Chapter 1 #3
Molly glanced toward the other three men.
“The rest are with me. You’ll find sledgehammers, battery-powered reciprocating saws, gloves and wheelbarrows staged in each of your areas.
The power is off, so you’ll have to use the headlamps on your safety helmets.
The rooms against the mountain don’t get much natural light.
” She handed Drake a helmet with a headlamp.
“Thank you all for answering Hank’s call.
We needed as many hands as we could get for this project, and sometimes, people are hard to come by in small towns. ”
Anxious to get to work, Drake plunked his helmet on his head and followed Parker through the maze of hallways to the back of the lodge. They hadn’t gone far before they had to stop and turn on their headlamps.
Parker continued, explaining what each room was as they passed doorways.
He eventually came to a stop in front of a wooden door.
“Grimm, this is your assigned area. Judge, yours is the next room. I’ll be two doors down.
If something doesn’t feel right, get the hell out.
We don’t know exactly how much damage the explosion caused.
I’d rather we err on the side of caution.
The sooner we see inside the walls, the sooner we can get to work rebuilding. ”
“Got it.” Grimm pulled on a pair of gloves, wrapped his hands around the handle of a sledgehammer and nodded. “Nothing like a little demolition to work out all your frustrations. Let’s do this.”
Judge entered the next room and found what he needed to get started. Parker moved on.
Gloves on, Drake grabbed the sledgehammer and went to work knocking big holes in the plaster on the back wall. Piece by piece, he pulled away the plaster and the narrow wooden slats behind it, exposing a couple of feet of the interior beams at a time.
Plaster dust filled the air, making it more and more difficult to see.
Judge found face masks in the stack of supplies and pulled one on over his mouth and nose.
He’d made it through half the back wall in less than an hour.
If he kept up the pace, he’d have that wall done in the next hour.
The other walls in the room had only hairline fractures in the plaster.
Hopefully, that was a good sign that they hadn’t been damaged to the point they needed to be torn down as well.
One thing was certain; they’d have to wait until the dust settled before they could assess the status of the support beams.
The banging on the wall in the next rooms stopped for a moment.
“Can you see anything?” Grimm called out.
“Not much,” Drake responded. “My headlamp is reflecting off all the dust particles.”
“Same,” Grimm came to stand in the doorway, wearing a mask over his mouth and nose.
“Let the dust settle for a few minutes,” Parker called out.
“Have you had a chance to find a place to live?” Grimm asked.
Drake shook his head, his light swinging right then left, bouncing off the dust in the air. “I just got to town and came straight here.”
“I think there’s room at Mrs. Dottie Kinner’s bed and breakfast where I’m staying. You can follow me there after work and ask her yourself if she’s got another room available.”
“Thanks.” Drake glanced across the room. “I think I can see the wall again.”
Grimm nodded. “Going back to my wall.”
Moments later, the men were slamming their heavy sledgehammers into yet more plaster.
Drake worked on the next four feet of wall, knocking out sheetrock. He grabbed hold of a portion of the drywall and pulled hard. A large portion fell away, exposing a gap between studs that was three feet wide.
Had there been a door there at one time? He removed the rest of the plaster down to the floor and had to wait for the dust to settle in order to see the beams, much less if anything lay beyond the beams.
As the dust slowly settled, Drake’s headlamp beam cut through the remaining particles to a room beyond the wall. It wasn’t more than six feet by six feet square and had been carved out of the rock wall of the mountain.
He stepped between the beams into the stone-walled room. Several wooden crates littered the floor, along with a pile of what appeared to be clothing. He crossed to the crates and found them to be full of bottles of some kind of liquid. None of the bottles were labeled.
Drake suspected the bottles were moonshine and that the stash was left over from the Prohibition Era. He turned the beam of his headlamp to the pile of clothes on the floor. The cloth had a floral pattern of faded pink and yellow. Perhaps it had once been a curtain or a woman’s dress.
As he neared the pile, he noticed a shoe and something that appeared to be a pole or thick stick lying beside it.
His pulse picked up, his empty belly roiling. He leaned over the pile of clothes and the shoe and froze.
The stick wasn’t a stick at all. It was a bone. On the other side of it was another bone just like it.
With the handle of his sledgehammer, he moved the crate beside the pile of cloth and gasped.
On the other side of the crate, lying against the cold stone floor, lay a skull covered in a dry mummified layer of skin with a few long, thin strands of hair clinging to it in scattered patches.
“Parker,” Drake called out.
When the hammering continued, Drake cleared his throat and yelled. “Parker!”
All hammering ceased.
“That you, Drake?” Parker answered.
With his gaze on what he now had determined was a complete skeleton covered in a woman’s dress, Drake said, “You need to come see this.”