Vance Caldwell

Mrs. Howell_s foot

CHAPTER ONE

Rebekah opened the door that led to the tunnel under the hill. The cute little twelve year old boy by her side peeked into it, then turned around and grinned at her. His eyes descended with a cautious sensuality down the voluptuous lines of her lushly shaped body before he looked back into the tunnel and disappeared. Rebekah closed the door and went upstairs. It was an old tunnel from the cellar into a large barrel-like enclosure lined with shelves that were too old and rotten to hold anything, whatever they might have held decades ago. Then the tunnel part proceeded, probably dug later, maybe during a war or something, right through the hill.

She had a new little boy upstairs. He was busy at the moment shining leather shoes and boots in the kitchen. She had hired him yesterday and he started today. He, too, was twelve and very angelic looking, a type she didn't usually bother with, but this boy's beauty that shone with a heavenly aura around his features and his soft blond hair stopped at his blue eyes, which shined with the merriment of the very devil himself. He had been too enticing to pass up. She could only hope that he was not a goodie-goodie who ran to his mother with each little problem he had.

"How are you doing, Jim?" she asked, smiling, as she came through the cellar door into the kitchen.

"Take a look, Miss Howell!" he said, pointing at the half-finished row of shoes that were spread across the floor on newspapers. Then he looked at her with curiosity.

Here it comes, she thought. All of the little boys were curious at first as to why no one was allowed to wear shoes in the house, although there were so many shoes in need of constant shining. But he didn't ask that at all.

"That's funny," he laughed a little. "I didn't see you go down there, but I heard you coming up the steps so it must be the cellar."

"It's funny?" she said in a questioning tone, raising one of her naturally thick and finely arched dark eyebrows.

"Well, I mean, in my house, when someone comes up from the cellar, that means they went down, and the last I saw you, you went out there!" he explained, pointing through the kitchen door into the hallway.

"A regular Sherlock Holmes!" she mumbled, remembering to smile and hopefully cover her surprise and concern. There were many entrances to the cellar. They all led to the same place, but she kept them as secret as possible. The door inside her own closet, a door that no one but she knew how to open, was the only door down to the secret tunnel that she ever revealed to the boys. The reason she kept it all so secret was self-protection. The door in the closet had a panel that fitted over it. When the panel was in place, no door was visible. Any little boy who spoke of such a door could be made to look foolish.

At the other end of the tunnel was a little cave, and this was blocked off very ingeniously by a rock that was raised and lowered and worked from the house by a simple lever. There was no written record of the tunnel. Rebekah's father had shown it to her when she was in her teens. Since he had told her not to tell anyone, she didn't even know if her mother knew of it. Her mother, now living with her second husband over a hundred miles away, never mentioned the tunnel, so Rebekah rather doubted that she knew of it. Her father had been dead now three years.