The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox Page 6

  Chapter 6

  Access Denied

  The three of us just stared at what looked like a manhole cover sitting underneath the blackberry branches. AJ spoke up first. “So what do you think it is, Scooter?”

  “There is only one way to find out!” Scooter said as he began clearing away the remaining few feet of branches so we could get to the handle of the big metal plate. AJ and me joined in with the task of moving thorny branches out of the way, and pretty soon we were all huddled underneath the bowing branches, staring at the lid in front of us.

  For such thick blackberries, I thought, there sure is a lot of room to move around.

  Scooter held his hand on the big metal plate as if to keep it closed and pointed with his other hand. “Hey, guys, look! A tunnel!”

  I turned to look where he pointed, and I understood why there was so much room to move around. There was a tunnel almost three feet high that ran away from us. It went straight backwards along the greenbelt line toward the really dense woods and appeared to dead-end in a wall of thorns about fifty feet back. I was about to go explore the tunnel when Scooter snapped his fingers and hollered for my attention.

  “Hey, Ty, don’t you want to see what’s in here?” He motioned towards the metal plate in front of him.

  “Oh, yeah, my bad,” I said. The tunnel exploration would have to wait just a bit.

  The plate in front of us looked very similar to a manhole cover—almost identical in shape and material. It had four holes set in a square near the middle of the circle, and the surface had raised little squares to give it sort of a waffle-iron look. In fact, the only thing that made me sure it was not a very misplaced manhole cover was the metal handle that was attached to one side.

  Scooter turned the handle and braced himself to heave open the huge lid, but to our surprise, it swung upward very easily. The lid was hinged on the side away from the handle, and you could tell the whole thing had been well-oiled because it hardly made a sound as it opened. We all looked at each other with a mixture of excitement and fright and, without a word, turned our heads toward what was lying in the hole once covered by the big metal plate.

  The sun was starting its descent behind the mountains, but it still shone into the blackberries at just such an angle that we could see fairly clearly a few feet into the hole.

  Right beneath the lid was the top rung of a ladder that descended straight down out of sight. AJ was halfway down the ladder before Scooter or I could stop him.

  “AJ, what are you doing?” we both said, practically in unison.

  “I’m checking out Mathisen’s hideout, that’s what!” he hollered back up the ladder.

  Even though no one had actually said it aloud, I think we had all jumped to that same conclusion the second we saw the big metal plate.

  “So what do you see down there?” I asked.

  “Not much, guys,” he said. “This room is only about ten feet long by five feet wide and maybe about ten feet tall. It looks almost like a huge closet, but with a ladder in it.”

  “Hardly the place for someone to live in, AJ,” Scooter said, disappointed. “Is there anything lying on the floor? Any markings on the walls? Something that would prove Mr. Mathisen has ever been down there?”

  “Nope, just four smooth concrete walls and a ladder. Wait! Hold on a minute, one of these walls is not concrete at all. It feels more like some kind of metal. And it’s a little warmer than the other walls, too.”

  I couldn’t stand to just listen any longer. I pushed past Scooter and shimmied down the ladder until I was standing next to AJ. There was plenty of room for both of us. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark room after being out in the sunlight all day. I blinked rapid-fire to try and make my eyes adjust faster, but I gave up once I realized the sun was starting to set and my vision ten feet below ground was only going to get worse the longer I waited.

  I turned to AJ and asked, “Alright, now which wall do you think is warmer than the others?”

  AJ placed his hand on the wall opposite the ladder, and I followed with mine. Sure enough, it was warm compared to the cold steel ladder. I rubbed my hands along the wall for no other reason than to be doing something while I tried to think. After a few swipes of my hand, my pinky finger jammed against something. It was a handle!

  The handle was about four inches long at about chest level. It reminded me of the handle on my dad’s gun safe. I wrenched the handle down and clockwise, and it turned from the original position of pointing to the right to pointing straight downward. The handle turned easily—in fact, too easily. I could tell that twisting the handle was not actually opening anything, and when I let go of the handle, it just sprang back into its original position.

  Scooter’s voice echoed down from the top of the ladder: “Guys, what did you find?”

  “Well, I found what feels like some sort of handle just sticking out of the wall,” I said. “But I can’t see too clearly. Why don’t you grab a flashlight real quick?”

