A Cry for Hire

Novella found the dumbwaiter in the wall the first week she and Liam moved into the semi-renovated roadhouse. Yet, even with her staunch stay-at-home reclusiveness, she had never thought of examining it. But the day was gray, too gray for spring --Mother’s Day. Moreover, Liam had delayed in returning from his meeting with the church deacons and Novella had no desire to roam the sidewalks of that all-white backwater Idaho town until he came back to retrieve her for the Mother’s Day luncheon. With too much time on her hands and worry on her mind, she decided at last, to explore the dumbwaiter.

It was one of four such devices (that she knew of) in the old four-story eighteen-room roadhouse. She had always suspected that this one --because of its central location—had been the focal station of past mayhem in the house.  

She swung its wooden doors aside and thought, It’s like a Lazy Susan for Dwarves. Leaning in and looking up toward the attic, she examined it and surmised that its chained pulleys, gears, wheels, bearings, and turntables, had probably hauled household items and a murdered traveler or two between the basement and the attic. Looks haunted, too, she couldn’t help thinking and frowned that her illness had caused her to fill her mind with true crime and paranormal TV shows. She turned her thoughts to the world immediately around her once more: Still, not only dead travelers but contemporary living ones as well could journey throughout the house using this conveyance. 

The dumbwaiter was littered with books fallen from the various bookshelves on the higher floors. Novella bit her full lips and peered past them at the back shelf they leaned against. Some hidden room lay behind that shelving, she was sure. A secret passage, perhaps! How could there not be? Perhaps one of the smaller town kids could help her scramble behind it. But on Mother’s Day, kids – small and large, athletic and pudgy—were honoring mothers. She thought again of Liam’s lateness – How could he forget her on Mother’s Day of all days? --and told herself she was becoming too wounded for words.

She pushed aside the books – and her anger at Liam—and stood half-wedged between the gigantic lazy Susan and the cabinet door. She studied the central vertical pole with its cables, flanges, gears, axles, chains and drives…and suddenly a striking epiphany: at the top of the pole, carved in the ceiling, was a shape very like the cross potent. An intersection and a sliding groove? She thought. So, this. . .mechanism is movable? Still, a puzzle lay before her. She looked closer. Yes, yes! Interlocking, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, the shelves could be gently pushed aside. She pushed books outside and to the side and found hidden slots within the walls through in which the dismantled shelves could be stored. 

Soon the cabinet lay bare before her and the Lazy Susan easily pushed to the farthest right of the cross potent. Novella now peered through the slatted wood at the back of the cabinet. A dim light flickered back at her. A small room. Perhaps others lay further behind this first. Probably laid out in railroad fashion. These supposed cabinets she now wished to explore. 

This cabinet in which she now sat --her feet under her legs, her hands sweaty and dusty, was adult-sized. Novella was not small -- nothing like the petite Yasuko Conklin who stole husbands and wrecked friends’ marriages. (She had been small once, but had gained weight after Liam confessed to his adultery.) Looking at her thighs, which she called “hamhocks,” she considered if any cabinets further within probably diminished in size. 

How silly if I were to end up wedged inside this little passage! What a sight that would be! Liam would have to dislodge me.  Him and his claustrophobia! Oh my! No, I can't see that! So it'd be the whole neighborhood dislodging me. She paused momentarily to imagine a video of her big Jamaican buttocks, secretly uploaded to the internet by some racist town cop. Yet, her curiosity was aroused and not even her imagination could abate it.