What about ‘rest in peace’?”

  Darius snorts. “I’m more worried about resting in pieces.”

  Deirdre taps me on the arm. “You’re sweet, Arthur. You’re concerned about being respectful. But we’ve come this far. We have to find out.”

  “Right,” I say. “You’re right. So how do we open the door?”

  “It’s a puzzle,” Darius declares. “We just have to solve it.”

  We all stare at the black door, as if waiting for something to be revealed. But what? “I don’t get it,” I admit. “There’s no handle or knob or latch. No keyhole even if we had a key.”

  “Deirdre?”

  “Sorry, Darius. I’m just not seeing a way in. I think we need a big crowbar.”

  “Let’s think about this,” he suggests. “We know from contemporary accounts that Donald Dunbar was obsessed with building a memorial for Lucy Dare. We know from our discovery that his friend James Rutgers helped him build that memorial, and that the entrance to it was hidden in the basement.”

  “So?”

  “So, why make a secret entrance if you don’t intend to use it? Why not completely seal it off? That would ensure the crypt—or whatever it is—would remain undisturbed, possibly forever. A secret entrance suggests that Dunbar used it, probably more than once, and possibly much more frequently. Paying his respects, as you would at an ordinary cemetery. If that’s true, then there has to be a simple way to open this door. Hidden but simple.”

  “I’m still thinking crowbar,” Deirdre says brightly.

  “It may come to that,” Darius admits.

  “What about the heart?” I wonder. “The initials inside? Could it be a clue? I mean, we’re assuming LD plus DD plus RIP stands for Lucy Dare, Donald Dunbar, and ‘rest in peace.’ But what if it means something else?”

  Darius tips his head to one side, considering the question. “Like what?” he asks.

  “Haven’t got a clue. Thinking out loud.”

  Darius brightens. “Maybe not a bad thought, Bash Man. The heart is a good place to start. The center of the door, the center of Dunbar’s life. It may well have more than one meaning, more than one purpose. Deirdre, could you lend me your hammer?”

  She reaches into her backpack, hands him the small hammer.

 
Darius starts tapping around the edges of the door. It sounds solid enough, and so heavy I doubt a crowbar would scratch it. As he gets closer to the center—closer to the heart—the tone rises. Not a lot, but enough to notice.

  Darius looks at us with a gleeful expression. “There’s something inside the door panel. Hear that?” He taps with the hammer.

  Tap. Tap. Clunk.

  “Could be some sort of mechanism,” he says. “A locking mechanism? If so, how is it triggered?”

  Darius puts down the hammer and uses his flashlight beam to light the area where the initials have been brazed into the iron door. He puts his face close to the surface, examining it from one side, then the other. Almost mashing his glasses he’s so close.

  I’m thinking he needs a magnifying glass.

  He stands back, wrinkling his nose as he squints.

  “I put the odds of my being correct at about fifty-fifty,” he says, not sounding all that confident.

  “Correct about what, exactly?” Deirdre wants to know.

  “This,” he says, putting one thumb on Donald Dunbar’s initials, the other on Lucy Dare’s.

  He pushes.

  There are two metallic clicks as the initials sink into the iron surface, and then with a sigh, the heavy door swings open.

  OKAY, I’LL ADMIT it. My knees are shaking as the iron door swings wide, revealing impenetrable darkness beyond. I’m afraid to raise my flashlight, terrified of what it might reveal. Crawling spiders, grinning skulls, bony knuckles reaching from the grave. Stuff so scary I can’t bear to think about it.

  Deirdre grabs my arm and whispers, “What now?” in a quavering voice.

  So I’m not the only one who’s afraid of the dark.