Ten Days at Federal Hill: Chapter Four

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Chapter Four – The Clerk’s Office

Carla woke suddenly in the middle of the night with one thought in her head: Julia’s flashlight. The one she’d been reading by, the first night. When Carla had sneaked into the alcove and looked at Julia’s sketch book, that’s the one thing that wasn’t there – the flashlight. Why would the flashlight be gone on a bright morning? Why were all those things dumped onto the bed? Where had Julia gone? Carla couldn’t go back to sleep. Frances stirred next to her, and Carla wondered about Julia.

So she slid silently from bed and crept across to Julia’s bed, lifting the curtain. Again, Julia was not there. Shamrock was not there. The books and other paraphernalia lay jumbled on the bed again. Now Carla was scared. Where could Julia be in the middle of the night? Was this the second night in a row she’d done this? Should Carla tell anyone? She looked out the window at the cedar tree, its massive trunk black under its branches. Moonlight filtered through to the grass, making soft shadows. Something rustled in the shrubs, in the darkness. Carla heard an owl hooting overhead. She didn’t know what to do.

A few moments later, soft clicking came down the hall. Carla came from behind the curtain just as Julia and Shamrock entered the bedroom.

“What …?” Julia began.

“Where were you?” Carla asked.

At first Julia didn’t answer. “I had to go to the bathroom,” she finally said.

“In your sneakers and shorts and t-shirt?” Carla asked? Julia slid out of her shoes.

“I forgot to take them off,” she offered. “Be quiet. Don’t wake up the sisterly monster.” She yanked her head sideways toward the big bed. Julia laid a finger on her lips and beckoned Carla into the alcove.

“Why’s your stuff all over the bed?” Carla asked.

“I was hunting for something,” she answered. Julia turned away and quickly slipped the sketch book under her pillow.

“Like that diary?” And Carla looked quizzically at the pillow.

Julia now looked puzzled, and then smiled. “Oh, yeah. My diary. It’s a secret.”

“I thought all the secrets were in that box.” Carla put her hand on the bumpy engraving of the lid of the box of secrets.

“Those are other people’s secrets, not mine.”

Carla made herself comfortable on her end of the bed. “So, why do you keep sneaking outside. Your shoes are all muddy, and your feet were muddy this morning too.”

Julia squirmed and fiddled with a bead necklace. “I don’t know. I like it outside. I love to walk around alone at night when the moon is really bright.” She looked up at Carla. “It’s so beautiful!”

“It’s so wet,” Carla replied. Then she added, “I know what you mean. It’s pretty amazing. Do you walk around in the boxwood garden? That’s what I would do.”

“Yeah, it’s the best place. It’s just like being a tiny puzzle piece in a big maze. It’s my favorite place.”

“Does the moon shine on the lady statue?”

“Yes. She glows,” Julia whispered.

Then Carla asked, “How did you hide under her, under the statue? Somebody would need to put it upright over your head.”

Julia grinned. “Yeah. That was Abe. He can keep a secret.” Suddenly she frowned.

“So there’s one secret!” Carla giggled, but Julia’s face was thin and serious. “Weren’t you scared? In there in the dark? In a hole?”

“Yes. But I made Abe promise to stand close by so he could hear me. That helped.”

“But ...” Carla puzzled it out. “But how did you discover the hole in the first place?”

Julia stretched her legs out. “I’m sleepy. Maybe I’ll take you out there tomorrow night so you can see the moon.” Carla nodded and crept back to her bed.

The Christophers at Federal Hill were generally a church-going family. The more people in the house, the more likelihood that church was on the Sunday schedule. Uncle Robert was an occasional preacher, and when Grandmother Julia came to live with them everyone felt guilty if they didn’t go to church. She liked church.

