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Had there been a door there at one time? He removed the rest of the plaster down to the floor and had to wait for the dust to settle in order to see the beams, much less if anything lay beyond the beams.
As the dust slowly settled, Drake’s headlamp beam cut through the remaining particles to a room beyond the wall. It wasn’t more than six feet by six feet square and had been carved out of the rock wall of the mountain.
He stepped between the beams into the stone-walled room. Several wooden crates littered the floor, along with a pile of what appeared to be clothing. He crossed to the crates and found them to be full of bottles of some kind of liquid. None of the bottles were labeled.
Drake suspected the bottles were moonshine and that the stash was left over from the Prohibition Era. He turned the beam of his headlamp to the pile of clothes on the floor. The cloth had a floral pattern of faded pink and yellow. Perhaps it had once been a curtain or a woman’s dress.
As he neared the pile, he noticed a shoe and something that appeared to be a pole or thick stick lying beside it.
His pulse picked up, his empty belly roiling. He leaned over the pile of clothes and the shoe and froze.
The stick wasn’t a stick at all. It was a bone. On the other side of it was another bone just like it.
With the handle of his sledgehammer, he moved the crate beside the pile of cloth and gasped.
On the other side of the crate, lying against the cold stone floor, lay a skull covered in a dry mummified layer of skin with a few long, thin strands of hair clinging to it in scattered patches.
“Parker,” Drake called out.
When the hammering continued, Drake cleared his throat and yelled. “Parker!”
All hammering ceased.
“That you, Drake?” Parker answered.
With his gaze on what he now had determined was a complete skeleton covered in a woman’s dress, Drake said, “You need to come see this.”
