by Sharon Sala
Tug groaned, then eased back down onto the pillow. “So what’m I supposed to do? I can’t take this pain.”
“You need to be in a hospital,” Nick said. “For all we know, you’re still bleeding…maybe even into your brain. It’s for damn sure you have a concussion, which means your brain is swollen. If it doesn’t go down and keeps swelling, you’ll die.”
Tug’s expression shifted from pain-filled to horrified.
“Well, hell, Aroyo. Don’t sugarcoat the news or anything.”
Nick moved to the foot of the bed to emphasize his point.
“I’m not trying to scare you, man. I’m trying to save your life.”
“The phones are still out,” Tug said. “But Wayman said the woman has a car.”
“It’s under a small tree with the roof caved in,” Nick said.
“And there’s a damned police chopper that keeps flying over the area,” Lou added. “It’s buzzed the house a couple of times already.”
Tug flinched, and tried to swing his legs off the bed.
“Wayman didn’t tell me that. We gotta do something. Someone hand me my pants. We gotta get out of here. I don’t want to go back to jail.”
“None of us do,” Nick said. “But you can’t walk, and so far, we haven’t been able to work on clearing the car long enough to know if we can drive it.”
“Wait until dark,” Tug said. “Work through the night. You hear me? We gotta get out of here.”
The bathroom door opened. Wayman was zipping up his pants as he strolled into the room.
“You heard Tug. When it gets dark, we’ll go to work. If we have to, we’ll work all night.”
Nick gave up. There was no way he was going to be able to talk them into surrendering.
Then the floor creaked above their heads, which meant Amalie was on the move.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and hurried out the door.
Seven
Nick raced up the stairs, certain that the footsteps he’d heard when he was in Tug’s room had been Amalie’s. Except her room wasn’t directly over Tug’s, so he shouldn’t have been able to hear her walking. If she was trying to run and they caught her at it, her life wouldn’t be worth a dime. And without a weapon, he couldn’t save her.
As he burst into her room, his anxiety quickly grew. She was nowhere in sight. Cursing himself for leaving her on her own, he wasn’t sure what to do. Calling out for her would only alert the others. He ran to the window, but it was still shut and locked. The bathroom door was open, but she wasn’t inside. Then he noticed the closet door was ajar.
His heart was pounding as he yanked it open.
“Amalie! Are you in here?”
His hopes fell when she didn’t answer. The light was on, but she was nowhere in sight.
“Damn it, Amalie…you’re going to be the death of me,” he muttered. He turned to leave, then heard what sounded like someone falling to the floor, followed by a muffled groan. Convinced she was hiding somewhere inside, he began shoving clothes aside and moving deeper into the closet.
Amalie was at her wits’ end. Nick had been on the stairs behind her, but she’d refused to wait or look back. She didn’t owe him any courtesy. By the time she reached her room, she was verging on a meltdown. She slammed the door, tossed the book on the bed and burst into tears. The hope she’d had that these men would be gone by tonight had ended with the return of the search party. Now what? Would their frustration and fears morph into a bigger threat to her? This constant state of panic and indecision was pushing her to the brink.
She cried until her head was throbbing and her stomach was in knots. Finally the tears came to an end, but her misery did not. She rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, too numb to think. When she finally got up, she moved to the window overlooking the south end of the property, her steps dragging.
“Nonna, Nonna…what do I do? I’m afraid to run for it, but if I don’t try, there’s no guarantee they’ll leave me alive when they go.”
Unfortunately there were no answers from Nonna, and nothing Amalie knew had prepared her facing this kind of trauma. She braced her hand against the windowsill, and as she did, she felt the imperfection beneath the paint and remembered what had been carved into the wood.
We are alive—1864.
Amalie shivered, remembering that the war had been raging for three years at that time and had not ended until the following year.
She leaned her forehead against the glass and took a slow, deep breath. It was the reminder she needed that worse things had come to pass on this land and Popes had lived through them. Just because she was the last, that didn’t mean she was lacking in strength.
She watched the chopper make another pass over the far end of the property before banking and heading back out over the bayou. Never had she needed a cell phone as much as she needed one now. Here she was, living in the time of übertechnology, stranded in a two-hundred-year-old house without the ability to connect with the outside world. Time warp. That was what this was. A freaking time warp.
She didn’t know if Nick was standing guard outside her room like he had last night, but she wasn’t going to rattle the tiger’s cage by going to look. And if she was going to spend some time in here, she was going to get more comfortable. She headed for the closet with one thing in mind: changing into her favorite but faded, oversize and ragged LSU T-shirt.
She turned on the light in the walk-in closet, trying to remember where she’d put the shirt when she’d unpacked. There was a small chest of drawers at the back of the closet, and she remembered putting some of her things in there.
Her grandmother’s clothing was still hanging on the rods, and as she walked toward the chest she caught a whiff of perfume and paused to bury her face in the fabric of Nonna’s favorite Sunday dress. It smelled of jasmine, too. Everywhere she turned, she kept coming in contact with her grandmother’s favorite scent.
