The Nancy Drew hour

I shoved the hangers to the side and shined the flashlight into the back wall. No spiders; smooth  plaster. I decided to started knocking in the middle and go towards the edges. Knock. Knock-knock. “Mom,” said Sonny. ”What are you doing in my closet?”

“Great, another pair of ears! Does that sound hollow—over there, to the left?” Knock knock.

“Um. No.”

“Darn it!” It was my second dead end of the day.

A theater with a Prohibition-era secret tunnel has recently inserted itself into my novel. One of those things that happens. It rekindled an old fascination from my Chicago days with speakeasies and escape routes, especially those associated with my orange tabby’s infamous namesake,  Al Capone. When I took one of the gangster walking tours in Uptown, I learned that Capone would supply his venues, such as the Green Mill jazz club, with liquor delivered via underground tunnels. These tunnels were, rather disappointingly, basically a bunch of interconnected basements rather than the standalone, dirt-walled tunnels of my imagination.

It’s common knowledge that during Prohibition, which lasted nationwide in the US from 1920 through 1933, Americans didn’t stop drinking. They just got sneaky about it, getting doctors’ prescriptions for medicinal doses of brandy, flocking to churches for the communion wine, and sharing recipes for bathtub gin and homemade distilleries. They jammed speakeasies and bought spirits from bootleggers.  During this era, people often built liquor-collection-sized hiding places into their houses, which were accessible via trap doors, sliding bookcases, false cabinet- and closet-backs, spaces underneath floorboards, etc.

 It struck me that I live in a house that was built in 1933. I thought about Scooby Doo, Nancy Drew, Jupiter Jones, the Hardy Boys, and the other kid detectives from my formative years. Those sleuths couldn’t go anywhere without finding smugglers’ caves and secret rooms, revolving fireplaces and the like. I’d lived in a Prohibition-era house for 13 years; surely it must be hiding a secret or two. I grabbed a flashlight and a magnifying glass and set out.

The original owner of our house was a blacksmith. He probably wasn’t a rum-runner in his spare time, but he was a prominent citizen with the means to amass a collection of whiskeys and wines. You’d think that by now we would have explored every corner of our house, but 1) there be spiders in the corners and backs of things, plus 2) it took us more than two years simply to open all of our moving boxes. We’re slow at this stuff.

I started with the built-in cabinet in the dining room where I keep the Christmas candlesticks and other rarely used items. I tapped at the back and sides of the cabinet without finding any hollow sound. There was, however, a mysterious wire running through it, vanishing up towards Sonny’s room on the upper floor and down towards the basement. One of the articles about Prohibition houses mentioned wires leading to hidden stills…

“I have stuff to do in here, Mom.”

I can take a hint and removed myself to the hall linen cabinet, where I began tapping for hollow walls once again. Dave opened his office door. “Could you do that later? I’m on a call.”

I sighed. Above my head was the hatch to the attic. We have no idea what’s up there, since the hatch is painted shut. (As are a couple of windows on the main floor.) Even when we discovered that a bat colony had taken up residence in the attic, the pest control people fixed it from the outside. I wondered if it was worth trying to chip at the paint in order to paw through whatever the bats had left up there. Not while Dave was in his meeting, though.

So I followed the wire down to the basement, where it vanished into the space behind the little door.

Unlike the painted-shut windows and attic hatch, the little door (so-called because it’s only about four feet high) has a sliding latch that’s been painted open. We have to lean an old pair of crutches against the door to keep it shut. The door leads to the cellar, which houses the oil tank. While the basement proper has painted cement block walls, the cellar’s walls are unpainted, a little crumbly in spots, and in one place there are big stones instead of blocks. The only sources of light are a couple of tiny rectangular windows just above ground height. The floor is dirt. Well, dirt mixed with rocks and bricks, forming a mound that rises to hip height on the east end. On top of the earth are old window screens, curtain rods, bags of mortar mix, rope, and a couple of flower pots. Nothing of ours, although technically we acquired it along with the house. Some of it could be stuff dating back to the blacksmith days. There’s room for a couple of crates of whiskey, or a chest of gold doubloons, or even a bootlegger or two in there.

Nancy Drew would surely get out a shovel and start digging, alone or with the help of George, Bess, and Ned. Me, I lost my nerve. I closed the little door and barricaded it once again, saving the mystery of the manor house for some other day.