Chapter 30

“I know. Dad’s workbench took up most of the middle of the room, between the furnace and that wall. There were shelves behind the furnace. Rickety ones, so I’m not surprised they’re gone now.”

“Concrete floor, three concrete walls, and that one,” Gregg pointed to the fourth wall with the brick base that went up three feet, then the deep spaces that went back to the exterior wall. “What were those for?” he asked.

Spence explained about the coal bins that his father had filled in with concrete when he had first bought the house.

“I’d be willing to bet all the walls down here were brick at one point in time,” Gregg said.

“Probably, but as long as I lived here, they were plastered over with concrete. So he couldn’t have dug out bricks to make a hiding place behind them for the…whatever. The same goes for where the coal bins were. As I said, he filled them with concrete, behind the bricks of the lower wall.”

“But not in the storage areas,” Gregg pointed out.