The Secret Cellar (24 page)

“She is full of secrets, this one,” says Dad, patting me on the head.

“Shall we go downstairs?” Shelley asks. “For the big moment?”

Down the spiral stairs we go, Margaret leading the way. When she gets to the cellar, she walks to the other end, running her hand across the top of the round table.

“Beethoven’s Nine,” she says, smiling. “Kaspar Neuner. Nine chairs. Sophie and I did a little research on German names last night, and guess what we found out? ‘Neun’ is German for ‘nine,’ so ‘Neuner’ means, literally, ‘a niner.’ As in one who is part of a council made up of nine members. All the nines—the tiles, the address, everything—it was his clever little joke on the world. It’s just like the words written in the stars. The secret to his identity was right under everyone’s noses all along.”

She opens her backpack, takes out a one-foot length
of broomstick, and unwraps the paper that has been protecting the epoxy tip that is a perfect copy of the bottom of Mr. Dedmann’s walking stick.

“Boy, I hope this works,” she says as we gather around her.

“Julius Caesar is first,” I say. “And you turn him clockwise.”

Margaret kneels down on the floor directly over Caesar’s medallion. She blows the dust out of the indentation in the center, lines up the grooves and notches of the key, and gently pushes it into place. “So far, so good,” she says. “It fits perfectly.” We hold our breath as she slowly, slowly, slowly turns the key, and listen as the machinery of the lock beneath us and in the walls clicks several times, followed by a whirring sound and one final
ker-chunk
.

All nine of us breathe in simultaneously.

“That’s one,” I say. “Now for our Muse. Well, Leigh Ann’s Muse, anyway. Terpsichore, counterclockwise.”

Margaret takes the key to the next set of black tiles and settles in over Terpsichore’s medallion.

Click, click, click, CLICK
.

Whirrrrrr. Errk. Whirrrrrrrrr
.

Ker-chunk. Ker-CHUNK
.

Breathe.

“All right, Venus, you’re up!” says Becca, racing Margaret to the final block of tiles and rubbing the medallion in the center. “Don’t let us down.”

The key goes in.

Silence.

More silence.

Then, faintly, the sound of a clock ticking all around us, growing louder and louder:
tick​tick​tick​tick​tick​tick​tick​-tick​tick​-tick​tick​TICK​TICK​TICK​TICK … errrrrrr-kkkkKER-CHUNK!

The wall at the back end of the house shudders for a second, but then the center section starts to move before our eyes, pivoting like a revolving door and leaving two openings, each about three feet wide. As the doors come to a stop, lights turn on automatically, and we all stand in the center of the room, frozen to the marble tiles.

“Holy crap,” I say.

“That was amazing,” says Leigh Ann.

Becca is the first to make a move for the opening. “Let’s check it out!”

“Don’t touch anything,” Margaret warns.

“Yeah, Bec,” I say. “You break it, you buy it.”

“Look at this place,” says Dad, stepping inside. “It is immaculate. Temperature- and humidity-controlled. It must go back twenty-five or thirty feet in that direction, and there’s a passageway all the way around the basement. There must be four or five thousand bottles. Who
was
this guy?”

I glance at Margaret, who, from the look on her face, is making mental calculations. Five thousand bottles times ten dollars, times a hundred dollars … Her eyes
grow wide as those numbers start to get seriously, well, serious.

An antique wheeled cart, its sides painted with clusters of grapes, sits just inside the opening in the wall. On it are three wooden cases of wine—one each from Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Loire Valley—and tucked in between two of the cases, nearly out of sight, is a single manila envelope on which Mr. Dedmann has written: “For Garrison Applewood, in appreciation for his years of service.”

Shelley hands the envelope to Mr. Applewood, who immediately tears it open and removes a single sheet of stationery with a handwritten message and a small, sealed envelope. The suspense builds to an unbearable level as we watch him read the letter with no sign of emotion.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “What is it? You have to tell us!”

