When the Grits Hit the Fan

by Maddie Day

  “You’re darn tooting I am, Robbie. Murder ain’t right, no matter which way you skin the hog.”

  I wrinkled my nose at the image of a hog being skinned. Then again, I freely ate ham and bacon, and served up plenty of it to my customers, too. It shouldn’t bother me. Then I thought about what he’d said. “So if he was dead before he went into the hole, the second set of footprints must be from the person who took him out there.”

  “Kinda looks that way, don’t it?”

  “You didn’t come by only for coffee today,” I said. “Did you?”

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs. “How well do you know Ms. LaRue, over to the library? She eats here pretty regular, don’t she?”

  This can’t be good. Why is he asking about her? “I don’t hang out with her personally, if that’s what you’re asking. But, yes, she’s been a faithful customer, even when other locals were staying away. And I think she’s honest and trustworthy.” I lifted my chin. If this was the result of Maude slinging lies about Georgia, I’d go to bat for a woman I belatedly realized I would call my friend. Maybe I should see if she wanted to hang out sometime.

  “Now don’t go getting your knickers in a twist. Seems she and Ms. Stilton had a kind of disagreement over a work project. Ms. Stilton is suffering something horrid from her husband’s violent death. Yesterday she come in and suggested Ms. LaRue might have been the one to do the deed, so to speak.”

  “That’s as ridiculous as saying Lou Perlman killed Charles.” I frowned at him. Georgia had been furious at Maude, for sure. How well did I really know either woman? Not well, at all. I’d learned over the last half year that the person you least imagined to be a killer could, in fact, be pushed over that line to take another person’s life. I sure hoped it wasn’t Georgia, but I had to admit I wasn’t a hundred percent positive.

  “We got to check out every possible suspect.” He drained his coffee. “Or rather, Octavia does. We’re just the helpers, so to speak. You said you was wanting some help. What would that be, now?”

  “This is going to sound foolish, but I found a secret passageway. And I didn’t want to investigate it on my own. Would you mind walking through it with me?”

  His eyes bugged out and his mouth dropped open. Picturing the look on his face was going to entertain me for years to come.

  Chapter 22

  I pointed the flashlight down the three-foot square shaft.

  Buck exclaimed, “Whadd’ya got here, girl?” He turned to look at me and then back at the metal ladder.

  “I don’t know, but I’ll show you the reason I didn’t want to go down there alone.” One of the reasons, that is. I showed him the cobwebs and dirt above, then I trained the light on the ladder. “No dust. No dirt. Not on the door handle, either. And why isn’t there a handle on the outside? Why didn’t anyone notice it or discover it when I bought the building?” I told him about the inspector missing it, and Jo not mentioning it.

  “So you’re thinking somebody’s been coming up here recently. Spying on you or something?” Buck asked, scratching his sandy-colored hair.

  “Could be. Could be a person down on their luck who knew about the passageway and hoped to steal something of value or stay out of the weather. Or even teenagers with too much time on their hands. I have no idea. I also don’t know where it ends up. Do you have time to check it out with me?”

  “Whyn’t you let me go on down first?”

  My inner Nancy Drew argued with this, and my inner scared little kid embraced the idea. I finally said, “That’s fine. Let’s go. You take this light. I have another one.” He was a heck of a lot taller than me, and stronger, too, when it came right down to it. If there was a door on the other end that was stuck, he might be able to free it up without my help. There sure wasn’t enough room for two of us to occupy the passageway at the same time.

  Buck jammed his hat back onto his head. He was too tall to scooch into the opening, so he sat on the edge and lowered his legs in, leaning his torso out until he’d moved his feet down enough rungs to let the rest of him follow. I dashed over to my tarp of tools and scrabbled around in it. I thought I owned another flashlight but couldn’t find it. I heard him sneeze, but the sound was hollow, like he was in a cave.

  “Bless you,” I called down the shaft. “I’m on my way. One second.” I grabbed my work light, a strong bulb in a cage with a hook on it, and stretched out the extension cord, which just reached the top rung of the ladder. After I flipped on the light, I hung it from the top rung and took a deep calming breath before I climbed in. I could do this thing. After all, I was twenty-seven, not seven. I made sure one hand was always hanging on tight to a rung and started to descend.

