The Secret of the Missing Grave

by David Crossman

  It was a little after two in the morning when Abby was stumbling down the cool hall toward her warm bed following her nightly trip to the bathroom that she heard the breathing again. Suddenly awake, she stopped short and listened. It was the same as always: long, low, and sad. She felt more than ever that the house itself was breathing—trying to tell her something. She could feel its exhalation like a feather on the tiny hairs at the back of her neck. Shivering from head to toe, she padded hastily down the hall and threw herself into bed.

  The breathing stopped and she waited, holding the blanket just below her nose with both hands, staring into the dark. Sleep tugged heavily at her eyelids when, suddenly, the thumping started. She listened carefully. Where was it coming from?

  There was only one way to find out. Slowly, fighting back a man-sized clump of fear, she drew the covers aside and put her feet on the floor. Why didn’t anyone come running at the noise? she thought.

  “They can’t hear it,” she reasoned aloud. “That means it’s only at my end of the house.” Not much comforted by this realization, she abandoned the safety of the bed and crept to the wall. Just as she placed her ear against the cold plaster, the thumping stopped. “Rats,” she said aloud. She replayed the sound in her mind. “Top to bottom,” she decided. She was sure of it. The sound had started near the ceiling, traveled downward in a straight line, and ended near the floor. It was a steady progression, and there was something metallic about the sound. Heavy, like iron. She’d heard the same thing somewhere before.

  Where?

  As she was deliberating, the noise began again. She nearly jumped out of her skin, but, recovering quickly, she pressed an eager ear to the wall. “Double rats,” she exclaimed. It wasn’t going from top to bottom. It was the other way around, and there was a lot more thumping. She moved along the wall to find where it was the loudest.

  Just outside her room, on the left side of the hallway, was a closet. That’s where the noise was coming from, she decided. Just inside the closet door.

  Again the sound stopped. Ab held a trembling hand on the closet doorknob and turned it.

  The door swept open silently, issuing a mothball-laden sigh of old air. A string hung alongside a bare lightbulb in the ceiling. She gave it a tug and the light came on.

  The closet was fairly deep, with rows of hooks on either side from which hung an assortment of winter coats, hats, and scarves. Built into the back was a set of drawers as high as Ab’s shoulders. The top of the dresser formed a deep, wide storage shelf, where piles of linens and blankets were kept.

  To the right and left, the walls were covered with ancient, brittle wallpaper of an elaborate design. The rear wall, behind the shelf, was painted a dull, musty beige. There was nothing special about the ceiling, as far as Ab could tell. Same with the floor; cracked old linoleum had broken away in places, revealing wide pine boards with many coats of paint.

  She tapped on the right-hand wall with the heel of her hand. Solid, no echo. Same with the wall on the left and the wall to the rear. All solid. No secret doors. No hidden rooms. “Triple rats,” she said, shutting the door quietly. She went back to bed.

  “There’s gotta be something there,” Bean insisted as they stuffed blue-spattered newspapers into a plastic garbage bag the following morning. Ab had told him her adventure of the night before, and they had just framed a plan to go investigate when Bean’s mom reminded them to pick up the mess in the yard.

  Ab had stopped stuffing and was reading: “Today’s high, four degrees. Low, minus thirty-two.”

  Bean cast a quizzical glance. He was used to Ab’s unexpected changes of topic. If he frantically referred back to something they’d been talking about earlier, sometimes days earlier, he could usually manage to follow the thread and make some sense of it. Other times, however, she’d say something right out of the blue, to which his customary response was “huh?” This was one of those times.

  “Huh?”

  Ab pressed the pages on the ground to flatten them out. “This says it’s only going to be four degrees today.”

  “What’s the date?”

  It was Ab’s turn. “Huh?”

  “The date on the paper,” said Bean. “What does it say?”

  Ab found the date in the upper right-hand corner of the page. “March fifth, four years ago. Where’d you get such an old paper?”

  Bean shrugged. “Mom saves ’em to start fires with.”

  “What kind of fires?”