  “Okie-dokie” is all I heard as the shadow above us disappeared from the hole’s entrance. With so many new thoughts rushing through my head, it seemed to take hours for Scooter to return, but it was only a couple minutes before a “Head’s up!” was followed by a near concussion as his flashlight bounced off my shoulder and clattered on the concrete floor.

  “Ow! You idiot! Do you think you could give me a little more warning before pelting me with stuff?” I was a bit peeved, but I got over it when I turned on the flashlight.

  The light from the flashlight made everything start to make sense. As the flashlight beam hit the wall, AJ and me could see that what we both had been feeling on the wall was a huge steel door. It was about seven feet tall and was almost as wide as the room itself. There was no door jamb, so unless you had a flashlight, it was hard to tell where the door started and ended. But when you took a step back, you could see it looked just like one of those huge steel doors you see in bank vaults. There was the small handle that I had previously come across, and just above the handle was a funny-looking keyhole.

  I reached out and tried to turn the handle again, and once again it moved with ease. Once I pulled down on the handle, I tried to pull open the door, and of course it didn’t budge. To be honest, I didn’t think it would. The way the handle moved, I knew the door must be locked.

  I shone the light along the other walls and the floor and told AJ to look and see if he saw some sort of key. After a few seconds, we both realized the floor was actually very clean and we weren’t going to find anything else down in the hole. We turned off the flashlight and climbed the ladder to meet a very anxious Scooter.

  “The door is locked, and there isn’t exactly a welcome mat to hide a key under,” I said as I reached the top of the ladder. My earlier excitement had faded just like the warmth from the May sun.

  “I guess we could set up our jingle bell alarm system again,” AJ suggested. “When Mathisen comes back, we can catch him inside.”

  “No way, dude. Mathisen is not going to fall for our set-up a second time. See that tunnel?” Scooter pointed down the hallway of blackberries towards the thick woods. “He will just take that tunnel and avoid our trap altogether.”

  “Besides,” I added, “I still hear phantom jingle bells every time I close my eyes!”

  As Scooter shut the metal lid, my curiosity was rekindled to explore the tunnel I had seen earlier. I started heading down the blackberry hallway, and AJ and Scooter fell in line behind me. I went only about twenty feet when I came across a second trail that branched off to the right. It was headed directly toward the thinner woods. To my disappointment, it dead-ended after only about ten feet. I turned to speak to AJ, who was right behind me.

  “It looks like Mathisen started cutting a second exit tunnel from the inside out but hasn’t finished it yet.”

  I don’t know why, but I decided to go to the dead-end of the tunnel anyway. I guess I was just curious about how close he was to finishing.


  When I got to the end, I realized there were a lot of blackberries to my left that were cut but hadn’t been moved yet. I grabbed a hold of a couple thick branches, careful to avoid thorns, and pushed. To my surprise and embarrassment, the entire wall of branches gave way, and I tumbled out and stopped at the foot of a small madrone tree. AJ and Scooter quickly came to my side and helped me up. As we turned back around to look at the blackberries we had just escaped from, Scooter hopped up and down with excitement.

  “Look what you just found, Ty, it’s a trap door!” As he said this, he grabbed the branches that had just given way and, instead of picking them up, swung the mass of branches back over the mouth of the tunnel. It made a little camouflaged door.

  “Fascinating!” Scooter continued. “Look, you can’t even see the tunnel we just came through. And this little makeshift door of thorns looks like all the other bushes around it!”

  “That must be how Mathisen escaped our jingle bell trap!” I said.

  “I agree,” Scooter said. “I’m guessing that the other tunnel has a similar camouflaged door, and I bet that is the way he usually enters.”

  Just then Mrs. Parks yelled from the back porch, “Scooter! Boys! Are you out there? It’s time to eat!”

  The thought of food was a distraction from our new discovery, but a welcome one. Scooter shouted back, “Be right there, Mom!”

  After making sure the “blackberry door” looked the way it probably did before I flung it open, we headed through the sparse woods towards the house.

  When we got to the path that Scooter had trampled with the bat, he took a few moments to sort of “fluff” the blackberries back up so they would look more alive and hide our tracks. In the waning light, it was hard to tell where we had entered the bushes. Speaking from personal experience with blackberry bushes, in a couple days those stubborn bushes would look as good as new.

  “Let’s pick this up after dinner,” Scooter whispered as we stepped onto the Parks’ backyard grass. AJ and me nodded in agreement, and the three of us ran inside the back door.