  “Almost down,” Buck called.

  “I’m on my way.” My body half blocked the light from above. The dark walls around me had been there for almost a hundred and fifty years. The sharp ends of nails stuck in toward me. I needed to be careful not to snag the back of my shirt or my elbows on them. My pulse throbbed in my neck, and I had to keep swallowing down the excitement. Or the fear. As I kept climbing, the light grew dimmer. I stopped and peered at the walls. What must be the base of the first floor was at my eye level. I knew there wasn’t a door leading to the shaft from the first floor, or if there was, it’d been blocked up decades ago. The shaft most likely ended in the cellar—that damp, dark cellar I basically didn’t use for anything except to house the furnace. I’d never seen a door in that area of the cellar wall, but I hadn’t looked for one, either. As I recalled, old boards were stored down there leaning against the wall. A doorway could be hidden behind them.

  “I’m at the end.” Buck’s voice wafted up. “Now I got to figure out how to get out of this dang trap.”

  A few more rungs and my feet were right above his head. I twisted my head down and to the side to see him with his back to the ladder, inspecting the wall with the flashlight. “There’s no door?” I asked, hearing my voice rise almost to a screech.

  “Might could be. Lemme see.” He felt around on the wall. “Yup, here’s a door. I’d kick it in, but I ain’t got room to get no purchase on it.”

  He definitely didn’t have room to get his knee high enough to put any force behind a kick. I watched as he put his shoulder to it. The door gave way and he stumbled through. I clambered down as fast as I could go without falling. I could barely see a thing except a moving flicker of light through the opening. I stepped carefully toward it and over a threshold. “Wow.”

  Buck was ahead of me, bent over and creeping along a passageway not much taller than I was. It wasn’t the cellar, or rather not a part of it I’d ever seen. Old wide boards stretched overhead and the walls were of a rough-hewn wood with lots of splinters and cobwebs. Four-inch-diameter logs, several still covered with bark, all with knobby knots extruding, served as posts every couple of feet. Underfoot was tamped down dirt. Damp dirt, too, since Buck’s feet weren’t raising any dust. My nose detected mildew and a faint odor of something else, maybe old manure.

  “You coming?” he called.

  “Right behind you.” I definitely didn’t want to be left behind. Underground in the dark in what was essentially a tunnel? No way. I was lucky to be keeping my panicked claustrophobia at bay as it was. While I walked, I tried to keep my bearings on where we were. We’d come down the east side of the house and then turned toward the right at the bottom of the shaft, so we must be going toward the back of the property. We might not be in the cellar, but the passageway was equally cold and damp. And was a lot more enclosed. “I wonder what this tunnel was made for,” I said, almost more to myself than to Buck.

  What if the passageway was part of the Underground Railroad? I’d read about an Indiana Quaker named Levi Coffin who had helped hundreds of slaves escape northward. We weren’t that far from the Ohio River to the south or Cincinnati to the east, both of which had been escape portals where slaves had passed through. I felt a chill, but it was from excitement rather than from the t
emperature.

  Buck slowed up and started to turn toward me, straightening as he did. Bad move. He scraped his head on a beam overhead. “Dang, that hurt.”

  “Keep your head down, Buck. Let’s get through this thing.”

  “Expect you’re right.” He hunched down again and forged ahead. “This is turning out to be more of a project than I’d reckoned on, Robbie. I’m going to have some explainin’ to do when I get back to the station.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  When he stopped again, I peered past him. He was pointing the flashlight at another ladder exactly like the first one.

  The only way to go was up.

  Chapter 23

  “I spose we’re heading up?” Buck asked, twisting to look at me.

  “Might as well.” I followed him up the ladder, but it didn’t seem as long a trek as the one down had been.

  At the top, he stopped and played the light on the walls. “I don’t see no door at all.”

  “Shine the light above you,” I urged him. My skin was crawling from being in the enclosed space. There must be a way out. There had to be.

