“Voila,” I said.
Eric stooped down to peer through the opening, then jumped back and looked up at me anxiously.
“Holy cow,” he exclaimed. “What is that horrible thing?”
Horrible thing? I bent down to peer through the flap. A pair of unblinking eyes peered out of a tangle of gray fur to meet mine. I was startled for a second, but then I relaxed.
“Good girl, Tinkerbell,” I said. “It’s only Rob’s dog,” I said to Eric. “She’s an Irish Wolfhound. Not horrible at all—just big. Lie down, Tink.”
I moved aside so Eric could look through the flap again. Tinkerbell, satisfied that Eric was with me, curled back up on the ground beside the flap. Josh began wriggling, so I set him down inside the pen. Eric followed suit with Jamie, then peered through the flap again.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” Eric asked, after a few moments.
“That’s the crawl space under the bandstand,” I said. “And that trapdoor—”
“Trapdoor?”
I bent down to look again. The crawl space was lit only by streaks of sunlight that came through cracks in the weathered floor of the bandstand overhead. Junk littered the entire area, including a huge heap of old tires, faded wooden crates, battered sawhorses, and other debris in the exact center of the space. Tinkerbell had curled up at the foot of the heap.
I turned back to Rose Noire. She was sniffing Josh’s diaper. In vain; I could tell just from his face that Jamie was the one who needed changing.
“Why is all the junk still on top of the trapdoor?” I asked. “Maybe it’s not Rob’s fault he’s still stuck in the courthouse.”
“Uncle Rob’s in the courthouse, too?” Eric asked.
“Only temporarily. And what if he came all the way through the tunnel only to find he couldn’t get it open?” I went on, turning back to Rose Noire.
“Tinkerbell would bark,” Rose Noire said.
“Tunnel?” Eric said. “You mean there’s a tunnel all the way into the courthouse?”
“I was waiting to uncover the trapdoor until I knew he was on his way,” Rose Noire said.
“Awesome!” Eric exclaimed. “Can I go through it?”
“Not now,” Rose Noire replied.
I’d have said not at all, but maybe she was right. An absolute prohibition would only make the tunnel more enticing. And I wasn’t about to distract Rose Noire when she was in the middle of changing Jamie.
“The trapdoor screeches like a wounded banshee,” she said over her shoulder. “We can’t open it without some kind of noise to cover it.”
“Like the calypso band that I thought was supposed to start playing at eleven,” I said. “Where’s the schedule?”
“I have it right there.” Rose Noire pointed a half-unfolded diaper at a well-worn clipboard lying on the ground nearby. “And that’s probably them now.”
Footsteps and a lot of dragging and thumping had begun happening up on the stage.
“They’re late,” I said.
“They’re on island time.” Rose Noire smiled indulgently.
“They’re not actually from the Caribbean, you know,” I said. “When they’re not playing in the band, they’re a bunch of CPAs from Richmond.”
“Well, in any case, they should be starting soon.” She glanced at her watch. “Eric, Rob was supposed to come out while your Aunt Meg was hammering so loudly on her iron.”
“Call him and tell him to get ready to come over as soon as the calypso band starts up,” I said.
“I’ll try,” she said. “But you know how spotty cell phone reception is over there.”
Spotty? It was virtually nonexistent. Most of the time we had to resort to sending text messages to Mr. Throckmorton’s computer.
“Awesome,” Eric said. “Did Mr. Throckmorton dig the tunnel?”
“No, it’s been there forever,” Rose Noire said. “No one knows how long.”
“Actually, we do have some idea,” I said. “The original courthouse was built during the 1780s and the trapdoor was mentioned in some documents from the 1840s, so presumably it was dug sometime between those two dates.”
“I thought the courthouse burned during the Civil War,” Eric said.
“Not by itself.” I nodded with approval when I saw that Rose Noire was rapidly texting on her phone. “The union Army burned it on their way south. But that was only the building. The basement and the tunnel survived.”
“And it’s almost certainly proof that Caerphilly was a stop on the Underground Railroad,” Rose Noire said, looking up from her phone. “Why else would they dig such a tunnel?”