Beautiful Chaos (32 page)

But the overwhelming brown of everything and the buzzing of ten thousand lubbers reminded me it wasn’t.

“I can almost smell the pie from here,” Liv said, looking toward my house longingly.

I glanced at the open window. “Amma hasn’t made a pie in a while, but you can probably smell her pecan fried chicken.”

Liv groaned. “You’ve no idea what it’s like living in the
Tunnels, especially when Kitchen is out of sorts. I’ve been living on my stash of HobNobs for weeks now. If I don’t get another package soon, I’m doomed.”

“You know, there is a little thing called the Stop & Steal around here,” I said.

“I know. There’s also a little thing called Amma’s homemade fried chicken.”

I knew where this conversation was heading all along and was halfway to the curb by the time she said it. “Come on. I bet you ten bucks she made biscuits, too.”

“You had me at ‘fried.’ ”

Amma gave Liv all the thighs, so I knew she was still feeling sorry for Liv after last summer. Luckily, the Sisters were asleep. I didn’t feel like answering questions about why there was a girl at my house who wasn’t Lena.

Liv stuffed her face faster than Link in his prime. By the time I was on my third piece, she was on her second plateful.

“This is the second-best piece of fried chicken I’ve ever tasted in my life.” Liv was actually licking her fingers.

“Second best?” I was the one who said it, but I saw Amma’s face when I did. Because by Gatlin standards, those two words alone were blasphemy. “What’s better?”

“The piece I’m about to have. And possibly the piece after that.” She slid her empty plate across the table.

I could see Amma smiling to herself as she added more Wesson oil to her five-gallon pot. “Wait till you taste a batch right outta the fryer. Can’t say you’ve tried that, have you, Olivia?”

“No, ma’am. But I also haven’t had any homemade food since the Seventeenth Moon.” There it was again. The familiar
cloud settled back over the kitchen, and I pushed my plate away. The extra-crispy crust was choking me.

Amma dried the One-Eyed Menace with a dishrag. “Ethan Lawson Wate. You go get our friend some a my best preserves. Back a the panty. Top shelf.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Amma called after me before I made it to the hall. “And none a that pickled watermelon rind. I’m savin’ that for Wesley’s mamma. It turned out sour this year.”

The basement door was across from Amma’s room. The wooden stairs were scarred with black marks, like a burnt marshmallow, from the time me and Link put a hot pot on the stairs when we were trying to make Rice Krispies Treats on our own. We almost burned a hole in one step, and Amma gave me stinkeye for days. I made sure to step on the mark every time I went down those stairs.

Going down into a basement in Gatlin wasn’t all that different from going through a Caster Doorwell. Our basement wasn’t the Tunnels, but I’d always thought of it as some kind of mysterious underworld. Under beds and in basements—that’s where all the best secrets were kept in our town. The treasure might be stacks of old magazines in the furnace room, or a week’s worth of icebox cookies from Amma’s industrial freezer. Either way, you were going back up with an armload or a stomach full of something.

At the bottom of the stairs was a doorway framed in two-by-fours. No door, just a string hanging on the other side of the doorframe. I yanked the string as I had a thousand times before, and there was Amma’s prized collection. Every house around here had a pantry, and this was one of the finest pantries in three counties. Amma’s mason jars held everything from pickled watermelon rinds and the skinniest green beans to the
roundest onions and the most perfectly green tomatoes. Not to mention the pie fillings and preserves—peach, plum, rhubarb, apple, cherry. The rows stretched back so far your teeth started to ache just from looking at them.

I ran my hand along the top shelf, where Amma kept all her prizewinners, the secret recipes and jars she saved for company. Everything in here was rationed, as if we were in the army and these jars were filled with penicillin or ammunition—or maybe land mines, because that’s how carefully you had to hold them.

“It’s quite a sight.” Liv was standing in the doorway behind me.

“I’m surprised Amma let you down here. This is her secret stash.”

She picked up a jar, holding it in front of her. “It’s so shiny.”

“You want your jelly to sparkle and your fruit not to float. You want your pickles cut to the same size, your carrots nice and round, your pack even.”

“My what?”

“How it goes in the jar, see?”

“Of course.” Liv smiled. “How would Amma feel if she knew you were sharing the secrets of her kitchen?”

If anyone knew them, it was me. I’d been by Amma’s side in the kitchen longer than I could remember, burning my hands on everything I wasn’t supposed to touch, sneaking rocks and twigs and all kinds of things into unsuspecting pans of preserves. “You want the liquid to cover the top of whatever’s inside.”

“Are bubbles good or bad?”

I laughed. “You’ll never see a bubble in one of Amma’s jars.”

She pointed to the bottom shelf. There was a jar so full of bubbles you’d think the bubbles themselves were what Amma was trying to bottle, instead of the cherries. I knelt down in
front of the shelf and pulled it out. It was an old mason jar covered in cobwebs. I had never noticed it before.

