“Then I have to know.” Elijah looked at her.
“Knowing won’t be enough, ma’am.
Someone will have to decide what the truth demands.”
Chapter 8: A Contract Nobody Signed
Elijah used the rest of the morning to examine the work orders posted in the carpenter’s shed.
Most were routine requests: a barn latch, a broken stair, a sagging fence.
One document bore Richard’s seal beside a list of timber cuts scheduled for the west cellar.
The work had been assigned to a traveling carpenter named Thomas Quill, whose signature Elijah did not recognize.
Several boards were ordered in dimensions matching the coal platform.
Elijah found the same measurements penciled on the back of a discarded receipt.
Someone had hidden an extra chamber within a space that had once stored fuel for winter fires.
Jacob Price, now old enough that his hands shook at dawn, watched Elijah study the papers.
“You have questions,” he said.
Elijah nodded.
Jacob led him behind the shed where the sound of sawing covered their conversation.
“Quill never came here,” the old man said.
“The colonel used his name on papers, but two men from the river built the platform at night.” Elijah asked how Jacob knew.
“They borrowed my square and returned it with red clay in the hinge.” Jacob touched his own scarred wrist.
“I knew those men before they worked for Whitmore.
They carry people under tarps and call them cargo.”
Jacob told him about a little girl who had been brought to Riverbend in the spring.
She wore shoes too fine for field work and spoke of her father, a teacher in Philadelphia.
Richard had ordered her confined until someone arrived with new papers naming an owner.
Jacob had passed the cellar once and heard her reciting a verse in a steady voice so she would not cry.
He never saw her again.
“I have been ashamed every morning since,” he said.
Elijah stopped him.
“You couldn’t open a locked door guarded by guns.” Jacob looked at him sadly.
“That doesn’t stop a man from hearing the child.”
Together they considered the platform’s structure.
The stone beneath the wall carried most of the weight, so lifting the planks would not collapse the room.
The hidden compartment would be narrow, and the ledger might be stored in a recess behind loose masonry.
Jacob said the colonel had ordered lamp oil delivered that afternoon, which suggested the cellar would be used after dark.
“If you go alone, you’ll never come back,” Jacob warned.
