Chapter 2 - My Father Had Been Under the Clubhouse
Nobody entered the hole.
That decision probably saved us from doing something stupid.
The fire department arrived first.
Then a building inspector.
Then police because nobody could immediately explain why an undocumented underground steel structure had active power beneath a crowded building.
The clubhouse was evacuated.
By two in the morning, floodlights covered the parking lot where Dad used to teach me how to change oil.
I stood under an awning while rain ran off the roof.
Wade joined me.
“You sure it was his writing?”
“Yes.”
“Could be old.”
“The cable isn’t.”
I had tested the jacket printing.
Manufactured less than eighteen months earlier.
Wade looked toward the building.
“Your dad was doing electrical work here.”
“You told me he was replacing lights.”
“He was.”
“That cable does not run to a light.”
Wade said nothing.
My father had spent thirty-four years with the Black Hollow Riders.
To outsiders, that sentence meant biker.
To me it meant missed Sunday dinners, emergency calls at midnight, charity rides, funerals, poker games, and men who called me kid long after I had a professional license.
Dad was the club electrician.
If something sparked, failed, smoked, or hummed, somebody called Eli.
Eleven days earlier, his motorcycle crossed the center line on a rain-slick rural road.
No other vehicle involved.
No mystery.
No conspiracy.
Just a sixty-one-year-old man, wet pavement, and a curve he had taken hundreds of times.
I had spent eleven days being angry at him for dying in such an ordinary way.
Now I had a different problem.
The county archives confirmed the next morning that the original 1955 parcel included a civil-defense communications shelter.
One line.
No detailed plans.
Listed as:
Auxiliary Communications Installation 4B.
Decommissioned in 1971.
Sealed status unknown.
The title history after 1982 did not mention it.
The club bought the old union hall in 1986.
Wade had been twenty-one.
“Did anyone ever tell you there was a bunker?”
“No.”
“Dad?”
“No.”
I watched his face.
Wade noticed.
“You think I’m lying.”
“I think my father installed new network cable into a buried government structure while you were club president.”
“That doesn’t mean he told me.”
Fair.
Then the inspector brought something out from the collapsed area.
A section of conduit.
Freshly cut.
Inside was another cable tag.
Dad’s handwriting.
This one did not say E.M.
It said:
DO NOT DISCONNECT BACKUP.
And underneath, in smaller letters:
Not until the records are copied.
Wade read it beside me.
Neither of us spoke.
May you like
Because now there were records.
We just didn’t know whose.
