She figured out the situation. Dirt and rock covered the barn floor, but the part of the floor nearer the door was made of wood.
She'd weakened the old floorboards when she drove over them, breaking them just enough so they'd give way under her weight. The Neon must have been parked on the solid dirt floor, so it wouldn't fall in.
Great. At least I won't get hit by a car. In a hole.
Nat put a hand out and felt the wall directly across from her. It was as if a hole had been dug in the earth, tall and skinny, but big enough for a person. She visualized it as being made by an index finger poked down into topsoil, as if to plant a seed. But she had to get out. She jumped up but couldn't reach that high. When she came down, her feet slid a little, but didn't touch dirt on the other side. Why?
She peered down at her feet, but it was too dark to see anything. It creeped her out. What was down there? A horror-movie image of a snake pit slithered into her mind. She tried to edge away but there was nowhere to go. Her back was literally to the wall. She jumped again but kept slipping when she landed. The floor of the hole was uneven. She couldn't see a thing. Then she remembered something. The key ring for the Neon had tons of stuff on it, the typical keychain of a teenage girl.
She reached in her coat pocket and pulled out the keys. The keyring held a pink plush heart, a small pink Swiss army knife, and a tiny pink penlight. Nat flicked the penlight on and aimed it at her feet. No snakes, just dirt. The penlight cast a faint, almost translucent, circle of light on the dirt wall opposite her, and she gasped. The wall on the other side of the hole didn't go all the way down, as she had assumed. It stopped at about thigh height, and the bottom half appeared to lead to another underground hole.
"Hello?" she said, but there was no echo. She crouched down as much as she could in the narrow hole and aimed the light inside the other hole. The light didn't reach far enough to reveal what was down were. Images of treasure chests full of gold doubloons and skeletons chained to walls popped into her head. She sat on her butt, then stuck her feet in the hole and aimed the light down her body. She could see a dirt bottom not far under her feet.
Nat let herself slip down like a kid on a muddy sliding board and tumbled into the bigger hole. She yelped, and dirt muffled the sound. She cast the light around the new hole. It was dirt on all six sides, rich brown earth veined with burnt-orange clay. Stones stuck out from the dirt. The ceiling was tall enough to stand up in, if you were as short as Nat, and like the walls, was reinforced by old wooden boards.
Could these boards break, too? If they do, will I be buried alive? And what about oxygen? I've grown fond of oxygen.
Nat banished the negative thoughts. She was standing in a man-made room of some kind. It seemed too elaborate for a root cellar. She cast the penlight on one of the boards in the back, then noticed some carvings. She made her way over and shone the light on the boards. Carved into it were the initials c.j., and underneath, t.j. She ran her fingers over them. They had been etched by a crude knife. She cast the light elsewhere on the wooden board. There were more initials: l.m., cm. Then a date: april 28, 1860.
"My God," Nat said aloud. She couldn't believe her eyes. 1860. She knew what it had to be, because she taught it every year. She must be seeing a stop on the Underground Railroad. A series of holes, hidden trap doors, and secret hiding places for slaves escaping from Maryland and points farther south. Some of the stops were homes with hiding places, but many more were in outbuildings, to make escape easier if the slavecatchers came. Chester County was dotted with historic houses that hid runaway slaves, houses that still existed today. Nat knew the houses by heart, taking a historian's delight in the old-fashioned names: Moses and Mary Pennock's house. Eusebius and Sarah Barnard's house. Mordecai and Esther Hayes's. Isaac and Thomazine Meredith.
Nat stood, marveling. This hole must have been one that no one had found yet. One that hadn't been discovered until now, perfectly concealed for almost a hundred years. The secret hiding place for so many poor, desperate souls. Nat had taught the History of Justice, and now she was inside it. She felt tears come to her eyes and blinked them away, running her fingertips over the boards. She wondered how many of these courageous people had made it north to freedom. How many had turned back. How many have been captured, beaten, or even killed.
This was sacred ground, and so were its boards, blanketed with initials and dates, which Nat read by penlight. l.b., Aug 1859, m., 1862, lu, 1861. Some of the slaves had written their names: January grandy. hannah Clemen. Some had numbers next to their names, which Nat guessed were their ages:, jed, 19. mary, 9. Many of the initials were no longer visible, but she could feel them with her fingertips. She remembered telling Angus about the Underground Railroad that day in the Beetle, on the way to the prison. She couldn't wait to tell him about the secret hole hidden under the floor.
Nat blinked. A secret hole hidden under the floor. People used it to escape to freedom. She flashed for the umpteenth time on Saunders's last words.
Tell my wife. It's under the floor.
She thought about it, as she had thought about it so many times before. But this time she looked at it in a different light. Saunders had said, "It's under the floor." When he'd said that, he'd been lying in the security room, the one without the videocamera. Maybe he hadn't meant that whatever "it" was was under the floor at his house. Nat had thought that only because the "tell my wife" part came first. But for a second, she set aside the "tell my wife" part. What if Saunders had meant that "it" was under the floor right where he lay-in the prison itself? And what would be under the floor at a prison?
A tunnel?
"Whoa," Nat said aloud, in the dark hole. It could be true. It wasn't crazy. Tunnels could help people escape. She was standing in one. But who would a tunnel in a prison be for? It only took a minute to come up with the answer.
Richard Williams.
Williams was the drug kingpin being held at the prison for almost a year. He'd want to escape before his trial, because with his charges, he'd go to prison for life. And he'd have the dough to get a tunnel built for him. He could have paid Graf to do it. Then Graf could have gotten his brother the contractor in on the scheme. It could easily have been disguised as part of the renovations. If Phoenix, or at least Jim Graf, had been digging at night, when his brother Joe Graf was on duty, nobody would have been the wiser. Especially if Machik were in on it, too.
Nat had an epiphany. The scam wasn't drugs. It was something far more lucrative, and far worse. It was letting a dangerous killer escape through a tunnel under the floor. How much would Williams pay to beat a federal rap? A couple million, maybe more? No wonder Machik got rid of the rugs in that security room so fast. The rugs had covered the mouth of the tunnel, and any inspection of them would have shown dirt on the underside. No wonder they had remodeled the room when Nat and Angus started asking questions. They had to keep hiding the tunnel. No wonder there had been orders for so many two-by-fours in the construction file. The two-by-fours had reinforced the length of the tunnel. It had taken them a year to dig, and they were about to put it to use-and get away with setting a ruthless murderer free.
Nat gasped as she realized the implications. Saunders was killed because he had discovered not a drug conspiracy, but an escape conspiracy. Upchurch was still the sacrificial lamb. Then Nat realized something else. If the murders of Saunders and Upchurch had been to conceal the escape, maybe the prison riot wasn't random at all-had been staged at one end of the prison as a way to distract everyone from the killings at the other end. A riot in the RHU would have been the perfect way to keep everybody occupied while Saunders and Upchurch were being murdered in the security office.