The second floor of the Granger mansion was much the same as the first. The wallpaper was just as garish. Other than that, the walls looked ordinary, and Abby couldn’t imagine them folding back to form a ballroom. Either that was a figment of Miss Granger’s imagination, or someone had renovated the walls. Not wanting to take advantage of Miss Granger’s hospitality, they only peeked in the rooms. The six bedrooms were filled to capacity with the same dark, over-sized, and over-ornamented furniture.
“Let’s just sit here in the hall to time-surf,” Abby said.
“The sheriff took Ned to the third floor,” John said. “Only I don’t see any stairs.”
“They must be in one of the bedrooms,” Kate said.
“They wouldn’t put the staircase in a bedroom,” Ryan said. “It would be in the hall. Obviously.” He walked down to the far end of the hall and entered the bathroom. “But if the bathroom was added later—since obviously they didn’t have indoor plumbing in 1834—then maybe…”
Abby and the others crowded together at the door to look in. Like everything else, the bathroom was oversized. It was paneled in boxcar siding that at one time had probably been painted white but was now yellowed with age. Just inside on the left was a small door of the same material set flush with the wall. A padlock dangled, unlocked, from a bracket high on the door.
Ryan removed it and opened the door, smiling smugly. “And there you are.”
Inside was a dark, narrow staircase, not nearly as grand as the main one to the second floor. John pulled out his flashlight and aimed it up the stairwell. A thick layer of dust covered the steps, indicating no one had swept them for a very long time. Footprints in the dust meant someone had been using them recently.
John started up the stairs. They creaked loudly, but Kate followed gamely after him. Ryan politely offered Abby the chance to go next, but she waved him on.
The third floor was one open room, a garret really. Although there was plenty of daylight left outside, the room was dim because the windows in the gables of the roof were boarded up.
Even so, they provided enough light to see what the third floor held. Ryan cursed and then Abby saw why.
Twelve sets of chains with manacles were set into the walls at equal distances. And chains hung also from the three support posts in the center of the room. Abby went to the one nearest her and knelt. At the end of the chain was a rusty neck collar resting on the floor.
“What is this place?” Kate asked, her voice hollow and strained.
John grimaced and his nostrils flared as if he had picked up a disgusting smell. “Ned Greenfield’s new home.” He opened his laptop and launched Beautiful Houses.
The lantern flickered over the walls and low ceiling. A chain hung from a post in the center of the room. “Bring him closer,” Granger said.
The sheriff and his men lay Ned beside the post and Granger pulled the chain up until he found the wide collar at the end of it. He knelt beside the boy and lifted his head to slip the collar in place. When he turned the key the lock clicked loudly.
Ned’s eyes opened. “Master Granger?”
“You’ll be all right, boy. I’ll take care of you.” Granger drew up Ned’s shirtsleeve and squeezed his bicep. “Just look at all that muscle. I’ve been watching you grow, boy.” He stood and looked proudly down at him. “Just look how big he is, Dobbs. Big all over, I’ll just bet.”
The men snickered and slapped their knees. “You fools go on down,” Granger said. “We’ve got to let Ned rest up.”
“Nelson? Where’s Nelson, Master Granger? Is he hanged?”
“Why in Hades would I waste a good man? I’ll put him to work at Half Moon. Soon as he’s healed up.”
Ned groaned and put his hands up to cover his face.
“Didn’t you hear me, boy? He’s not hanged.” Granger’s face and teeth were yellow in the lantern light. “But I daresay you’ll find your new job more…pleasurable than he does his.”
Master Granger moved away and the door closed. The key grated in the lock and the footsteps grew soft and were gone.
Ned wept until he had no more tears. When he opened his eyes, the moon shone in from a window high on the wall. Even that soft light hurt his eyes, so he closed them again. His head still felt like an axe was buried in it, but even so, he could think now.
No sense denying he was scared. But mostly, he decided, he was surprised he wasn’t hanging from a tree, swaying in the wind. Unless they’d lynched him and he was too stubborn to know he was dead. He reached up to feel for rope burns and found instead a metal collar. Yes, he remembered. Master Granger had put it on him.
A whispered voice came to her, and for a moment Abby was confused about where she was—or rather when she was.
“Abby? John? It’s me, Brother Greenfield. I’m coming up. I don’t mean to startle you.”
It was much darker, most of the light gone from the windows. Only the glow from the computer showed Abby where everyone was. Then she saw Brother Greenfield as he reached the third floor. Patty Ann came in behind him.
“Hello.” John paused the action and shown his flashlight at the feet of the newcomers.
“Miss Granger went on to bed. I think she forgot y’all were here. So I called Brother Greenfield….”
Matching expressions of horror played over Patty Ann and Brother Greenfield’s faces the moment they spotted the chains.
“There have been tales that Granger kept his kidnapped victims on the third floor,” Brother Greenfield said. “I had no idea the evidence of it would still be here.”
“So this wasn’t part of the Underground Railroad, then,” Patty Ann said.
“No, honey,” Brother Greenfield said. “I think that rumor got started because it made for better PR around town. In the black community, the story is that John Granger was part of a network that kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery in the South.”
“A Reverse Underground Railroad,” John said.
