Some Like It Hawk(5)

“So the early nineteenth-century mayors would have an escape route if the citizens showed up with tar and feathers,” I said.

“You mean there were Pruitts here back then?” Eric asked. Strange how even a teen who only summered here automatically associated tar and feathers with the family that had misruled Caerphilly for so long.

“No, the Pruitt family didn’t show up until Reconstruction,” I answered. “They’re not the only crooked politicians in the world. They don’t know about the tunnel, and we all have to be very careful not to let them find out.”

“They’d tell the Evil Lender, you know,” Rose Noire said. “The Pruitts are the ones who brought the Evil Lender to Caerphilly in the first place.”

“So don’t brag about knowing where the tunnel is if any Pruitts are listening,” Eric said. “Got it.”

“Only a few people in town knew about the tunnel when the siege began,” I said. “In fact, for most of the twentieth century, only the county clerks knew it had ever existed. After all, it was in the courthouse basement, and there’s nothing worth stealing down there. Never has been anything down there except the clerk—currently Mr. Throckmorton—and over two centuries’ worth of gently crumbling town and county records.”

“For the first few weeks of the siege, we kept pretty busy hauling in supplies,” Rose Noire said. “We all expected that sooner or later the Pruitts would remember about the tunnel and find a way to shut it down.”

“We?” Eric repeated.

“A lot of townspeople are in on the secret,” I said.

A cheer went up overhead. Eric had opened his mouth and was saying something, but he was drowned out by the thunder of half a dozen steel drums.

Eric drew closer.

“So this whole time everyone in town has been just strolling through the tunnel with supplies?” he asked. He had to shout to be heard.

“Heavens, no,” Rose Noire said, with a shudder.

“It’s no stroll,” I said. “Here, I’ll show you. Help me move this stuff.”

Rose Noire went back to the front of the tent to keep watch. Eric and I crawled under the bandstand, where he helped me pull aside the tires and boxes to reveal an ancient-looking iron trapdoor with oversized hinges on one side and a huge, slightly rusty ring on the other. It was set into a wide slab of eighteenth-century stonework, heavily patched with early twentieth-century concrete. Overhead, the steel drums had subsided and we could hear the drama student who served as today’s emcee formally introducing the band, his words punctuated by random notes from the drums or guitars.

“Grab the ring,” I said. “Get ready to pull. But wait until the music starts.”

The calypso players launched into their first number. I nodded to Eric and we heaved on the ring. The trapdoor rose with a screech that would have alerted half the county if the musicians above hadn’t been playing their hearts out, with occasional deliberate squawks of feedback.

We peered down into the tunnel, a three-by-three-foot shaft lined with stone for the first six feet and then with boards. A flimsy-looking ladder was nailed along one side. In the dim light, we couldn’t see the bottom.

We gazed in silence for several long moments.

“Wow,” Eric said finally. “How deep is that anyway?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“Must be a hundred feet.”

Actually, it was more like twenty-five or thirty, but if he thought it was a hundred, all the better. I was worried that he’d scamper down the ladder and disappear into the tunnel, but he stood looking down into the entrance with a slightly anxious expression on his face. Maybe Eric felt the same way about the tunnel as I did.

“Don’t go down there,” I said. “It’s pretty narrow, and Rob’s due out any minute, and you don’t want to get in his way.”

“Okay.” He managed a fairly credible air of disappointment. “I guess they had to keep the entrance narrow so people couldn’t find it as easily.”

“The tunnel’s even smaller,” I said. “Not much over two feet high and wide. Remember, they didn’t have power tools back then. It was all dug by hand.”

“Amazing that it hasn’t caved in after all these years.”

“At least half of it was partly caved in when this whole thing started,” I said. “But we dug it out and now we have it pretty well shored up. We’ve only actually had three substantial cave-ins, and one of those was last year during the big earthquake. We’ve always managed to get people dug out pretty quickly.”