Page 10 of Ghost Hunters 2

“I wanted to go into winemaking. I got really interested in it for a while.”

“Well, you have a great place to do it,” he suggested as he waved his hand around the room. “And the bottles already here are probably worth a fortune. You own them now.”

She paused and said, “Yeah, I guess I do?”

They stepped further into the room and searched the walls for another passage but didn’t find anything that shouldn’t have been there.

“This is ridiculous,” Jillian said. “There must be a way out of this room. They would have had to have a way to bring supplies in and out.”

“Yeah, but however they did it, it wasn’t in this room,” Dino concluded.

“Let’s go back to the tasting room and have another look,” Jillian suggested. “We must have missed something. Maybe there is another way out from there.”

They went back to the first room and searched the walls again. This time they looked over every inch of the room.

Jillian moved under the steps and knocked on the walls. When she tapped the walls there she heard an echo. Her heart skipped a beat. She turned her head and shouted, “Dino, I think I found something.”

Dino joined her in the cramped space and together they knocked on the wall. Something was here that was different.

Dino moved his hands along the corner seams. He pulled his hand away sharply. “Ouch.” Stepping back into the light to check his fingers he spotted blood.

Jillian peeked over his shoulder. “What happened?”

Dino looked at her and shrugged. “My fingers ran into something sharp.”

Jillian glanced back into the shadows under the steps. She snapped her flashlight and returned to the alcove. “I think you found a door.”

Dino joined her. “A door? Where do you see a door?”

Jillian pointed her light into the corner and they could both see a pair of rusty hinges.

Dino followed the hinges up to the ceiling and along the top of the wall. It stopped at the connection right under the steps. “I think you’re right. There is a doorway here. We just have to figure out how to get it open.”

They could see a slight seam in the wall.

Dino reached up to press the door looking for the trip switch. When he pressed the top left just under the stairway the door clicked open.

Again, it took both of them to pull it open enough to squeeze through. The door hadn’t been opened in years and like the hinges, it had rusted shut. The tunnel they found on the other side was dark and dank.

The floor was dirt and the walls were slimy with moss. “Yeah, this isn’t like the wine room for sure,” Dino noted dryly.

“I hope you have had a tetanus shot?” Jillian asked him.

He paused to look over at her. “I did in fact. I got cut when I was helping Gramps to build a shed in his backyard and I cut myself on a piece of metal.”

“Good...” She shook her head. “Not the cut but the shot. Cause that rust looked to be at least two-hundred years old.”

He shook his head. “I can’t even imagine that.”

“We must have found part of the old plantation,” Jillian said as she moved her flashlight around the tunnel. “And PEE YOU! I don’t think there’s been any fresh air down here in years.”

“Probably not. Didn’t Matthew say the girls didn’t drink their father’s wine?” Dino commented as they pushed through the tunnel. “That means they weren’t even down here when they lived here.”

The tunnel opened into a larger room that had several doors. This part of the building hadn’t been hooked up to electricity so they had to depend on their flashlights to light their way. Dino went to the line of doors and began opening one after another. They revealed more rooms beyond the openings. He got to the third door and this one was a little harder to open.

Jillian joined him and together they forced the door open. On the other side they could feel fresh air. Once they pushed it enough to see beyond a few feet, they noticed brush and undergrowth blocking the entrance.

The fresh air felt good on her skin. Jillian turned her back to the door and dug her shoes into the floor.