Amber House (22 page)

“The grout between the squares here. It’s not quite the same color as everywhere else.”

He pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and swiveled out a blade. He poked the cement between the marble tiles. It gave away under the blade like chalk.

“This is it,” he said, excited.

He got the crowbar. Carefully, he inserted it into the crumbling grout under the edge of the tile. He wedged in a little wooden block for a fulcrum, then pushed the bar back and down, levering up the marble. Sand and chunks of the soft grout sifted down. “Can you hold this?” he asked, indicating the lever. “So I can get a grip on it?”

I took his place. He came around in front of the tile, lifted it out, and set it aside carefully.

We turned the beam of light on the void in the floor. It was filled with rough wood boards. Jackson smiled up at me. “I think if we pull out the other three tiles, we’ll have ourselves a trapdoor.”

I felt another genuine treasure hunter’s thrill.
A secret door. A place other people don’t know about. That nobody has entered for decades — maybe not since Fiona did.
Whether or not the diamonds were hidden down there, how cool was it to be able to explore a place like this, full of forgotten secrets? How many people would ever have the chance to do something like this?

When we’d levered up the three remaining tiles, we’d uncovered the iron hardware of a door. Jackson took a can of oil from his kit and wetted the hinges liberally.

“How’d you know to bring that?” I asked.

He shrugged with his mouth. “You said ‘trapdoor.’ Stands to reason there might be some rusty hinges.”

He braced himself with his legs to either side of the door and started pulling on the ring handle, straining so hard that the muscles in his arms and back bulged. Sodden notes of movement sounded all around the edges; the hinges grated. Jackson pulled harder. With a final rasping
pop
, the front edge lifted above the marble tile around it.

Jackson backed up, lifting the door higher. The hinges screeched but gave. The door creaked fully open. An invisible cloud of dank, stale air rose out of the black hole below.

“Okay, I don’t want to sound lame, but —” The opening spread at our feet like a pool of ink. I pointed the flashlight down and in. The beam seemed feeble, as if the darkness was pressing against it. I saw the heavy wooden steps of a ladder, what looked like a stone floor. “Yeah. I don’t think I can go down there.”

Jackson shook his head and grinned at me. “What? You going to let me have all the fun?”

To be honest, I definitely thought he could make this exploratory run all by himself.

“Give me the broom, will you,” he said, “and shoot me some light. Please.”

He swiped the broom all around the opening, swept off the upper steps on the ladder, and gave the ladder a couple of whacks for good measure, I presumed to chase off any remaining bugs. Then he started down, giving each step an experimental stomp first to make sure it would hold him.

As he descended into the pit with the light, it grew dark in the gazebo. I got out Sammy’s little flashlight.

“What do you see?” I called down to him. “What’s down there?”

“I think you’re going to have to come down and see for yourself.”

“You’re kidding, right? Tell me what you see.”

“Well, for one thing, no webs. I think we’re pretty safe on the spider front.”

“Really? I can trust you?”

“Yes, you can trust me. No spiders. Really.” He made a great show of sweeping down the rest of the ladder. “Okay? Now come on. There’s nothing down here that can hurt you.”

I sat and swung my feet around to get on the ladder. Maybe I could do this.

Maybe not.

“Come on. Don’t be a wimp,” he said in a pleasantly taunting voice. “My opinion of you is slipping, coz.”

“Oh, well, I can’t let that happen,” I answered in exaggerated dismay. I took a deep breath and started down.

The walls of the passage were made of mortared stone, the floor of rough granite. It ran off in two directions into a darkness that continued beyond the reach of my flashlight. Water seeped from the sides and ran in a thin stream down the middle.

It gave me the creeps. “Where do the passages go?” I asked.

“I dunno,” Jackson said. “That one” — he pointed to my left, in the same direction the water was running — “could go all the way down to the river. The Captain was supposed to be a smuggler. This would be great for that. They built the stone tunnel on the hardrock of the bluff, then filled around it with dirt. Planted the maze on top to hide it. It’s a fairly elaborate setup.”

