“Give me a break!” Alix said, groaning. “Tyler, sweetie, don’t eat that.”
Jared pulled the boy away from the gas pedal, put him in the car seat, and fastened it. “Everybody ready?” he asked as Alix got in and shut the door.
“All of us long-legged creatures are ready to go. Right, Tyler?”
He laughed, kicked his stubby little legs, and said, “Go! Go!”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Jared said and pulled out of the driveway.
When they got to the North Shore, Twig’s men were there working. Right away, two of them gathered a stack of scrap wood, put it in the shade, and Tyler ran to it.
Alix hadn’t seen the chapel for a while and she stood there transfixed. To see her own design come to life was almost more than she could bear. The structure wasn’t yet complete, but enough of the chapel was done that she could envision the finished product. The exterior, the windows, the doors, the steeple, were all just as she’d seen them in her mind.
“Like it?” Jared asked from behind her.
“Very much.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. As a fellow architect, he knew how she felt.
“Okay,” he said, “enough daydreaming. Let’s get to work.” He was holding Parthenia’s map. “Not that anyone could find anything from this thing, but—”
“What’s that?” Alix pointed to a rectangle drawn beside the washhouse. Last night she’d been too sleepy to do more than look at the drawing.
“It says SOAP. I guess Valentina stored her soap there.”
Alix took the sketch, pointed the front of the house toward the sea, then looked to her right where the washhouse was drawn. There was no distance given, so it could be fifty feet or a hundred yards, as the property was quite large.
The only thing near the washhouse was a funny little icon of two round circles with a rectangle connecting them with the word SOAP written beside it.
Alix and Jared looked at each other, having no idea what the symbol meant, but it was west of the house so they walked that way. The centuries had covered the ground with fierce little bushes and it was slow moving through them.
A short distance from the house, Alix saw a chest-high rock and another near it. There were some boulders on the island, left over from some long-ago glacier, and these two were only about six feet apart.
“They’ve been flattened here,” Alix said, running her hand across the top of the first rock. Someone had chiseled out a place on the top surface and a matching one was on the other rock. It was subtle, not something a person would notice, but a tabletop could be held in the chiseled places.
Jared looked at the map. “If this was a table—”
“Or open shelves to hold the drying soap molds,” Alix said.
“Right. Then the washhouse was …” He stepped over about three feet. “Here.” Reaching down, he scraped out a stone from the sandy soil. It was a round rock, the kind used in a fireplace, and under it was a very old piece of rusty metal. It looked to be the handle of a big washtub.
Alix smiled. “Looks like Parthenia did draw a good map.”
Jared gave a one-sided grin.
“Petticoat Row rules again!”
Jared laughed. “Stop bragging and let’s go get some shovels. This has to be dug out by hand.”
Twig’s men stopped work on the chapel to help find the washhouse. Over the years they’d found many artifacts—coins, ivory, buttons—in the old houses they’d remodeled, but no matter how many things they discovered, each one was of interest.
It didn’t take much digging to see that a building had once been on the site. There were a few pieces of charred timbers, broken china, more scrap metal. After about an hour, they had the stone of the basement outlined. They could see where the foundation of the big fireplace had been and started digging there.
The men took turns, filling the bucket, then the wheelbarrow. Alix stayed under a tree with Tyler, trying to keep him occupied so he wouldn’t get in the way. At first she’d tried to keep him clean but soon found out that wasn’t possible. They broke for lunch and started again an hour later. It was slow going, as the old stones needed the dirt to hold them in place. Three times they had to stop to construct forms to fortify the stones. Two trips were made to Island Lumber to buy reinforcing materials.
It was late afternoon when Jared called to Alix. “I think we have something.”
She picked up Tyler and went to what was now an impressively large hole. Jared and Dennis, the tile setter, were at the bottom. Some stones had fallen out of the thick walls and the men were standing in rubble. Jared stepped back to expose what they’d uncovered. Just behind him, set deep into the stone, was a rusty iron door. All the men were standing over the hole, looking down, and watching. Dave, the cabinetmaker, passed down a crowbar to Jared. After a look at Alix, he pried the door open.