And there, now clearly visible, was a full-size image of the same brass sextant that lay downstairs in the library—or rather, the half of the instrument that wasn’t hidden behind the captain’s left leg.
“Okay, guys,” Gerritt said, “there has to be a reason that the captain brought us here. Let’s figure this out.”
Jill was already up next to the painting, looking at the heavy carved picture frame, the bright beam of her headlamp aimed just inches before her eyes. Ben was doing the same thing on the other side, carefully inspecting the frame and where it met the wall. He pulled gently outward on the thick edge of the carved wood—no give at all. The frame was a good four inches wide, and it was fastened directly to the wall—he could see the screw heads. Through the years, the workers adding fresh coats of paint to the walls had run their brushes right against the frame—and there were no breaks, no cracks. Anyone trying to remove this painting would need a hammer and a chisel to work it loose.
Robert gently pushed on the canvas itself, then tapped on it.
“Listen,” he whispered, and he tapped again on the canvas. There was a wooden sound.
Jill said, “I think that’s normal. With a painting this big, there would have to be a layer of wooden boards behind the canvas, to help keep the frame together. That’s what we’re hearing.”
Then Jill gave a soft gasp. “Check this out!” And she pointed at the center of the bottom edge of the frame.
Ben leaned in close, and in the bright LED light he saw a small brass plate screwed to the frame and fancy lettering on it—the title of the painting.
“One Still Star”
by John Singleton Copley
“Cool!” Gerritt whispered. Then he said, “But . . . we’re still not getting it—what are we supposed to do with this information?”
Jill stepped to the far side of the hall, then she whispered, “Hey, get out of the way so I can see the whole thing. . . . Good.” Speaking slowly, she said, “Okay . . . we know how the captain keeps comparing this building to a ship.” She paused a moment, then said, “So . . . what part of his ship am I looking at there, in the painting?”
With no hesitation Ben said, “That’s the quarterdeck, which is sort of the captain’s private walking space on deck, near the ship’s wheel and the compass binnacle. And see those two small windows and that door there to his left? That’s the captain’s cabin.”
Jill squinted at the painting. Then she shrugged off her backpack, unzipped the main compartment, and dug around for a few seconds.
Ben saw her pull out the large iron key that they had discovered just a few feet from where he was standing, hidden behind a piece of wooden floor molding—the key that was inscribed with a warning: USE ONLY IF YOU MUST.
“What are you doing?” he whispered.
“Thinking,” she said. “And looking.”
She stepped closer to the painting, and the beam from her headlamp narrowed. And Ben saw what she was looking at: the painted door of the captain’s cabin. She moved closer still, until the beam was about as big around as a basketball, then a softball, and finally a tennis ball. And now Ben saw what she was seeing, and so did Robert. Because that painted door also had a painted keyhole.
Jill lifted the iron key, and before either he or Gerritt could say a word, she pressed the end of it right against the brittle canvas.
“Hey!” Ben said. “That’ll rip th—”
But the key didn’t rip the canvas.
Instead, a small piece flipped up out of the way—a flap of canvas that must have been glued to the back of the painting. And Jill pushed the big key straight into the painted keyhole of the painted door.
She looked at Robert and Ben, her headlamp beam lighting one face, then the other. She whispered, “The key’s in as far as it’ll go—what should I do?”
Instantly, Ben said, “Turn it!”
Robert added, “Yeah . . . try turning clockwise!”
With both hands on the large round end of the key, Jill applied a steady pressure.
In the silent hallway, the sound of metal rubbing against metal seemed loud, and when Jill had completed a half turn of the key, there was a definite click, and an even louder scraping sound—but not metallic.
The frame of the painting, the part that was fastened to the wall, stayed put. But halfway across the width of the wooden frame, a vertical crack opened up, and the whole right edge of the painting moved outward a quarter of an inch.
“Pull,” Gerritt whispered. “Pull on the key!”
Jill did, and Ben could see that she didn’t have to pull very hard. And when she did, the whole painting creaked and swung toward her, like a door.
The entire back side of the painting was exactly that—a door, a six-paneled pine door, complete with a tarnished brass knob and a boxy-looking surface-mounted lock, the lock Jill had just opened!
“Wow—look at that!” Ben said breathlessly.
They looked upward into the darkness, all three of them.
What they saw was a staircase, steep and narrow.
And all three of them knew exactly what they were going to do next.
CHAPTER 24
Cleared for Action
Jill led the way, and the steps they climbed weren’t like a staircase at all. Ben realized it was more like a ladder up a narrow passageway on board a ship, complete with a narrow grip rail along each side.
He was counting, and when he had climbed twenty-two steps, Jill whispered, “Stop! There are boards above my head!”
Ben said, “It’s probably a hatch cover—push up on the front edge, the part closest to the steps.”
He was right. The hinged lid was less than two feet square, and it opened near the center of the room. Once they had all clambered up, Robert closed it.
The inside of the cupola reminded Ben of the secret room in the sub-basement, the one hidden behind the tide mill—except this room seemed smaller than he had expected. He had looked up at the cupola for as long as he could remember, a little house perched on the school’s roof, and he had imagined lots of space, and being able to walk around and look out all the windows.
