Some Like It Hawk Read online

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” Eric asked, after a few moments.

  “That’s the crawl space under the bandstand,” I said. “And that trapdoor—”

  “Trapdoor?”

  I bent down to look again. The crawl space was lit only by streaks of sunlight that came through cracks in the weathered floor of the bandstand overhead. Junk littered the entire area, including a huge heap of old tires, faded wooden crates, battered sawhorses, and other debris in the exact center of the space. Tinkerbell had curled up at the foot of the heap.

  I turned back to Rose Noire. She was sniffing Josh’s diaper. In vain; I could tell just from his face that Jamie was the one who needed changing.

  “Why is all the junk still on top of the trapdoor?” I asked. “Maybe it’s not Rob’s fault he’s still stuck in the courthouse.”

  “Uncle Rob’s in the courthouse, too?” Eric asked.

  “Only temporarily. And what if he came all the way through the tunnel only to find he couldn’t get it open?” I went on, turning back to Rose Noire.

  “Tinkerbell would bark,” Rose Noire said.

  “Tunnel?” Eric said. “You mean there’s a tunnel all the way into the courthouse?”

  “I was waiting to uncover the trapdoor until I knew he was on his way,” Rose Noire said.

  “Awesome!” Eric exclaimed. “Can I go through it?”

  “Not now,” Rose Noire replied.

  I’d have said not at all, but maybe she was right. An absolute prohibition would only make the tunnel more enticing. And I wasn’t about to distract Rose Noire when she was in the middle of changing Jamie.

  “The trapdoor screeches like a wounded banshee,” she said over her shoulder. “We can’t open it without some kind of noise to cover it.”

  “Like the calypso band that I thought was supposed to start playing at eleven,” I said. “Where’s the schedule?”

  “I have it right there.” Rose Noire pointed a half-unfolded diaper at a well-worn clipboard lying on the ground nearby. “And that’s probably them now.”

  Footsteps and a lot of dragging and thumping had begun happening up on the stage.

  “They’re late,” I said.

  “They’re on island time.” Rose Noire smiled indulgently.

  “They’re not actually from the Caribbean, you know,” I said. “When they’re not playing in the band, they’re a bunch of CPAs from Richmond.”

  “Well, in any case, they should be starting soon.” She glanced at her watch. “Eric, Rob was supposed to come out while your Aunt Meg was hammering so loudly on her iron.”

  “Call him and tell him to get ready to come over as soon as the calypso band starts up,” I said.

  “I’ll try,” she said. “But you know how spotty cell phone reception is over there.”

  Spotty? It was virtually nonexistent. Most of the time we had to resort to sending text messages to Mr. Throckmorton’s computer.

  “Awesome,” Eric said. “Did Mr. Throckmorton dig the tunnel?”

  “No, it’s been there forever,” Rose Noire said. “No one knows how long.”

  “Actually, we do have some idea,” I said. “The original courthouse was built during the 1780s and the trapdoor was mentioned in some documents from the 1840s, so presumably it was dug sometime between those two dates.”

  “I thought the courthouse burned during the Civil War,” Eric said.

  “Not by itself.” I nodded with approval when I saw that Rose Noire was rapidly texting on her phone. “The Union Army burned it on their way south. But that was only the building. The basement and the tunnel survived.”

  “And it’s almost certainly proof that Caerphilly was a stop on the Underground Railroad,” Rose Noire said, looking up from her phone. “Why else would they dig such a tunnel?”

  “So the early nineteenth-century mayors would have an escape route if the citizens showed up with tar and feathers,” I said.

  “You mean there were Pruitts here back then?” Eric asked. Strange how even a teen who only summered here automatically associated tar and feathers with the family that had misruled Caerphilly for so long.

  “No, the Pruitt family didn’t show up until Reconstruction,” I answered. “They’re not the only crooked politicians in the world. They don’t know about the tunnel, and we all have to be very careful not to let them find out.”

  “They’d tell the Evil Lender, you know,” Rose Noire said. “The Pruitts are the ones who brought the Evil Lender to Caerphilly in the first place.”

