by K. J. Emrick
“Calm down,” she told him playfully. “I really do need to check on the oven. Help me do all this and then next, we can eat.”
“Um, eating isn’t really what I had in mind for next.”
She laughed softly and tossed an apron at him, similar to the one she was wearing. “Put that on, and I’ll let you take mine off later.”
“Deal,” he said immediately.
At the stove she softened butter in a deep pan while she listed off the other ingredients for Jerry to collect. Brown sugar, cream, sherry and brandy. There was a joke he made about alcohol with girly names that was hardly appropriate, and Cookie laughed and blushed at the same time.
She shoved him gently by the shoulder when he leaned in for a kiss.
Still laughing with her, he stumbled sideways and caught the edge of a potato sack, tripped, and toppled backward into the corner where the wall that ran behind the oven met the wall between the kitchen and the main room of the bakery. It was where Cookie kept her hanging certificates and pictures of the bakery. It was where all the cold air seeped in during the winter months.
Jerry slammed into that wall, very hard, and Cookie felt the impact in the soles of her feet.
The drywall cracked and showered dust over Jerry’s head. Framed pictures crashed down and crashed against his back and shoulders.
Cookie dropped her spoon. It clattered against the stovetop as she rushed to kneel down at Jerry’s side. He had slid the length of the wall down to the floor, his eyes wide and staring. “Jerry? Jerry are you all right?”
He looked up at her. “Ow.”
“That’s all?” she asked, incredulous. “You fall that hard and all you have to say is ow?”
“Uh… timber?”
“Funny man. I guess you can’t be hurt too bad if you have jokes.” Cookie felt her fingers over the back of his head, and he winced when Cookie felt a bump near the top of his scalp. “Oh, sorry. Sorry. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, uh yeah. I’m fine. Ow. Well. I guess that’s what I get for fooling around in a kitchen, right?”
“My sauce!” Cookie jumped up and dashed back to the stove, stirring the sauce to keep it from scalding. It was a huge batch, enough for most everyone in town to have a serving of the pudding if they wanted one. “It’s okay. It’s fine.”
“Well I’m glad to know we saved the sauce,” Jerry griped, working his way up to a crouch, and then back to his feet. “I guess the only thing that really got damaged was your wall.”
“My wall?” That caught her attention. She came back over to see where Jerry was pointing. The drywall hadn’t just cracked. The yellow painted wall had split nearly floor to ceiling, and broken chunks of it fell away as Jerry poked and pressed at the damage. A few of her precious pictures and certificates were still hanging on their nails but only precariously, and she took each one off before they could decide to fall and break as well. Wonderful, she thought sarcastically. “I’ll have to get this fixed up, I suppose. Not today though. It can wait. As far as I know there’s nothing behind this part of the wall except an empty space for plumbing and ductwork.”
“You don’t know what’s behind your wall?” Jerry had that tone in his voice that men used when they thought a woman was being especially foolish. “This is your bakery. You should know what’s in the walls.”
Cookie put the photo frames on the island counter, and bent to pick up the three that had landed on the floor. The glass on one had cracked but the other two seemed fine. “This wasn’t my building at first, you know. I inherited it, more or less. Everything works and I haven’t had to do any major repairs and that’s all I ever really cared about.”
“Uh, Cookie?”
“I mean, really Jerry,” she said, going back to the stove to stir the sauce again. “I have enough to worry about just with keeping the bakery going. Sales have been up this last year but you know I have to keep working at it.”
“Cookie.”
“It’s not like your line of work,” she continued, making sure he didn’t get a word in. “You never run out of business in police work. I have to keep baking if I want people to buy things from me. It takes up most of my time.”
“Cookie, seriously.”
“I am being serious, Jerry. This business is more work than people realize. Up early, to bed late some days, and everything depends on me. Not to mention, I have Clarissa with me until her senior year of high school starts.”
Leaning in closer he took her hand in his, and then pulled her over to the wall. “Cookie, look.”
“What are you…”
Oh.
He hadn’t been trying to argue with her, she realized, which she would have known if she’d listened. He’d been trying to show her the hole in the wall. It was bigger now. About as big around as a nice, ripe watermelon. Broken pieces of the drywall were in a heap on the floor. She clucked her tongue. It was bad, sure, and it was going to need some real attention, but she stood by her earlier thought. It could wait.
“It’s all right, Jerry. You didn’t fall into the wall on purpose. It’s as much my fault as yours, really, because we were both screwing around. One of the first rules of the kitchen is not to push and shove because accidents happen. Guess I just got carried away. I’ll call someone tomorrow to fix it.”
“No, Cookie, look. See what’s behind the wall?”
“Behind the…?” Cookie peered closer. Behind the drywall, behind the broken pieces of thin wooden slats, there was a bigger, more solid piece of wood. A dark layer of some oil-based stain soaked up the light. Hesitantly, Cookie reached in and pressed her hand against it. The wood felt solid to her touch. Firm. Cold, too. Then near the bottom of the hole, she felt a metal strip and a raised bump in the hexagon shape of a bolt.