Carla and Julia were both groggy in the morning and missed breakfast. They were pulling on Sunday dresses when Uncle Robert started the mini-van, and they snatched a muffin each from the kitchen table on the way out the door. Teddy drove his car, and they jumped in the back seat. Julia slept through the sermon while Carla elbowed her and scribbled on the bulletin. She knew there was something she had seen or heard – something, she wasn’t sure – since she’d arrived at Federal Hill that was bothering her. Something was wedged in the back of her mind that needed attention, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Within five minutes of coming home, the children had all stripped out of their Sunday clothes. Teddy and Sam bolted outside to the horse barn. Ben pulled off his tie, sat at the kitchen table, elevated his sore foot, and began peeling potatoes for dinner. Only Frances stayed in her dress, waltzing in the foyer and singing something from West Side Story. “I feel pretty, oh so pretty …!”

As Carla and Julia ran past her out the front door, Julia said, “After dinner I’ll take you to the clerk’s office.”

“What’s that?”

“Just an empty building through the woods, but it’s kinda cool. Mom won’t let us swim until 3:00. You wanna swim?”

“Sure!”

When the boy cousins had polished off all the pot roast, gravy, and dinner rolls, and the dishes were piled in the sink, the two girls strolled through the kitchen door into the warm, still afternoon. The pine woods were aromatic with baking pine needles underfoot and pine sap warm under the bark. Julia led her cousin to a one-room abandoned building a hundred yards from the house. The building’s narrow end that faced them was masked almost entirely by a huge chimney stack, nearly as broad on the bottom as the building’s width.

“What is it?” Carla asked.

“The man who built the house used it as his office a long time ago. But people have lived in it too. They call it the Clerk’s Office, so that’s what he used to do, I guess.”

“What’s a clerk?”

“I don’t know,” said Julia, “but there used to be lot of big books in there, full of columns and numbers, until the county came and took them away. They were in a big trunk. I’ll show you.”

The door scraped along the wooden floorboards as they entered, and a squirrel scampered up the chimney. Like the house, the office had tall windows, and one end of the room was dominated by a grand fireplace. Carla stared at it in awe.

Julia said, “Go on. It’s big enough for you to stand in.”

Carla walked to the stone opening, ducked her head slightly, and went inside. Soot and dirt lined all the walls, but the firebox was still equipped with its cast iron mechanisms for cooking. In one corner leaned a rusted iron pot. In another corner of the inglenook fireplace was a broken chair, its cane pushed through. Carla dragged it over, leaned it against the inside of the firebox, and perched on its edge.

“I love it,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s about my favorite place. I used to bring Shamrock here and we’d have tea parties.” She grabbed a broom that was leaning next to a window and began sweeping the hearth. “It’s dirty now. I used to keep it clean.” She stopped. “I like to pretend this is my house.”

“Do the boys ever come here?”

“Not any more. I don’t think so. They hang around in the barn and ride horses.”

Carla sighed and looked around. A tall, skinny desk and a heavy trunk stood against one wall. Stacks of books and firewood littered the other side of the room.

“If there were a bed, you could sleep here!” Carla said happily. “Would your mom let you?”

“I have, a few times.” Julia walked to the trunk. She lifted the lid and removed a heavy quilt and a lumpy pillow. “See?”

While Julia dug around in the trunk for other cherished items, Carla took a stick and began to scrape the grime from the fire bricks. On one inside wall of the fireplace the bricks had been removed and replaced as if for a repair. Carla prodded these bricks and they shifted. She pushed them with her hand but was afraid to push very hard. Julia was now taking dishes from the trunk.

“What’re those?” Carla asked.

Julia jumped as if disturbed from a dream. “Oh! Umm …” she hesitated, “I found these dishes under the house last summer. They’re broken and I didn’t think mom would want them.”

Carla came to investigate. The cups and saucers were quite old and badly chipped. There were four saucers and two cups and part of a bowl.

“No tea pot?” she asked.

“Nope. I wish.”

“What’s upstairs?” Carla inquired. Next to them a slender stairwell ran up one wall.

“Nothing. You can go look if you want to.”

Julia was right. The upstairs room was perfectly bare. Two small square windows allowed light in on either side of the fireplace, although the chimney itself, which dominated the building, had been boarded over with a wall. This made the windows rather deep. Carla walked up to the wall and tapped on it. It rang hollow.

“Hullo?” Julia called.

“Nothing,” Carla called back.

