The Truth of Yesterday (64 page)

     I found the chain and gave it a tug. I gasped as light flooded the cellar. The bulb was very dim, barely enough to light the small room, but it was enough to temporarily blind me. When I'd blinked away the sunspots,
Amalie
stood waiting for me over by one of the walls. The cellar was of the old-fashioned root cellar variety. It had a plain dirt floor and brick walls covered with moss and mildew. It stunk of musty rot. Along one wall was a wooden bench-like structure that had once held vegetables and other perishables in the days before refrigeration. Overhead, pipes and wires ran between the rough-hewn beams that supported the floor of the house above.

     As soon as she was certain she had my attention,
Amalie
turned and walked directly into and through the wall.

     “Now what am I supposed to do?” I asked no one in particular. Somehow, I knew
Amalie
was gone. The feeling of her presence left as soon as she went through the wall. “You know,” I said to her anyway, “there's no door in that wall. I can't follow you. I'm not a ghost.”

     
Maybe I should have enlisted Seth
, I thought.
He could have walked through walls if he wanted.

     I waited a few minutes, but it soon became obvious that she wasn't returning. Whatever she'd wanted me to see, she'd shown me. I decided it was time to wake Steve up-and put on some more clothes. I realized I was freezing in just my underwear. I slipped back up the stairs, leaving the light on at the bottom, and up to my room where I pulled on some clothes. Then I went and tapped softly on Steve and Adam's bedroom door. They must have been sleeping as lightly as I had been, because the door opened almost immediately.

     “What's wrong?” Adam asked in a tight voice.

     “I need to talk to Steve,” I whispered.

     “What's going on?” Steve asked, appearing over Adam's shoulder.

     “
Amalie
came back,” I said.

     “Should we call Judy?” Adam asked. Once upon a time, he'd been a skeptic when it came to
Amalie
and things supernatural, but he was a believer these days. Anyone who'd anything to do with
Amalie
was now a believer.

     “It's after
three o'clock
on the morning,” Steve said.

     “I think we should call her,” I voted. “If we don't, she'll be very unhappy in the morning.”

     Adam picked up the phone and dialed her number.

     “What happened?” Steve asked me while Adam talked to Judy.

     “I'll tell everyone at once when Judy gets here,” I told him.

     Adam hung up. “She's on her way. I don't think I even woke her up. Maybe she knew something was going to happen tonight.”

     That was possible, or maybe Jake just hadn't come home tonight.

     Judy must have broken land speed records driving to the B&B. She was there before Adam and Steve had barely had time to get dressed and meet me downstairs in the lobby. We let her inside and I quickly filled them in on
Amalie's
appearance and my subsequent adventure in the cellar.  

     “You went down there alone?” Adam asked in horror.

     “I didn't see where I had much of a choice, and besides, she was pretty insistent.”

     “I'm really proud of you, Killian,” Judy said in a soft voice. It was obvious that she was really only half here with us.

     
“Proud of him for risking him life?”

     “How did he risk his life?” Steve asked. “
Amalie's
never had a history of hurting anyone.”

     “There's a first time for everything.”

     “Why don't I show you where she went through the wall,” I offered, in an attempt to head off any hysterics. We all went down the stairs to the cellar and I pointed to the wall through which
Amalie
had made her dramatic exit.

     “Why would she walk through a wall?” Steve puzzled. “What could she be trying to tell us?”

     “Maybe there wasn't a wall there when she was alive,” Judy said, and we all turned to stare at her in surprise.

     She walked over to the wall and scraped at the moss growing on the bricks.

     “What do you mean there wasn't a wall there?” Steve asked.

     
“Just what I said.
If she walked through this wall, she did it for a reason. There's something on the other side of it that she wants us to know about. Maybe the baby was never the reason for leading us down here in the first place, or at least not the only reason.”

    “But why would that make you think there wasn't a wall there when she was alive?”

     
“Just a hunch.
Aha! See?”

     “See what?” Steve and I asked in unison.

     “The outline of a door,” Adam answered for her.

     “So you see it too?” Judy asked.

      “Yes, it was bricked up some time after the wall was built. You can see the brick pattern is different inside the outline than the rest of the wall.”

