Back in the car, I hug Scott. “Thank you for making me continue our search.”
He just smiles and kisses me.
“Am I forgiven then?”
“Perhaps.”
Chapter Twenty
Elise: 18 March 2017, Afternoon, Wright’s Homestead
The drive home is quiet. Only the car engine purrs like a satisfied kitten along state highway six. My thoughts are swirling through my head, some louder, others just a whisper, breaking up and bumping into each other.
“You’re quiet.” Scott breaks the silence.
“I have to when the voices in my head work overtime. Mark told me so much about my family. I knew nothing about our history. It took one conversation and my life had become three-dimensional. I’m not just this abused person with multiple personalities, but I’m part of a family with a long, sad history. I remember Miss Marple asking after my family. Back then I found that strange. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t belong to a family.”
“So, meeting Mark was good then?”
He doesn’t understand what the meeting meant for me. He always accepted his family. We never considered family as something that existed outside of our Tribe. We rejected the notion we belonged to the people who were our birth parents. They abused us. It was pure self-preservation.
For years I didn’t even think of the Tribe as my family. I was this small rowing boat in the middle of a hostile ocean, torn away from my anchor and without a harbor. Lost, forgotten, half the time imprisoned in a drug-stupor, with no purpose or value. I didn’t even know that any other form of existence was possible.
Was meeting Mark a good thing? It was like a tectonic shift that reshaped the landscape of my mind. How can I explain that to Scott?
“It blew my mind. I always thought of auntie as this old woman, and to a young child, she probably was. She was only thirty-eight when she died, younger than I am now. My mother died at the age of thirty-one, that’s an odd notion. So young.”
“Does that change how you feel about your mother?”
“I’m not sure yet. It’s shaken up how I always thought and felt about my family. Their lives didn’t start with me. A lot happened that shaped them long before I was born.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“Perhaps later, it has to settle in my mind first.”
“As you wish. We found nothing that links to the burglaries, though.” Scott gazes at me and then chuckles.
“No goldmine, no smugglers; just an eccentric ancestor and a potato cellar under the shed. Not very interesting or romantic, I’d say.”
“I agree and yet I feel so much richer. We should ask Mark to build the extension for us once we get the permit.” I slow down the car and turn into Flatbush Creek Road.
Scott laughs out loud. “You only want more stories, admit it.”
“Yes, that too, but my aunt trusted him. That’s a good enough recommendation for me.”
I turn quiet. Every time I drive down Flatbush Creek Road now, I’m reminded of the day when Scott’s cabin burned down. It always gives me the shivers.
“Do you think your burglars were looking for the cellar?”
“In my bookcase? I don’t think so. And they are not my burglars.”
“No, that was a silly thing to say.” He shakes his head and we laugh until we stop at the homestead.
Inside, Scott goes straight to the range and lights the fire for hot water. We both need a strong cup of coffee after this afternoon.
“I can’t wait for us to have electricity. Who still lives like this?”
“We do.”
I don’t have much compassion for his complaints. I like the smell of the wood and the time it takes to cook a meal or make a coffee. It slows life right down to a pace I love. I’m getting the mugs and the milk out and put them on the table next to Mark Brewer’s plans.
“I remember how I only had to flick a switch to heat a kettle or make some toast. I don’t miss it.”
While Scott stokes the fire and shakes his head about my old-fashioned ideas, I’m heading out the back to hunt for the ominous cellar. We’ve lived here over a year and never came across something looking even remotely like the entrance to a cellar. It’s probably collapsed or my auntie filled it in.
I direct my focus inside, hoping to connect with Mikey, the go-to Tribe member when it comes to all things hidden. Nothing. The lack of response is hard to take and a stab of loss and grief pierces my heart. I never expected to miss the others. I used to call them time-thieves. But now I would give everything to have them back the way we were when we arrived here. Sometimes I still sense I’m not alone but not very often.
Where is the cellar?
Mark Brewer said under the shed and the square on the plan was about where the shed’s window is. An image floats through my mind like a GIF of a woman and a young child disappearing down a ladder into the ground. It’s as if I’m pulled to the side of the shed. I swear I feel Maddie; I swear I hear her giggle; I swear I can feel her little hand in mine, fleeting as the touch of a butterfly’s wing, but as quickly as it came, it went again. A rush of joy washes through me. I’m not alone.
The dirt under the window is compacted more than the rest of the garden. I kick some away with my foot. A hollow sound makes me stop.
“Scott, I think I found it.”
He looks around the corner. “Found what?”
“The cellar entrance. Quick, bring a shovel. Forgotten is the coffee.”
He’s just as curious as I am and comes with a shovel and a torch. He scoops away the soil until a one by one yard wooden lid with a metal hook on one side becomes visible. He