  “So don’t brag about knowing where the tunnel is if any Pruitts are listening,” Eric said. “Got it.”

  “Only a few people in town knew about the tunnel when the siege began,” I said. “In fact, for most of the twentieth century, only the county clerks knew it had ever existed. After all, it was in the courthouse basement, and there’s nothing worth stealing down there. Never has been anything down there except the clerk—currently Mr. Throckmorton—and over two centuries’ worth of gently crumbling town and county records.”

  “For the first few weeks of the siege, we kept pretty busy hauling in supplies,” Rose Noire said. “We all expected that sooner or later the Pruitts would remember about the tunnel and find a way to shut it down.”

  “We?” Eric repeated.

  “A lot of townspeople are in on the secret,” I said.

  A cheer went up overhead. Eric had opened his mouth and was saying something, but he was drowned out by the thunder of half a dozen steel drums.

  Eric drew closer.

  “So this whole time everyone in town has been just strolling through the tunnel with supplies?” he asked. He had to shout to be heard.

  “Heavens, no,” Rose Noire said, with a shudder.

  “It’s no stroll,” I said. “Here, I’ll show you. Help me move this stuff.”

  Rose Noire went back to the front of the tent to keep watch. Eric and I crawled under the bandstand, where he helped me pull aside the tires and boxes to reveal an ancient-looking iron trapdoor with oversized hinges on one side and a huge, slightly rusty ring on the other. It was set into a wide slab of eighteenth-century stonework, heavily patched with early twentieth-century concrete. Overhead, the steel drums had subsided and we could hear the drama student who served as today’s emcee formally introducing the band, his words punctuated by random notes from the drums or guitars.

  “Grab the ring,” I said. “Get ready to pull. But wait until the music starts.”

  The calypso players launched into their first number. I nodded to Eric and we heaved on the ring. The trapdoor rose with a screech that would have alerted half the county if the musicians above hadn’t been playing their hearts out, with occasional deliberate squawks of feedback.

  We peered down into the tunnel, a three-by-three-foot shaft lined with stone for the first six feet and then with boards. A flimsy-looking ladder was nailed along one side. In the dim light, we couldn’t see the bottom.

  We gazed in silence for several long moments.

  “Wow,” Eric said finally. “How deep is that anyway?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Must be a hundred feet.”

  Actually, it was more like twenty-five or thirty, but if he thought it was a hundred, all the better. I was worried that he’d scamper down the ladder and disappear into the tunnel, but he stood looking down into the entrance with a slightly anxious expression on his face. Maybe Eric felt the same way about the tunnel as I did.

  “Don’t go down there,” I said. “It’s pretty narrow, and Rob’s due out any minute, and you don’t want to get in his way.”

  “Okay.” He managed a fairly credible air of disappointment. “I guess they had to keep the entrance narrow so people couldn’t find it as easily.”

  “The tunnel’s even smaller,” I said. “Not much over two feet high and wide. Remember, they didn’t have power tools back then. It was all dug by hand.”

  “Amazing that it hasn’t caved in af
ter all these years.”

  “At least half of it was partly caved in when this whole thing started,” I said. “But we dug it out and now we have it pretty well shored up. We’ve only actually had three substantial cave-ins, and one of those was last year during the big earthquake. We’ve always managed to get people dug out pretty quickly.”

  From the look on Eric’s face, I had a feeling I’d eliminated the danger that he’d try to sneak into the tunnel.

  If only I could eliminate my own constant anxiety that all the little cave-ins were warning signs that a great big one was coming. And my not entirely irrational dread that when—make that if—it happened, Rob would get caught in it.

  “And the big deal about Fourth of July is that we’re going to replace the trapdoor then,” I said.

  “You couldn’t just try oiling it?” Eric asked.

  “We do,” I said. “Daily. Doesn’t help much. So we’re replacing it. Actually, the Shiffleys tried once before, but apparently back in the nineteen-twenties someone—possibly bootleggers—did some repair work. The trapdoor doesn’t just sit on the slab—it’s anchored by a whole lot of steel bars going down into the stone and concrete. They figured out they’ll have to hack the whole thing apart with jackhammers and blowtorches. It’ll make a hell of a racket. So they’re going to do it under cover of the college orchestra concert, which will end with a bravura performance of The 1812 Overture, complete with cannons and fireworks.”

