The Secret Cellar (10 page)

“If you think that’s cool, check this out,” I say, pointing to the enormous round table in the center of the room. It is surrounded by nine chairs, and like the ceiling, the top has a celestial-themed paint job. A spiraling mass of stars—thousands of them, most in red and blue—cover the surface, glittering under layers and layers of clear varnish.

“That’s our galaxy,” Margaret informs me. “The Milky Way. Astronomers estimate that it contains more than two hundred billion stars. And it’s just one of billions of galaxies. It’s mind-boggling.”

“Oh, my mind is boggled, all right,” I say. “I mean, who needs the Internet when we have you?”

“Yeah,” agrees Leigh Ann. “We should just call you Margapedia.”

Margaret does her best to ignore us. “This must be where Beethoven’s Nine had their meetings. Now that they are Beethoven’s Eight, I wonder what they’ll do.”

“I don’t know about that, but check out this floor,” says Becca. “I was so busy looking at the ceiling that I almost missed it.”

Polished white marble—acres of it—covers the cellar floor, but down the centerline of the room, three large squares of black, each a three-by-three grid of large tiles, are bordered by reddish-brown stone. A brass medallion marks the center of each of the black tiles, and Margaret kneels down to get a closer look.

“The floor is extraordinary, isn’t it?” says Shelley.
She stands in the middle of the square closest to the back of the house. “These are the nine Muses of Greek mythology. The other two are the nine planets, and—”

“—the nine worthy men,” finishes Margaret, standing on the medallion in the third square. “Here is our old friend, Alexander the Great.”

“Boy, this guy has, er, had an issue with the number nine,” says Becca.

Shelley smiles. “So you’ve noticed.” She turns and walks toward the back wall, gently touching the wood paneling that stretches from floor to ceiling. She points to the thirty-six smaller medallions (yep, I counted, and, yep, thirty-six is a multiple of nine) centered on the wood panels surrounding us. “These smaller brass medallions represent mankind’s highest achievers. According to Mr. Dedmann, they are the top nine in art, music, literature, and science. Here’s Galileo, and Goethe, and Wagner, and Rubens. It’s fascinating, really. And if you’ll pardon the expression, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Shelley directs us to take seats around the table before she continues. “Mr. Dedmann only brought me down here a few times, but each time, he told me that one day he was going to tell me a secret about this room, and about him—a huge secret, he said. I was dying to know what it was, but I didn’t dare press him. Mr. Dedmann could be … well, ‘difficult’ I suppose is the best word. One day he seemed to trust me completely, and then the next he would be very secretive, unwilling to share any information—even details I needed to know about his music collection. I hesitate to say it, but he could be a little … paranoid. Whatever his secret was, he was terrified it would be discovered.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I whisper to Margaret.

“Probably.”

Shelley continues: “Then one day we were down here preparing for one of his Beethoven meetings, and
he said something about a combination. I asked him if he had a safe in the house, and he just smiled. He walked over to that wall, the one at the back of the house. He placed his hands against it and looked all around the room—at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything. Then he looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘In this cellar, my dear, are all the answers. You just have to know where to look for the questions.’ ”

“What do you think he meant?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. Once, out of curiosity, I counted the number of steps it took me to walk from one end of the room to the other, and then did the same thing upstairs. It’s the same distance in both directions as the upper floors, which makes sense, right? But then one day I saw something strange. We were down here together, and when we finished what we were doing, he sent me up ahead of him. I started to climb the spiral stairs, and then, I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I sneaked back down just far enough to spy on him.”

The four of us lean across the table, eyes wide.

“What did you see?” Leigh Ann asks, her voice barely a whisper.

Shelley points at the paneled wall behind me, where Johann Sebastian Bach’s medallion is attached. “That wall was opened up like a door, and Mr. Dedmann was inside for a while. It was dark, so I couldn’t see what was there, but when he came out, I could see that he was trying to conceal something under his jacket. He pushed
the door closed, and that’s when I hurried up the stairs. My heart was pounding—I was so afraid he would see me and fire me on the spot.”

