THE TRAP Read online

  “That rock at the bend?” Miss Alden asked, as they threw the flat into the back of the Pacer, not bothering to put it into the spare tire recess.

  “Yes.”

  “Ought to be marked.”

  “Oh yes,” Liv agreed and made a mental note to paint the rock orange in the morning.

  Miss Alden wiped her hands on her khaki trousers. “You look peaked. Care for a glass of iced tea at my house? Or are you in a hurry to get home?”

  Miss Alden held out her hand to Travis, and he presented her with her cane. She accepted it with a grave little half-bow, then leaned on it casually.

  “I’ve got some toy soldiers Travis might like to look at,” Miss Alden went on.

  “Oh, please, Liv,” Travis said quickly.

  Liv nodded. “Thank you. You’re so good to us, Miss Alden.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Miss Alden said gruffly. “And call me Helen, will you?”

  “If you call me Liv,” Liv said.

  Miss Alden led the way. Liv rolled up the Pacer’s windows and turned on the air-conditioning. Travis settled down next to her in the front seat.

  “Reach me the aspirin, will you, darling?” Liv asked.

  Travis popped open the glove box and extracted the plastic bottle.

  “Got a hurt, Liv?” he asked sympathetically.

  “Headache,” she answered.

  “Does aspirin work for bug bites?”

  Liv chewed the aspirin and thought about it. “Ought to help, some. You want one? Have to chew it.”

  Travis thought about that, then extended a not very clean palm. She shook out a single aspirin with one hand. Grimacing, he chewed it thoughtfully and swallowed hard.

  “Yuck,” he said.

  That seemed to settle the subject.

  The road rose to their own driveway, and once past it, dipped again and leveled, as did the land itself. Miss Alden’s house was the last on the road, and the oldest as well. Hers was the old Dexter place, a farmhouse that had been for a hundred years the first and only habitation at the north end of the lake. Unlike the cottages and summer houses of her neighbors, built on slices of shore frontage, Miss Alden’s house stood alone, separated by thick woods and some twenty acres of the original Dexter holdings. Much closer to the lake than any of the late-comers, its broad, screened porch, shaded by the big old trees, gave onto a much-envied sand beach, built in the twenties before such tinkerings with the shore line were regulated. Lowbush blueberries bound the sand in place. On the far side of the house, the soil was just fine, and supported lawn aplenty, patches of flowers and a garden. A little ways away, gnarled apple trees still bore edible fruit. It was always a cool and beautiful spot, smelling of green things growing, and the baptismally clear water of the lake.

  Liv rolled down her window and breathed it in. The aspirin was easing her headache, and her toothache.

  The old house was built of stone, with thick walls and a slate roof. Its design was plain, a simple rectangle with the second story tucked under a hipped roof. In the twenties the porch had been added to one of the short sides, and though roofed with asphalt and floored with wood, its arched pillars and foundation piles were also of stone. Ivy had taken hold of the stone so many years ago that the vines were woody and as thick as electrical cable. Around the stone foundation the vines had recently been cut away, so the stone looked exposed. Narrow cellar windows squinted blankly out of the naked stone. But the glass, caked with dirt, had been taken out, perhaps for cleaning, and stood leaning against the stone. Fresh red caught Liv’s eye and when she craned, she saw a new course of bricks laid behind the sill. Miss Alden was bricking up her cellar windows.

  Miss Alden was slow leaving her car, stopping to check the set of her hat in the rearview mirror and collect her cane, so Liv and Travis gained the porch, and waited for her at the top of the steps. At one end of each step cacti grew in large clay pots.

  “The door’s open, go in,” Miss Alden called to them, climbing out of the Plymouth.

  Travis pushed open the screen door, and Liv followed him in. It seemed at once much cooler than it was outside, and quiet, the way library vaults and churches are. Threadbare pillows smelling of eternally damp feathers cushioned wicker chairs, rockers, a porch swing. At the far end of the porch, a hammock hung limp as a flag without a breeze. A single window opened from the porch to the interior of the house.

  Miss Alden’s cane stumped up the steps behind them and across the porch. She bustled past them, a ring of keys in her hand. “Come in, come in.”