Cookie held her breath. She remembered something that had happened to her two months ago. Not long after coming back from the cruise where her good friend Jessica had gotten married and Clarissa’s step-father had been murdered. There had been a dream, one that she’d had only once. She’d forgotten all about it, until this moment. Now she remembered.
The exposed red bricks that outlined a wooden door banded in metal. Cookie stopped, and stared. There was no such door in her kitchen. There never had been.
In the dream, Cookie stepped forward. Cream waited for her, and together they both looked into a dark space…
This was the door from her dream. Exactly where she had dreamed it would be.
“There shouldn’t be a door here,” she said, shaking her head to clear away the cobwebs of the dream images.
Jerry worked his fingers in behind the edges of the broken drywall, and pried off more pieces of chalky yellow-painted plaster. The pieces of slat board snapped away easily. That’s a fire hazard, Cookie thought distractedly as she watched him making the hole wider.
“There’s bricks back here, too,” he said. “Looks like someone tried to seal this section of wall up. Make it look like it didn’t exist.”
“Well, it certainly fooled me.” Behind her on the stove Cookie heard her sauce bubbling. She went over, and took the pan off the heat. This was going to take a while, obviously. The sauce would have to wait. “Why is there a door in my wall?”
“Well obviously,” he said, blowing dust away from the seam between red bricks and wooden door, “there’s a door to the basement.”
“Jerry, I don’t have a basement.”
“Uh, okay.” He broke off another huge chunk of the drywall. “So it goes somewhere else. It’s just a door right now, Cookie. For all we know it just goes out the back of your bakery. Or used to. Your building is one of the original ones on Anthem Way, right? It’s pretty old. Different owners have probably renovated it to suit their own needs. The police station is the same way. There’s a closet that was built over a window. It’s still there from the outside, glass and all. I know you inherited this place from the woman who took you in, but who owned it before that?”
“I believe it was a butcher
’s shop back then. Fran Hazelton told me about it once or twice.” She shrugged. “You remember Fran, right?”
“I do.” Jerry had most of the door revealed now, dropping another double handful of slat pieces to the floor. “She was a nice woman. I remember when she took you in, actually. I was just starting out at the police force back then.”
Cookie felt herself blush deeply. Jerry had noticed her all the way back then. That was something she never knew. They had been friends for years before she became aware of his more romantic interests in her, but what had his intentions been before that? Running her fingers over the diamond on her engagement ring, she wondered how different her life might have been if she’d started dating Jerry when they were both young, and life was simpler.
He saw her watching him, and he winked at her. Cookie’s heart flipped. They might not be as young as they once were, but she wouldn’t trade what they had for anything. Love was timeless.
“Anyway,” she said, returning to the more down-to-earth subjects of building renovations and history, “Fran never said very much about what the place was like before she bought it for her bakery. Maybe the town museum has some records?”
Jerry nodded. “Sure, maybe. The library too. Really, though, it might not come to that. If this door even still opens—” He paused to tear off a piece of drywall nearly as tall as he was, exposing more bricks and the entire one side of the door. “—then it might just open up on the back wall of the building. There might not even be a handle…”
With another forceful yank, the handle was uncovered. It was a lever, instead of a knob, and underneath that was a huge keyhole meant for an old-style key. One with a shaft and a bit like old skeleton keys. Cookie shivered when she saw it, although she couldn’t say why.
“Well,” Jerry said, carefully inspecting what he had revealed. “The brickwork seems sound. The hinges have a lot of rust on them though. I don’t know if it will open or not.”
“I can’t believe I just let you destroy the wall of my kitchen,” Cookie told him, looking at the mess and the damage. She’d been so surprised to see the door here, the same one from her dream, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to tell him to stop. “Jerry, how can this be here? I had a dream about it, and now it’s here. How is that possible?”
He was wiggling the handle up and down, listening to the mechanism squeak and squeal from disuse. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you about my parents’ house where I grew up. It was a great house, old and full of character. The second floor had this hallway that kind of curved around and at the very end, there was a room to the left, and a room to the right. You could go into either one, and they were so big that they kept going past the doorway. Only, the hallway stopped at the edge of the doors. There should’ve been more to the hallway, but there wasn’t.”
He blinked, his eyes unfocused as he looked back through the years. “I never realized that there was this empty space there, behind the end of the hallway. It never occurred to me. At least, not consciously. Then one night, I had a dream. I dreamt that a little girl’s ghost led me upstairs to the end of that hall, and then disappeared into the wall. She was holding a finger up to her face when she vanished. Like it was some big secret. When I woke up the next morning I went and looked, and sure enough I could see where the hallway ended even though it should have kept going for another four feet. There was this negative space behind the wall. There could have been anything inside.”
Cookie was fascinated. A ghostly dream, a hidden space. It was the stuff that good mystery novels were made of, but it was more than just that. She loved this man. She wanted to know every detail about his whole life. “So what did you do? Did you ever look behind the wall?”
He shrugged. “I asked my parents about it, and they said the wall had been put there years ago to close up the space around where a chimney used to be. Like I said it was an old house. Could it have been a chimney back there? Sure. It could’ve been. I was never brave enough to go looking behind the wall, because I was afraid of what I might find.” With his knuckles he rapped on the door they had just found. “This time, I’m not turning up the chance to see what’s there.”