She went to one window and rested her arms on the sill. It moved slightly as if loose, so Carla worked a finger beneath the board and lifted. It came out quite easily and she looked down into a dark hole, two feet across with the fireplace bricks sloping away down one side. Then the sill board slipped from her hands and fell into the hole. It thudded as it fell. Carla did not hear it hit the bottom.

“What’re you doing up there?” Julia called.

“I found a hole.”

“A what?”

“Um, a hole. In the wall, next to the fireplace.”

Julia ran up the stairs and hurried to the window. She pushed Carla aside and looked down into the dark opening.

“Sorry. The board was loose and then I dropped it down the hole.”

Julia did not reply but immediately began tapping and gripping all the boards along the wall, especially around the windows and in front of the chimney which the wall hid. Carla joined her, not knowing what they were looking for. But soon the girls discovered more loose boards, and at last an entire panel, disguised as several boards, at floor level. Julia lifted and pulled the panel out. Behind it, running along the curving side of the chimney stack, a ladder attached to it descended into the darkness where the board had fallen.

“That’s a bad place for a ladder, if there’s a fire in the fireplace, y’know?” Carla said.

But Julia was not listening. She put her feet into the square opening and scooted onto the ladder.

“What are you doing?” Carla exclaimed. “You’re not going down there?”

“Yep. I have to know. You coming?”

“I’ll stay up here at the top. You let me know what’s down there. It’ll just be dirt and squirrel bones, I bet.”

Julia disappeared down the ladder into the darkness. Carla waited, and waited some more. She heard scrambling and sounds of wood scraping and even a squeaking hinge. Finally, she called, “What did you find?”

A few minutes later Julia’s head emerged at floor level. “Nothing really.” She was covered in cobwebs and soot. She was filthy, and Carla noticed from the waist down moist earth covered her clothes.

“Good grief! Your mom’s gonna be mad.”

“Nope. She’ll never notice. I’m good at sneaking inside, and she doesn’t care how dirty we get, as long as we don’t mess up the house.”

Julia brushed off and the girls sat downstairs by the trunk playing with the dishes, pretending to have tea. In the trunk were also a few old cloth dolls and two rag rugs. Julia put the rugs out for them to sit on, and served tea to the dolls. Carla, bored with this kind of play, fingered the edge of the worn rug. It was made of braided strands of fabric. The rug turned Carla’s mind back to her adventures of last year with Cecil and Connie, how they’d helped some children escape a life of slavery in a workhouse, children who made rugs just like these day after day. She studied the edging and looked carefully at how the ends were tucked and stitched to the rim of the rug. The stitches were clustered in groups of three – tightly together – and then a gap, and then three more, tightly together. Then Carla pulled the rug from underneath her and examined it more closely. This was a rug made by her friend Celeste! She was sure of it. The little girl Carla had rescued from a life of drudgery and fear had made this very rug! Celeste had carefully described to Carla how she stitched the edge of each rug she made, using a stitch different from the other children. Since Celeste’s number at the workhouse was “Three,” she used clusters of three stitches together.

Carla’s heart pounded. “Do you know where this rug came from?” she asked breathlessly.

Julia hesitated again, as she had when asked about the dishes. “Um … it was under the house too, I think.” She looked down. Carla could tell she was lying.

“No it wasn’t. You have to tell me the truth. I need to know how this rug got here,” Carla asked.

“Why? What’s so special about it?

Now it was Carla’s turn to fib. She could never tell Julia the truth about what had happened last summer. No one knew except Cecil and Connie, no one in the family. Carla wished she could ask Celeste about the rug! Would she know how one of her rugs had come here to Federal Hill?

“I can’t tell you,” Carla insisted, “but it’s important. Really important.” She stood up. “I’ve got to talk to Cecil. I’ll see you later.”

Carla walked out the door of the little building. In her anxiety about the rug, she forgot about the hidden panel, the secret ladder, the mud on Julia’s clothing She left her cousin alone. She would not see her again for nearly twenty-four hours.

(To read chapter five, click here.)

[Ten Days at Federal Hill and all its components are copyrighted by the author, M.K. Christiansen.]