  The door, like its frame, was a new-looking modern one, custom-made of thick solid pine to fit the opening, but hung on old-fashioned wrought-iron hinges, perhaps the original hardware. It offered an iron latch instead of a doorknob, incongruously topped with a brand new mortise lock. Beyond it, the house was one large, low-ceilinged room. The stone walls of the house had been plastered and wainscoted. Instead of the more-common narrow, vertical strip pattern, the white-painted, waist-high wainscoting was paneled like a door, or the mahogany library paneling of the Neal Street Victorian townhouse in Portland that was the Russells’ home in the winter. At the far end, the wainscoting framed the fireplace, leaving only the stone mantel and the granite stiles exposed. Travis’ fingers twitched nervously at Liv’s trousers at the sight of several trophy animal heads on the walls: a lion, a buck with an awesome rack of antlers, a coyote. Their glass eyes, dusty and dead, did not render the lion and the coyote, with their fierce displays of yellow teeth, less fearsome, but rather more so. The fireplace looked as if it could easily handle the roasting of a big game animal, or Len Winslow’s pigs. Wood for a fire was laid on wrought andirons, and more wood was neatly stacked within reach against the paneling. Handy to the fireplace, a brass box screwed to the wainscoting held wooden matches. The floor was of wide pine planks, bare of paint and aged to a warm, translucent beer-gold, on which Miss Alden had placed the animal skins as rugs. A coarse-haired zebra skin at the door, a bear rug, head and all, before the fire, the headless lion at the foot of the couch.

  The long walls were pierced twice each with small, many-paned windows hung with plain white net curtains. The light admitted was not great and the room, despite the reflective white surfaces of wall and ceiling, was dark and cool. Miss Alden flicked a light switch, illuminating a big wrought-iron wagon wheel chandelier suspended from the exposed beams of the ceiling. Its watery light reminded them of the brilliance of the day outside and the impermeable thickness of the stone that walled them in.

  “Make yourself at home,” Miss Alden said. “I’ll be right back.” She disappeared up the steep stairs that rose on the right of the door, working the cane ahead of her a little like a mountain climber’s piton.

  The room had been furnished with the sort of cast-off pieces relegated to a summer place when they had lost their first charm but were still too good to throw away. They were old and comfortable, and a little smelly, not only with the accumulated scent of the people and pets that used them, but of cleaners and polishes, their own aging fabric and of damp and long periods of disuse. On the stone hearth, a blue bottle that had once held a quart of Swedish mineral water was filled with black-eyed Susans, daisies, and the first Queen Anne’s Lace that signals summer’s end and promises snowdrifts where its own white drifts billow on the high weeds of the fields.

  A spinet piano graced the long wall opposite the stairway. Liv wondered how it stood the damp, the freezing cold of winter, and why the vandals had not destroyed it. Closer, she could smell the finish and see the grooves scarring the wood, like a network of roads going nowhere plowed through deep snow, that no amount of refinishing could ever repair. The thieves that had broken in—that must be why she was bricking up the cellar windows.

  Travis slipped his hand into hers. She squeezed it and led him to the sofa, which creaked in a friendly way when they sat down. There was a big wicker basket of needlework handy to it; Liv remembered Miss Royal bundling her needlework back into the basket,
rising from the very corner of the sofa she was now sitting in to meet the new neighbors, the only other time Liv had been in this house. Her other encounters with the two women had been at the post office in Nodd’s Ridge or walking on the cottage road, on the beach, or berrypicking in nearby fields. For three summers Miss Alden and Miss Royal had remained just the two elderly lesbians who lived next door.

  Miss Alden came stumping downstairs again. She still wore her khaki safari shirt and trousers tucked into high black boots, but she had changed her Panama for a black silk scarf tied gypsy-style around her head, and she had freshened her red lipstick. She carried a leatherbound wooden case the size of a large breadbox in her hands, and her cane under her arm.

  “You might be interested in this,” she said to Travis. She held the case out to him.