  He peered at the top of the shaft. And pushed. Hinges complained, but a trap door opened. I’d never been so glad to see natural light. Which promptly disappeared again when the door fell shut.

  “Dang it,” Buck said. “Something’s blocking it up there.” He climbed up another rung, braced himself against the wall of the shaft, and pushed with both hands until the door went vertical. “Lemme get out and I’ll fix it all the way open for you.” He held the door open with one hand.

  After he got his long legs up and out, I heard the scrape of wood dragging on wood. The door clunked wide open, falling all the way back.

  I stared up. Above me loomed the high inside rafters of my own barn. I climbed out then dusted off my hands. We stood in the back corner where Jo had a left a pile of old furniture that I’d never gotten around to either fixing or taking to the dump. Broken ladder-back chairs had been dumped on their sides near a tall dresser that was missing a drawer.

  “That there desk was half blocking the trap door.” Buck pointed to a wooden desk decades overdue for a refinishing.

  I squatted and peered at the floor. The rough, wide pine flooring showed the marks of the desk having been dragged across it. If a person had been down that tunnel and back recently, there should be other marks. I looked around, then pointed to several other sets of narrow tracks like the desk legs would have made. “Look, Buck. Somebody else pushed that desk before you did.”

  He bent over to look. Straightening, he pushed his hat back on his head. “You’re right. And that means whoever it was pushed the desk back over the trap door when they came out so it wouldn’t be obvious.” He brought his face close to the desk’s top. “Probably can’t get no prints from this, but we can try if you want.”

  “I guess.” I kept examining the floor, but any discrete footprints that might have been there had been scuffled into a mix, just like when I stirred baking powder and salt into flour. I hugged myself against the cold air in the drafty old barn. Motes floated like lazy snowflakes in the light from the high windows above the wide sliding door. My rattletrap Dodge minivan occupied the space in front of the door, and I’d fixed up one section beyond that to hold extra lumber and other building supplies that weren’t hurt by freezing. I’d roughly renovated a room in the far corner with minimal heat, shelves, and a workbench as my workshop. I stored tools and paint in that space. In the year since I’d bought the property, I’d never cleaned out the corner where we stood.

  “Tell you what, though. I’m putting a lock on the barn. I never thought I needed to before now, but if somebody thinks they can waltz through a hidden tunnel into my store, well . . .” I shook my head.

  “Sounds like a plan. Listen, I got to be getting back to work.”

  “Of course. Thank you so much for coming through with me. Don’t worry about fingerprints. I mean, I have no proof that anybody trespassed, really. Except I did hear a noise upstairs last night.”

  “You did? Why didn’t you say so?” He frowned.

  “I didn’t see anybody. I thought maybe it was a squirrel in the attic or something.”

  “Huh. Welp, I’ll get an officer over to check for prints when we find a free minute. And I’ll be by tomorrow for breakfast.” He ambled to the door and slid it open enough to pass through. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Pleasure’s mine. Take care.” I joined him at the door and waved, watching him shuffle through the snow and then disappear around the front. I took a step to follow him and froze. I turned slowly and stared into the barn. I’d relocked the front door of the store before Buck and I had gone upstairs. I knew my apartment door was locked. I hadn’t brought my keys. Or my phone. What an idiot. I swore.

  “Buck!” I called out as I ran around the front of the store, but the taillights of his cruiser were already heading down the road toward the center of town.

  I’d been meaning to hide an extra key outside but had never gotten around to it. I was going to have to go back through the passageway. Down the ladder in one shaft and back up the ladder in the other. And in between I needed to traverse the dark mysterious tunnel, a space terrifying to a claustrophobe like me.

  I stomped my foot and slapped my leg a couple of times. “Robbie Jordan, you’re twenty-seven,” I said into the chilly barn air. “You’re healthy and smart, and you have a flashlight. Get over it, already.”

  Sliding the barn door shut with rather more force than necessary, I made my way back to the open trap door and grabbed the flashlight from where Buck had laid it on the floor.

  I took in a fortifying breath. I could do this. And whether or not I could, I had to.

  Chapter 24

  Okay. I’d made it down the ladder.