He smiles, holding up the envelope. “It’s true. He wrote a new will. This is it. It’s been signed and dated and properly witnessed, so it looks perfectly legal to me. Everything he owns, except for these three cases of wine, which are for me, goes to you, Shelley. He says that you will find a journal down here that explains everything in more detail, but you really are his great-granddaughter. At the end of the war, he believed his wife, Venus, and his son, also Kaspar, to have been killed in the bombing of Dresden. He only recently learned that they had
survived somehow and emigrated to Canada, thinking that he was dead.”

Shelley, sobbing, hugs Mr. Applewood. “Why didn’t he just tell me the truth?”

“Well, we can hope to find an answer to that question,” Mr. Applewood says, “but I wouldn’t count on it. I have a feeling he took a lot of secrets to the grave. Now, let’s have a look around down here, to see what he’s been hiding all these years.”

We all start to move cautiously around the cellar. Everyone except Dad, that is. He is, pardon the cliché, like a kid in the world’s greatest candy shop, dashing from stack to stack and running his hands through his hair in utter disbelief.

“Look at this!” he cries. “Two full cases of 1959 Haut-Brion! And one of the ’61. Here’s Bouscaut! And here’s Château Margaux—three cases of the ’66! And the Saint-Émilions—Figeac, and Cheval Blanc, and Pavie!”

“He’s just making up a bunch of French words, isn’t he?” says Becca.

Dad doesn’t even hear her; before my very eyes, he drops to his knees and makes the sign of the cross. “Sophie! Come here!
Regardez!
Château Petrus! There must be fifteen, no, twenty cases!
Impossible!
”

“Uh-huh. I’m guessing that’s a good one.” But he’s already moved on to the next stacks, shaking his head
and muttering. Now that I’ve gotten him into this cellar, I’m afraid that I’ll never get him out.

Meanwhile, Margaret has gone to the far wall of the cellar, at the back of the house. “Um, guys, come here!” she says. “But watch where you step.” She points at muddy footprints on the otherwise pristine tile floor. “Those are new.”

“Wh-what? How can they be new?” I ask. “Nobody has been in here for months.”

Raf kneels down to make a close inspection. “Hmm. She’s right. This is new. It’s still wet.”

My arms break out in goose bumps, and the skin at the back of my neck tingles.

Leigh Ann latches on to me. “B-but if they’re wet—”

“—it means they didn’t come in the way we did,” Dad says, finishing her thought.

“And look!” cries Margaret. “You can see, right here on the floor, where something was dragged. There were cases of wine stacked all along here. A lot of them, and they’re gone!”

Dad picks up one of the loose bottles from the rack before him, then walks completely around the stack before announcing, “These are all Burgundies: Pommard, Chambertin, Corton, Montrachet … Clos-de-Vougeot, Nuits-Saint-Georges … but nothing in cases.”

Margaret has her flashlight out, poking it into every crack in the wall and floor. “This is strange,” she says.
“There are two different sets of footprints here. And they all end right … here.” She stops in front of the racks that line the back wall, near the corner.

“There must be another door,” says Livvy.

Margaret runs her hands along the front of the rack. “I don’t see how there could … Hello! What have we here?”

“What is it?” Leigh Ann asks as we crowd around Margaret.

Margaret lifts a hand-printed card (Meursault 1999) that conceals an undecorated brass medallion with the same “keyhole” in the center as those commemorating the nine planets, Muses, and worthies.

“What are you going to do?” Shelley asks.

Mr. Applewood takes a step backward.

“Um, yeah, Margaret,” says Leigh Ann. “How do you know what’s on the other side? I mean, it could be … anything.”

“We didn’t know for sure what we’d find in here, either,” Margaret replies. “We were pretty sure, maybe, but not positive.”

“If you ask me, this whole operation has ‘alien invasion’ written all over it,” says Becca. “This opens a door that leads to their mother ship, which has been buried down here for centuries. I’ll bet this Dedmann guy was one of them.”

Livvy doesn’t know what to make of Becca, and whispers in my ear, “Is she serious?”

“To be honest, I’m never a hundred percent sure,” I say.

“He
was
one of them,” Margaret says to Becca. “He was a German spy during World War II, remember?”

Becca folds her arms across her chest. “Perfect cover for an alien.”

