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“Not at all. That would be great.”
“I’ll give you a hand in the kitchen,” Emily offered, standing and collecting dishes from the table.
“I’ll see you then,” Alec advised. “I think I’ll head outside and see if Hal needs any help.”
Maren nodded her thanks for that, and Dan, who’d been mostly quiet during breakfast, spoke up.
“I could help you with taking that tree apart.”
“That’d be great,” Alec accepted.
Mark Thompson blew out a breath, apparently as a bit of feigned resignation. “Me, too. I can’t sit in here while you two are being politely helpful.”
Alec pointed at Mr. Adamczyk and raised a brow, a silent invitation.
Mr. Adamczyk chuckled easily and said, without shame, “I’m too old, boys—for either the cold or the chopping or whatever else you’ll be doing out there. I’ll keep the parlor warm for you, maybe stoke that fire.”
Everyone moved off in different directions then.
Maren felt a genuine satisfaction for the camaraderie that had just unfolded and cast a final glance at Alec before she backed into the swinging door, pushing it open into the kitchen. She couldn’t help but appreciate him for everything he’d done today, not least of which was saving her from that increasingly awkward situation with Mrs. Adamczyk. Alec, however, headed toward the side door and the hallway, was unaware of her lingering gaze.
She held the door open for Emily who followed, her hands full like Maren, and then let the door swing closed just a momentbefore Alec turned in her direction for one last glimpse of her before he exited the room.
***
“I feel like I’m going to get in trouble if I allow you to continue while we all head inside,” Alec said to Hal more than an hour later, who was snow blowing the inn’s driveway, but had throttled down the machine when Alec approached him.
Hal waved off Alec’s half-serious concern. “What else am I going to do all day over there?”
Alec smirked. “Over here,” he said, tossing his thumb over his shoulder at the old Victorian, “you can come in and warm up for a while and join the tour of the smuggler’s cellar.”
“Seen it, heard it,” Hal chuckled. “You guys go on in. That’s a huge help, just getting all the walkways shoveled and so much more of that tree cut up. You’re making me look good.”
“Easy to do,” Alec assured him. He liked the guy, couldn’t help but like someone who went out of his way to support Maren. He started backing away, so as not to face the wind so soon, and wagged his gloved finger at Hal. “She’ll be disappointed if you don’t show for dinner, though,” he reminded him. Even though it was presumptuous, he had a feeling he was right.
“I’ll be there. I’ll wrap it up in a bit and head on home for a shower before I come over.”
Further away now, Alec gave him the thumbs up and followed Mark and Dan around to the back of the house, to enter there so that they didn’t make a mess in the foyer.
The three of them cleaned up a bit and joined Maren, Emily, and Mr. Adamczyk waiting in the front parlor. Alec wasn’t bothered that they’d been gone longer than an hour and judging by the constant chatter and laughter overheard as they’dreturned and even while he was upstairs, he didn’t suppose those waiting were perturbed at all by the amount of time passed.
“All set?” Maren asked when Alec joined them, the last to arrive. “Great. Let’s get started.” She began by providing flashlights for the tour. “Of course there are lights down there, but you might want to peruse every nook and cranny. I know I did, and still do quite often.”
While the steps leading to the basement were sturdy, they were narrow and not very deep. The cellar was much cooler than the house, with low ceilings and the thick, musty scent of time. Alec and Mark, who was also over six feet tall, were forced to duck a bit to avoid conking their heads every few feet. There were plenty of exposed stone walls and remnants of the old knob and tube electrical components. It was also as intriguing as billed, with a labyrinth of passageways and spaces, so large that Alec began to believe the basement had a greater footprint than the house itself.
Maren flashed her light on old wooden barrels and carved wood wine racks built into the walls as she made her way toward the front of the basement, which would be the section closer to the road, and thus the lake. She stopped inside a room that might have been 12 x 12 and waited for everyone to enter the opening.
“Here’s another wine rack,” she said, approaching that old apparatus against one wall. With a subtle push on one of the shelves, the entire rack and the wall behind it grunted and was pushed forward.
Several flashlights aimed at the opening Maren had just revealed.
“This is as far as it opens these days,” Maren said, which was about two feet wide. “And though the wall itself is cool enough, I want you to see the tunnel here. It’s quite ingenious,but then it’s also much colder since it leads to a trap door in the front lawn near Maple Street. But if you want to follow,” she invited, stepping through the opening, “you’ll see that the tunnel was lined with concrete—it actually looks like a hollow tube of concrete. There is a walking space, just wide enough for two people but then there’s also a ledge that runs the length of the tunnel. It’s sixty-six feet long, by the way. And I’m guessing that the ledge was used to move the crates and barrels of liquor. The ledge is more than a foot wide, as you can see. They’d bring in each crate and put it up on the ledge and just walk along the tunnel, pushing each crate along with them. I suspect barrels, if they transported those as well, were simply laid on their sides and rolled all the way in and then back out when it needed to be moved again.”
Maren’s face was barely visible, the darkness of the cellar and her flashlight pointing elsewhere not allowing him to gauge her expression, but he sensed her enthusiasm for the subject matter in the quickened, higher voice she used.
He thought it was kind of cute.
“Down at the other end, if you’re interested in venturing further, the tunnel ends at a set of concrete stairs, which go up to a trap door laid flat in the lawn. Hal contends that back in the day, the top of that door would have been covered with sod or sections of grass, if you will, so that it blended in with the lawn. The ledge continues there, right next to the stairs, so when the crates came in, they simply had to slide them down from ground level and men down here would move them along.”
