by K. J. Emrick
“Okay, fine,” Cookie agreed. “And if this was a butcher shop before it was a bakery then of course they would need someplace to keep the meat from spoiling. I get that. I just don’t understand… why cover it up?”
“Renovations?” Jerry suggested, angling his orange plastic flashlight down at the bottom of the stairs. By the looks of it, the cellar wasn’t any more than six feet tall. He was going to have to crouch when he got down there. “I don’t know. Maybe when your building got modernized to include things like refrigerators and ovens and such they just didn’t need the cellar anymore.”
“But everything is upstairs on the first floor.” Cookie thought about it as she edged into the stairwell behind Jerry. “The gas lines, the electrical cables, even the plumbing. None of it runs down here. It’s like this part of the building was just forgotten about.”
“So let’s go see what people forgot.”
Cookie really didn’t want to but there was just no help for it. The cellar was here, and she needed to know if it affected her building in any way. Structural problems could have been brewing down here and she would have never even known it. “You know we forgot about dinner, right? We haven’t eaten yet.”
“That can wait,” Jerry said, turning to kiss her forehead. “We can reheat the chicken parm after we’re done exploring. Besides, it’s probably just an empty room now. If we’re lucky maybe we’ll find some hundred year old wine bottles or something, but I doubt there’s anything here.”
Cookie looked past him, into the path of her light. “It’s so filthy down here. We’ll need a shower when we’re done.”
In the backsplash of his flashlight his smile was downright wolfish. “Well, if you insist. I’m game if you are.”
“Separate showers,” she specified. “Remember Clarissa is still here with me this week.”
“Spoilsport. Where is Clarissa?”
“Oh, off with that boyfriend of hers. She has a curfew, and she’ll call if there’s trouble.”
“You aren’t… worried?” he asked. “Two young kids, alone together at night?”
“Alone together in Widow’s Rest,” Cookie reminded him. “If there’s trouble to get into in Widow’s Rest, I haven’t found it yet.”
“Didn’t someone die in your bakery a while ago?”
“Yes,” she grumped, “and thanks for bringing that up again. It nearly ruined my business.”
“Sorry,” he apologized. “Anyway, that’s not the kind of trouble I was referring to. Clarissa’s only a teenager. Kids are kids, remember.”
Cookie shook her head. “Not Clarissa. I mean, sure she’s still a kid, but she’s got a very good head on her shoulders. She won’t do anything to wreck her chances of going into college or doing whatever she wants afterward.”
“Well,” he said, taking a step down, “you know her best. I just don’t think she’s old enough to go on unchaperoned dates yet.”
“You’re not her father, Jerry,” Cookie chuckled at him. “Her mother knows this boy of hers and so do I. Hamish’s a good young man, and Clarissa’s mother trusts him. So do I.”
“I wasn’t trying to be her father,” Jerry said with an odd note in his voice. “Let’s just go down here and check things out. We’ll find our hundred year old bottle of wine, or whatever, and then we can get back to that dinner you’re so worried about.”
He went down the steps after that without another word. Cookie had to wonder at his sudden change in behavior. When he first came into the bakery tonight he’d been so cheerful, full of flirtatious comments and jokes. Now, he was acting downright sullen. Had she said something to upset him? She knew that he liked and cared about Clarissa, but this seemed like something else.
The steps were crumbling with age in some places, off-kilter in others, set between two stone walls the whole way down so they couldn’t see anything of the space below until they got there. Once they set foot on the hard-packed dirt floor, they waved their flashlights back and forth. Jerry had been right. The place was empty.
More rough stones had been put together with mortar or mud that was so old it had basically become rock itself. There were rough wooden shelves running floor to ceiling in one corner, empty and splintered. In the other corner on this side, bundled stacks of newspapers were leaning precariously, the twine used to hold them together frayed and dry and looking ready to burst apart at any second. Cookie shined her light up and found heavy log beams supporting the ceiling. On some of them cement was dripping down the sides, frozen in the act of trying to reach the floor.
“Did they pour the foundation for the building right on top of this space?” Cookie wondered out loud.
“Looks like,” Jerry agreed, running his hand along the beams. “It’s even possible this root cellar was here first, and they put the building on top of it years later. Like the old bomb shelter underneath the police station. Ow.”
“What? What is it?”
“Splinter,” he grumped, sucking on his finger.
“You’re having a rough day, aren’t you?” she teased. Those newspapers in the corner caught her attention. They were yellowed and tattered where the twine had cut into them, but maybe there would be a date on them. That could at least give them an idea of how long ago this cellar was closed off.
“I wasn’t having a rough day until I got here.” Jerry smiled in the upturned beam of his flashlight. “I think your building hates me, is what it is. Where are you going?”
“I want to look at these papers.”
“Okay. I’m going to look over behind the stairs.”
They discovered that the stairway came down in the middle of the cellar, and with the walls on either side of the steps, they couldn’t see a lot of the rest of the room. Cookie had to believe the rest of it was just as empty as this side.
