Murder Most Maine (14 page)

On the bottom floor, I trained the flashlight on the walls and floor one more time. And that’s when I saw the hatch.

It was right under
the bottom of the staircase, the crack in the boards outlining it almost invisible. It was obvious why it had escaped notice for so many years; now, though, a splintered area on one edge, farthest from the stairs, caught my attention. That must be where they had pried the door up. Holding the flashlight between my chin and my chest, I reached down and attempted to heave it up off the floor; on the third try, it came up with a creaking noise, exhaling a cold, earthy smell that made me think of basements.

Which made sense, because in a way, that’s what the tiny chamber was.

I trained the beam of the flashlight into the yawning gap, illuminating a small, irregular chamber that had evidently been hewn from the rock below the lighthouse. Even though I knew the skeleton had been removed, I was terrified of seeing something—a finger bone, or a pool of dried blood—to remind me of what had lain here for so long.

But the room’s rocky floor was empty, its occupant relocated to an antiseptic laboratory somewhere on the mainland.

Propping the door of the hatch up against the back of the stairs, I descended the wooden steps and stood on the dirty floor. The crude room was small, but deep, about six feet in diameter and eight feet high. I flashed the light around the rocky walls, looking for some indication of who might have hidden here, but nothing but bumpy dark granite stared back at me.

Had Harry been harboring a slave in this tiny room? I wondered. If he had, how long had the poor person been forced to stay here, in this little dark cell hewn into the rock? It must have been bitterly cold in winter; there was no place for a fire, and the granite would have been as frigid as the ice and snow outside.

A couple of shelves had been hewn from the rock, at around shoulder-level. If they had held anything, though, it had either disappeared long ago or been taken during the restoration. I ran my fingers over the rough shelves, which were more like alcoves, wondering what secrets they had held. Had the man who owned the skeleton been murdered in this little room? Or just hidden here, later? Had his death had something to do with Harry’s disappearance?

I stood in the room for a long moment, trying to imagine it as it had been when the work crew discovered the body. My fingers trailed over one of the rocky shelves; when I pulled them back, they were coated with grime. Wiping my hand on my jeans, I turned and climbed the stairs, turning halfway up to get one last look at the room. I flashed the beam around—and stopped.

Unless I was mistaken, something wooden was jammed into a crevice near the ceiling. I concentrated the light on it for a moment longer, thinking it must just be a chunk of wood wedged in to keep the floor supported.

But most wedges of wood don’t have keyholes.

My heart pounding, I hurried down the stairs and trained the beam on the corner of the ceiling where I’d seen the wood. From this vantage point, it was invisible. And, unfortunately, unreachable.

Should I tell Matilda it was here, and let her get it?

I could—in fact, I probably should. But I was far too curious. I jumped up a few times, trying to reach it, but it was too high, so I came up with another plan.

A stack of chairs had been in the keeper’s house, I remembered, covered with plastic. Would they be strong enough to hold my weight?

There was only one way to find out.

I hurried back up the steps and crossed the short distance to the keeper’s house, pulling my windbreaker tight around me to shut out the cold. The sky had darkened to black while I was in the lighthouse, and the white stars shone cold overhead, obscured occasionally by a tattered wisp of cloud. I pushed through the door to the pile of old furniture, feeling only slight qualms as I pushed aside the steamer trunk—which was interestingly heavy, making me wonder what was inside it—and grabbed what looked to be the sturdiest of the chairs. Which wasn’t saying much, unfortunately.

The wind buffeted me as I carried the rickety chair back to the lighthouse; once inside, I hauled it down the short flight of stairs, the flashlight clenched between my chin and my shoulder. Then I placed it as evenly as I could on the lumpy floor and climbed onto it gingerly, wincing at the loud creaks the old wood made from the weight. I transferred the flashlight to my left hand, and while the wind moaned overhead, reached out for the box with my free hand.

If the box hadn’t been quite so wedged into the rock, everything would have been fine. But my gentle efforts to dislodge it didn’t work, and a moment later, the chair protesting loudly below me, I was forced to set the flashlight on the shelf and grab the box with both hands, tugging hard.

The first two times, nothing happened.

The third time, however, the box came rocketing out of the wall. At exactly the same moment, the ancient chair gave way beneath me. The chair’s wooden leg splintered, sending me plummeting to the room’s rocky floor. An instant later, something exploded next to my head, glancing my temple.

I had had more head injuries since coming to this island than most professional football players experience in a career, I thought as I lay in the darkness, staring up at the beam of the flashlight, which lay out of reach on the high shelf.

I remained prostrate for a few minutes, trying to get rid of the dizzy feeling in my head before attempting to sit up. The room spun a bit as I finally levered myself upward, looking for the box.

The fall had broken the brittle wood, and the top of the box had popped free, releasing a sheaf of papers that had scattered on the floor. I bent to pick them up; they were handwritten, and both the ink and the paper appeared brownish. Then again, it could just have been the dim light. I gathered them together gently, trying not to damage the documents, and laid them into what was left of the base of the box, which was about eighteen inches long, a foot wide, and a couple of inches high. Without the flashlight in hand, it was too dark to read the archaic script, but I could make out dates; it appeared to be a log of some sort. I had gathered half of the papers, laying them carefully in the box and hoping I hadn’t gotten them terribly out of order, when I found the cover—a piece of rotted leather that had evidently housed all the pages. I groaned, realizing I’d inadvertently destroyed a historic book, and felt around on the floor to see if I’d missed anything else. Or inadvertently decimated anything else.