  “Cool.” Eric perked up a bit at the thought. “There is one thing I don’t understand, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My mom said you and Michael were worried that the Evil Lender might take your house,” he said. “Does this have something to do with that? And how can they do that, anyway?”

  My stomach tightened, as it always did when the subject came up.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. And then I realized that if Eric was almost old enough to drive, he was also old enough to deal with a few complications. “The short version is that they can’t. But the county might be able to seize our land if they needed it for some public purpose. And right now the county owes the Evil Lender a lot of money. What if the Evil Lender told the county board ‘We won’t sue you, and we won’t make you pay back those millions of dollars—all you have to do is use your power to seize these people’s land and sell it to us’?”

  “But the county board won’t do that—right?”

  “I hope not. They don’t want to, but what if the Evil Lender backs them into a corner where they can’t refuse?”

  “What does this have to do with Mr. Throckmorton?”

  “Cousin Festus thinks having him there helps the county’s case.” Festus Hollingsworth, part of Mother’s vast extended family, was representing the county in all of these legal matters. I found myself wishing, not for the first time, that Festus would explain why he thought Mr. Throckmorton’s presence was so useful. Was it only for the PR value, or was there some obscure legal reason? But Festus hadn’t become a respected litigator and one of the top property law experts in Virginia by sharing his strategies with the immediate world.

  Or maybe Festus might have enlightened us if he’d had time. For the past six weeks, he and the team of attorneys and paralegals he’d installed on the third floor of our house had been putting in twenty-hour days sorting through the boxes and boxes of papers and diskettes the lender had delivered. “It’s called document dump,” Festus had explained. “In discovery, they’re required to give me all relevant documents. But there’s no rule to prevent them from hiding them in several tons of useless garbage.” Festus was a veteran of many battles against slimy corporations. He knew how to deal with all this—didn’t he?

  “Festus is the expert,” Eric said, echoing my thoughts.

  “So until he tells us otherwise, we protect the secret of the tunnel,” I said. “And help Mr. Throckmorton stay in place.”

  Eric tried to draw himself up to his full height, whacking not just his head, but even his shoulders on the low ceiling—when had he suddenly grown taller than me? He nodded with enthusiasm.

  “You can trust me!” he said.

  “Of course, protecting it doesn’t mean we have to sit here staring at it,” I replied. “Let’s go out and keep watch. Always peek out before you reenter the tent; never leave the tent unguarded until the junk’s on top of the trapdoor; and if someone catches you going in or out of the crawl space, there’s your excuse.”

  I pointed to a mini-refrigerator tucked just inside the entry. I popped the door open to show its contents: sodas, water bottles, juice, fruit, and neatly stacked jars of the organic baby food Rose Noire still made for the boys.

  “Our cover story is that I keep this back here because people were eating the boys’ food,” I said. “And drinking my sodas.”

  I peeked out and saw only Rose Noire in the tent, so I lifted the flap and we scrambled out.

  “Just one more thing,” Eric said. “What if—Oh my God!”

  Chapter 3

  My heart leapt as I looked to see where Eric was pointing. It seemed a harmless enough tableau. Apparently Eric had failed to notice that we were putting the boys down in Spike’s pen. Spike was licking Jamie’s face. Jamie was lying on his back, kicking his feet in the air, giggling happily. Then I realized what had alarmed Eric. Josh was waddling toward the two—in fact, as we watched, he reached down, grabbed a handful of Spike’s fluffy black-and-white fur, and yanked. Hard. So hard he fell down, still holding a few tufts of fur.

  Spike yelped and whirled toward Josh. Eric belatedly realized that as babysitter he should be doing something and scrambled to grab Josh. But Spike was faster. By the time Eric reached them, Spike was happily licking Josh’s face. Jamie started crying.

  “It’s okay,” I said, as I picked up the abandoned one.

  “‘Pike!” Jamie said. “Want ‘Pike!”