“That can’t be Amma’s.” I rotated the jar in my hand.
FROM THE KITCHEN OF PRUDENCE STATHAM.
I shook my head. “It’s my Aunt Prue’s. She must have been crazier than I thought.” Nobody ever gave Amma anything that came out of another kitchen. Not if they knew what was good for them.

As I slid the jar back in place, I noticed a dirty loop of rope hanging back in the shadow of the bottom shelf.

“Hold on. What’s that?” I pulled on the rope, and the shelves made a groaning sound, like they were about to fall over. I felt around with my hand until I found the place where the rope met the wall. I pulled again, and the wood began to give way. “There’s something back here.”

“Ethan, be careful.”

The shelves swung forward slowly, revealing a second space. Behind the pantry was a secret room, with crude brick walls and a dirt floor. The room stretched back into a dark tunnel. I stepped inside.

“Is that one of the Tunnels?” Liv looked into the darkness behind me.

“I think this is a Mortal tunnel.” I glanced at Liv from the shadows of the tunnel. She looked safe and small inside the pantry, surrounded by Amma’s old rainbows caught in a jar.

I realized where I was standing. “I’ve seen pictures of hidden rooms and tunnels like these. Runaway slaves used them to leave houses at night without being seen.”

“Are you saying—?”

I nodded. “Ethan Carter Wate, or someone in his family, was part of the Underground Railroad.”

10.09

W
ho is Ethan Carter Wate again, exactly?” Liv asked.

“My great-great-great-great-uncle. He fought in the Civil War, then deserted because he didn’t believe it was right.”

“I remember now. Dr. Ashcroft told me the story of Ethan and Genevieve and the locket.”

For a moment, I felt guilty that Liv was here instead of Lena. Ethan and Genevieve were more than a story to me and Lena. She would’ve felt the weight of this moment.

Liv ran her hand along the wall. “And you think this could be part of the Underground Railroad?”

“You’d be surprised how many old houses in the South have a room like this.”

“If that’s true, then where does this tunnel go?” Now she was right next to me. I took an old lantern down from a nail
that had been hammered between the crumbling bricks of the wall. I turned the key, and the lantern filled with light.

“How can there still be oil in there? This thing has to be a hundred and fifty years old.”

A rickety wooden bench lined one of the walls. The remains of what looked like an army-issue canteen, some kind of canvas sack, and a wool blanket were stacked neatly beneath it. They were all coated with a thick layer of dust.

“Come on. Let’s see where it leads.” I held the lantern out in front of me. All I could see was the twisting tunnel and an occasional patch of brick built into the dirt.

“Waywards. You think you can go wherever you want.” She reached up with one hand and touched the ceiling over our heads. Brown dirt rained down, and she ducked, coughing.

“Are you scared?” I nudged her with my shoulder.

Liv leaned back and yanked on the twisted loop of rope. The false door behind us closed with a sharp bang, and it was dark. “Are you?”

The tunnel dead-ended. I wouldn’t have seen the trapdoor over our heads if Liv hadn’t noticed a slice of light above us. The door hadn’t been opened in a long time, because when we pushed our way up, whole shovelfuls of dirt caved into the tunnel—and all over us.

“Where are we? Can you see?” Liv called up from below. I couldn’t get a solid foothold in the side of the dirt wall, but I managed to haul myself aboveground.

“We’re in a field on the other side of Route 9. I can see my house from here. I think this used to be my family’s field before they built the road.”

“So Wate’s Landing must have been a safe house. It would have been easy enough to sneak food into that tunnel right from the pantry.” Liv was looking at me, but I could tell she was a thousand miles away.

“Then at night, when it was safe, you ended up out here.” I let myself fall back down to the ground, pulling the trapdoor back into place. “I wonder if Ethan Carter Wate knew. If he was part of it.” After seeing him in the visions, it felt like something he would do.

“I wonder if Genevieve knew,” Liv said.

“How much do you know about Genevieve?”

“I read the files.” Of course she did.

“Maybe they did it together.”

“Maybe it had something to do with that.” Liv was looking past me.

“What?”

She pointed behind me. There were planks hammered into an awkward X. But the boards were rotting, and you could see a doorway behind them.

“Ethan. Am I imagining—”

I shook my head. “No. I see it, too.”

It wasn’t a Mortal doorway. I recognized the symbols carved into the old wood, even if I couldn’t read them. Across from the trapdoor that led into the Mortal world was a second doorway, which led into the Caster one.

“We’d better go,” Liv said.

“You mean go in there.” I set the lantern down on the ground.

Liv already had her red notebook out and was sketching, but she still sounded worried. “I mean go back to your house.” She
sounded annoyed, but I could tell she was as interested in what lay beyond the doorway as I was.

“You know you want to go in there.” Some things never changed.

The first board splintered, coming off in my hands as soon as I pulled it loose.

“What I want is for you to stay out of the Tunnels, before this somehow manages to get us both into trouble.”

The last of the boards fell away. In front of me was a carved wooden doorway that framed massive double doors. The bottom seemed to disappear into the dirt floor. I bent down to take a closer look. There were actual roots connecting the doors to the earth. I ran my hands along the length of them. They were rough and solid, but I didn’t recognize the wood.