Time Windows (13 page)

"No, we ate hours ago," Mr. Hooton told her. "Everyone is up early around here. This is just a snack to tide us over till lunch."

"We eat a lot," added Buddy, helping himself to another piece of coffee cake.

Mrs. Wainwright nodded approvingly. "With two healthy boys in the house, You've got to have a lot of food on hand." She smiled at Miranda. "You look like you could use a little fattening up yourself, dear."

"Here, Skinny," said Buddy, passing her another piece of coffee cake.

"Slender," corrected Dan. Miranda looked up, startled, to find him smiling at her. His smile transformed his whole face. Was he a jerk or wasn't he? She felt confused and changed the subject.

"I've been reading your book," she told Mrs. Wainwright. "I found it in the library. It's really interesting."

"Thank you! I'm planning to write a history of the Hooton family next." She sipped her coffee. "In between music students."

"Oh, yes! I forgot you were a Hooton, too."

"Bite your tongue," chided Dan. "Once a Hooton, always a Hooton."

"Every Hooton for the last two hundred years has lived in this house for some time at least," said Mrs. Wainwright. "Any story of the family would also be a story of the house. My great-grandfather and grandfather and father were all born right upstairs, just as I was myself."

"And you, too—right, Dad?" asked Buddy.

"Well, no. I was born in the Garnet Hospital," he admitted. "Times change."

"Tell us how it was in the old days, Aunt El." Buddy twinkled at her across the table. "When you were a girl."

"Old days!" Mrs. Wainwright pursed her lips. "I'm sure when we were busy living them we never thought they'd come to be called the old days! You just wait, Buddy. Wait till you're an old man and your grandchildren ask you about the old days when you sat gobbling coffee cake during a storm."

Buddy considered this. "But this is
now,
" he said. "
Now
can't be called the old days!"

His mother reached over and ruffled his hair. "Oh, Buddy, eight years old is too young to start thinking about the vagaries of time."

Mrs. Wainwright spread jam on a thick slice of bread. "Nonsense. He lives in a museum. Everything is a matter of time. The present becomes both past and future—depending which way you look at it."

"Sure," said Dan. "We can say 'tomorrow is Monday,' but then tomorrow we'll say '
today
is Monday,' and then on Tuesday we'll say,'
yesterday
was Monday,' so Monday exists in the past, present,
and
future! It depends on which point of view you take."

Miranda thought about her dollhouse. "But do you think it's possible for times to exist at the same time? I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but do you think it would be possible for times to sort of overlap?"

"Sounds like science fiction to me," said Dan.

"But the idea is fascinating," said Mrs. Hooton. "I've always wished that time machines existed—I'd love to travel back in time."

"I'd go back to see the cowboys," said Buddy.

"I think I'd go some place really interesting," mused Mrs. Wainwright. "Or should I say some
time
really interesting? Medieval England!"

"What about you, Mandy?" asked Mr. Hooton. "Where would you go?"

"Oh, I don't know. I was wondering more if it would be possible to
see
into other times—not actually travel back to them and walk around, but just be able to
watch.
"

"Like a fly on the wall, huh?" asked Dan. "You're there and nobody knows it. Peeping Mandy!"

"Something like that," replied Miranda, refusing to laugh with him. She hesitated. "Like looking through a window into another time, for example."

Mr. Hooton nodded. "But how would it work? Would you be watching time unfold as it happens—or would you just be watching it as if it were a film, similar to television? Would the past be broadcast live or pre-recorded?"

"An interesting question, Ed," agreed Mrs. Wainwright. "And living here in Garnet gives one a special feel for the past, I think. United States history begins in this area."

"Think of the history this house alone has seen!" marveled Mrs. Hooton. "The Revolutionary War, the Civil War ... In fact, caring about time is really what led us to turn this place into a museum. Right, Ed? Caring about the past enough to spend the present guarding it for the future."

"A tough job!" cried Mr. Hooton, rather dramatically. "But somebody's got to do it!"

They all laughed. Buddy grabbed the last piece of coffee cake.

"Our house was part of the Underground Railroad," Dan told Miranda. "Did you know that? It was probably the most important job this old house ever had."

