First Family

CHAPTER 53

GABRIEL WAS TRYING his best not to even breathe. He held the big set of keys steady in his hand and was trying to locate every sound throughout the many nooks and crannies of Atlee before taking each step. Part of the little boy wondered why he was doing what he was. The other part of him well knew why: curiosity. Sam Quarry had often told Gabriel that curiosity was a good thing, meant you were really alive, wondering what made the world tick. He didn't think Mr. Sam would think it was so good right now, because Gabriel was just this minute slipping down to the basement in the middle of the night to see something Mr. Sam probably didn't want him or anybody else to see.

He passed by the old furnace that in the dark resembled nothing but an iron monster ready, willing, and more than able to swallow little boys. Then he saw the old safe with the spin dial that had the numbers and slashes nearly worn off, and the bronze handle that one had to crank down on to open the door. Gabriel had never tried to get into the safe, but he'd often thought about it. What adventure-seeking child wouldn't?

He skittered down the corridor, trying not to breathe in all the musty damp. You couldn't spend much time at a place like Atlee and not experience some type of mold allergies; it just came with the territory. Yet he gamely hurried on.

He reached the thick door and looked down at the fist of keys. He examined the lock and then tried to figure which key might fit it. He was able to eliminate about three-quarters of the potential ones using this method and then finished off the task by simply inserting one remaining key after another in the old lock. The third one he tried did the trick.

It made a big click as the lock tumblers slid neatly into place. Gabriel froze, thinking he might have heard a heavy step on the stairs coming down here. But after a minute of holding his breath and praying that it wasn't Mr. Sam woken out of a dead sleep by him sneaking around the house, he put the wad of keys in his pocket and tugged on the door.

It opened on well-oiled hinges. Mr. Sam, he well knew, was good about keeping things in fine working order. One reason he had come down here, perhaps the overriding reason, was to see where the slaves had been kept for doing crazy things like trying to escape to freedom, as if anyone finding themselves bound by chains, white or black, would not try to do that very thing.

When he closed the door behind him and flicked on the small flashlight he carried with him, the first thing he saw was the row of battered file cabinets. Then his beam hit the wall above. That's when his jaw slackened, when he took in the boards full of writing, pushpins, connective string, photos of people and places and index cards. He drew closer, his youthful brow crinkled in both confusion and wonderment. As he spun around and his light hit off the other walls revealing still more of this, something tugged deep in Gabriel's chest.

Fear.

And yet curiosity eventually won out and he moved forward and focused on what appeared to be the first board in the sequence, at least judging from the dates written on each section of wall. Names, places, events, times, details of seeming insignificance were given life here. And as Gabriel followed the tale around a space where over a hundred and fifty years ago, people with the same color skin as him were left to die, the fear slowly began to return.

Gabriel had a wonderful memory, which was one of the reasons he was such a stellar student. He absorbed as much as he could, but even his mind began to overfill with all the bytes of information on these walls. The little boy had to marvel at the brain that Sam Quarry must possess. He had always known that the man was smart, tough, and as self-reliant as anyone he'd ever met. There didn't seem to be much that Quarry couldn't figure out. But still, what he was seeing now took his respect, no, his awe, to a whole different level.

But then there was still the fear. And it was metastasizing right now.

So concentrated was Gabriel on the story revealed on the walls that he never heard the door open, never caught the sound of the footsteps coming up behind him.

When the hand gripped his shoulder his legs buckled and it was all he could do not to scream out.

"Gabriel!"

He whipped around to see his mother standing there wrapped in her old bathrobe.

"What you doing down here?"

"Momma?"

She shook him. "What you doing down here?" she said again, her voice both angry and frightened. "Been looking all over for you. Thought something happened to you. Scared me to death, boy."

"I'm sorry, Momma."

"What you doing here?" she said one more time. "You tell me, right now!"

He pointed his light at the walls. "Look."

Ruth Ann's gaze slowly drifted over the space, but unlike her son there was no curiosity behind it. She turned back to him. "You ain't supposed to be down here. How'd you get in here?"

He pulled the key ring out and she snatched it from his hand.

"Momma, look. Please." He pointed frantically at the covered walls.

"I ain't looking at nothing 'cept getting your butt back to bed."

"Look at that picture of that girl. I saw her on the TV at school."

She slapped his face. The shock that registered on Gabriel's face evidenced that this was something that had not occurred before.

"Let me tell you something," she said. "Mr. Sam done give us his home. All his land and this house when he die. All we got is 'cause of him. So don't you say nothing against that man or I'll slap you again only harder."

"But Momma-"

She raised her hand and he drew back from her.

"Let me tell you something else. I know Sam Quarry a good long time, from when you weren't much bigger than my fist. He took us in when he ain't got no reason to. He a good man. If he doing something down here, that's his business." She pointed around the room. "Whatever this all is, then he got himself a damn good reason for doing it. Now let's go, boy."

She grabbed his arm and hustled him out of the room, locking the door behind them. As they rushed up the stairs, Gabriel looked back once at the room below before nearly sprinting back to his bedroom, propelled by a smack on the backside by his still obviously upset mother.