The Closet

Chapter 11

            As Frank suspected, he received a call from his commander as soon as he walked in the door of his office the next morning.  

“Major James,” said Colonel Taylor, “Please report to me at your earliest opportunity.”

“Yes sir,” answered Frank.  He hung up the phone, tucked his hat under his arm and walked down the hall to his commander’s suite. 

The secretary said, “The Colonel will see you in just a moment, Major.  Please have a seat.”

Frank sat uneasily awaiting the summons from Colonel Taylor. 

In a few moments, the phone rang and the secretary answered and after a moment said, “The Colonel will see you now.”

Frank was a professional officer and he knew what was expected of him. He stood and strode into the office coming to the position of attention in front of the Colonel’s desk where he saluted smartly and said, “Major James reporting as ordered, Sir.”

A long moment passed before the Colonel Taylor rumbled, “Stand at ease.”

Frank shifted to the proper position and another long moment passed. 

“The first thing this morning I received a call from a Military Police Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jebson. He informed me that your children had been left unsupervised while you and your wife were out of town, and that they had turned up in a secure area next to the runway here on Coleman in the middle of the night. What have you got to say about this, Major?”

“Sir, my wife and I allowed them to stay in our quarters alone under the supervision of Colonel and Mrs. Friedrickson, who live next door in the other half of our duplex while I was away at a conference and to which my wife accompanied me. I can see that it was poor judgment and I apologize for that. As far as their presence on the runway last night, I have not yet gotten to the bottom of their activities. As I understand it, they claim to have gotten lost in the woods while they were hiking yesterday afternoon, and came out next to the airfield. They apparently climbed the fence and were apprehended. We will be having an intense discussion on the subject tonight and I will be happy to keep you informed.”

“You must be aware, Major, that it is against regulations for your minor children to be left alone without an adult on the premises, and that doesn’t mean next door.”

“Yes, sir.  It won’t happen again, sir.”

“You must also be aware that I do not appreciate having my officers or their families reflect poorly on this unit or on me personally.”

“Yes, sir.  Again, I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

“Keep me informed of the story, Major. I don’t want to be the last to hear about it.  Dismissed.”

Frank came to attention and saluted again, did an about-face, and marched out of the office.

When he got back to his office, he closed the door and called Lacy.

When she answered, he said, “Well, I still have a job.  Just barely, I think.  I’m pretty new here for Colonel Taylor to have developed much trust in me I’m afraid, and this is a bad way to start things off.”

Lacy said gently, “As he gets to know you and sees your work, I’m sure he will see how valuable you are,” but she couldn’t keep herself from adding,“But maybe it would be a good idea to get a sitter next time we leave town.”

“Yes Ma’am. I have been so instructed.”

“If we ever leave town again”, he thought.

“Anyway, let’s plan an early dinner so we can hear what they have to say. Tunnels and ladders and our children exploring them? This should be interesting at least.  We need to think about how we will deal with their dishonesty.  And small prevarications seem to grow into great lies. There needs to be a real lesson here.”

“We can’t judge them until we have heard what they have to tell us. Go be responsible and I’ll see you home for dinner. I love you.”

“I love you too.  Bye” and he hung up.

Nights without sleep wear adults out too, and the day seemed to drag on for Frank, as well as for the rest of his family. The teachers of the James children were beginning to notice that it wasn’t a one-time occurrence. Dark circles under her eyes and a look of general dishevelment along with inattention in class prompted Allie’s teacher to send a note home expressing her concern and asking for return communication. Such things were not too unusual in an armor community where fathers were frequently away and single parenthood was common. It was just unusual for someone like these children, whose father was a senior officer and who had a mother at home. 

Walking home from school that afternoon, the sidewalk seemed endless as Jarom and John dragged their feet every step of the way. They were not eager to face their parents and admit to what their father would surely describe as a lack of character. That was an attribution they had heard occasionally and that made them feel more miserable than any other punishment devised. They were actually good kids that the siren song of adventure had tempted them beyond their will to resist. They had been taught to face up to their shortcomings and admit their faults so that they could rise above them. They were prepared to do so but that didn’t mean they had to be happy about it.

The children were all home, but their father wasn’t due for an hour or so. He had told their mother that he had been gone a week and had work to catch up on. That did nothing to calm the empty feeling in the stomachs of each of the younger Jameses, knowing that the confrontation was just delayed and  wanting to get it over with. Finally they heard Frank’s car pulling in to the driveway, but Frank walked in and kissed his wife and asked when dinner would be. She replied that it would be ready to eat in about 30 minutes, so he sat down in his favorite chair with the newspaper. He did not appear to notice the anxious youths that ducked in and out of the living room, ready for action and hoping against it.  