“She has to know this is here,” Patty Ann said. “That’s why she’s been so set on me not cleanin’ up here.”
“She knows,” Brother Greenfield said. “I think it’s part of what’s got her so tied up in knots.”
Ryan looked at his watch again. “Well, let’s get back to time-surfing.”
“We were watching your Ned Greenfield,” Kate said. “It was awful. Granger had him chained to that post. Are you sure you want to watch this? If you want, we could tell you what we find out.”
“Oh, honey, I was just thinking the same thing about y’all. I hate for you to see what went on up in this room. But as distasteful as it will be, I want to know what happened to Ned. It would set Uncle Henry’s mind to rest.”
“Are you sure?” John asked.
“Go ahead.”
Ned stretched out his arms and legs. They moved sure enough, but hurt like demons were gnawing on them. His shirt was torn to pieces from the rough ground he’d been dragged over. He ran his hand over his chest and belly and found wounds there, but at least the blood was sticky and not running.
Nelson! He gasped and fire wrapped around his ribs, which made him gasp all over again. Then he remembered Master Granger said he wasn’t dead. Said he put him to work at Half Moon. Ned groaned. He might as well have said Nelson was dead.
He had walked past Half Moon many times. The salt slaves lived in even rougher huts than Master Granger’s field workers. Was Nelson bleeding in one all alone?
He’d seen them working and knew there were lots of ways to die making salt. He’d heard about a man being crushed by a wagon loaded with salt barrels that got away from them. Another man was hit by a flying axe-head as he cut down trees to keep the furnaces fed. Another was burned when a boiling saltwater kettle tipped over on him. They had heard his screams out in the fields as they chopped weeds in the corn. They said it took him nearly a week to die.
The slave graveyard was down that way. And plenty of times when he walked past it, there was a fresh-dug grave with a fresh-carved wooden marker. It had to be easy to carve the words in the wood. But there weren’t near as many of them on the slave markers as there were on the granite ones in the Granger family cemetery. They put the slaves’ names on the markers, surely. But did they put how they died on them? Did they say where they came from? Who their families were?
Oh, Nelson!
Mama had picked the name Greenfield for them because Master John promised her that her children would work the fields and not ever make salt. Master loved Mama’s cooking that much. That other thought tried to wedge its way in, but Ned wouldn’t let it get a hold in his head. It was Mama’s cooking that Master liked.
Oh, Mama!
Pain streaked through Ned’s chest, and he put his hands to his heart to keep it from ripping in two. Pap and Nelson and Nancy Jane and Maybelle, and Baby Lizzie. Where were they this lonesome night? How would he ever find them now he was chained to a post like a dog? At least Mama wasn’t there to see it. And that her other boy was working the salt after all.
Metal scraped against metal, and he knew that someone was working the lock in the door. Lantern light streamed into the darkness and he covered his eyes. He tried to sit up, but an explosion of pain in his head put him right back down on the floor. The door was relocked and he heard a soft shuffle of footsteps coming toward him.
“I’m here to tend you,” a female voice said. She set the lantern by him, and he turned his face away when the light threatened to burn out his eyeballs. Mercifully she moved it away and he turned back. She was not as young as her voice had sounded. She was blacker than he was and, except for her calico head covering, melted into the darkness. She looked ten kinds of sad, but her face was set like she was determined to get a bad thing over and done with.
He heard water trickling and then he saw that she had set a bucket of water next to him. She wrung a rag out and wiped his face with it. The warmth of it was soothing and he tried not to flinch.
“Who you be, ma’am?”
“I don’t be no ma’am, that’s sure. I be Master John’s house gal Lil.” Water from the rag ran down his neck behind the iron collar, and he wondered if it would rust away given enough time. She opened the shreds of his shirt and began dabbing at the wounds on his chest. He tried to pull his shirt back. His mother was the only woman that had ever touched him and that had been years ago.
“You just lie still. Master John say to clean you up. He say to tell you…he say to show you what your new job be.”
“I’m not going to Half Moon then?”
“No, you goin’ stay right here. He say if you be nice he take off this thing.” She thumped her finger against the iron collar. “You’d like that right enough, I ’spect.”
“Yes, ma’am—I mean yes.”
“Master John, he don’t got enough mens to make the salt. He say he ain’t to get no more from Kentucky, not Missouri neither. Master John, he got gals though. He tell them gals if they make fifteen babies they can go north.” She held up her ten fingers. “That’s this many.” She closed her left hand, leaving her right fingers extended. “And this many.” She put the rag back in the bucket and then took up her lantern and aimed its light around the room.
Ned rolled onto his side and followed the lantern’s light with his half-shut eyes. A dozen chains hung from the walls. Near each was a narrow sleeping pallet and a lidded pot.
“Master John, he pick the strongest gals and bring them here soon as they ready.” Her voice was as rusty as a nail in the rain. She wiped at her eyes and stood there looking down at him. “Master John, he say I got to show you how.”
As her meaning sunk into his skull at last, he pulled himself to his feet, his head near cracking open, and backed away from her. “Why you talkin’ that way, Lil? I’m the one with a broken head, not you.”
She followed him until he reached the end of the chain. His eyes went strange again and he felt himself starting to fall, but she took his arm and eased him back to the floor.