Undertaking Irene

by Pamela Burford

  He inserted the bent thingie into the keyhole and held it there while he stuck the squiggly one in and yanked it out a couple of times. Voilà. The knob turned. The whole process took less time than pouring a bowl of Fruity Pebbles.

  Martin pulled me inside the Employees Only and closed the door. The room was about twelve by twelve feet with brick walls and exposed pipes overhead. Cobwebs abounded and a musty, dusty smell pervaded the room, which appeared to serve as a catchall for unused furniture and equipment. Desks. Filing cabinets. Lamps. Bakery racks. A cluster of fat, outdated computer monitors. A tall metal storage locker. We immediately ascertained that we were alone.

  “Someone left the light on.” I nodded toward the bare light bulb dangling from a ceiling joist. It emitted a weak glow that failed to penetrate the corners of the room. Neither of us had flipped the switch by the door, so the last person in here must have failed to turn it off. Judging by the neglected look of the place, that could have been weeks ago.

  I detected movement in my straw tote as Sexy Beast yawned and stretched. His front paws and sleepy face appeared over the top edge of the bag, nose twitching as he catalogued the contents of the room. He whined to be set down on the floor so he could explore—which would never, ever happen. Not in this dirty, gloomy place. As a consolation, I offered him scritches and a treat from one of the bag’s inside pockets.

  Martin, meanwhile, poked around the room. He pushed aside a stack of folding chairs and examined a small wooden door set halfway up the wall. “This looks like a dumbwaiter.” He shoved upward on the brass handle and managed to slide the door partway up. He stuck his head in and peered upward.

  His voice echoed. “Looks like the shaft goes all the way up. For room service, I guess, when this place was a hotel.”

  “More like booze service,” I said. “During Prohibition there was a speakeasy where Sophie’s office is now.”

  He straightened and plucked a cobweb off his ear. “I guess they used the dumbwaiter to sneak bottles up and down.”

  “Hokum Hannigan owned the building,” I said. “Also the Historical Society building, only it was a boardinghouse and brothel back then. Supposedly they were connected by a secret tunnel where they stored and transported the stuff.”

  That got the padre’s attention. “Yeah? There’s a tunnel down here?”

  “Well, not anymore, if it even existed. They say the entrances were boarded up.”

  He looked crestfallen but still curious. “Wonder where it was.”

  “Who knows? Let’s go.” I’d had enough of that creepy room. I paused with my hand on the doorknob, listening for activity on the other side. It wouldn’t do to be seen leaving the Employees Only. SB gave a sharp bark, impatient to explore. I shushed him and urged him to settle down on his sweater-nest.

  “Where’s the Historical Society?” Martin asked. “What direction?”

  “You mean from where we’re standing? Uh…” I pointed to the closed door. “Well, the front of this building is thataway. It faces west. And the Historical Society is a few blocks directly north of here, so…” I pointed northward.

  He turned to face the north wall. “So the mouth of the tunnel could be right behind these bricks.”

  “Or it could be behind plaster and wallpaper out there.” I jerked my head toward the door and the prettily decorated foyer beyond. “Or it could’ve been some kind of trapdoor in the floor and was cemented over decades ago. Or the whole thing could be BS.”

  He stood in the one spot where no clutter blocked the north wall and ran his fingers over the bricks, cast in shadowed relief by the anemic overhead light, which seemed to obscure more than it revealed. In truth, I shared his fascination. What child has never fantasized about a secret passageway? But I was relieved when he roused himself with a little shake and said, “Let’s go find Detective Hernandez.”

  He crossed the room and reached for the doorknob, but I didn’t relinquish it. Now I was the one standing there staring. Not at the wall but at the floor directly in front of the wall—the space Martin had just occupied.

  “What?” he said, watching me.

  I squinted through the long shadows and slowly approached the spot, a paler rectangle in the filthy cement floor. The patch measured about eighteen inches by three feet. “It’s cleaner here. Something was moved.” I glanced around. “That thing.”