There were three bundles of papers in the stack, each of them a foot thick or so. The bundle on top was actually upside down. She saw a faded black and white picture of a street, full of houses and businesses, and on closer inspection she saw that those buildings were blackened and falling down. The photo, according to the caption, was actually about a fire that had damaged that section of street.
It took her a moment, but she finally recognized the area in the photo as Main Street right here in Widow’s Rest. She vaguely remembered something about there being a huge fire here way back in the day. 1910? 1915? Something like that.
But if this was the newspaper account of the fire, how old were these papers?
She set her plastic flashlight down on the floor. It rolled to the right just a little bit when she did, kicking up motes of dust that floated in the cone of its light. Shadows played all around her as she carefully took ahold of the top bundle of papers by both sides. Dry and brittle, they crinkled and compressed under her grip, threatening to become powder in her hands. Slowly, she turned them over and around, and with a relieved breath she set them down again on top of the others.
The twine simply separated, the fibers giving up their ghost as the whole stack spilled over at her feet.
Cookie jumped with a tiny shriek as the papers slid over her flashlight and plunged her into darkness. Something touched her foot and she recoiled again before she realized it was just the newspapers, settling to rest on the floor like a huge pile of autumn leaves.
Oh no, she thought to herself. They’ll be ruined!
“Cookie? Cookie are you all right?”
Jerry’s flashlight came around to where she was, revealing the mess she’d made of the once neat pile. Some of the newspapers had torn themselves apart to pieces of scrap. Some were still intact. A few were nothing more than tiny fragments floating down to cover everything else.
“What happened?” Jerry asked her.
Still recovering from her fright, Cookie took a long breath in. “I just wanted to see the date on the newspapers, you know? To see how long they had been down here.”
Jerry regarded her for another moment. Then he nodded, and knelt down to recove
r her flashlight for her. The increased illumination was a huge relief for Cookie. As he handed it back to her, still on his knees, he examined the corner edges of a few pages. “1912. September, 1913. August, 1913. Looks like they’re all from that time period. Good.”
“Good?” she asked, not understanding. “Why is that good?”
He stood back up, hunching his head and shoulders to keep from bumping against the beams, and for a few seconds he couldn’t look at her. When he did, it was with the hard expression of someone steeling themselves to say something they’d just as soon forget. “It’s good, because it means what I found isn’t recent.”
“What…?”
Before she even had the question out, he was motioning for her to follow him to the other section of the room, behind the walls of the central stairway. She went, sensing that it would be quicker and easier to just let him show her whatever this was. Their flashlights revealed more empty room back here as well. A pile of rags in one spot was all Cookie could see.
Then Jerry took her gently by the arm and made her turn to him. “This is going to be upsetting, Cookie. If you don’t want to look, it’s okay. If you want to go back upstairs and let me handle everything, that’s okay. Just let me know.”
His tone was beginning to worry her. “Jerry, you haven’t even told me what it is I might not want to see. What’s down here?”
“It’s a body,” he said, plain as that.
Funny, she thought later, how those three little words should have frozen her in place, and yet they didn’t. She turned around, panning her flashlight, expecting to see a dead person with cold, staring eyes. In her life she had seen entirely too many of those. Maybe there would be some blood. Maybe a bullet hole or a knife wound.
What she saw instead would haunt her nightmares for years.
In a chair set against the backside of the stone walls around the staircase, sat a skeleton. It had been hidden from them when they came down. It would be hidden from Cookie still if Jerry hadn’t known she would demand to see it.
Death took a lot of forms. She was very sure of that. This must be one of the worst.
The arms of the skeleton had fallen away from the shoulders sometime in the past. They hung tangled in the same chains that were wrapped around the rest of it, from neck to feet. The skull had rolled back on the collapsed spinal column, empty eye sockets gazing up at the ceiling… or maybe Heaven, praying for help that never came. Someone had tied this poor soul to this chair, here in this root cellar, and left them to die.
Cookie gasped, putting a hand up to her mouth. This person had been left here for dead, and then someone had… boarded up the entrance to the cellar… so no one would ever find them…
“I think,” Cookie told Jerry, moving her hand from her mouth to her stomach, “that I’m going to be sick.”
“I’d be worried about you if you weren’t,” he told her. “Let’s get back upstairs. I’ve got some calls to make.”
Holding an arm around her waist, he guided her away from the poor, wretched, dead man who had been sitting here in this grave beneath her bakery.
Was it a man? Cookie didn’t know. Maybe it was a woman. There was nothing left that would let her know.
The light shifted as they moved away, making it appear that the dead bones were watching them as they walked away.
***
It was going to happen all over again, Cookie thought to herself.
A few years back, one of her customers had fallen dead after taking a bite of something she’d made here in her bakery. It hadn’t been her fault, of course, and the real murderer had been found after a few days and a few hair-raising moments, but still. For those few days suspicion had fallen pretty heavily on her, and Cookie’s customers had all but disappeared. She’d nearly had to sell the shop to that vile man, Benjamin Roth.
Now there was another dead person in her bakery. She braced herself for what was to come, fearing a downturn in her business again. Would the bakery survive this time? Would she survive, if her livelihood suddenly disappeared because of all this?