  I turned and stared into the tunnel, taking in a nice, deep calming breath. Gripping the flashlight and thanking my fairy godmother that I’d put fresh batteries in it last week, I let out the breath and started walking. I would not break into a panicked run. I would not. The last thing I needed was to trip and injure myself.

  “One foot in front of the other, Jordan,” I told myself. “You got this thing.” In fact, holding the light made me feel a lot better. And it was kind of interesting checking out the construction.

  Winters must have been a lot more severe back in 1870, so maybe this tunnel was a way to get from the house to the barn without going outside. Seemed like it would have been a lot simpler to build a connecting structure above ground, though. I mused again that it might have been part of the Underground Railroad. I shook my head. There was no longer a need for the Underground Railroad in 1870. Unless the barn predated the store. A smaller house could have stood where the store was. Another piece of information to check into at the library or town hall.

  At least thinking about the reason for the tunnel had taken my mind off the fact that I was in a small tight space twelve feet underground. I came to the place where the passageway took a turn. I was about to walk past when the light caught a bit of color.

  What was that? I stopped and shone the flashlight on the rough boards.

  About three feet off the ground a small scrap of red cloth had snagged on a thick splinter sticking out from one of the log posts. I was about to reach for it when I pulled back my hand. The scrap could be from clothing my intruder had worn. I peered closely at it. It was almost certainly from whoever had been sneaking along the tunnel. The cloth was too bright a color to be a hundred years old. I wanted to pull it out, but I knew I needed to leave it there for Buck or another officer to retrieve. If there was one thing I’d learned from associating with the police in recent months, it was that they needed to deal with evidence in the proper way.

  I reached for my phone to snap a picture of the scrap. Oops. No phone. It was back in the restaurant. I needed to get through the tunnel so I could call them. But suppose the intruder came back and saw—No, that wasn’t going to happen because
I was going to lock that barn up tighter than a C-clamp holding a glued join.

  I glanced behind me. The barn wasn’t locked yet. Whoever the intruder was could be coming after me. I swallowed and hurried on, my heart thudding as loud and fast as a jackhammer. I’d never been so happy to see the ladder that led up to the second floor. I closed the door tight behind me before I started up. It was awkward climbing with the flashlight in my hand. I couldn’t get a good grip on the rung, so I tucked the light into my back pocket. That made it shine up and behind me, which wasn’t particularly useful. I was almost to the ground floor level when my foot slipped on a rung and bumped back down to the previous rung. At the same time, my hand lost the grip on the rung above. The flashlight fell out of my pocket and slid all the way to the bottom. My chin crashed on the metal ladder, but I managed to hang on with my other hand and keep myself from following the light. I looked up to the opening to the second floor. The work light I’d left shining down welcomed me, a beacon in a dark storm. Dark passageway, mental storm.

  I forced myself to calm down again before carefully climbing up to safety, one rung at a time. I eased out of the shaft and through the small door. The wide open and well-lit demolition site was a beauty to behold. Whew.

  My first order of business was blocking the entrance. I shut the door tight, dragged the heavy table saw over again, and jammed it against the door. It didn’t have a lockable latch but I could remedy that later. I ran down the stairs and into my apartment.

  I rummaged in my junk drawer until I found a nice heavy padlock. I slid the key onto my usual key ring before heading from my apartment out the back door. I locked up behind me, pocketed the keys, and headed to the barn. Some barns featured a separate people-sized door, but mine wasn’t one of them. I pulled the hinged hasp away from the thick metal staple on the barn frame, opened the wide sliding door, and stepped inside.

  I didn’t want to unlock and lock the barn every time I came home. Before securing the barn door, I backed the van out and left it in the driveway, pushed the desk back over the trap door—just in case. I headed into my tool room and found another hasp and loop that could serve as a lock for the second-floor access to the tunnel. I knew from inspecting the property last year there were no loose boards in the barn walls to be easily pried loose, and the only windows were ten feet up and no more than two feet tall. A pretty tight fit for a person. If an intruder was so brazen as to haul a ladder to one of them and squeeze through, it was a long drop down inside.