  I indicated the dented metal storage cabinet standing nearby, six feet tall with the same footprint as the pale spot.

  He gave the cabinet a shove, and we discovered it was on wheels. “So what?” he said. “Someone did a little rearranging.”

  I looked from the north wall to the other three. “It’s hard to tell in this dim light, but do the bricks here look different from the rest? A little more uniform maybe? I wish I had a flashlight.”

  Martin produced his key ring and freed something from it. A small, bright circle of light illuminated the bricks in front of us. The mini flashlight couldn’t have been more than two inches long, but it was powerful.

  “Were you a Boy Scout?” I asked.

  “Until I earned my Criminal Mischief badge.” He directed the light at the brickwork, concentrating on the room’s corners. “You know, I think you’re right. Also, the mortar looks neater on the north wall. I bet it was built more recently.”

  “Maybe the tunnel wasn’t just local legend.” I took the flashlight from him and peered closely at the bricks. The differences were subtle, but they were there if you looked hard enough. “Maybe it really existed and this is where they bricked up the entryway.”

  “Or maybe it’s old Hokum Hannigan they bricked up back there.”

  “Hokum died quietly in his sleep at age ninety-three,” I said, standing on the clean patch of cement and running the light over the bricks.

  “Sure, that’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Give me the flashlight.”

  I batted his hand away. “I’m not finished.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’ll know when I find it,” I said.

  Then I found it.

  “Do you see this gap?” I ran my finger over the end of a brick where the mortar didn’t seem to adhere.

  He examined the spot. “That can happen when mortar shrinks over time, usually because it was improperly mixed. Or when the foundation settles. Also, variations in temperature can cause moisture to infiltrate. And don’t even get me started on expansion joints.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you?”

  “Sure I do.” He puffed out his chest. “I’m a guy.”

  “Okay, does this look like random shrinkage to you?” I moved the light upward from the floor, tracing a connected pattern of nearly invisible gaps between bricks and mortar. When the pattern continued over my head, Martin commandeered the flashlight and traced its path as it made a ninety-degree turn and ran horizontally for about four feet before turning again and continuing to the floor. It was the size and general shape of a wide door.

  “Hmm…” he said.

  “Hmm…” I said.

  Holding the flashlight between his teeth, he placed both palms on the bricks and pushed. Nothing. He pushed again, harder. Then he handed me the light and gave the wall a bone-jarring slam with his shoulder. I heard the breath hiss between his teeth and suspected that if I hadn’t been there, he’d have howled and cursed up a storm.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said, rotating his shoulder. “Whatever caused that crack, it’s not budging. Let’s go.”

  “In a second. Hold on to this. Don’t let SB get down.” I handed Martin the straw tote, then pressed my fingertips to the inside edge of the crack and gently pushed, alert for the subtlest sign of movement. I felt like a safecracker as I slid my fingers downward a couple of inches and tried again.

  The padre said nothing, but I sensed him losing patience. What effect could my puny efforts have after his manly display of brawn?

  I worked my way down the right side, then sh
ifted my attention to the left, palpating the inside edge of the gap.

  He sighed. “Jane—”

  “Sh! Be quiet and let me concentrate.”

  He brought his mouth close to SB’s ear and stage-whispered, “Mommy’s lost it.”

  I gave another small push at waist level and felt a brick depress slightly beneath my fingers. “Uh, Martin?”

  “What?”

  I lifted my hand away. The entire brick “door” popped forward several inches, with a metallic murmur. We leapt back. Sexy Beast lost his cool, and it was long seconds before I even thought of shushing him.

  “Whoa,” Martin said. “Whoa.” I’d dropped the flashlight. He retrieved it and ran the light around the edges of the protruding bricks, which were backed by a wooden panel that barely cleared the surrounding wall. We couldn’t see what was behind it.

  A finger pull had been installed in the edge of the panel. Martin gave me an impish smile. “You want to do the honors? You earned it.”

  “It’s all yours, Padre.” All I could think of was Hokum Hannigan’s grinning, rag-draped skeleton falling on me in a clatter of cobwebbed bones.

