Secret Basement

Carole shook her head. ‘I can’t say. I mean, he would be gone for quite a while. I tried waiting up for him, you know, just to see what he did or where he went. But I fell asleep eventually and didn’t know when he’d come back into the house.’ She glanced at me. ‘Did you know there’s a basement in the backyard?’ ‘No.’ I shook my head mechanically, my brain numb from all the information overload. ‘The trapdoor’s painted the same colour as the concrete floor. That’s why no one ever saw or noticed it. I only…Well, after I noticed Mr Finnegan going into the backyard several times, in the middle of the night, while there was nothing out there, I got, ah, I got curious.’ I would have been, too, if I were in her shoes. ‘So I did, uh, some snooping around.’ Carole stared into her mug of tea. ‘When I was doing spring cleaning one time, I went out to the backyard when Mr and Mrs Finnegan were out. You were at school. I looked around, and I looked really, really hard. Ran a broom over every inch o