I took off my glove, let my mind drift, and touched the ladder. Immediately, I saw people climbing down it, dressed in ragged clothes, their frightened dark-skinned faces looking for hope from the man who stood close by me, holding a lantern.

“Well, I think someone else besides just the Captain knew about it, because this trapdoor was used by runaway slaves. At least once, anyway. Which makes sense. Fiona wrote about her grandmother — my great-great-great-grandmother, I guess. Said she was an abolitionist and used Amber House as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Fiona was pretty proud of her. I think her name was Maeve.”

“Yes,” he said. “Ida told me about her. Oddly enough, I had a great-great-great-grandfather who helped runaways too. They caught him and killed him.”

Even in this, life hadn’t been fair to Jackson and his family. Maeve had died of old age, at Amber House. I didn’t want to think about how Jackson’s great-great-great-grandfather must have died. It struck me that if we ever did find the stupid diamonds, Jackson didn’t just deserve to have “a share.” After what my ancestors did, he and his family deserved to have them all.

I knelt and touched the stone floor beyond the ladder, seeing men in sailors’ garb hauling crates down the long passage. “It looks like you’re right about the tunnel being used for smuggling at one point.”

He looked at me with interest. “You pulling up another vision?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?” he pressed.

I thought about how to answer that. “It’s not always the same. Sometimes it’s like I’m standing in the middle of the past, but I’m invisible to everyone around me. Sometimes, I just get a blurry image, or it’s like I’m imagining it. A couple of times I’ve dreamed I was someone from the past, while I was sleeping. And sometimes I only hear voices.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding.

I pointed my little flashlight beam up the tunnel leading away from the river and presumably toward the house. “So, no spiders?”

“No,” he said, “no spiders.” He ushered me past him. “Just keep an eye on your footing, because the rock’s a little uneven.”

I took his advice and trained my light on the ground, but kept flashing it ahead as well. I wasn’t going to walk face-first into a web. Or let anything else surprise me from the shadows. I started to point my flashlight at the ceiling, but he stopped me. “Don’t look up.”

“What?” I said, suddenly panicky, certain there were spiders everywhere above me.

He caught my hand. “Don’t look up,” he said again.

I yanked my hand back, gave him my sternest look, and said, “I need to see what’s up there.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling, “but don’t forget I warned you.”

I pointed my light at the ceiling and peered into the gloom among the roots. There weren’t any spiders; he hadn’t lied. But the black tar of the ceiling was spotted all over with white blotches. I squinted, trying to see —

“Oh my god!” I shrieked and dropped the flashlight. “Ohmygod, ohmygod.” The ceiling was covered —
covered
— with two-inch-long albino crickets. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them.

“Ohmygod,” I repeated for emphasis.

Jackson unsuccessfully hid his smile, took my arm, snagged my fallen flashlight, and started me forward again. “They’re cave crickets,” he explained. “Completely harmless. Stop screaming and they won’t fall off the ceiling.”

“Ohmygod,” I whispered, “ohmygod.”

“We’re almost there,” he said. A wooden door showed in the darkness just ahead.

I reached out and took the latch in my hand.

Sudden daylight filled my vision, and Sorcha was there, the woman in my dream of Amber House. She was looking back at me — no, beyond me — at Liam.

“It’s beautiful, my love, everything my heart has ever wanted.”

I closed my eyes, pushed open the door of the buried house, and went in.

The room beyond was heavy with dust. The gray coating clearly had not been disturbed for years, perhaps since the beginning of the last century. The little house had been waiting in darkness and silence since then.

I grabbed the large flashlight from Jackson’s hand and directed it up at the ceiling. No crickets. Not a one.

With the smaller flashlight, Jackson found an old lamp hanging beside the door. He gently shook it. Its contents sloshed. “Wonder if it will light.” Setting the lamp on the floor, he lifted off the glass chimney. “Stand back a little,” he warned. He pulled a pack of matches from his pocket, struck one, and held it to the wick. It smoked greasily, then caught. He rubbed the glass chimney against his pant leg before he fitted it back over the flame. When he set the lamp in the dust on the table, the contents of the room came into soft focus.