But standing inside it now, there was no nighttime view of the shoreline and the bay—no view at all. The room was completely closed in. So those outer windows were only for show, which was kind of a sad discovery.
But it made sense to Ben. There must have been some other access to the outside of the cupola, maybe a walkway across the roof. Because over the last two centuries, workers would have certainly climbed up to check the roof for leaks, and the wooden window frames would have needed fresh paint every ten or fifteen years. But the inner room had remained untouched.
Like that hidden basement room, this one had also been lined with copper sheeting to make a completely weather-tight box. Ben had thought it would be boiling hot up here, the way his attic room at home sometimes got during a heat wave. But there must have been some kind of ventilation system or thick insulation, because it was surprisingly cool—much cooler than the third-floor hallway had been.
There was a sudden squeak, very close, and they all froze.
Then came another one, and Gerritt smiled, pointing upward.
“Relax,” he whispered, “it’s the weather vane turning, up on top.”
A secret door behind a painting, a climb up thirty-three steps, a room with no windows and completely lined with copper—all very strange. But the oddest thing of all? The room was empty, completely bare. No furniture, no chests, nothing.
Ben could tell that Jill and Robert had felt the same stab of disappointment.
Gerritt was the first to say it.
“So,” he began slowly, “looks a lot like a dead end.”
“C’mon, guys,” Ben said. “There has to be something here, something that’s not obvious. Maybe there was even something we missed on the way up the ladder.”
“Or,” Gerritt said, “maybe Lyman and his gang got up in here three weeks ago and they carted off whatev
er used to be here, and now we’re sitting here like a bunch of chumps. How about that, Pratt? Because this is an empty room.”
It was that tone again, that same, superior, sarcastic tone. Ben really hated it, and he wanted to rush right over to Gerritt, shove him down backward onto the floorboards, and land one good punch, right on his freckled nose—it would just feel so good!
But for the thousandth time in the past month, Ben forced himself to stop feeling and keep thinking.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Look, we all worked really hard to get here, and as bad as it looks, we have to study every square inch of this whole room. So, let’s turn our headlamps up as bright as they’ll go and give it another fifteen minutes, or as long as it takes. But we have to do this—we have to. So, Gerritt, you take that end, I’ll take this end of the room, and Jill, you take the middle section. Walls, floor, ceiling, let’s look at everything—okay?”
Ben didn’t wait for either of them to reply, but simply began the work at his end of the space, the south side of the room. And he was relieved to see that Jill and Robert followed his lead.
The walls at his end of the room were not hiding any mysteries. The edges of all the copper sheets had been sealed with melted lead, and there were no cracks, no open seams, no places where there could be a hidden doorway or a secret compartment. And the ceiling was the same way.
The floorboards were heavy oak, and each plank was nailed into place with large nails, their rounded heads sticking up slightly above the surface. A few of the boards squeaked underfoot, but Ben didn’t think there was anything unusual about that. Still, he wanted to be completely thorough, so he got on his hands and knees and inched back and forth across the room, following each plank from wall to wall, looking for something, anything.
He was on his fifth board when Jill whispered, “Um . . . Ben? You need to see this—you too, Robert.”
Jill had raised the hatch, and she was leaning forward into the staircase, her head actually down below the level of the floor, aiming her phone camera at something. As Ben and Robert walked over, she snapped a picture with the flash on and then straightened up. She tapped on the screen, adjusted the size, then aimed it at them.
“Check it out!”
Ben squinted. Right on the end of the plank in the center of the hatchway, there was a tiny indentation in the wood.
It was Gerritt who said it out loud. “That’s definitely a star! But . . . why?”
Ben backed down the ladder into the passageway until he stood at eye level with the ends of the planks, his headlamp aimed straight ahead.
“The center plank, the one with the star? See the edges on both sides, how they run straight up and down? Now look at the next planks, the ones out on either side. Look at how the edges are different. Those are called tongue-and-groove planks, so the boards are joined together tightly along their entire edges. But this center plank? It’s not tongue-and-groove—get it? So the center board can be pulled straight up!”
Ben stepped down another rung on the ladder and put his hand under the edge of the board with the star on it. “Okay, you guys get shoulder to shoulder on your knees on either side of this board in the middle, but keep off of it. And then both of you get one hand around the end of the board, and when I count to three, I’ll push, and both of you pull up. One, two . . .”
“Pratt, you’re nuts!” whispered Gerritt. He pointed at the top of the plank. “Look at the size of those nails—they’re practically spikes! We’re gonna need a crowbar and a hammer to even start to get this board out!”
Ben glared at him. “Just give it a try, okay, Gerritt? On three . . . ready? One, two, three!”
The board practically flew upward, and Jill and Robert had jump to keep it from clattering onto the floor—which would have woken up Lyman and Wally for sure.
Ben almost said, See, it wasn’t a stupid idea, Gerritt, you grumpy, sarcastic idiot!
But he didn’t.
And then Gerritt surprised him.