"You mean
trains
came through our house?" asked Buddy, quite confused. "But the train station isn't even close by!"

"No," Dan explained through their laughter. "The Underground Railroad was just a name for the chain of families who helped slaves escape from the Southern states to the North and Canada. The slaves had to have somewhere safe to hide until they could get to freedom."

"We learned about that in school last year," said Miranda. "It was very dangerous for the runaways, but also for the people who helped them escape, because that was against the law."

"Dan and Buddy will have to show you the secret room," said Mrs. Wainwright. "When my brothers and I were little we used to play there. One of us played the runaway slave, and the others were the slave-catcher and the person hiding the slave." She grimaced. "I was the youngest and had to be the slave most of the time. It was terrible."

"But you can bet it was more terrible actually
being
a slave," said Mr. Hooton.

"Of course, Ed! But you know what I mean. Didn't you play in the room when you were a boy? You know it was much more fun to be the slave-catcher asking questions or the owner of the house making up lies to keep the slave safe, than to hide in the dark behind the false wall."

"False wall!" cried Miranda. "This I've got to see."

"It's wild," Dan said. "The whole back wall under the basement stairs slides away—but you'd never know it. It's almost impossible to detect cracks in the stone." With his face flushed and animated, he no longer looked the slightest bit dour. "The Hootons who lived here then—I mean in the years before the Civil War—built the secret space themselves. They couldn't even trust outside carpenters to come in."

"As far as we know, the Galworthy and Hooton men did all the work themselves," added his mother.

"Galworthy?" exclaimed Miranda. "Does that mean our house might have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, too?"

"Indeed it was!" said Mrs. Wainwright. She sat back in her chair abruptly. "Don't tell me you haven't found the secret room yet!"

Miranda actually dropped her fork. Everyone laughed at her dramatic response, Mrs. Wainwright loudest of all.

"My goodness!" She adjusted one of her colorful scarves. "How awful to be living in a house with a secret hiding place and not even know it."

"But where is it?" asked Miranda.

"I don't know—I've never seen it," said Mrs. Wainwright. "But I do know the story behind it."

Miranda sat back in her chair and stared across the table expectantly. She could see the branches of trees outside the window slashing back and forth in the wind and could hear the muted gush of rain pouring from the gutters. She waited for Mrs. Wainwright's story with a thrill of excitement. These new revelations about her house could only add to the magic it held for her already.

"Come on, Aunt El," Buddy urged. "It's story time!"

"She wants us to beg her," teased Dan. "Please tell? Pretty please?"

"You two just hush," replied the old woman. "Let me make sure I've got the facts straight."

Mr. Hooton poured her another cup of coffee. "Here, this will get the old story-telling juices flowing."

She sipped her coffee and patted her lips neatly with a napkin. Miranda felt ready to burst with waiting. Mrs. Wainwright finally cleared her throat.

"If I recall correctly," she began, "the hiding space in your house, Miranda dear, was built even before ours here. But there was a big problem with the Galworthys' secret room—one nobody found out about until the first family of slaves to hide there nearly suffocated after a few hours in the small space. The hiding place was airtight!"

"Were the people all right?" Miranda asked.

"They were unconscious, I believe. But the Galworthys were able to revive them. The fugitives stayed at the house a week to recuperate, and then the Galworthys helped them move on. I remember hearing that while they waited, the father of the escaping family, who was a carpenter, built a special dollhouse for the Galworthy children. He worked on it day and night—maybe to keep himself from worrying about the journey that lay ahead for him and his family. It was supposed to be a miniature of the big house—in every detail except for the hidden room."

She paused and sipped her coffee, looking around the table at her rapt audience. "Perhaps leaving out the secret room was his message to all the children who would play with the house—that houses shouldn't have to have secret rooms. That people shouldn't have to be on the run."

It was on the tip of Miranda's tongue to tell them she had found the dollhouse, but the same odd sense that she mustn't tell her parents about the magic kept her silent now.

"How did they fix the secret room?" she asked instead. "I mean so they could use it again. Did they just poke some airholes in it, or something?"