  “Aren’t they cute?” Rose Noire cooed.

  “Wow, Spike really has mellowed,” Eric said.

  “Only where the boys are concerned,” I said. “To the rest of the world he’s as fierce as ever—maybe fiercer if he thinks you’re a threat to the twins.”

  Eric nodded. I was relieved to see that he was still eyeing Spike warily, as if not sure how far to trust him.

  I handed Jamie to Eric and turned to Rose Noire.

  “So what’s taking Rob so long?” I asked her.

  “Apparently Mr. Throckmorton is helping him test a new game.”

  “New game?” Eric perked up. Not surprising—he was, after all, squarely in the age range targeted by Rob’s phenomenally successful computer and role-playing games.

  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to show it to you—on this side of the tunnel, please. Josh and Jamie are too young to become tunnel rats. And can you keep an eye on them while I go get something to eat?”

  “I have a better idea.” Michael, my husband, had appeared in the doorway to the tent.

  “Look,” I said to Jamie. “Here’s Daddy.”

  “‘Pike!” Jamie was unconsoled, and still struggling in Eric’s arms.

  “Let me have him.” Michael gave me a kiss, then scooped Jamie out of Eric’s arms and lifted him up as high as he could reach—which, since Michael was six feet four, meant Jamie was flying fairly close to the ceiling at this end of the tent. He squealed with delight.

  “Eric, you bring Josh,” Michael said, as he continued to wave the giggling Jamie overhead. “The hay ride’s starting any second now.”

  “Cool,” Eric said. He managed to snag Josh without getting bitten by Spike and the four of them were out of the tent before I had the chance to check the boys’ diapers.

  Though I did notice that Michael grabbed the diaper bag I routinely kept packed and ready, so I told myself not to worry.

  Spike settled down to watch the door through which the boys had disappeared. I congratulated myself, not for the first time, at having found the perfect watchdog for the tunnel’s mouth. If the boy
s were in the same enclosure as Spike, he would bark furiously when anyone approached and attempt to bite anyone foolhardy enough to disregard his warning and enter the pen—even, at times, Michael or me. If the boys weren’t with him, he sulked, and usually snapped at intruders out of sheer crankiness without even the courtesy of a warning bark. I had no doubt that Spike had contributed more than any of us to ensuring that the existence of the tunnel remained a secret.

  Tinkerbell just sighed and curled up to sleep.

  “Now that the boys are in safe hands, I’m going for some lunch,” I said to Rose Noire. “If I go now, maybe I can beat the rush. Call me when Rob’s safely out.”

  “I have Tofu Surprise in the mini-fridge,” Rose Noire said. “You’re welcome to have some if you want to stay here.”

  “Thanks, but I was planning to get some chili at Muriel’s Diner,” I said. “Want me to bring you some? She makes a vegetarian version.” Then a thought hit me. “Of course, if you already have Tofu Surprise, I suppose you won’t want chili. Maybe you can give some to Rob when he gets out.” I was eager to see the Tofu Surprise disappear before Rose Noire could browbeat me into consuming any more. The only surprising thing about it was how a pound or two of spices utterly failed to conceal the taste and texture of the tofu, which was probably my least favorite food.

  “No, thanks,” Rose Noire said. “But you go on. I’ll stay here and wait for Rob.”

  I nodded my thanks and strolled out.

  The calypso band was still playing—with more enthusiasm than skill, but the crowd seemed to be enjoying them. Or maybe they just enjoyed having a place to sit that was out of the sun—the Shiffley Construction Company had installed dozens of new, sturdy wooden benches in a semicircle around the front side of the bandstand, and hung giant tarpaulins over them, turning the whole place into a much more usable event space. Every bench was filled, and there were even a few people standing at the back or along the sides, braving the blistering sun to hear the concert. The Fourth of July decorations had turned out well. The bandstand’s ornate Victorian wooden fretwork had been freshly painted so that it looked more than ever like a giant wedding cake, and it was so festooned with flags and red, white, and blue bunting that even the old-timers who hung out at the VFW hall allowed that the new mayor had done the town proud this year.