CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Marie was pretty sure she should feel more surprised that, thanks to Benjamin and his construction crew, another secret room had been uncovered at June Manor. But the house had been nothing but a big bundle of surprises ever since she moved in, so a hidden, partially buried room honestly seemed par for the course. It fit right in with the hidden room upstairs, her great-aunt’s ghost, and every other oddity that had come with it. Looking at the door along the far wall of the hidden room several feet beneath her, Marie started toward the edge of the hole.
“No, no,” Benjamin said. “Let me go down there. That’s a decent drop.”
Marie knew it was the smart move, but she was just too ensnared in the mystery of it all. She scanned the edges of the hole the backhoe had dug up and saw the top edges of the brick wall across from her. The top of the fractured wall sat about a foot and a half beneath the soil, giving her easy access to it. As for the drop…well, she’d manage that when she got there.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, walking over to the other side.
Clearly concerned, Benjamin came with her. Marie also noticed his three crew members watching on with concern. The discovery of the hidden room seemed to have everyone wrapped up in a bit of excitement. Wine cellar? Prohibition brewing room? Some sort of secret room June hid priceless artifacts away in? The possibilities were endless.
Marie reached the other side of the hole and got down on her knees. True to his word, Benjamin was there to help her. As she turned and started to slide the lower portion of her legs down into the open space beneath them, Benjamin clasped her by her wrists and helped to lower her down. Marie kicked out with her feet, her sneakers touching the surface of the brick wall. When she was secure, she leveled herself out vertically and looked up at Benjamin.
“Okay,” she said. “You can let go now.”
He reluctantly did as she asked. As it turned out, the drop wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d been expecting. There was a little impact on her ankles, and that was it. With her feet on the concrete floor, she gazed up at Benjamin and gave him a thumbs-up.
“Good Lord, be careful down there,” Benjamin said. “If I—”
He was interrupted by another voice. It was a familiar one, and it did not sound very happy. It was the sound of Posey coming across the yard.
“Marie Fortune, what in the name of all that is holy and blasphemous do you think you’re doing?”
“Discovering,” Marie said with a little laugh.
This was true. She did feel like some sort of adventurer or archaeologist as she stood in the center of a room that had been hidden underground for Lord only knew how long. Her eyes instantly went to the door within the brick wall in front of her. She then took some time to study the wooden racks that had been bolted into the wall. From the lip of the hole, she’d thought they might be wine racks, but as she stood in front of them, they looked more like makeshift book cases or some sort of odd, segmented workspace. Each little space was empty, save the dust that had collected there in a thin sheet over the years. The old chest sitting against the far wall seemed to promise the largest mystery of all, but upon inspection, Marie was not at all surprised to find that it was locked.
She turned her attention back to the door, looking up at Posey and Benjamin before reaching out for the doorknob. They both looked on in anticipation. Marie used this encouragement to reach out and turn the knob. The encouragement and excitement both vanished when the knob only turned a quarter of the way.
It was locked. Of course it was.
But…she looked back up at Benjamin, curious. “I’m not the best with directions or layouts,” she said. “But this wall and door would be pretty close to where the house basement ends, right?”
Benjamin looked at June Manor, thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. Beside him, Posey’s eyes grew wide and she took off in a waddling sort of run back toward the house. While Marie waited, she tried the door again. She knew, of course, that it would be locked but simply liked the feel of something so old and unused in her hand. It almost felt as if the knob was trying to tell her a story—maybe of all the hands that had touched it in the past. She could very well be the first person to have touched this doorknob in fifty years or more.
Idly, she wondered if her mother had ever touched it. Had her mother ever seen the room? She was not surprised that she was again thinking of her mother; the woman had been heavily on her mind ever since she’d sent that postcard addressed to June.
Before she could get derailed by anxious thoughts of her mother, Marie started to hear noise from the other side of the door. There was a faint knocking sound, followed by Posey’s muffled voice. Posey was speaking loud enough, though—which was her usual volume.
“Can you hear me?”
Posey asked through the door and the basement wall that sat behind it.
“Yes! Do you see any latch or cracks hidden anywhere?”
There was silence from the other side as Posey checked. Marie ran through her own mental inventory of the basement as she waited. She hadn’t spent much time down there but figured if there was some sort of hidden passage, there was no way she would have found it without some heavy searching.
“No, nothing,” Posey finally answered.
“Okay…stay there. I’ll be there in a second.”
She turned back and stared up at Benjamin, realizing that it was going to be much harder getting out than it had been getting in. “So,” she said, frowning up at him. “Two things. First, can you get a ladder down here to help me out?”
“Of course. And two?”
It almost pained her to say it because of what the end result might be, but it was out of her mouth before she could stop it: “Do you have a sledgehammer?”
As it turned out, Benjamin
did
have a sledgehammer.
He carried it down into the basement with Marie walking behind him. Posey was still standing by the far wall in the basement. Marie could see where she had moved some bins and boxes around, making sure Benjamin would have enough room. There was a stirring of excitement in her eyes—an emotion Marie was pretty sure she would also feel if she wasn’t so bothered by the fact that she was about to have a hole knocked out of her basement wall.
“You sure you’re okay with me doing this?” Benjamin asked.
“I think so,” Marie said. “Is it something you can repair?”
“Yeah, I can put a door there. Might need to get a bricklayer to come in and fill in the frame, though.”
That meant more money, of course, but things were going well recently. Between a constantly booked bed and breakfast and the surprisingly lucrative ghost-extracting business, she was finally able to make such decisions without sweating over her bank balance.
“Then yes, go ahead.”
Marie and Posey stepped all the way back to the stairs. Marie almost felt guilty watching Benjamin slug away at the wall. It was more work than she’d assumed. It took a good five strikes to get a crack going down the wall, and another five for any sort of crumbling to begin. By the time the wall started to crumble away, Benjamin was sweating and grunting with each swing. Finally, after sixteen swings (Marie counted), the door was revealed. It looked as if the concrete wall of the basement had been stopped about six inches away from the door, making sure it was not cemented closed forever.
Benjamin let the sledgehammer go, propping it up in the corner. “The rest is a little more delicate,” he said. “I’ll get my guys to clean it up a bit. One way or the other, you’ll have an actual entrance to that other room in a few hours.”
“And then what?” Posey asked.
“I don’t know,” Marie said. “I guess I really haven’t thought it out very well, have I?”
“You just found another secret room in a weird house that was given to you by a dead woman,” Posey pointed out. “Sometimes it’s hard to properly think such things through.”
Marie knew she meant it as a joke, but there was also something darkly tinged about the comment.
Yeah, this is my life now,
Marie thought, looking at the old oak door peeking through the shattered concrete wall.
Sure is a long ways away from Pampered Paws…
While it was an encouraging thought, she also thought it was quite a telling one. Because as she looked through this new hole in the wall that led to yet another secret room, the Marie Fortune she knew back then seemed like a very different person. And while she missed that woman at times, she was thrilled with the new woman she was becoming—haunted manor and all. And now with this new discovery, there was no telling what the future might hold.