  Wide-eyed, Travis accepted it, settling it on his knees. He pried off the lid. Inside, three-inch-high lead soldiers in blue uniforms were ranked in alternate rows with lead soldiers in gray uniforms. Some stood straight to attention, their rifles held across their bodies, and others knelt to fire. They were beautifully detailed: blue-eyed or brown-eyed; blond, brown, black, and even a couple of gray-haired ones who wore officers’ insignia. One wore glasses, several sported beards or mustaches or sideburns, and three of the lowest rank were black. They all bore markings of rank: two colonels, four captains, six lieutenants, ten sergeants, twenty corporals, one hundred privates, and two resplendently uniformed generals.

  “Wow!” Travis breathed in awe.

  “Travis!” Liv exclaimed. “Miss Alden! They’re marvelous.”

  Miss Alden chuckled. “When I was six, I wanted those soldiers worse than anything. It was quite unsuitable, of course. But I summoned up my courage and asked for them anyway. They were given to my brother for his birthday, which followed mine by three days. He was the best of brothers, Travis. His name was Emmet. He gave them to me, in front of our parents, because, he said, ‘Helen didn’t cry, even though she wants ‘em so bad.’ I gave them back to him, years later, when we were grown up and he had a little boy. And then, they came back to me. Emmet’s son died, and Emmet couldn’t bear having them around.”

  Travis grinned at her. “Can I play with them?”

  “Of course,” Miss Alden said. “That hearth over there makes a bully battlefield.”

  He looked at his mother. “What’s bully, Liv?”

  “Super.”

  Travis slid off the sofa, clutching the case fervidly. His cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  “Bully,” he muttered thoughtfully, as he sank onto his knees at the edge of the hearth.

  Miss Alden watched him, her hands on her thighs just above her knees, and showed her large, yellowed, and rather fiercely crooked teeth, right to her gums, in a stiff smile. Like the box of toy soldiers, her smile seemed taken out of storage, wrinkled and faded, like something that had been folded away in damp and dark for a long time, in an attic or cupboard under the eaves. Abruptly, she stood up.

  “I expect you’d like that iced tea I promised. I know I would,” she said.

  “Could I do anything to help?” Liv offered.

  Miss Alden looked closely at her. There was nothing unused or retired in her bright eyes; they saw everything. “No, no,” she said. “You look done-up, if you’ll forgive my saying so. Are you in pain?”

  Liv colored. “Just a headache. I took some aspirin in the car.”

  Miss Alden was silent.

  It occurred to Liv that Miss Alden must have listened to a thousand student lies in her day.

  But the tall old woman merely nodded. Leaning on her cane, she stalked to the old refrigerator.

  “Wow!” Travis breathed. He looked over his shoulder at her, his face shining with excitement. “Look at this, Liv.” He held up a cannon. He had ranked the soldiers on the hearth and discovered a second layer in the box, of artillery and cavalry horses.

  “Fantastic,” Liv assured him, but he was already rapt again.

  Miss Alden settled a tray on the coffee table.

  “Much as I hate to disturb Travis’ maneuvers,” she said, “perhaps he’d like some rations.”

  “Travis,” Liv said.

  Travis looked up again and saw the tall glasses of tea and the plate of Oreos on the tray. He grimaced, then carefully deposited the two horses he was holding on the hearth and scooted up to the coffee table.

  “Sugar?” Miss Alden asked.

  “Yes, please,” Travis said. He wiped his brow with a grubby hand, leaving a smear like ashes. With the other hand, he accepted the glass.

  “Cookies?” Miss Alden asked.

  “Yes, please.”

  Concentrating intensely, he made short work of the snack. He drained the glass with an audible rattle.

  “More tea, Travis?” Miss Alden asked.

  He looked at his mother hopefully.

  Liv nodded.

  Miss Alden poured another glassful from the pitcher on the table. She bent over Travis to give it to him.

  “Can you be trusted with a secret?” she asked him.

  Travis’ eyes widened over the rim of his glass. He shook his head solemnly.

  Miss Alden held out her hand.

  Travis placed his glass carefully on the table, then climbed off his knees and took it.

  “This house has a lot of secrets,” she said, casting a proprietary eye around the room. “For instance.” She rose and went to the nearest window, and drew wooden shutters rattling across it. The shutters slid out of the thick stone walls like the blades of a rusty guillotine.