Dinner was served and the family sat around the dining room table. They enjoyed a Mexican dish together, and then Frank suggested that the children might volunteer to clear the table and wash the dishes. Lacy whispered to Frank, “You’re killing them, you know.”

“I know,” he replied. “And oh it is so sweet.”

At long last, the dinner over and the dishes done, they gathered around the living room.  Frank said, “I want you to know that your mother and I are disappointed. While it is true that we were partly at fault in not getting a sitter to stay with you at night, we expected better. You should not have been out of the house after bedtime, and you should not have misled the Friedricksons by not letting them know that we would be delayed. We acknowledge that we should have called them to discuss it with them, but we also expected your obedience and cooperation. We will unfortunately not have the luxury of a repetition. I believe the Friedricksons would never agree to it, and after my conversation with my commander today, neither will I. Now that all of that is out of the way, we’ll refer to it no more. Right now, we want a full accounting of your activities and whereabouts in the last several days.”

John said, “Jarom, why don’t you start. It was your discovery, after all.”

Jarom spoke hesitantly. “OK.”

And then he began the incredible tale. “Remember when I hit my head in the hallway and bled all over the floor?  Like I told you then, I tried to open the closet door, and it was stuck. When it flew open, I banged my head on the wall and wound up with my head in the closet. I was pretty woozy and there was blood running on the floor, but I noticed some screw-heads on the floor of the closet that didn’t make any sense. There were two screws on each side of the floor, all toward the back wall of the closet, and none near the door. I wondered what was under the floor.”

“A few nights later, I remembered the screws. I didn’t feel like going to sleep, so John and I went down to the basement while you two were talking in the living room and got a screwdriver,” he said, de-emphasizing the Mission Impossible quality of the trip. We got a screwdriver and came back up and then we opened the closet door and unscrewed the screws in the floor.  I pried up the boards with the screwdriver and the floor came up letting us see under it. I had my little flashlight, and we could see a shaft with a ladder on one wall going straight down. I had actually unscrewed the floor from hinges that were set beneath it. I screwed the screws back in and then could pry up the front of the door and it would hinge in the back.”

“I caught them then,” piped up Jason.  “Jarom closed the door and we went back to bed before you guys came upstairs.”

“And then the next night, I heard them talking about it, so I came too,” said Allie smugly.

“So you obviously planned to climb down your ‘secret’ tunnel?” asked their Dad.

“Yeah,” admitted John.  “We thought about telling you about it then, but it was our discovery and we were afraid that the Army would take it away, so we waited until you and Mom were asleep, and then we climbed down the ladder.” 

Then Jarom started talking, saying, “The bottom of the ladder is not close to the floor of the tunnel, so we needed a way to get down from the ladder.  We came up again and made a list of things we needed. We got headlamps for each of us and John made a rope ladder we could climb down, and then after you and Mom left, we went down into the tunnel.”

Frank and Lacy looked at each other incredulously. They didn’t know what to believe.  This sounded more like a make-believe adventure than a real one.  A ladder dropping down through a shaft from their upstairs closet?  It just strained credibility beyond its limits, but there was one way to find out what reality was, and that was the next step.  They silently agreed to take it.

“OK, kids,” said Frank. “I think it’s time we see your closet.”

They all stood up in agreement, and the boys tore up the stairs and pulled open the closet door. Allie was right behind the boys, and a little more sedately with some trepidation followed their parents. John moved the vacuum cleaner down to his room and Jarom ran to get the screwdriver. By the time they were back, Frank and Lacy were ready for the show. Jarom, the master of the screwdriver, pried up on the front of the trap door and it hinged back to vertical and left them all staring down into a dark hole. 

Frank and Lacy were awestruck. The kids had told them what to expect, but somehow they still couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They children realized that it was dark down in the hole and could see that their parents were still uncertain as to what to believe, so Jason and Allie each ducked into their rooms and extracted their headlamps from their backpacks and gave one to their Mom and one to their Dad. Frank leaned over the shaft and could see the ladder extending far below until the light was too dim to see. Lacy leaned over the shaft and started nervously when she realized that a fall down that shaft would cause serious injury. 

“How far down does that ladder go?” Frank asked.