“Sophie would have tripped and fallen down the stairs,” says Becca. “She’s the worst snoop ever.”

I can’t deny that. It’s a sad fact that I am the world’s most incompetent criminal.

“But it proved something to me.… Somehow, the basement is bigger than what’s above it,” Shelley says.

Margaret is on her feet, completing a thorough examination of Mr. Bach’s wood panel. She runs her fingers all around the edges. She taps. She pounds. She presses her ear against it. She sniffs. When she gets to the brass medallion, she looks it over very carefully before touching it. “What are you hiding in there, Johann?”

“I see that you’re on a first-name basis with Bach,” I note.

Around the outer ring of the medallion, a six-inch circle, is engraved “
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH, 1685–1750.
” The center is a sculpture of his face that sticks out a couple of inches. But between the outer ring and the sculpture is a second ring, half an inch wide, with nine stars, each a slightly different shape, cut deeply into it.

As Margaret touches the ring with the stars, she gasps when it moves under her finger. “Did you see that? This part moved.” She slowly spins the stars all the way around, clockwise at first, then counterclockwise. “I can
feel it … clicking inside, like there are gears or something.”

Within seconds, we discover that all thirty-six medallions have one movable ring built into the design. The shapes cut into them are different, but each has exactly nine. Nine circles, nine triangles, nine octagons, nine ovals, and so on.

“Again with the number nine,” says Becca.

Leigh Ann is on her hands and knees, crawling over the nine planet medallions, stopping on Jupiter. “Hey, these are different! It’s the center that moves.”

The floor medallions—Nine Worthies, nine planets, and nine Muses—are larger than those on the walls, and are perfectly flat. In place of the sculpture that sticks out on the wall medallions is an elaborate engraving, and in the center of that is an oddly shaped, inch-deep indentation.

Leigh Ann has her fingers in the indentation, trying to move it. “I can’t really make it turn, but I can wiggle it a bit,” says Leigh Ann. “There’s like little … buttons down in the hole. Same thing with Mars.”

“Wait! Do that again,” Margaret says. “Wiggle Mars, just like you were doing before.” She puts her ear on the Bach medallion. “When you wiggle it like that, I can hear it in here. It’s like they’re connected, like they’re … all … part … of …”

Her voice trails off as she makes the leap to mental
hyperspace, leaving us mere mortals in her wake. Muttering to herself all the while, she scurries from the Muses to the worthies to the planets, lying facedown on the floor to examine each medallion with her magnifying glass. Then she makes a complete circuit of the room, pausing to look at every artist, composer, writer, and scientist, finally coming to stop in front of Mr. Bach.

“Sophie, go to Saturn and kneel down next to the medallion,” she says. “Leigh Ann, you go to Hector, and Rebecca, one of the Muses. Good. Now, when I point at you, jiggle the center just like Leigh Ann was doing earlier.”

“What’s going on?” Becca asks.

“You’ll see,” says Margaret.

Her smile widens with each wiggle of the brass medallions. “Incredible. Whoever created this was an absolute genius.”

“Are you going to share?” I ask.

“The whole thing—the floor, the walls, all these medallions—is a giant lock. It’s ingenious. Instead of numbers, the combination is made up of planets, and Muses, and the Nine Worthies.”

And then it hits me like a ten-ton sledgehammer (courtesy of the Acme Sledgehammer Company, naturally). “The walking stick is the key!” I shout. Everyone looks at me as if I have flipped. “Don’t you see? Remember the clue? I’ll bet you anything that the end of the walking stick is shaped just like this”—I point to the indentation
in the center of Saturn’s medallion—“and when you give it a turn, voilà! The lock opens.”

“If you know the combination,” says Margaret. “But I think you’re right about the walking stick. That would explain why Klinger was so determined to buy it. He must know how this works and is trying to open it.”

