Chapter Eight #2
“But how do you know they aren’t? The crates don’t even say what’s in them.”
“I got nothing like that on my shipping list.” He seems not to care. “There’s always something piled up over there.”
“Huh.” I stare at the crates a little longer, annoyed. “Can we get someone to move them, please?”
He grabs his phone and starts talking. When he glances my way, he’s wearing a curious expression. He takes in whatever is being said, then he faces me with apology.
“They say we don’t have the manpower to move them right now.”
I’m a nice person. I really am. But I have a load of work to do, a deadline, and what some people call an Irish temper.
Flares up out of nowhere. I’ve spent years training it to stay under control, but that has had mixed results.
Sometimes, like now, it shows up in an intimidating expression, or so I’ve been told.
“I’d like them moved,” I say through my teeth.
“Right,” he says. “I’ll see if I can get someone down here in the morning.”
“It’s not even eleven, Paul. They can send someone right now. I know they can.” I fold my arms. “Should I call Jack Samson? He said to contact him if I needed anything.”
Paul thinks that over, then taps into his phone again. When the conversation ends, he informs me that they will send someone down in an hour or so.
I accept that for now, and I move to the next item on my list.
“Hey,” Paul offers cheerfully from the other side of the room. “People say there’s a ghost down here. And a tunnel for smugglers, apparently.”
“Smugglers?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Who says there is a ghost?”
“Guests.”
I’m not surprised. In fact, I’d be surprised if there weren’t any ghosts here.
All the old places are haunted in one way or another, and the Dominion is well-known for that.
Paul’s watching me, waiting for a reaction.
Does he think that the mention of ghosts will scare me?
I’m not afraid of a poltergeist. Not yet, anyway.
I swear I saw the ghost of a woman hanging at the top of the grand staircase at the Keg Mansion last time I was there.
I hadn’t had too much to drink, either. When I asked the server if I was losing my mind, he laughed and confirmed I’d probably seen exactly that.
The Keg Mansion used to belong to the famous Massey family, and after her mistress died, the maid tied a rope around her neck and dropped over the banister.
The server told me there’s also supposed to be a ghost of a little boy at the bottom of those stairs, but he’d never seen him.
The boy had fallen down them, and after he died, other children saw him there quite often.
Another time, I had an unnatural experience at the Winter Garden Theatre.
My grandmother and I had gone to a show, and before the intermission, I had to use the bathroom.
There was no one else out there, which was spooky enough, but then a waft of cold air came out of nowhere and passed over me, carrying the lingering scent of flowers.
Lavender. The sense I got from that was strange enough that it sent me hurrying back into the theatre.
Later, when I was doing some reading, I came across references to the Lavender Lady ghost at the Winter Garden.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, some people staying at the hotel say they hear noises at night coming up through the pipes. Like voices, maybe.”
“Which pipes?”
He points vaguely at the boiler room, at the other end of the subbasement.
“Those pipes have been checked out, I assume.”
“A hundred times. Nothing wrong with them. Weird, right?”
“Is it always voices? Or is it like a windy sound? A whistling? Or clanging, maybe?”
“They say it’s voices.”
“How long have people talked about that?”
“Way before I started working here, and I’ve been here fifteen years.”
Why is he watching me so closely? I fold my arms and stare back at him. “What do you say?”
“I’ve heard things, but not voices, I don’t think. I’m not too sure.”
Decades of mysterious, ethereal noises suggest something deeper going on. I make a note and move along to the next point on my list.
“Ah, good,” Paul says as another man enters. “Inspector needs a little muscle, Gary.”
“What do you need?”
Gary’s younger, and from the tautness of the short sleeves on his tattooed biceps, he should have no trouble lifting these crates out of the way for me.
“Can you move some of these crates? I need to check on a vent behind them.”
He rattles one, feeling for the weight. “Sure.” He lifts the top one and sets it aside. “Good?”
I try not to feel sorry for him. He’s paid to work, not pout. “Sorry. The vent I need is at the bottom.”
Wordlessly, he continues to disassemble the mountain of crates.
“There it is,” I say as he’s reaching for the lowest crate. “You don’t have to move that one at least.”
I step in and reach for the vent. All seems to be working fine, the air tickling invisibly through my fingertips as it should.
Then I notice a vertical crack in the wall beside it, which makes me curious.
I don’t know if they’ve built expansion joints in this area, and I’m not about to knock down a wall on a hunch, but it’s odd to see a crack like this in the middle of a wall.
I slide my finger down the line, then I spy another one farther along, hiding behind a different crate.
Gary sees the apology in my expression, and he moves that crate as well.
Another crack appears. I squeeze my arm between the wall and a crate and follow the line upward this time, to where it abruptly ends. And where it abruptly starts again, only horizontally.
“Gary?”
He moves another crate, exposing a door. It’s painted the same colour as the wall, as is the latch.
“Why is this covered up?” No answer from either one. “Paul, you’re down here a lot. You ever seen this before?”
Apparently neither man has any idea.
Paul shrugs. “Could be the old smugglers’ tunnel. Prohibition and all that.”
Gary leans in and jiggles the latch. “It’s nothing. Just another storage room. Locked, anyway.”
“You don’t have a key?”
Both of them shake their heads.
I don’t recall this door in the blueprints, so I unroll them again and skim my finger across, locating the spot on the wall. There is no record of any doorway there.
“Did you get what you need?” Gary asks, impatience creeping into his tone. “I mean, other than opening this door, which we can’t do.”
“For now. Thank you for your help.”
I take a photo of the door as well as the crates set beside it, then I take one from farther back so I can see exactly where it’s positioned in the room.
Gary piles the crates back where they were, and I take a closer photo of the Montey Series Industries stamp.
I see no other information, like where they’d come from, what they contain, or where they are headed.
Opening crates is beyond my remit, but this secret door is a mystery I need to solve.