Maya stepped up beside him. “What are you doing?”
“Seeing what’s out here and if what I’m picturing in my head matches reality.” He exited through the gate, and she followed. Lila brought up the rear. He pointed to the avalanche area. “You can’t see the tunnel from here, but it’s over there. If I remember correctly, I think it runs this way.” He pointed toward the lodge.
“How are the tunnels shaped?” Maya asked. “Could one lead us under the slide and out to the road? Like could we use one to escape?”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to figure out.” He rubbed his chin, thinking. “As I was walking it, it seemed like they make a kind of an M shape. The entrance was straight ahead and thenthere was a fork in the road, so to speak. I went left, and it had a sharp curve that started taking me back toward the lodge. I don’t know where the other curve ends up, but if it’s the same as the first, it might take us off the property. There were a couple of other tunnels that branched off the way I went that looked like they went up the mountain, but I can’t say for sure.” He tracked the area from the tunnel with his eyes, estimating where the opening would be in the lodge.
“The basement,” Maya murmured.
“Yes,” Lila said, “that’s where I was going to take you. It’s just a junk-filled storage area, and it’s been forever since anyone’s been down there. I used to go down just to make sure no one was trying to overstay their welcome at the resort, but I found a way around that nonsense. I finally booby-trapped the door so I could tell if it had been opened or not. It never was.”
“Can you get us down there?”
“Of course.” She motioned for them to follow and led them to a back room off the kitchen, then to an old door in a hallway. “Look at the bottom.”
He looked and saw a piece of black electrical tape that ran horizontally across the crack of the door.
“Still there,” she said. “But open it and that’s the way down.”
“Clever woman.”
She shrugged. “I can be. I requested a lock be installed, but no one was worried about anything down there and said it was a waste of money to protect it with a lock.Iwas more worried about someone going down there, hurting themself, then suing the place. But no one else was concerned about that. They said no one knew about the basement anyway. They’re not wrong. I still wanted a lock, but we don’t always get what we want, so here we are. The map is toward the back on the wall.”
He twisted the knob and pulled. Nothing. “It’s definitely not locked, but...” He jerked harder, and it opened with an earsplitting screech.
Maya jumped and clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a yelp. He raised a brow at her and she flushed. “Sorry. I guess I’m a little on edge.”
“I don’t blame you.” He tried the light switch on the wall without hope, so when the bulb over the stairs came on, he almost jumped too. “Well, that’s good news.” Gideon started down the steps, with Maya and Lila right behind him.
Once they reached the bottom, stale air surrounded them. The place was filled to the brim with restaurant and ski equipment. Old furniture and mining tools, safety equipment and dust.Somuch dust. “Talk about a hoarding situation.” For the next thirty minutes, they moved stuff to create a path to the back where Lila said the map was.
“Oh wow,” Maya said, “look at that.” A large intricately hand-drawn map was tacked to the wall. “This has to be it, doesn’t it?”
They all stepped closer and Gideon laughed. “No way it can be this easy.”
“I think it is actually this easy, thanks to Lila,” Maya said.
“You think this is it? Am I right?” Lila asked.
“I really think you are,” Gideon said. “Well, it’s not an M shape. It’s more of a W on top of an M. But I think this is where we are now.” He tapped the paper. He looked closer. “I wonder what these little circles are? Ventilation shafts, maybe?”
“No idea,” Lila said.
“Guess we know where the rumors came from now,” Maya said. “No treasure indicated, but it’s a fun thought. Which one of those tunnels leads out? Surely whoever built these wouldn’t go to all that trouble without one route off the mountain.”
He touched the top one. “This one is a possibility.”
Maya placed a finger on another area. “And this one is the area uncovered by the avalanche.” She traced it. “So it doesn’t go out,” she said. “Bummer.”
“Is there an entrance to these tunnels from the lodge?” Lila asked. “The map’s down here, so it seems like there would be one. Maybe?”
Gideon glanced around the area once more, then returned his gaze to the map. “I would think so. How have we not heard about this map in all the years of coming here?”
Lila shrugged. “The resort’s still owned by the original family, but turnover is pretty high, and there aren’t any employees that have been here for an extended period of time. And those who were here back in the earlier days have all passed on. So it’s no surprise that no one would know about this. And if someonedidknow about it, they wouldn’t necessarily have any reason to talk about it. You know how I came to discover it. I haven’t thought about it once until you were talking about tunnels.”
“Okay,” Maya said, pointing to the far wall. “Back there, behind all that stuff and around the corner, is where the door should be.” She snapped a picture of the map with her phone, then led the way, dodging items and shoving boxes to the side to make a path. When she rounded the corner, she stopped. “It’s a wall, not a door.”
Lila tapped it. “Sounds solid.”