His knocking produced a very hollow thud. There was definitely space behind the door. Cookie almost told him to just leave it. She had the sudden urge to board the door back up again and forget they had ever seen it. The thought of what might be behind there scared her, and she couldn’t say why.
Only, this was her bakery, and she needed to know why there was a door here. She needed to know why someone would choose to put up a wall over the door in the first place. What mysteries were they about to walk into? Should she look, or keep it forever hidden?
Meeting Jerry’s eager gaze, she nodded her head.
He kicked the debris on the floor out of his way, and turned the lever handle, and pulled.
The door didn’t open.
Cookie let out the breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. “Well. So much for that. Is it locked?”
“No, I don’t think so…” He tugged at it again. This time there was the shriek of wood rubbing against wood, the tiniest groan of metal grating on metal. “I think it’s just stuck. It probably swelled over the years with moisture and the building settling, or whatever. Maybe if I got a crowbar I could force it open.”
“No. Absolutely not.” Cookie crossed her arms over her apron. “I draw the line at crowbars. If we have to start using power tools then the door can just stay closed. It will be just one more unsolved mystery.”
“You hate unsolved mysteries,” he reminded her.
“Yes, I do, but…”
“Okay, then here we go.”
Grabbing the handle with both hands, bracing his feet, Jerry pulled.
The door opened a bare few inches.
Cold, musty air wafted into the kitchen, cutting through the pleasing aromas of warm cinnamon and sugar. Jerry stepped back from it, holding a hand over his nose and mouth. Cookie was glad that most everything she’d made so far for the centennial party was packed away either in the walk-in fridge or in airtight containers. The sauce on the stove was a complete loss now, overcooked and black, so she would have had to throw it out anyway. Even if she could have saved it she would always associate it with this smell. An odor like freshly turned compost.
In another moment the smell coming through the door lessened, although the cold draft continued. “Well,” Jerry commented, “that was interesting. Can’t wait to see what’s on the other side.”
“Or,” Cookie suggested, “we could just close it back up.”
Jerry looked at her, his expression disappointed. “Uh, we can, I suppose. If that’s what you really want?”
She looked at the opening in the door again, and fought back the feeling of unease that was crawling up her spine. Her suggestion to close it up again had been half in jest. She wanted to know what was there but that smell that had rushed out at them when Jerry had pried it open just this little bit…it was like death. Like the smell of a graveyard after rain.
Still…
In the end her curiosity got the better of her. Every door led somewhere, right? This was her bakery. Her pride and joy. If there was a door in it that had been kept secret all these years, she wanted—no, needed—to know where it went.
“Good.” Jerry said, correctly interpreting the look in her eyes. He sounded almost cheerful as he laced his fingers and raised his arms over his head, limbering his muscles up. “Let’s do this. You take the handle and pull, and I’ll try to get… my fingers… into the crack like… there. Ready?”
She nodded, and adjusted her grip on the lever, and then waited as Jerry counted to three.
Together, they pulled. The door opened another few inches before the hinges locked up. They yanked, and pulled, but the door only gave that much.
“I guess that’s it,” Jerry said when one more pull didn’t get them anything. He put his face up to the opening, careful of the edges of the broken
slat boards. “Do you have a flashlight? It’s pitch dark in here but it looks like it goes back pretty far. We could always get the hinges off and open it that way, I guess. That’s going to be a lot of work though. Plus, it’s going to take those power tools you don’t want me to use.”
“Oh!” Cookie exclaimed. That gave her an idea.
Without explaining she went over to the tall cabinet. From inside, she took a plastic bottle of vegetable oil. She brought it over to the door, and then poured a generous amount on each of the heavy, rusted hinges and an inch or two along the metal straps that connected them to the door.
“Give that a few seconds,” she instructed. “There. Try it now.”
With one eyebrow raised skeptically, Jerry took his grip on the edge of the door again, and together they worked it back and forth, back and forth until, with a hard grinding and a squeal that sent tingles shivering through Cookie’s fingertips, the door scraped opened wide.
If anything, it made the musty smell of the frigid air more intense.
“Neat trick,” Jerry told her, brushing his hands off against each other.
“Bakers do it hotter,” she quoted from an internet meme she’d read not too long ago. The smile she flashed him slipped away when she got a glimpse inside the opening behind the door.
“Flashlights,” Jerry said. “We’re going to need flashlights.”
From behind them, Cream whimpered and turned away from the darkness that pressed close to the secret doorway. Padding over to the other end of the kitchen, he pushed in behind the stacked burlap sacks of onions, and hid with his paws over his nose.
Chapter Two
Two flashlight beams revealed the space behind the door.
It was a small alcove, with walls made of big uncut stones and a floor that looked like poured cement. Jerry pulled away a heavy triangle of cobwebs, wiping the mess off on his jeans.
The opening turned to the right, and followed a set of narrow stairs down. Cookie knew it would lead to a basement under the bakery. It just didn’t make any sense.
