It was coming from deep beneath the floorboards.
Bree shined her light, seeing gaps between the boards, and got on her knees, looking through the gaps to see a stone-walled basement cluttered with rusting old farm equipment.
There had to be a way down. She moved farther into the barn, casting the light into every corner and stall, looking for a stairway or a trapdoor. But she found none. Maybe she had to go back outside, find an entrance to the lower level. She turned and headed toward the doors.
As she crossed the charred lighting scar on the barn floor, she heard cracking before planks broke away beneath her.
Chapter
74
I would later learn that a man named Ezra Pike must have built the tunnel sometime in the late 1850s. Pike was a farmer on the land, a Quaker, an ardent abolitionist, and a vital cog in the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves reach Canada before and during the Civil War.
But that day, from my perspective, Pike’s tunnel was being used as a pathway to enslavement, torture, and murder. I was having no part of it, and that steeled me, made me determined to rescue Cam Nguyen and those babies. I was fifty feet down the tunnel when I heard the babies squawking somewhere ahead of me. And then the muffled voices of Carney, Nguyen, and the other man and woman we hadn’t seen yet.
Adjusting the beam, changing it to red, I cupped the bulb of the slender flashlight and stalked forward, then turned the light off altogether when the voices got loud enough to distinguish.
“Who’s going to be first, Kenny-Two?” the woman asked.
“I hate to say it because it’s so sad, sister, but it’s the boy, of course,” Carney replied. “Kevin was the first to go.”
His sister? I thought. Kevin? I moved close enough to see light glowing through cracks in the plank wall that blocked the way.
“I went first?” the other man said in a wavering voice.
“I saw it with my own eyes,” Carney replied in a grief-stricken voice. “She drowned you first, little brother. Mother of the year! Mother of us all!”
I pressed my eye to a slit in the wood and saw into a low-ceilinged space with a stone foundation, Ezra Pike’s root cellar, a way station on the long road to freedom. Carney had recently built a crude room inside the root cellar that stuck out of the stonework to my left about fifteen feet. I could see exposed two-by-fours and thick foam insulation coating what would turn out to be plywood walls. Soundproofing, I guessed.
But for some reason Carney didn’t care about sound that day. He had left the steel door ajar. Light spilled out of the room into the main root cellar.
“So Kelli went into the water next?” Kevin asked.
“As soon as there were no more bubbles rising in the tub,” Carney replied as if in awe. “She wanted us to go in reverse order of how we came into the world. Isn’t that right, Mommy?”
My hands searched the corners of the door that blocked the tunnel, trying to find the mechanism that would open it. But I couldn’t find it.
Carney said, “Mommy, give me Kevin to hold while you get down on your knees by the tub. You’ve got dirty work to do.”
In desperation, I pushed against each edge of the wall. The left one budged just as Cam Nguyen screamed, “You’re insane! I won’t do it!”
The babies began to screech and cry. Over their wailing, from somewhere far above me, I thought I heard a crash.
Chapter
75
Bree felt the floor giving way and instinctively threw her arms out wide. She fell through splintered wood that ripped at her legs, waist, and ribs before she slammed to a stop, trapped at her armpits. Her lower body and legs dangled in the basement below.
The impact had knocked the pistol from her hand. It lay a few inches away. But she still clutched the little Maglite.
She felt like she’d broken a rib, maybe two. And was that feeling blood?
Like ice fracturing, boards all around her started cracking and popping. For a terrifying moment she thought it would all collapse and she’d plunge through onto the rusting blade of some old piece of farm equipment in the darkness below her. But the boards held long enough for her to realize that she might escape if she acted quickly.
To get her elbows beneath her, she wiggled, strained, and struggled, trying to ignore the sharp pieces of wood biting at her from all sides like so many sharks’ teeth. She made it to her elbows and stopped there, breathing hard and thinking for the first time that the floor busting must have made a terrible noise.
Had Carney heard it? Was he coming for her from wherever he was keeping Cam Nguyen