"No, they decided not to use the room again. They were afraid that any modifications that would make the room safe would also make it easier to detect."

"What about a hidden vent with a fan system or something?" asked Dan.

"We're talking mid-nineteenth century," his father reminded him.

"In any case," continued Mrs. Wainwright, "the Hootons were building their own hiding place, and by the time more slaves came along the Underground network, the room under the stairs here was ready."

"And we Hootons know how to build things right!" cried Buddy.

"Well," laughed Mrs. Wainwright, "
those
Hootons surely did. The Galworthy hiding place was never used as a stop on the Railroad again, as far as I know."

Miranda felt a surge of excitement start at her toes and move up through her whole body. She was tingling with the desire to jump up and run home to look for that airtight room.

"Want to see our secret hiding place?" Buddy asked, and she had to will herself to calm down.

"Sure," she said. "But then I'd better be getting home."

Dan squinted at her in such a way that she knew he was aware of her eagerness to be off. Well, so what?

Buddy scraped back his chair. "Come on! The tour starts here!"

"I'll come, too," said Dan, and he and Miranda followed Buddy.

They hurried through a large kitchen, into a narrow pantry, out again into a laundry room, where an ironing board piled high with rumpled shirts nearly capsized as they passed. Around a few more corners—then they stood before a low wooden door.

"The old cellar," Buddy announced.

"How many cellars do you have?"

"Two," answered Dan. "This old one, which isn't used anymore except when we take museum tours down to see the hiding place. And then there's one on the other side of the house—it's more a proper basement. That's where we keep all our junk."

Buddy led the way down the steep flight of narrow stairs. Dan followed, and Miranda came last. "Watch your head at the bottom," Dan turned to caution her. "The ceiling slopes low."

The cellar was cold and empty. The only light came from a ventilation slit up high by the ceiling, covered with a grate. It led directly outside. "This is where they stored meat and other food that had to stay cold," said Dan. "There were no lights down here—but darkness was to the slaves' advantage. It made it harder to see the cracks around the hidden door."

"Where
is
the door?" Miranda asked.

Buddy shrieked with laughter. "You're looking right at it!"

"But
where?
" She peered at the stone wall in front of her and then back at the boys.

"You'd make a terrible slave-catcher," said Dan.

"I take that as a compliment," she retorted.

"I meant it as one!" His hand brushed her shoulder. "Here, look."

He trailed one finger along the wall. As far as she could make out there was no crack, no indentation or marking to suggest a door. And yet under Dan's hand, an entire section of the wall slid sideways and a hole appeared, leading into the hidden chamber.

"That's incredible!" The tingle of excitement shot upwards again.

Buddy grabbed her hand. "Come on, I'll show you!"

Dan stood back and allowed Buddy and Miranda to enter the room. It was darker than any darkness Miranda had ever known. She couldn't see her hand in front of her eyes. "I can't believe this," she cried, groping with one arm for the walls. "It's pitch black!"

Dan shone a flashlight in from the entrance. "Let's shed a little light on the subject."

Now Miranda could see that the room was only about five feet square and furnished with two long wooden benches, a pile of gray woolen blankets, an earthenware jug, and a tin pail. The floor and walls were made of stone, and the cold was bone-chilling.

"Not a place you'd want to hang out in for long," Dan said lightly. "But it did its job well enough." He beamed the light onto the jug. "Mom set this stuff up in here to show how it looked back then. That jug was for drinking water. The pail was their toilet."

"When you gotta go, you gotta go," said Buddy.

"Yeah. They might have had to hide for hours at a time."

"Can you imagine how it must have been for those poor people, having to hide here?" asked Miranda, backing out of the cold little room. "God!" She had a glimmer of insight into the fascination history held for her father, whose interest in the past had always seemed inexplicable. She'd felt, when she thought about it at all, that the past had never been as alive as the present. Yet what she saw through the dollhouse was vivid, and this hiding place with its pile of blankets and jug for water was so real that for a moment time seemed to invert itself, and she thought for a second she heard the thump of a slave-catcher's boots on the narrow cellar steps.