  Travis grinned at Liv. His eyes danced.

  “Built right into the walls,” Miss Alden said. “Indian shutters.”

  She held out her hand again, and Travis jumped up to take it. She led him at a processional pace to the fireplace.

  “This house is the oldest house in all of Nodd’s Ridge. It wasn’t the first one built, but it is the oldest one still standing,” she told him.

  Travis looked up at her, waiting for the secret.

  “It’s so old that the man who built it, Stephen Dexter, who was my great-great-great granduncle, was afraid the Indians might attack it and kill him and his family.”

  Travis caught his breath.

  “So he built a secret hideaway that would keep his family safe even if the Indians burnt the house down around them. Nothing like that ever happened. The Indians all died from cholera, along with Stephen Dexter’s first wife and three of his children. But the secret hiding place is still here.”

  With that, Miss Alden reached forward with her cane and pressed a piece of molding on the wainscoting to the left of the brass matchbox. And a section of the wainscoting, about as big as a china cupboard door, opened up.

  Travis gasped. Liv came to her feet in surprise.

  Behind the door was a dark hole tunneled in stone, the very wall of the house, and the fireplace. Miss Alden swung the secret door open and stepped up to it. Travis, still clinging to her hand, followed her. But he looked back over his shoulder at Liv, and she came to him at once.

  Without so much as a backward glance to see if they were coming, Miss Alden stooped into the darkness. They could hear the hollow tap of her cane on the stone.

  Travis and Liv, hunching her shoulders instinctively, followed her. It was immediately cooler. The light behind them showed them the rising steps of a very steep, stone stairway. The passage was so narrow they could not help touching its rough, cold, raw walls every time they moved, not just with their hands, but all over, so it seemed as if the walls were reaching out to touch them. Travis tightened his hold on Liv’s hand, and she assumed he was tightening it as well on Miss Alden’s, who was a dark shape, like a shadow in thick woods of a cold dark winter night, above them. His breathing had quickened, and so had hers. Behind them, the door in the wainscoting swung slowly shut.

  Travis jumped, and dug his nails into Liv.

  Miss Alden turned and whispered, “Don’t be frightened. You’re safe a
s houses in here.”

  And with a tug of Travis’ hand, she led them upward in the blind dark. Every once in a while, it seemed as if the gold head of her cane flickered, reflecting a minuscule quantity of fight seeping from some unknown source, perhaps around the edges of the secret door. It seemed possible at the time that it flickered on its own by magic. Their eyes had just begun to adjust to the lightlessness when Miss Alden stopped. Here the passage seemed to widen as it turned.

  She tapped the wall on the right. “Three and a half feet of stone wall between us and the fireplace.” She swung the cane to tap the left-hand wall. The sound of the cane was wood on iron. “Here’s the gun rack Stephen Dexter built into the wall.”

  Miss Alden groped with her free hand to find Travis’ in the dark, and helped him feel of the iron bands that formed the gunrack. Then it was Liv’s turn. Liv winced at Miss Alden’s rough, callused, almost cruelly tight grip. At once the old woman let go of Liv’s hand, releasing it onto the crude iron of the rack. Liv was astonished at the coldness of the shotgun muzzles as she felt them blind.

  “How many are there?” she asked.

  “Eight. It’s only part of my collection. The rest I keep in Wellesley. They come from several sources. My father and Emmet and my own acquisitions. Stephen Dexter had no intentions of sharing his weapons with the Indians, so he placed his rack here. The thieves have never found them.” Miss Alden chuckled. “Perhaps they’ll have the luck this year.”

  Then Miss Alden’s cane tapped higher, on stone. “Three feet on this side, part of the exterior wall.” She started up again, and shortly they reached the top of the stairs. Miss Alden thrust with her cane into the darkness ahead of them, and there was a thunk as it solidified and became a door, the twin to the one by the fireplace, opening before them. They emerged into a bedroom under eaves.

  Blinking, they turned to look where they had been. The secret exit was closing. Miss Alden tapped it lightly with her cane and it lay flush against the wainscoting around the bedroom fireplace. She turned to them, smiling broadly. Her eyes were alit with a fever of excitement.