“Well, I’m going to open it,” says Margaret, inserting the key into the center of the medallion. She pauses, takes one last look at the faces surrounding her, and turns the key. This time, there’s no whirring or clicking or ker-chunking: the door swings open with barely a sound.

Nine anxious, curious people crane their necks to look down the muddy two-foot-wide tunnel that leads away from the wine cellar.

“Cool,” says Becca.

“Creepy,” says Leigh Ann.

“Shhh!” Margaret hisses. “Listen!”

Leaning in closer and closer, all I hear is the sound of my own nervous breathing … until … Yes! There it is—a long way off—a voice!

We all step back involuntarily; let’s face it, nobody was expecting that.

“Do you have any idea who that might be?” Dad asks me. “I have the feeling you haven’t told me everything.”

“Wellll, I have an idea, but—”

“It’s this guy, Marcus Klinger,” says Margaret. “It
has to be. His shop is right”—she points down the tunnel—“there. It’s on Eighty-First, just behind this house. He must have believed that we really found the will, and panicked. He knows he’s not going to get the house, so he might as well steal all the wine.”

“But if he knew about the tunnel all along, why wait until now to steal the wine?” Shelley asks. “He could have taken it months ago.”

Margaret’s head—I swear!—turns into a giant light-bulb as the truth hits her. “He didn’t know about the tunnel until Lindsay showed him those blueprints! Remember, Soph? We were hiding in the elevator and spying on them, and she told him about the plans.”

“And he asked her if he could take a closer look!” I say.

Dad holds up a hand to stop us. “Wait, wait, wait. What plans? Who are you talking about?”

“Um, yeah, Dad,” I start. “There’s actually a lot I didn’t tell you.”

“And there’s no time now,” says Margaret. “They’re coming!”

Leigh Ann’s eyes are big as platters. “Oh my gosh. What are we going to do? What if it’s not Klinger?”

Margaret softly closes the tunnel door. “Everyone hide! We need to see who it is, and then—”

“I’ll sneak around and shut the door behind them,” says Raf.

Dad gives me a what-did-you-get-me-into? look and
ducks behind a stack of wooden wine cases. “Romanée-Conti,” he sighs loudly. “If they start shooting, please, God, let them hit me and not the wine.”

“Sh-sh-shooting?” stammers Mr. Applewood. “Miss Gallivan, you didn’t say anything about … You d-don’t really think …?”

“No,” I say firmly. “We’ll be fine.”

I mean, we will, won’t we?

And so we wait, hunkered down behind thousand-dollar bottles of wine. Whoever is out there is getting closer, but I still can’t distinguish voices through the thick door.

“Sounds like they have a wagon,” Leigh Ann says. “Something’s squeaking.”

“Those are probably the GSRs,” says Becca.

“GSRs?” Shelley asks.

“Giant subterranean rodents,” Becca answers. “They’re all over Manhattan.”

“You can’t scare me with rat stories anymore,” whispers Leigh Ann. “Now that I got to know Humphrey, I realize that rats are only trying to survive, and take care of their families—just like everybody else in the world. And there’s no such thing as a GSR. You stole that from that movie with the princess and the giant and that you-killed-my-father-prepare-to-die guy.”

“His name is Inigo Montoya. And those were
ROUSs—rodents of unusual size,” I say. “Totally different creature. These are much bigger. And more dangerous.”

Margaret shushes us. “They’re right outside,” she whispers. “Stay down.”

“What is your plan?” Dad asks her.

Margaret smiles, shrugging. “I don’t know. I’m … improvising.”

Something bumps into the door, and a few seconds later it swings wide open. I can’t say that I’m shocked when Marcus Klinger—unshaven, filthy, a bit desperate-looking, and holding the walking stick—steps inside. I expected to see him.

“C’mon,” he growls. “We still have a long way to go. All this Burgundy has to be moved, and then the Bordeaux. If you want your share, you’re going to have to get a little dirty. Stay there! I’ll hand the cases to you, and you stack them on the wagon. It’s too hard getting it over this threshold. And be careful. If you break it, it comes out of your share.”