     As he said this, I felt something shift inside me, for a moment I felt disoriented, as if the floor had vanished from underneath me, but before I had time to even stumble, everything stabilized. Only, instead of seeing the cellar as it had looked only seconds before I was seeing it as it must have looked in the 1850's. The wall we had all been studying was suddenly partially covered by floor to ceiling shelves, full of preserved vegetables in glass jars. Without being told, I somehow knew that the shelves were a cleverly disguised door and there was an opening behind them. I blinked and the shelves were gone, replaced with the blank brick wall once more.

     “It was part of the underground railroad,” I said.

     It was my turn to have everyone turn and stare at me in surprise. “Did you see that?” Judy asked with a quiet intensity.

     I nodded.
“Just now.”

     “See what?
How?”
Adam demanded.

     “It's his Gifts,” Judy explained. “Sometimes he can see things from the past.”

     “There were shelves there,” I said. “Almost like a big bookcase. There were canned foods on the shelves, not like we have today, in jars like they used to can food at home.”

     “I still do it that way,” Judy said with a slightly amused smile on her face.

     “I don't know how I knew it,” I went on, “but I just knew that it was really a door and that behind it was a secret room or something.”

     
“My house?”
Steve said almost reverentially.
“Part of the underground railroad?”

     “It still doesn't tell us why it was bricked up,” I pointed out, “Or why
Amalie
wanted us to know it was there.”

     Steve walked over and ran his hand over the bricks. “We'll have to open it up.”

     “Are you sure that's a good idea?” Adam asked.

     “It's a historic landmark,” Steve said with a frown.

     “Who knows what we'll find in there.”

     “
Amalie
knows,” Judy pointed out. “And she wants us to know too.”

     Adam pursed his lips. “Well, we're not going to find out tonight. I say we all go back to bed and try to get some sleep.”

     Steve nodded. “Adam's right. We can't do anything about this now and a little sleep sounds like a good idea.”

     I had to agree that sleep would be awful nice right about now. I'd gotten precious little that night. Judy nodded her agreement and we all climbed up the stairs, Steve coming last after he'd turned the light off.

     “I need to speak to Killian for a moment,” Judy said, once Steve had latched the door. I thought I knew what it was she needed to speak to me about. I agreed to let Judy out and Adam and Steve went upstairs to bed.

     As soon as they were gone, Judy turned to me with a concerned expression. “I barely know where to start,” she said.

     “Let me guess, I'm in danger?”

     She raised one eyebrow. “Yes.”

     “You're only the third person to tell me that tonight, and I knew it already on my own.”

     “Don't be flippant about this, Killian,” she warned.

     “I'm not, really. Trust me; I have a healthy amount of fear about all this. I'm just trying to not let it paralyze me.”

     “It has something to do with your investigations, including the one I asked you to do on Jake.” It was a statement, not a question, but I nodded anyway. “Jake is in danger too,” she continued. “I can feel it. It terrifies me because there isn't anything I can do about it. He didn't come home tonight.”

     I held a silent debate in my head about whether or not to tell her what I had discovered that night. I finally decided to just give her a capsulated version. “I saw Jake tonight at the Ball. He was with Fenton Black. Do you know who he is?”

     “I've heard of him,” she said in a monotone voice. From the look on her face, I thought it safe to assume what she'd heard wasn't good.

     “Apparently, Jake's been, for lack of a better word, dating Black.” Judy cringed. “It gets worse. He saw me at the Ball and dragged me into a hallway, where he proceeded to tear me limb from limb for investigating him behind his back. It seems I left a trail wide enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through. He figured out that it was you who hired me. He was furious.”

     She sighed heavily. “I was afraid it was something like that.”

     “I'm sorry I messed things up so bad.”

     She patted my cheek. “You didn't mess anything up. I'm the one who hired you. And who knows, maybe something good will come out of this yet.” She didn't sound very convincing. She gave me a hug and turned to leave, but then stopped, her back still to me.

     “You know,” she said slowly, in a tired, worn voice, “there are times when I wish I wasn't Gifted, when I think it would be better to not know certain things. It would be nice to just live my life as ignorantly as everyone else for a change.” She turned deliberately and looked me in the eye. “There's death in the air, Killian. I don't know who, but someone is going to die, and soon.” With that, she was gone, leaving me alone with the chill that raced through my body at her words.

Chapter 27