The table the lamp sat on was simple planks on a square base, with three mismatched chairs around it. Beside them, a massive fireplace, well blackened. In the corner, a rope-strung bed frame rotted with age. At its foot, a simple dresser with its back against the wall and a mirror over it.

On either side of the entrance, I saw the windows that Liam had carefully built into the stone walls more than three hundred years before, now blind with bricks holding out packed earth. On the wall opposite the fireplace, there was a built-in cupboard with thick moldings and a hand-painted design. Beside it, a second door, waiting to be opened.

I gestured at it. “Would you?” I asked.

Jackson lifted the lever handle and tugged. The door creaked open on rusted hinges. I brought the lamp over to reveal what lay beyond.

It was a small space, only slightly bigger than a closet. A child’s bed, collapsed in on itself, filled the end of the room. Under another bricked window to my left sat a wooden trunk and a primitive rocking horse, its body a cut log, its legs and neck thick branches. The straggling wisps of real horsehair still hung as mane and tail.

I realized I was afraid to touch that horse, afraid to see the generations of long-dead children who had ridden it in imaginary pastures. I backed away and out of the room.

“Will you search for the diamonds?” I asked Jackson. I noticed I was talking in hardly more than a whisper. It felt … unseemly … to speak out loud in a place where silence had ruled so long. I thought this must have been the way archaeologists felt when they finally opened an ancient tomb. The world of noise did not come there anymore.

He nodded and got started in the main room, opening drawers and cupboards. It felt like a violation. I didn’t want to watch.

Some little flicker of movement caught my eye — it must have been Jackson’s passing reflection in the mirror. I went over to the mirror. It was a sweet little thing with a hand-painted flowered border. I wiped the worst of the dust from the glass face with my gloved fingers. The black-specked silvering of the mirror was revealed. I sucked in my breath and made myself look.

Face after face surfaced in the glass and sank away, replaced by others. I waited and watched, and the multitude of reflections drifted back, allowing one image to swim forward: Sorcha’s face. Her hands were covering her eyes as Liam guided her by her shoulders to stand directly in front of the mirror. She lifted away her hands and her face lit with delight — the glass, perhaps, was a surprise gift.

Another face swam forward, a little Sorcha-like face, all pert prettiness, frowning as she pulled a comb through her hair.
Another face, a handsome black woman — the woman who’d saved the baby. She was wiping the glass, but paused, seeming to stare for a moment right into my eyes. Another face, familiar to me — a white woman, wan and dreamy, touching the glass and looking beyond it. Then many faces, all dark skinned, this one calm, this one fearful, this one wiping tears away, this one looking in the glass with wonder, as if he had never seen his face reflected back to him before.

Then my mother’s young face appeared, her features sad and urgent, her mouth shaping words I could not hear. Why was my mother’s face in this mirror? I wondered. Had she been here? Had she also found Heart House?

“Sarah?” Jackson said my name, and the image disappeared. “Something you might want to see.”

He had a picture in his hands, an old framed photograph the size of a postcard, of a woman and child from the Civil War era. The little girl was looking back, past her mother’s shoulder. She had a mass of curls escaping the ribbon tied around her head, the curls of a Renaissance angel.

“You know who this is?” he asked a little oddly, drawing my attention back to the woman.

“Not really,” I told him. “Maybe Maeve — the grandmother who used this place to hide runaways.”

“And who’s that?” he asked, pointing to the corner.

I looked. There did seem to be a third person there, back under the tree. I rubbed, working the glass clear. The figure was indistinct, blurry — another “ghost” caught in the long exposure times of early photography. He — no,
she
— seemed strangely dressed, maybe even wearing pants. I could not see, could not make out her features —

“I think I know who it is,” Jackson offered quietly.

“Who?”

“I think it’s you. Isn’t that your shirt?”

No.
I shook my head in utter denial. It could
not
be me. My skin crawled. I looked again.

I had a shirt like that, a baseball tee, and the figure looked like she was wearing jeans.
Jeans!
It might have been me. Maybe. But how? And when? I had never been back to that time that I remembered. And was the little girl in the picture
looking
at me?