Chapter 46
When Sean stared down at the plans Rivers had emailed him, he wasn’t really sure what he was looking at. “I think I slept through this class in architecture school,” Sean said.
“Just go to the last page, ignore everything else,” Rivers said.
Sean flipped through the pages in the PDF scan and then blinked a few times. “Just so I know I’m not crazy,” Sean said, and before he could finish, Rivers did it for him.
“That’s another sublevel,” Rivers said. “It’s beneath the basement.”
Sean studied the page more closely, looking for the entrance that would take him even further below, but he couldn’t find it. “What the hell is down there?”
“Well, it’s a long story,” River said. “The county didn’t have any of the original blueprints on hand.
But they had what the new owner gave them for the renovations.
I guess The Bonnie is a historical landmark or something.
Anyway, because of the hotel’s history and the murders that happened there in the fifties, plenty of online sleuths and horror and mystery fans have pieced some things together over the years.
One of them is the fact that during Prohibition, The Bonnie had a speakeasy.
And it turns out some Chicago mobsters originally built the hotel.
” She paused. “Does that sound familiar to you?”
“Are you meaning to tell me that Marco Donovan, the guy whose receipt we found in the trash can, is a descendant of the same people who built this hotel?” Sean asked.
“I haven’t done an official family tree, but I’m betting that the safe answer is yes,” Rivers said.
“Some FBI files were declassified back in the 90s when the mob was no longer a threat. I found a few articles about it online in the corners of the internet. My guess is that very few people knew about the speakeasy’s construction back then.
After the mob was effectively run out of town in the fifties, the hotel changed hands.
I would assume the speakeasy was forgotten about, especially after the murders in the hotel room took center stage. ”
Even though Sean was staring at the evidence right in front of him, he found it hard to believe that a secret speakeasy had been sitting under the hotel this entire time.
But that might explain why Sean hadn’t been able to find a little girl or the mobster who dropped their receipt into the trash can in room 109.
“So, where’s the door to the speakeasy?” Sean asked. “I’ve been in the basement, and I didn’t see a door.”
“Well, the entrance is listed on the blueprints, so you’ll have to go down there and measure it out to see where it’s hidden,” Rivers answered.
Sean quickly returned to the kitchen and went down the steps into the basement. He flipped on the light. With the power back on, it was easier to see, and Sean got a better look at the space; the bride’s body was still on the table.
The corpse was out of place among the old furniture, chairs, paintings, lamps, and a lot of stuff from what was probably the hotel’s original design before Roger bought it and refurbished it.
Even though Roger had kept a lot of the old paraphernalia, some pieces down in the basement were either broken beyond repair or no longer fit the aesthetic.
Sean still had the blueprints pulled up on his phone, and he tried to find the spot where the door would’ve been based on the diagram.
After a few quick measurements, Sean identified the location behind what was now a storage freezer.
“We might have a problem,” Sean said. “It looks like I’ve got a two-thousand-pound freezer in front of me. I don’t think I can move that out of the way on my own.”
“Well, if you want to get into the speakeasy, you’ll have to figure something out,” Rivers said.
Sean considered that and then approached the fridge. He remembered that it wasn’t turned on, and he opened the doors. He ran his hand along the back interior wall of the freezer. “There’s a false wall in the back,” Sean said.
Sean worked quickly to remove the backing, and when he did, there was another door behind it. It was old, metal, and slightly rusted.
“There’s some kind of door here,” Sean said.
“You’re a regular Hercule Poirot, Sheriff,” Rivers said.
“I could never pull off that mustache,” Sean replied, but he hoped to find Karla Grayson on the other side of that door.