  Okay, you can just shut up right now. You weren’t there.

  He gave the finger pull a tug and the brick door swung wide. We would have paused to admire the fancy hardware that made such a cunning thing possible, but our attention was fixed on something else.

  No, not on Hokum’s ghastly remains, which were blessedly absent, but on a heavy steel door that had been concealed under the false wall. It was an old door, battered and rusty, with a tubular push bar and a big, serious-looking padlock hanging open on a big, serious-looking hasp. The door was set into the original brick wall, which was partially visible behind the false one.

  Discussion would have been pointless. We both knew that walking away at that moment was not an option. He handed me the tote bag, then reached out and depressed the push bar. We watched the door swing open on grumpy hinges.

  17

  Not if the Death Diva Has Anything to Say About It

  THE TUNNEL EXHALED moist, earth-scented air. A dozen plank steps led down to a brick-walled passage with a tamped dirt floor and wooden ceiling. The reason we could see all this is that the lights had been left on here as well. However, while the bulb in the storage room was the old-style incandescent type, forty pathetic watts at most, the one hanging in the tunnel was a modern, energy-efficient fluorescent bulb that emitted lumens galore.

  Sexy Beast growled softly, his dark little gaze unblinking as he stared into the underground passage. I decided I’d rather not know what manner of critter his high-powered nose detected.

  Next to the staircase was a scarred wooden ramp. My overstressed brain flashed on an image of wheelchair-bound smugglers before it came to me. Hokum’s men probably slid cases of liquor down this ramp.

  We began speaking in whispers. We both knew Jonah Diamond might be somewhere in that tunnel, if he hadn’t already exited from the other end about a quarter mile away. We had no desire to alert him to our presence.

  The padre said, “Boarded up, huh?”

  “That’s what everyone believes,” I said. “Looks like someone wanted to keep the tunnel to themselves.”

  “Yeah, someone who had access to this building long enough to erect a fake wall and an invisible doorway,” he said. “Not to mention enough bread to get the job done and buy the workers’ silence. You said Hokum Hannigan owned the place?”

  I nodded. “After he died, Nina’s parents donated both buildings to the town—this one and the Historical Society. For tax purposes.”

  “When was that?”

  “Sometime in the nineties. Nina’s folks were well off, like Ben said. I never met them, but I heard stories about how eccentric and secretive they were. I wouldn’t put something like this past them.” I gestured toward the clever brick door, which I now saw had an interior latch so it could be opened and closed from the inside.

  “So they deed the buildings to the town but keep the cool smuggling tunnel in the family,” he said.

  “Looks that way. Which would mean that Nina knows about the tunnel and how to get into it. She probably inherited the keys.” I indicated the open padlock. “And I know that she’s in charge of the Prohibition museum, which is in the basement of the Historical Society. That has to be where the second entrance is hidden.”

  “So she and Jonah were getting it on in the tunnel,” he said. “Their own secret trysting spot.”

  “You think so?” I made a face. “How romantic.”

  “It would explain why Ben could never track them down. Nina gives Jonah the key to this door so he can sneak into the tunnel during trips to the bakery. Meanwhile she goes into the Historical Society a few blocks away—”

  “Which she does practically every day,” I said.

  “—and all anyone sees is two people entering two different buildings.”

  “They slip into the tunnel separately,” I said, “meet somewhere in the middle, and what, make whoopee in some dark, disgusting corner?”

  “Maybe not so dark and disgusting. Remember, this place is all theirs. They can fix it up any way they want. Maybe there’s some kind of underground honeymoon suite back there.” He descended the steps, which creaked alarmingly under his weight.

  “Don’t do that. He might be in there.” I didn’t add what we both had to be thinking: that if Nina had been murdered, her body could be stashed somewhere in there. The hairs on my nape stood up and saluted that possibility. “Let’s go find Bonnie.”

  “In a minute. I just want a quick look.” He took a few steps into the passage and gestured for me to join him. “Come on, we’ll probably never get another chance.”

