Come with me,” Mrs. Chandler said.
She rose and I followed her through the kitchen and finally through a thick door about the size of a drawbridge. Mrs. Chandler turned the big metal knob with both hands, put her shoulder to the door, and swung it open.
When Mrs. Chandler flicked on a weak overhead light, dust swirled and the air tasted like a dirt sandwich. The room was small and seemed smaller in that it was tucked tight with a bulky desk that looked to have been built about the time Calvin Coolidge was in office. There were stacks of papers and books resting on it. A rolling chair with a hole-pocked leather seat was pushed up in the leg well. More books and files were mounded precariously on shelves that ran five high all around the redbrick walls. There was a reel-to-reel machine on a smaller desk that looked ready to fall over and burst into a thousand pieces. The little desk and recorder wore a coat of dust like an old wool blanket.
She said, “I knew they weren’t giving me money for nothing, so there had to be a reason they wanted me on their side. Bert spent a lot of time in his office downtown, and when he was home, when he wasn’t kicking my ass and raping me, he was in here with the door locked. Now and again I could hear him playing a reel-to-reel, but the door was far too thick for anything to be understood outside of this room.
“I got to thinking if he was hiding something—and he was always bringing in papers—it would be here. But then again, if they came and looked, which I suspicioned they did, they would have found this place, and anything here they could have taken easily. They kept paying me, so I felt if there was something, they hadn’t found it.
“Then I remembered the Moonshine Castle. It was supposed to have existed in this house. I looked everywhere for it, specifically in this room, which is what made the most sense to me. One day I’m sitting at the desk here, drinking coffee, trying to figure where the goods might be, maybe in storage somewhere, or perhaps Bert was running a bluff all along, and I heard a squeak, looked down, saw a mouse at my feet. I have this thing about mice and rats. One of them could run me a mile and make me jump over hurdles. I lifted my feet quick and the wheeled chair rolled out from under me and flipped over and tossed me on the floor. Mouse ran right past me and was gone.
“So I’m thinking I’ll poison that little disease-carrying son of a bitch, and I put the stuff out in this room, and about a week later I smell something like an elephant has died under the house. The odor goes all through the place, but in here, that’s where it stank the most.
“I determined it was in the wall. I took a hammer to it, and behind the drywall I found bricks. That’s why the wall is all bricks now. I took out all the drywall eventually, working a bit at a time. But while I’m taking it out, looking for that dead mouse, behind the desk there, close to the floor—do you see that little iron loop? You’ll have to look under the desk.”
I looked. The loop was sticking out of the wall close to the floor and a four-foot-long patch of wainscoting.
“Help me slide the desk aside,” she said.
We moved it.
“Now,” she said, “go pull the loop, then lift.”
I pulled. I heard a clicking sound like a big cricket sawing his legs, and then I lifted. The wainscoting came out of the wall a few inches, and now the floor, right in line with floorboard cracks, lifted. It was a trapdoor. I pushed it back. The gap was about three feet wide all around.
“Fit right in, didn’t it?” she said.
I looked down into the dark gap and could see some wooden stairs, and then I couldn’t see much of anything.
“We’ll need a flashlight,” she said. Mrs. Chandler took one from the desk drawer and, with the beam leading her, went down the steps, and I followed.
I could quickly tell in the scanning beam of the flashlight that it was much larger than the upstairs. The room ran most of the length and width of the house. It was stuffy, as there was no cooling from the house unit.
There was a long bar, and on it were metal and plastic see-through containers with files and reels of tape in them. Shelves behind it were also stacked with files and loose papers. There was a long table and a few chairs in the room. Beyond that, there was very little.
“There’s a light on that wall,” she said. “There’s a wire that comes out of it, and it’s a little threadbare, so I wouldn’t touch it. Just give the switch a quick flick. First time I turned it on, I managed to touch the wire instead of the switch and got lit up well enough I damn near sucked my panties up through my asshole. I could taste them in my mouth. Pardon my language, but I’m dying of cancer, so what the fuck.”
She stepped back from the switch she had set the light on, which didn’t encourage me.
I flipped the switch with a deft and swift touch. The room lit up, and not in fire, as I’d feared, but in a golden light that came from rows of raw bulbs fitted in bare ceiling fixtures.
“Had to buy new bulbs to get some light on the subject, but this room, or something like it, is what they were looking for. I know. I looked through it.”
“When did you find this?”
“Years ago. It’s why I believe they haven’t had me have an accident of some kind. They think Bert had the goods, and he did, and they fear something happens to me, the records will end up being released to the world. Everything he thought mattered, he copied, boiled down to the essence—he was good at that—and stashed it here. Over time, I’ve read a lot of this stuff, listened to some of those reels, the hidden recordings of conversations Bert had in his office. No doubt he had enough to have them by the wing-wangs. I liked that monthly check, so I didn’t do anything about it. Just like they hoped for. Well, I didn’t do anything directly. I didn’t have the courage for that. But I did put a kind of message out in a bottle once, telling some of it, hoping someone else would come forward that knew something so I wouldn’t put my tit in the wringer, but they didn’t. I was trying to feel bold and at the same time keep my payment and my safety. But my message didn’t do much. Now and again the bottle pops up and someone reads the message, but you’re the first to make something of it, you and Christine.”
I smiled. “You’re Natural Wilson.”
“I am,” she said.