“Wow,” he said. “I was completely wrong! Look, all the nails are fake! None of them go through the board!”
Jill said, “So . . . this is a false floor?”
Ben said, “We’ll know in second.”
He climbed up out of the staircase, but left the hatch up. “Here, grab the edge of the next board, this one on the left. But it’s part of that tongue-and-groove system, so instead of pulling up, we need to pull it loose first, straight toward the right. On three . . . one, two, three.”
The plank groaned a little as its grooved edge separated from the next board, but it came free.
“Look,” Gerritt said, “same deal—fake nails!”
Jill ripped off her headlamp and lay on her stomach, peering below the other planks. “This is it, guys, this is it! There’s stuff down there . . . chests or something! And one of them is huge!”
In less than ten minutes, twenty-one planks had been removed and quietly stacked against the north and south walls of the room. The copper-clad walls extended downward, about three and half feet below the level of the old floor, and met the new floor—which was also covered with copper, just like the floor of the secret room in the basement.
One long supporting beam ran lengthwise through the center of the space—the board that had held up the planks of the false floor, but Ben saw that it was cut in two. After the three of them lifted off each half-beam and then the chunky center support, the space was open and clear—except for the things Jill had seen.
Three low tables stood directly opposite the stairway hatch, two of them smaller, and a really large one in the center—six or seven feet long. Actually, Ben was only guessing they were tables. He could see what looked like table legs, but each object was covered almost to the floor with heavy canvas—and with a layer of dust that hadn’t been disturbed for centuries.
Pointing to the left, Ben said, “Should we look at that one first?”
“Sure,” said Gerritt.
“Wait,” Jill whispered. “Look!”
Ben got closer with his headlamp, and Robert snapped a quick photo.
In front of the thing on the right, the numeral 1 had been stamped neatly into the copper on the floor. A quick inspection showed the item on the left was labeled 2, and the large object in the center was marked 3.
“So,” Gerritt said, “now we know. Old Man Oakes is still calling the shots. Hang on a second while I switch the camera to video. . . . Okay, Pratt, let’s see what’s behind curtain number one.”
Ben lifted the cover off—it was a glass top display case, almost identical to the one in the library where they had found the sextant, except this one didn’t have a lock. But the hinged top had been sealed shut with pitch—the same sealing method Ben had now seen twice before, complete with an embedded wire for opening it. Jill and Robert crowded in beside him, bending over to look through the glass.
From behind the camera, Gerritt said, “That looks like silk wrapping—open it up!”
Ben ripped the wire free all the way around the edge of the lid, and bits of brittle pitch flew off in every direction. Then he and Jill lifted the front edge of the heavy lid and leaned it against the wall behind the case.
Robert got between them, aiming the camera right down into the case. It was like he was directing a movie.
“Now, both of you reach in from the sides and unfold the edges of the silk. . . . And keep your heads back so I get a clear shot.”
They unfolded the cloth side-to-side first, and then peeled a layer frontward, and folded the final layer toward the back.
“Holy moly!” said Ben.
Gerritt whispered, “Is that . . . ?”
Jill said, “Yes—the Declaration of Independence!”
Then she asked, “But . . . like, it’s a copy, right?”
“Yeah, of course,” said Ben, “but it’s still amazing!” He knew exactly what he was looking at. “This is called the Dunlap broadsheet, and these were the very firs
t official printed copies—incredibly rare!”
Jill gave him squinty look. “And . . . you know this how?”
“ ’Cause my grandfather took me to the Maine Historical Society on a rainy day last summer, and I studied an identical copy there. And one just like this sold for eight million bucks about ten years ago! And see the bottom there, the handwriting and the signature? Nobody’s got a copy like this one!”
Across the bottom of the paper were the words, “For Duncan Oakes, a true Patriot,” and then an unmistakable signature:
“So, do you think the signature and all would make it worth, like, fifteen million?”
Ben grinned. “Who knows? Stuff like this is . . . it’s just priceless! And there’s tons more! Well . . . three or four, anyway.”
As gently as possible, he lifted the edge of the heavy paper.
The other documents were just as amazing, each separated by a single sheet of fine white silk. There was Captain Oakes’s commission as a naval officer—a handwritten parchment signed by members of the first congress; a personal letter from George Washington thanking him for his military service; another letter signed by John Paul Jones; a printed copy of the US Constitution dated 1789—this one with a personal note signed by John Adams; and also from 1789, a printing of an early draft of the Bill of Rights.
Ben whispered a breathless description of each item for Robert’s video. With these things alone, someone could set up a fabulous museum! Still he could tell that he was more excited about these things than Jill or Robert was.
“Okay,” said Gerritt, when he’d reached the bottom of the stack. “Let’s get to the next one, Pratt.”
But Ben wouldn’t be hurried. He carefully restacked the documents, putting the sheets of silk between them, then folded the outer covering so the collection was just as they’d found it.
“And now, secret number two,” Gerritt said, moving to the left side. “Jill, how about you lift the cover this time?”
Jill removed the dusty cloth, and it was another display case, slightly larger, but in every other way identical to the first, and sealed the same way.