  Gingerly I walked down a few rickety steps, peering into the murky recesses beyond the reach of the light, clutching SB’s tote to my chest. I shivered, whether from excitement or fear, I couldn’t say—probably a heart-thumping mixture of both. “They say it’s not safe.” I was still whispering.

  “Who’s ‘they’?” He strolled a little farther, looking around. “The same folks who claimed the entryways were boarded up?”

  I took the last steps but stayed put at the bottom of them. Loose bricks lay scattered on the dirt floor. “The walls aren’t holding up too well. And look.” I pointed to the ceiling where the

  wooden planks that held back thousands of tons of earth were rotting and even missing in places. Massive vertical timbers had been placed along the sides for support, but they, too, had seen better days.

  “Don’t you know? That’s part of the allure of doing it in a place like this.” He wagged his eyebrows. “A little danger to spice things up.”

  I had one hand inside the tote, restraining a squirming Sexy Beast, who was all too curious about this strange new place. “I’m out of here, Padre. And I’m locking the door behind me.” Never mind that I didn’t have the key.

  He lifted a piece of wood with some kind of writing on it—probably part of an old liquor crate. “Where’s your sense of wonder, Jane?”

  “It’s cowering behind my sense of self-preservation, if you must know.”

  He tossed the artifact and ambled back to me, shaking his head in regret at the lost opportunity. “All right, let’s go get the cops up to speed on all this.” His mouth quirked. “Never thought I’d hear myself say those words.”

  I turned to go back up the stairs just as a supersized rat ran across my foot. I screamed and flailed my legs, losing my balance and landing on my butt in the dirt. SB leapt out of the tote with a ferocious bark and took off after the rat, both animals swiftly disappearing into the tunnel.

  “SB!” I ran full tilt after him, my legs moving before my brain could catch up. “SB, you get back here right now, do you hear me?”

  “SB, come!” Martin shouted, sprinting past me into the near darkness beyond. Unlike me, he had the presence of mind to use a command the dog would understand, if SB even heard us. With each passing second, his shrill
barks became fainter and fainter. He might be a runty toy poodle, but those little legs could eat up the ground when he was motivated.

  I kept running, sweating now, concentrating on Martin’s footfalls ahead as the passage curved and the inky shadows succumbed to the glare of another fluorescent bulb. The lights were strung at regular intervals along the length of the tunnel, I discovered as we ran deeper and deeper into it. Prohibition-era detritus littered the route: empty bottles, the remains of wooden crates, a rusted handcart lying on its side.

  I caught up with Martin when he stopped where a side tunnel branched off the main passage. He was breathing hard, listening intently, trying to ascertain which direction the dog had gone. We heard no barking, no rat squeals, no nothing.

  “Oh God oh God oh God,” I muttered, imagining Sexy Beast catching up to the rat and wondering how much damage the disgusting, disease-ridden beast was liable to inflict. Then my imagination turned it into a swarm of rats, then a veritable tidal wave of rats ganging up on my poor SB. There’s never just one rat, right?

  “Stop it,” Martin said.

  “What?”

  “We’re going to find him. He’s not going to get eaten by rats. So just stop it.”

  I took a deep breath, my heart still banging from exertion and fear. I nodded. It was disorienting being underground. I wondered how far we’d gone and which end of the tunnel was now closest. A light bulb hung nearby, so I had a good view of the sagging and broken ceiling planks, the dirt and rubble that had sifted down from the gaps between them, and the half-rotted support timbers.

  The mouth of the side tunnel was in the worst shape, partially blocked by fallen bricks and ceiling debris, and held up only by a pair of heavy, tall timbers. A cluster of tools stood propped against a wall. Sledgehammer. Ax. Shovel.

  A body could be buried in the dirt under my feet and who would ever know?

  Martin cupped his mouth and in a booming, alpha-male roar, commanded, “SB! Come!”

  From deep within the side tunnel came a response, only it wasn’t SB. The voice was decidedly human, but muffled behind something. We looked at each other.