She dropped her head down into her hands on the kitchen island, wanting to cry. The tears wouldn’t come. She knew she shouldn’t be so concerned about whether she was going to sell four donuts tomorrow or forty. The tragedy here belonged to that dead man in her cellar. Whoever he was. However he’d died. That was the real tragedy, and the real mystery.
It was nearly nine o’clock now and they still hadn’t eaten dinner. Not that she was hungry, and not that Jerry had the time. He’d been busy with every member of the Widow’s Rest police force, Officer Jones and the others, plus a few investigators and crime scene technicians borrowed from the State Police. How long had they been down there in the cellar this time? She checked the clock, and watched the numbers change from eight-fifty-one to eight-fifty-two. Let’s see, she thought. The police photographer—a nephew of the mayor’s—had arrived around eight. So, nearly an hour down there in the dark, examining a dead man’s skeleton.
Coffee, she decided. She would make everyone some coffee. It was the least she could do. Actually, it was all she could do. She felt entirely, totally, completely useless. When she’d asked Jerry what she could do to help, he’d basically told her to just stay out of the way. Not in those words of course, because he had too much tact for that, but with the same sentiment.
So, she’d put Cream upstairs in their apartment after making sure he had a little outside time to take care of his business while the patrol cars began to arrive. He wasn’t himself, poor thing. All the excitement, she supposed. Or the smell from down below that still hadn’t quite dissipated. Either way, he was jittery and nervous, and he had not wanted to leave her side.
Down in the basement. There’s a phrase she wasn’t used to using. She had a basement now. A basement made of stone and dirt with a dead body in it. Lucky her.
After giving Cream his treat of bacon bits mixed into his dry food, she had spent a little bit of time with him to let him know everything was okay. Too bad she didn’t believe it herself.
Setting the kettle on the stove to boil, she took out ceramic mugs and jars of instant coffee, regular and decaf and dark roast, too. Should she make some tea? Did Officer Jones like tea? She thought maybe he did.
Then she looked at the cups. How many people were in her bakery now? She threw her hands up in the air. She didn’t even remember. There was one or two stationed outside, too, for crowd control…
“Grandma?”
Clarissa was suddenly rushing into the kitchen, sweeping in with her boyfriend right behind her, dropping a styrofoam take-out container on the island counter before throwing her arms around Cookie’s neck.
“My, you’re home early.” It was all Cookie could think to say. There was just so much to explain, and so much to worry about, but all she could do was wonder why the two youngsters had cut their date short. “Hello, Hamish.”
“Hello, Mrs. Williams.” He smiled half-heartedly, looking like he wanted to give Cookie a hug as well.
Hamish had grown up quite a bit since the time Cookie had caught him and Clarissa sneaking around together. His once messy dark hair was now trimmed in an undeniably cute style that was much more fitting for an aspiring chef. More Gordon Ramsey and less Gordon Lightfoot. He’d shot up and filled out, and with that strong jaw and those gray-green eyes he could have probably gone to Hollywood and made himself a career in acting. Instead, he wanted to be a chef.
Cookie approved.
She also had to admire how he’d taken courses to finish high-school early so he could start culinary school at eighteen. Not everyone that age knew what they wanted out of life. She certainly hadn’t known back then. She might have her goals clearly set in mind now, but at Hamish’s age things had been very much up in the air for her.
“So,” she asked, tearing her mind away from the past and back to the present, “why are you back already?”
Clarissa looked at her like it should be obvious. “We hear
d about the dead body in your basement.” With wide eyes, she turned to the new doorway that had suddenly sprouted in the wall of the kitchen. “I didn’t even know we had a basement.”
“We don’t,” Cookie said automatically, and then remembered to correct herself. “At least, we didn’t used to. Or I mean, we did, but nobody told me about it!”
Frustrated, she went back to the kitchen island and eased down on one of the stools. Just as she did, the kettle whistled to tell them the water was ready for coffee.
“You too?” Cookie growled at the traitorous kettle. Was nothing on her side in this whole bakery? “Clarissa, could you take that off the burner, please. Hamish, would you mind stepping downstairs and telling the first officer you find that we have coffee up here if anyone would like some?”
Hamish looked over at the dark shadows collected behind the broken up false wall and the newly exposed door. Cookie saw his hesitation, and she didn’t blame him for it one bit. What sane person willingly walked into a grave?
It was hard for her not to look at this hidden basement that way. It had become that dead man’s final resting place, buried and forgotten. For decades, people had lived and worked and done business above his head while his body decayed to bones and his spirit languished in whatever purgatory souls went to when they were murdered and buried and forgotten. She shivered just to think about it.
“Don’t worry,” she told Hamish. “I can go down and find Jerry myself.”
“No,” he said quickly, raising a hand to hold her off. “I’ve got it. Actually, I think I’d kind of like to see what’s down there. I’ll just poke my head down the stairs until I see someone.”
Cookie really appreciated that offer. He was so very grown up for his age. He’d done a world of good for Clarissa, and she’d done the same for him. With a careful look around the corner, he started down into the gloom of emergency lights being run from batteries that Jerry and the others had set up.
