This was not a normal door. Anyone could tell that much.
But Ben needed a closer look, and Jill was in front of him again, blocking part of his view.
“Um, could we swap places for a second?”
“Yeah, Jill,” Robert said. “Move aside and let Indiana Pratt come to the rescue.”
Another wisecrack. Gerritt was pushing hard today, and it was very distracting. Ben was almost sure it was because of that business with Wally before school—he was going to have to find a way to bring that up . . .
“No problem,” said Jill, and Ben snapped back into the moment. She stepped aside and slipped past him on the narrow walkway.
Up close with his headlamp on full power, Ben confirmed what he’d thought: The door was covered with copper—several large, overlapping sheets. The metal had turned a mottled green. Oxidation—that’s what Mr. Collins would call it.
Similar to the wooden hatchway Robert had opened, this door also had an iron ring lying flat, set into its surface. Ben worked the ring out far enough to get both hands around it and pulled. . . . Nothing, no give at all.
And that’s when he saw the wire—a twisted loop of wire at the upper left-hand corner of the door frame.
“Hey, guys!” he called. “Remember the pictures I took of that little brass coffin lid last week? The edges of this door are sealed shut exactly the same way!”
He snapped four quick photos. The wire was embedded in pine pitch that had been pushed into the crack between the door and the granite blocks surrounding it. Putting his index finger through the twisted wire, he pulled. It ripped through the brittle resin all around the door frame, and dark chips flew off in all directions.
Ben dropped the wire, grabbed the ring on the door, and yanked at it again. There was a little movement this time, but just a fraction of an inch. He felt footsteps behind him, and then Robert’s light was on the door, too, scanning the edges.
“You’re pulling the wrong way, Pratt. The door doesn’t open out—or in either. It slides to the right. . . . See those scrape marks?”
Ben pulled sideways on the ring, and the door slid smoothly, gliding into a slot built into the wall. Then he squeezed to the left and said, “You figured it out, Gerritt—you should go in first.”
Robert grinned. “Yeah, that way I’m the one who gets an axe in the neck from the booby trap, right?”
Robert went ahead anyway. Ben was right behind him, and Jill followed them both. All three stood still, just inside the doorway, not saying a word, their headlamp beams darting around the space as they tried to take it all in.
The first thing Ben saw was a massive ship’s wheel—actually, a double wheel with a wide cylinder in between! It stood in the corner to the left of the doorway, held up by a stand that looked like it had been ripped right off the quarterdeck of a warship. And as he looked at that wooden stand, he noticed the beautiful red-and-blue oriental rug it rested on—the floor of the whole room was nearly covered with thick, rich carpets! The room itself was fairly large, probably twenty feet by thirty feet, and the low ceiling was held up by a dozen sturdy wooden posts.
Jill said, “Can you believe this place? It’s like a museum!”
Ben walked to a square table with raised edges that stood in the center of the room. “This is a chart table—and these maps? They’re probably the ones the captain actually used!”
He aimed his phone’s camera and took a quick picture of the map on top—it was Barclay Bay, and there on the shoreline of Edgeport, he saw that the captain’s building had been circled with black ink. Ben wanted to look at every single chart, but there were too many other things to see.
Walking to the back of the room, he found a round table with six chairs. There was a full set of sterling silver dining dishes, two candlesticks, plus six goblets and six sets of silverware, all laid out—every piece tarnished completely black, but heavy, and covered with rich engravings. It was like the captain was expecting to entertain visitors . . . and then it struck Ben.