I was about to give up when my left hand encountered something rough and cold in one of the corners behind the stairs. I closed my fingers around it and then jerked them away, realizing what it was I had touched.

It was a manacle.

I reached out to touch it again, and realized it was still shackled to its twin.
Wait until Matilda hears about this!
I thought, lifting the heavy metal rings off of the rocky floor. Then it occurred to me that my method of recovering the information—breaking an antique chair, shattering an antique box, and then scattering the contents of a historic handwritten book all over a dirty floor—would be enough to have the local historian bar me from her circle of acquaintances for life. She’d done a good bit of archeological field work before taking up residence on the island, and had made it clear more than once that she was a wee bit compulsive when it came to handling artifacts.

Which I apparently was not. Even if it wasn’t my fault that the chair had broken and the box had gone winging across the little room.

I looked up at my now-unreachable flashlight. Should I leave the broken box and its contents here for the workers to find and report to Matilda—along with the flashlight and the remains of the chair? Or should I take everything back to the inn with me—and then hand it over to her the next day?

It was a tough call. If I left it here, Matilda couldn’t be mad at me for tampering with artifacts, but there was always the chance that someone might not bother to pass it on. If I took it with me, maybe I could tell her that I had just found it all lying around, and that I had no idea how the box got destroyed. Maybe in the construction, somehow …

A few minutes later, I was traipsing back to the keeper’s house in the dark, trying not to get spooked as I fumbled the second-sturdiest chair from the pile and hauled it back to the lighthouse. It held me long enough to get the flashlight and feel around to see if I’d left anything behind. There was a scrap of fabric tucked into the back of the shelf, balled up at one side and tied with a piece of rough twine. I stuffed it into my pocket and climbed down again. It took a few trips to return the chair to its home in the keeper’s house, along with what was left of its companion. Then I laid the manacles and the bit of fabric in the box, gathered the pieces together, and with the heavy box in one hand and the flashlight in the other, hoofed it to the chain-link fence. I was relieved to pull it closed behind me and step back into the twenty-first century.

___

My right arm felt like it was about to fall off by the time I made it back to the inn about a half hour later. Who needed to lift weights when you could cart artifacts across the island? I thought as I let myself into the kitchen and laid the broken wooden box on the table.

My nighttime visit to the lighthouse seemed far less spooky in the warm light and faintly spicy aroma of my familiar yellow kitchen, but as I opened the box, the musty odor of the underground room wafted out of it, sending chills up my spine once again.

The manacles were on the top of the box, made of iron, and rusted all over. I lifted them from the box carefully; they clanked open as I laid them on the table, trying to imagine whose wrists had once been imprisoned in them. Or ankles, I realized, examining the short chain between the bigger rings.

Next was the scrap of fabric I’d found tucked into the corner of the shelf. On closer inspection, it appeared to be a homemade doll, its head stuffed with some soft material, like cotton. The fabric was calico, its tiny rosebud pattern smudged with dirt and yellowed from handling or age—it was hard to tell which. A crude smiling mouth had been inked on the head, along with two black eyes. A child’s doll. A slave child’s only possession? Had the slave-catcher come to Cranberry Island to return a child to shackles?

I shivered, laying the little doll next to the manacles, where it smiled up at the lights, eyes staring blindly among the faded roses. Then I turned to the papers in the box.

As I had suspected, they did seem to be a log.

There was no name on the pages, but there were dates on each entry. I shuffled through the old papers, trying to find the earliest entries, which turned out to be in November of 1836. Each day was recorded, with a quick bit about the weather. I read through, feeling my excitement dim, because the references to weather went on for entry after entry. “High winds” were common, as was “rain” and “snow,” but after about sixty pages of meteorological observations, I started to wonder if there would be anything of interest. Then, in January of 1839, there was a different kind of entry.

“The M___ delivered two parcels from South Carolina today, to be held until the S___ returns for pick-up, Wednesday next. One sustained some damage during the voyage; I have endeavored to mend what I could. Have stored both in the cellar to await transport.”

Excitement coursing through me, I flipped the page and ran my finger down the page to Wednesday.

“The S___ picked up the parcels from South Carolina today, amid northeasterly winds and a storm. Shipped out for Halifax at 03:00.”

Three o’clock in the morning?

I flipped through several more pages. Every six weeks to two months, there was another reference to a shipment, always delivered by the M___, and always picked up at the dead of night by the S___. And all headed toward Nova Scotia. No mention of money passing hands; just references to parcels. A few of them seemed to be moved from the lighthouse—assuming that was the “cellar” referred to in the entry—to Hatley’s Cove to await transport. Could that be a reference to Smuggler’s Cove, which was hidden near the Gray Whale Inn and had been known as a prime spot for the transport of illegal goods? I’d been in there once before—it had a room-like cave deep inside it, including two ancient iron rings for boats to tie up at, so the story made sense. I’d always assumed the smuggled goods were rum, or sugar, or tobacco, or something. But could it have been people the smugglers were moving? I looked up the source of the “parcels.” They were mainly from South Carolina, but some came from Alabama, and there was one set of six from Mississippi.

Why would he—or she, or whoever had kept this record—have written all of this down? There was no reference to money, or payment, or the type of goods transported. But every parcel arrived and left in the wee hours of the morning, and every one came from a southern state. The “parcels” were recorded in batches ranging from one to as many as seven. Was it possible that seven people had huddled together in that cold dark basement under the lighthouse, waiting for a ship to come and take them to freedom?