  “Fires. You know, to keep warm,” Bean replied sarcastically.

  Ab tilted her head a little sideways and thought a moment, taking in her surroundings. The huge forsythia bush in the little park across the sidewalk had always been green. She’d never seen it without its full, luxuriant robes of summer. The same of the maple trees: some a deep, dark purple, others an airy green. The same for the oaks, the alders, the birch, and the larch. To Ab, it was always summer in Maine. It was impossible to imagine the branches stark and bare against a steel gray sky, or the sidewalks and shore covered with thick layers of ice and snow. She’d never seen spring in full flower, when the lilacs and lupine seemed to try to outdo each other with gaudy displays of color and heady perfume. She’d never smelled the delicacy of autumn when trees were alight, each leaf a Viking king’s death ship set ablaze for the journey to Valhalla.

  For her, summer meant Maine, and Maine meant summer. Of course, other seasons came to Maine, but it was hard to imagine. When she slipped out of her daydream, she found that her eyes had focused on a small headline on one of the yellowed sheets of newspaper. “Priceless Collection Still Missing,” she read aloud.

  Bean looked up from his work. “What’s that about?”

  Ab read on. “Authorities appear no closer to solving the mysterious disappearance of over thirty masterpieces from Boston’s exclusive Princep Gallery. The disappearance last month of the priceless original paintings was discovered by gallery owner Clifton Bright. As there was no sign of forced entry, gallery employees were early suspects. All but one, Amelia Williams, were cleared early in the investigation.

  “Ms. Williams, who went missing the day of the theft and was at first believed responsible for the burglary, reported to work the following week, saying she had been on vacation and didn’t know anything of the theft.

  “A quick check of the employee records showed that, indeed, Ms. Williams had long been scheduled for vacation as of the day of the crime. Subsequent investigation verified that she had booked into an exclusive hotel in Camden, Maine, and spent a week there. She was seen by many, including employees of the Maine State Ferry Service who attested to the fact that she had made several day trips to the islands of Penobscot Bay, primarily Penobscot Island.

  “Most baffling, according to sources close to Bright, is the fact that one painting was left behind, Renoir’s recently discovered Weeping Widow, perhaps the most valuable work in the collection. Other paintings in the gallery were blah, blah, blah ... ,” Ab synopsized: “It tells about the paintings. That’s all.”

  “What’s a Renoir?” Bean asked.

  “He was one of those old painters,” Ab explained.

  “The one that cut off his ear?” Bean asked hopefully.

  “No. That was van Gogh,” said Mrs. Carver. She’d come out to inspect cleanup operations.

  “Cut off his ear?” said Ab incredulously. “Why?”

  Mrs. Carver leaned on the railing. “Passion, as I recall. He got in a fight with his best friend, another painter named Gauguin.”

  “He cut off his ear’ cause he had a fight?”

  “Oh, don’t be surprised. People will do anything for love: love of painting, love of a person. What would you say if I told you there was a man who ate a Porsche to show a woman how much he loved her?” said Mrs. Carver as she knelt beside them and helped stuff newspapers in the bag.

  “Eat a porch?” said Bean skeptically.

  “Not a porch, a Porsche. The car, you know?”

  Now I know where
Bean gets it, Ab thought, but she was too polite to say anything.

  “When Uncle David lived in New Zealand back in the sixties, he read a newspaper story about a man who told this girl he’d do anything she asked him to. So she told him to eat a Porsche.”

  “Why?” asked Ab.

  “Well, I think that was her way of saying ‘Forget it,’ explained Mrs. Carver. “But apparently he took her at her word.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Bean, who sometimes had difficulty telling when his mother was pulling his leg. “Did he?”

  “He did,” Mrs. Carver asserted flatly. “He bought an old Porsche from the junkyard for fifty dollars and, piece by piece, from headlights to tailpipe, had the whole thing ground into a fine powder, which he sprinkled over his meals, like pepper. Took him three years to eat it all.”

  “Oh, well,” said Ab, “I s’pose it could be done like that.”