“We think it’s about 85 feet from the ground to the bottom of the ladder, and then a 10 foot drop to the floor of the tunnel,” answered John, “But we’re starting on the second floor, so it’s probably more like 110 feet from here.”

He added, “What we don’t know is who made the tunnels or why they were made.  There is almost no sign of people down there.”

“You keep saying tunnels?”questioned Frank numbly.

“Yeah,” cried Jarom. “There are 8 different tunnels running in all directions from the bottom of the shaft right here. They go to an underground river and to an Abandoned Ammunition Storage Arsenal and to all the kasernes around BFV. And to the BASF plant. John and I found a map of this whole area on the internet and we measured how far it was to all those places on the map, and then we counted our steps to see how far we were going, and that’s how we figured out where we were under the ground.

“And you took Allie down that ladder?” she asked with an uncharacteristic tone of accusation. 

“Mom,” Jarom said. “She didn’t give us a choice.  She threatened to blackmail us if we didn’t take her along, but she was fine. I couldn’t believe she could even climb up the rope.”

“Climb up what rope?” she asked, and then said, “Oh, never mind.”

On cue, John brought out the climbing rope that he had gotten from the gym teacher.  “This is the rope, Mom. It’s real heavy so you can get a good grip on it so it’s easy to climb.”

“John made a great rope ladder, but we left it hanging from the last rung of the steel ladder, and when we came back it was gone,” chimed in Jarom, now eager to get the whole story out.

Everyone turned to look at him with two unspoken questions from the parents awaiting an answer.

“Well, we don’t know who took the ladder, but we think there must be someone who walks around down there,” said John as reasonably as could be expected with an unreasonable situation at hand. Sometimes you see a footprint in the dust, but not often because we’ve never seen him. After he took the ladder, we found another way out through the graveyard.”

At that, Lacy sunk back against the wall and looked despairingly at her husband. Frank, for his part, was trying to moderate his interest with his carefully nurtured reputation as a stern but loving father. The looks he could feel piercing his back from his wife dampened his mounting enthusiasm only a little.

They all knelt there looking at each other, waiting for the obvious suggestion.  Finally, Jarom made it: “Do you want to come down and see it, Dad?” 

Allie turned to her mother and said, “And you too, Mom. Want to come down the ladder and see the tunnels?”

Lacy just shook her head, still trying to get her mind around this unbidden interruption to her peaceful and uncomplicated life. “Frank,” she said.  “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go down there?”

Jarom popped off again, “Mom, it’s no big deal. We’ve been down there lots of times.  It’s easy. Even Allie thinks so!”

Frank looked at his adventuring offspring and his hesitant wife. He was not about to let an opportunity like this pass. Entire boyhoods go by without being presented with such a chance. He was an engineer. He had designed tunnels, but had never gotten to climb into one from his second story closet. Looking at his wife though, made him realize that he had better sell this pretty softly if he wanted to keep peace in the family. 

“Kids,” he said gruffly, trying to maintain the air of parental authority and leadership his mental image of himself required. If we all want to go down and look at your tunnels, then we don’t have enough equipment to make the trip. Let’s close the hatch for now, and in the morning when the Px opens, we’ll go and get two more headlamps and see about an emergency escape ladder like they sell for climbing out second story windows in a fire.  When we have our stuff together, then we’ll take the trip down the ladder and see if we can figure out what this is all about.

Frank dispersed them into their rooms and then he and Lacy retired to their bedroom.  “Frank, she began….I just don’t think it’s a good idea for us to get involved in this tunnel thing.  It looks dangerous and I think we should just tell the Army about it.”

Frank smiled which was a bad move for a serious conversation. “Sweetheart, I am the Army. Who do you think they put in charge of looking at things like this? The engineers!”

“Then fine,” she said, “Tell Colonel Taylor and let him put together a team of experts to explore this thing, but it isn’t a place for the children.”

“Lacy, you’re tired and scared and I understand that, but remember, they’ve been down there by themselves and haven’t been injured yet.  If I’m with them-if we’re with them, we can exercise a little control and see what there is to see.  If it merits turning it over to Colonel Taylor, we will.  After today, though, I don’t want to look any more foolish to him than I already do by sending him on a wild goose chase over nothing. Tomorrow, let’s see what the kids have found, and then we can make a good decision.”

Knowing she was fighting a losing battle, she quietly dressed for bed and he did the same. They turned out the light and Frank went quickly to sleep. Lacy slept, but not for a while.  She lay awake worrying about things she still did not yet have a grasp of.