Shelley’s face clouds over suddenly. “Oh no.”

“What’s the matter?” Leigh Ann asks.

“Mr. Klinger isn’t trying to open the lock. He’s trying to stop me—or anyone else—from opening it before the end of the year.”

“But … why?” Margaret asks.

“Because I have to be out of the house by December thirty-first. The only reason I’m still here is the slow pace of lawyers and probate courts. You see, Mr. Dedmann left the house to Mr. Klinger and the rest of the Beethoven people. But all the contents of the house, except for some of the furniture, were left to me. That’s why we were able to have the auction that you went to. But once I’m gone … I know it’s mean to say this, but I don’t think Mr. Klinger can be trusted to carry out Curtis’s wishes. If he finds anything of value, he’s not going to tell anyone. He’s been spiteful to me ever since he learned that I was a beneficiary of the will. He even accused me of improperly influencing Mr. Dedmann.”

“What a jerk,” says Leigh Ann. “Just because you’re pretty …”

“Why didn’t he leave everything to his relatives?” Becca asks. “Isn’t that what people usually do?”

“Or perhaps to some other deserving person. Someone like … me?” I suggest.

“Yeah, a fifteen-room house is just what you need,” Margaret says. “You can’t keep one little bedroom clean.”

“Neat people are boring,” I say.

“Getting back to Rebecca’s question,” Shelley says, “I’m not sure if he had any relatives. Certainly none that he ever talked about.”

“This place must be worth a fortune,” Leigh Ann says. “No wonder Klinger wants you out. They’re probably going to sell it as soon as they can.”

“Well, we need to figure out what’s behind these walls,” says Margaret. “And that’s all there is to it. He said it himself: all the answers are down here in this cellar.”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” I say. “You said that when Mr. Dedmann came out from behind the wall, he looked like he was carrying something. Did you ever see what it was?”

“Come upstairs with me,” Shelley says. She leads us up the spiral stairs to the first floor, and then into the kitchen, where she opens the door to a small under-counter refrigerator and removes an empty wine bottle. “This is where he kept his wine. Now, I can’t be sure that this is what he had under his coat, but I don’t know where else it could have come from. I did some shopping for him that morning, just as a favor, and also picked up
the two bottles of wine he had ordered at a wine shop earlier in the week. When I put them into the cooler, I rearranged all the bottles. And this one was definitely not in there; I would have remembered such an old-looking label. When I saw this in the trash bin, I started to wonder. That’s why I kept it.”

“What do you think, Sophie?” Margaret asks, handing me the bottle. “You know about wine.”

Shelley lifts an eyebrow. “You do? Because I’ll confess, I know nothing.”

“Well, a little,” I admit. “My dad is French, and, well, you know. They’re crazy about wine. Let’s see, Château Latour, 1949. Wow, that is old. Um, it’s from Bordeaux, which is where my dad grew up, and I think I’ve heard of it. Can I take this to him? He can tell me all about it. Way more than you would ever want to know, even.”

“Sure. If you think it might be helpful.”

“One more thing,” says Margaret. “When we met the first time, you told us about a picture and the notebook he wrote his last words on. Can we see those?”

Shelley retrieves them from the top drawer of a desk in the front hallway and sets them on the counter.

“She’s beautiful,” I say, holding up the photo of the young woman. “She looks like a movie star. I wonder who she was.”

The only clue as to her identity, however, is that single script “V” on the back.

Meanwhile, Margaret studies the notebook. “Look inside,” she reads. Flipping through the pages, she lands on one with a list of words and letters that look as if they were scribbled down in a hurry:

“Have you ever seen this?” she asks Shelley.

Shelley shakes her head. “Never. Doesn’t mean anything to me. It can’t be that old, though, because I had just bought that notebook for him a few days before he died. Toga? Will? I can’t imagine what it’s all about. Like I said, Mr. Dedmann had a lot of secrets.”