Harry nodded. “I’ll stand it up by the door.” He bent to grab the edge and stopped. “This was used for something. There are pieces of broken chain on the outside corners.” He aimed the beam of his flashlight around the edges of the wood. “It appears to have been attached to the opposite wall with hinges but some of them have broken off.” He shone the light overhead and then he laughed. “The chains went through pulleys attached to the beams so it could be raised and lowered as needed.”
“Wow!” Jim said. “Alice, this must be your grandfather’s little hideaway, where he wrote in his journals. Your Mom always said that he sometimes stayed out here all night. They just assumed he slept on an old army cot when he got tired.”
“Instead, he built a kind of homemade Murphy bed,” Harry said.
“He was a pretty crafty old coot when he wanted to be,” Jim said, “and stubborn, too, from what I’ve heard.”
Alice heard the pain in his voice. “Jim, I think it’s time you took a break,” she said gently.
He nodded. “Yeah, I’ve had the leg hung down a little too long. It’s starting to hurt.”
“Why don’t you go on in the house,” she suggested. “We’ll join you shortly for coffee.”
Harry watched as Jim hobbled to the door. “I’ll get this out of the way so next time you come out you will be able to get in here.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hogan.”
When Harry had the makeshift bed out of the way, Alice and Bertie came inside. There wasn’t much to see. At one end was a small table with a wooden chair, and a shelf on the wall that held several stacks of what appeared to be old hardcover notebooks.
A bench was built across the other end, containing a few ancient items: kettle, iron fry pan and pot; a few enamel mugs, plates and bowls; an old glass jar with several knives, forks, soup spoons and teaspoons. On one end of the bench there was an old-fashioned kerosene lamp.
“Wow!” Bertie said. “It looks like Jim was right. This must have been where your grandfather came to write in his journals.”
Alice nodded. “That’s probably his journals on the shelf over the table.”
“I think you’re both right,” Harry said, looking at the floor. Why was there a trap door in the centre of the floor? “Did you ever hear any stories of a secret passage to the old man’s room?”
Alice, who was standing by the table, laughed. “No secret passages in the family history that I know of.”
“Root cellar, maybe?”
“What are you talking about?” Bertie asked.
“The trap door here in the centre of the room,” Harry said.
Both women turned and came towards him, standing on the opposite side of a square piece of plywood just in from the doorway. There was a notch cut into one side, presumably for lifting it up.