Amalie blinked back tears, trying not to think of the things that had gone undone when her grandmother died. This was Nonna’s favorite dress, which begged the question, what had they buried her in? It made Amalie sad, wondering if her grandmother’s funeral had been less than it should have been because she had not been in charge of making the arrangements.
“Sorry, Nonna,” she said softly, then stepped away from the dress and reached for the chest of drawers.
The first thing she saw when she opened the top drawer was an LSU logo. Bingo. She grabbed the shirt, then, before she could close the drawer, dropped the shirt on the floor.
“Drat,” she muttered, as she bent over to get it.
As she did, her gaze fell on the back of the closet, and all of a sudden she was a child again, playing hide-and-seek with her father and scooting as far back into Nonna’s cedar-lined closet as she could get.
In doing so, she’d accidentally leaned against a spot on the wall that triggered a hidden latch. The hair rose on the back of her neck as she remembered a small section of the wall swinging inward. Thinking that she’d broken something, she quickly pulled it shut without ever saying anything about it, and over the years, she’d completely forgotten the incident had ever occurred.
But now she was old enough to understand the implications, and the location of a secret door was something she wanted to investigate.
She ran back into her bedroom, tossed the T-shirt on her bed, grabbed a flashlight and then ran back inside the closet. Within moments she was on her hands and knees, crawling beneath the clothing to the farthest corner. Then she sat back against the wall, just as she’d done when she was little, and began pushing against the panels. It took a few tries before she hit the right spot, then all of a sudden the door swung inward without making a sound.
“This is so cool,” Amalie said, as she rolled over onto her hands and knees, and swung the flashlight beam into the darkness.
The air inside was musty but otherwise lacking any identifiable scent. It occurred to her that there could be an
ything from spiders to rats inside, and she winced as she swept the interior with the small beam of light. To her surprise, except for a slight film of dust, it appeared void of critters, crawling or otherwise.
She inched her way a little farther inside, again sweeping the low ceiling and dark corners with the flashlight before crawling the rest of the way in.
The room was small, but once inside, the ceiling was just high enough that she could stand. Testing the floor gingerly with each step, she moved deeper inside, constantly sweeping the walls and floor until she was in the farthest corner.
She swept the light across the wall and then suddenly stopped.
“What in the—”
She moved closer, aiming the light at one specific spot. A name had been written on the unpainted wood. It was faded and faint, and she’d almost missed it.
Polee.
That was an odd name. She aimed the flashlight again, looking to see if there was a surname to go with it, then froze. There were more names—all kinds of names, all over the wall—written in pencil, some carved into the wood, a few written in something that had left thick, dark smudges, something like blood.
But the longer she looked, the more certain she was that the names had nothing to do with the people who’d lived here. There was not one name on this wall that ended with Pope.
As she stood staring at the names, the hair on the back of her neck began to rise.
Most of the names were misspelled, while in other cases all she saw was an X. She began to read aloud.
“Sarah—Big Joe—X—Jude—Rufus—X X X—Ol Mamy—Litl Pete—Markus—Zeb—Polee—X X X X—Abel—Huney—Babe Gurl…”
Name after name, mark after mark—like a roll call from the past. There were dozens upon dozens—maybe as many as one hundred. She knew for a fact that the early Popes had been slave owners. But this defied understanding. It would seem that, over time, their mind-set might have changed.
These names on the wall—all written in different hands, in different mediums—were hard to explain away by any means other than the obvious. This hidden place was all that was left to show that at one time in history, the Vatican had been a stop on the Underground Railroad.
It was staggering to know that her ancestors had cared enough to risk their own lives and well-being to give others a chance at a better life.
Amalie laid her hand on the wall, imagining these people’s terror and, at the same time, their strength of purpose. Desperate to escape the bonds of slavery, they had risked it all. She didn’t want to think about the ones who hadn’t made it. It was enough to know that they’d taken the chance, and for however brief their time on the run, they’d been running free. When she finally stepped back, she was crying again, but this time it wasn’t for herself. It was for them.
And in a strange way, finding out what her ancestors had risked, as well as knowing what the runaways had endured to even get this far, gave her a newfound strength to deal with what was happening to her now.
If she lived through this mess, she was going to make sure that the proper authorities learned of this room. As a teacher, she could not overlook the value of such history. It needed to be shared. And as the last living descendant of the Popes, it was up to her to make that happen.
Just as she was about to leave, she heard the door to her room open, then close. She froze, listening to the sound of approaching footsteps.
God help me…don’t let it be that pig Lou.
She thought she heard someone talking, but from in here, could not identify the voice. In a panic, she pushed the door shut. Then suddenly the footsteps were inside the closet. Her heart was pounding, her palms wet with sweat.
Then she heard a man’s voice and breathed a quiet sigh of relief. It was Nick. He wasn’t her knight in shining armor, but at least she wasn’t afraid of him. Without caution, she knelt down to trigger the latch, but in the dark, dropped her flashlight and fell instead, ramming her shoulder against the wall. The pain was so sudden and so sharp that she jerked backward, holding her shoulder and groaning aloud.