  “Could and was,” said Mrs. Carver. “Just goes to show, there’s nothing people won’t do—or at least try to do—when they’re motivated by love, or hate. You’d be amazed.”

  A subtle motion caught Mrs. Carver’s eye, and she looked up to see the curtain softly descend in the tower window of the Winthrop House. “You’d be amazed,” she repeated softly.

  “Did she marry him?” Ab wanted to know.

  “’Course she didn’t,” said Bean. “Who’d marry somebody crazy like that?” He looked at his mother. “She didn’t marry him, did she?”

  “In fact, no,” said Mrs. Carver. “The woman married someone else about three months after he started eating the car.”

  Ab was amazed. “Then why did he keep eating it?”

  “He found out he could get in Ripley’s Believe It or Not if he finished eating the car.”

  “Did he?” asked Bean excitedly.

  “He did. I guess he hated to see anything go to waste.”

  5

  THE DISCOVERY

  “YOU’RE WASTING YOUR TIME,” said Mr. Proverb. “From what I hear, half the people in town have tried to find that tunnel.” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’ve even taken a crack at it myself. Went over those walls with a fine-tooth comb. However,” he said, slapping his knees as he stood up, “I guess at your age, your time is your own, so have at it. Just don’t go knocking holes in anything. Okay?”

  Ab and Bean thanked him, opened the cellar door, and flipped the light switch.

  “Oh, I’m afraid the lights don’t work,” said Mr. Proverb. “Something’s wrong with the wiring, apparently. I’m not surprised, it’s so old. Amby Martin’s coming to look at it next week.” He took a flashlight from a shelf over the cellar stairs. “You’ll have to use this, but be careful. There’s all kinds of junk down there. I haven’t got around to clearing it out yet. One of these days.”

  Ab followed Bean as he descended into the darkness.

  “Have fun,” Mr. Proverb called after them. “If you find any treasure, we’ll split it, okay?” He laughed and closed the door.

  Typical of most old island houses, the cellar of the Moses Webster House was formed by huge slabs of granite butted end to end, with the joists of the floor overhead forming the ceiling. “This is the biggest cellar I’ve ever seen,” said Bean as they left one section and entered another through a low, wide door. It was also the deepest cellar he’d ever seen, with enough headroom even for his dad, who was six foot two, to stand up straight. However, as he and Ab entered the next section, the floor changed from granite slabs to dirt and rose steadily uphill, until they both were bending a little to avoid getting cobwebs in their hair.

  To their right, the ground rose into darkness that Bean’s light couldn’t penetrate, but he could detect rough-cut granite pillars studding the ground and supporting the structure. Immediately ahead of them, a small rectangular window tucked under the joists admitted a weak wash of light.

  “That’s where they bring in the firewood,” said Bean, indicating the window with his light and tracing a trail of old footprints and wood chips back to the pile of cordwood stacked against one wall.

  Ab studied the wall, which was different from the others; it was plaster-covered brick rather than granite. “What’s this for?” she said, slapping the wall loudly with the palm of her hand. “It doesn’t even go all the way to the ceiling.”

  Bean traced it with the beam of light and came to a comer, where another wall, similarly made, led into the shadows at a right angle. “It’s a cistern,” he explained.

  “A cistern? What’s that?”

  “Where they collected water back in the days before plumbing. Rainwater from the gutters ran down the spouts and ended up here. Then there’d be a pipe ... ” He stepped on tiptoe at the edge of the cistern and probed the shadows with the flashlight until he found what he was looking for. “There, see?”

  Ab, too, stood on tiptoe and peered over the wall. “I see. So that went upstairs to a sink or something?”

  “Right,” said Bean, “where there was a pump.” The beam of the flashlight bounded up and down as he mimicked the action of a pump handle.

  “Listen,” said Ab suddenly. “Footsteps.”

  Bean put the flashlight below his chin and shined it up into his face, where it cast long, unnatural shadows and made him look ghoulish. “Ooooo,” he wailed eerily.

