12th of Never

Chapter 86

THE DARK HALF BASEMENT had a low ceiling, a dirt floor, three walls lined with shelves, and a two-door metal utility cabinet backed up against the fourth wall.

Yuki opened the cabinet doors expecting to see neat shelves of tools, but the cabinet was empty. The back of the cabinet had been replaced with a rectangle of painted plywood fitted with a hook on one side and hinges on the other. Yuki unhooked the plywood board and swung it open.

There was nothing behind the board—truly nothing but air. Yuki reached into her jacket pocket and took out her keys. She had a flashlight on her key chain, a small one with a pretty bright LED beam. She flashed the light into the back of the closet and saw a tunnel, seemingly endless, that was cut into the hill.

Yuki took out her phone and called Brady.

“Come to the basement,” she said. “I think I found something.”

The opening was four feet high by three feet wide by too deep for the flashlight to find the end of it. Yuki stooped, pulled her elbows in tight to her sides, and stepped into the rabbit hole.

She followed her flashlight’s beam, and after about twelve feet the tunnel took a soft turn to the left and joined a concrete conduit—it looked like a drainage pipe. Yuki aimed her light and saw that down at the end of the conduit was a metal door.

Her phone rang. Jackson.

“I’m in the basement. Where are you?” he said, sounding both annoyed and worried.

“There’s a tunnel, Jackson. Open the utility cabinet.”

Yuki knew she should wait for him, but she had to keep going. The door at the end of the conduit had a latch with an open padlock dangling from it. She lifted the padlock, put it on the floor, and opened the metal portal.

There was an immediate rush of air from a vent overhead. Yuki put her hand on the wall and flipped a switch. Light flooded the tiny room from an overhead fixture, illuminating every square inch of it.

The cell was six feet by six feet, five feet high, with cement walls. There was a rough wool blanket and a thin uncovered pillow on a narrow cot up against the wall. Yuki saw a bucket in one corner with a toilet seat on it, a small flat-screen TV on a wooden crate, and a hook on the wall with a rag of a nightgown hanging from it. Her eyes went to a child’s crayon drawing of a kitten on the opposite wall, which bore the words POKEY BY LILY.

Yuki turned. Brady stood bent in the doorway. He peered into the cell.

“What the hell?” he said.

Yuki felt shock and disbelief. “Lily lived here. This was where she lived for a year.”