Nick was frantic as he dug through the clothes. He needed to find her before the others knew she was missing, and although the groan he’d heard was definitely nearby, there was no one inside this closet but him.
“Amalie! Amalie! Where the hell are you?” he whispered.
“In here,” she said, and then groaned again.
She couldn’t find her flashlight, but she could feel the wall by the door. In the dark, she found the latch and tripped it, opening the door wide enough to let in some light. She saw her flashlight and picked it up, but when she tried to crawl out, her shoulder gave way.
When a portion of the closet wall suddenly swung inward, Nick’s eyes widened with surprise.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, and got down on his knees to look in.
Amalie was sitting against the wall with a flashlight in her lap and cradling her shoulder.
“What in hell are you doing in here?” he asked, as he crawled toward her.
“Revisiting my childhood,” she muttered, and rested her forehead on her knees, trying to psych herself up for the painful crawl back out.
“You’re hurt,” Nick said, as he laid a hand gently at her nape. “What happened?”
“I fell and bumped my shoulder,” she said, then moaned again. “Lord have mercy, I have to crawl to get out, and my shoulder won’t bear the weight. Could just one more thing go wrong today?”
Her sarcasm was impossible to miss, but so was her misery.
“I know I keep saying this, but it’s the truth. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Nick said softly, then slid an arm carefully around her shoulder.
Without thinking, Amalie turned toward the comfort and buried her face against the curve of his neck.
Nick flinched. Damn it. I don’t want to feel like this. I can’t afford to feel anything for her.
But his emotions seemed to have a different agenda.
Amalie was in too much pain to think about how perfectly she fit within his embrace. All she knew was that his voice was soft and his touch was tender.
“Will you help me get out?”
Nick rested his cheek against the crown of her head and closed his eyes.
Help her? I’m the one who’s in trouble.
“You know I will. But just for the record, what the hell were you doing in here? Planning to hide?”
“No. I just remembered finding this place as a child and wanted to see it again. Only this time I went inside and found something I didn’t see before.”
Nick glanced around the space. It was dark and dusty, but there was still enough light to see it was empty.
“I don’t see anything. What did you find? Ghosts?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Amalie said, and aimed her flashlight at the back wall. “Have a look.”
Nick took the flashlight and stood, immediately bumping his head on the low ceiling.
“Damn. Who built this room? Elves?”
“Sorry,” Amalie said.
“It’s not like this hasn’t happened before,” Nick said, and rubbed his head as he moved toward the wall in a crouch.
Amalie watched as he moved the flashlight beam across the names. When he came back to her, she could see the awe on his face.
“Those aren’t your ancestors’ names, are they?”
“I doubt it,” Amalie said. “I never knew about this, and no one in the family ever talked about it to me, but I’m thinking this house might have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. I can’t wait to contact the historical society and have them come check it out.”
“Weren’t your people slave owners?”
“Yes, at one time for sure, which makes this all the more amazing.”
Nick smiled, then cupped the side of her cheek.
“You’re very beautiful when you smile.”
Amalie froze. It wasn’t like she’d never had a compliment before. And it wasn’t like she’d never been
attracted to someone the way she was attracted to Nick. But this was someone who had invaded her home. She’d heard about the Stockholm syndrome—the hostage becoming attached to their captor. This was getting too personal, and it needed to stop.
“Uh…like I said…I need help getting out, and I don’t think my shoulder will bear my weight.”
Nick dropped his hand and stifled a sigh. He got the message. Don’t touch.
“No problem. I’ll pull you out backward. You just sit flat with your legs out in front of you and let me do the work.”
Amalie sat down, then stretched out, bracing herself as Nick crawled up behind her, slid an arm beneath her breasts and tightened his grip.
Her pulse kicked.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked.
Anything but. Then she frowned. Where the hell had that come from?
“No.”
“Okay, here we go, and remember…let me do the work.”
“Okay.”
She heard him inhale, then felt him leaning backward, using his weight as leverage to move her along. And it worked. A few more tugs, and he’d pulled her out of the secret room and back inside the closet.
“I’m out,” Amalie said, as her legs cleared the threshold. Then she shut the door. Before she could move, Nick was on his feet, pulling her up with him.
Amalie groaned, then winced as she found herself upright.
“What a mess that was.”
Nick turned her around until they were eye to eye. Her forehead was furrowed in pain, and her curls were even more tousled than ever.
She’d already made it clear there was to be no touching, but there was a smudge of dust on her cheek.
“You have a little…uh, there’s some…oh, what the hell,” he muttered, and wiped away the dust with the flat of his hand.
“Oh…uh…thank you,” Amalie said, then reached up just as he dropped his hand and bumped into him.
“Sorry,” they said in unison, but neither of them moved.
Amalie stared up into his face, wanting him to be something he wasn’t.
He was too close, and she was too tempting. He cupped her face with both hands, then slowly, slowly, lowered his head.