  Shivers tripped up Ab’s spine. She grabbed his elbow with one hand and slapped him hard on the back with the other. “Stop it!” she squealed.

  Bean laughed and aimed the flashlight at the joists. “Somebody walking upstairs,” he said casually.

  Ab loosed his arm and slapped him again. “You stinker,” she said, but she couldn’t keep from laughing herself. “Let me have that for a while.” She held out her hand and, reluctantly, Bean handed her the flashlight. “What’s down this way?” she asked.

  To the left, between the cistern and a retaining wall of granite, a narrow passage ran toward the outside wall on the side of the cellar facing the Winthrop House. At the end of the passage was a door with a small broken window covered with the grime of years. As Bean pushed, the door opened with a loud complaint, then thudded against the wall and nearly fell off its hinges.

  They stepped through the doorway into a small, dingy room with a low ceiling and plaster walls that had once been painted white but were now a dusty gray. On the outside wall was a deep-set window looking out on the little dirt lane between the houses. Enough daylight seeped through the dirt-encrusted glass so the flashlight wasn’t needed. Ab shut it off.

  “What do you think this room was for?” she asked.

  Bean made a thoughtful appraisal of the space. It was about six feet wide by eight feet long. Given the amount of debris on the floor—broken pottery and china, an old magazine and a newspaper, coffee cans full of cracked, dried paint, and assorted other junk—the room was most recently used primarily as a catchall for things on their way to the dump. “If it was closer to the stairs, I’d say they used it for storing preserves, or potatoes and onions, or apples, but it’s too far away. And there ain’t any shelves.” Bean rubbed his hands along the walls. “Never were, either. No bracket holes in the plaster.”

  “Bracket holes?” Ab turned on the light and shone it on Bean’s hands.

  “If they kept food down here, they’d have had shelves, and if they’d had shelves, they’d have to have brackets, and if there were brackets,” he concluded, “there’d be holes where the screws went that held ’em up. There ain’t any.”

  Ab was impressed with his logic if not his grammar. Bean was making sense. “That doesn’t happen very often,” she said softly, looking at him with new eyes.

  “What?” said Bean, only half listening. He was studying the wall.

  “Oh, nothing,” Ab replied. Bean stopped at a certain point and seemed to be tracing something with his fingers. “Did you find something?” she asked.

  Bean continued a minute in silence, bending closer and closer to the wall and investigating something
from floor to ceiling.

  “What is it?” Ab asked impatiently.

  “Grooves,” said Bean softly. He went slowly around the room, running his hands over the brittle plaster, some of which fell to the floor at his touch. When he had completed his circuit of the room, he straightened up, put his hands on his hips, and leveled curious eyes at Ab. “There are grooves in the walls all around the room.”

  “Grooves?”

  “Well, kinda grooves. More like scratches, I guess.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Bean shrugged. “I don’t know. Must mean something.”

  Ab scrutinized the marks for a few minutes. “There’s no pattern,” she pronounced finally. “Some of them are deeper than others. Some start above the floor. Some seem to start below it. Some are just a few inches long, and some go all the way from the floor to the ceiling. And there’s no regular spacing between them.” She stood up. “Maybe it’s just the way they were made.”

  “Anyway,” said Bean, “there’s no place for any kind of tunnel or secret passage.” He slapped the wall to his left. “The other side of this wall is where Mr. Proverb hangs his tools, and the whole thing is lined with workbenches. The porch is out there,” he indicated the wall to the right, then rested a finger on the wall behind them. “This wall is backed by the cistern, and that”—he pointed at the wall facing them—“has windows in it. There’s no place to put a secret door in here. Still ... ”

  “Still what?”

  “Well, if I was building a secret tunnel, this is just the kind of place I’d put it.”

  “Where it doesn’t seem possible!” Ab joined in excitedly.

  Bean nodded. “As I said, people have been looking the wrong way.”

  “They’ve been looking for something obvious,” Ab agreed. “But if it was obvious ... ”

  “Then it ain’t much of a secret passage,” Beam summarized with a sly smile. “That’s right.”