Chapter 6 - The River Flue
James did not curse. He did not kick the stairs. He descended slowly back into the cellar, set the industrial flashlight on the edge of the maple workbench, and looked at the four solid brick walls surrounding them.
“My grandfather was an engineer,” James said, his voice flat, stripped of panic. “He never built a room with only one way out. Not in a timber facility where sawdust fires could trap a man in thirty seconds.”
Marlow walked the perimeter of the room, her hand trailing along the damp brickwork. The mortar was rough, coated with white efflorescence from decades of river moisture.
“Amos didn't build this cellar for drying timber alone,” Marlow said, remembering the stories her father used to tell about the old days before the electric kilns were installed. “The heat didn't come from steam pipes. In the forties, they used the waste heat from the sawmill’s sawdust burners.”
James looked up at the ceiling. Heavy cedar joists, blackened by old smoke, ran across the span, supporting the layer of firebrick above.
“Where did the exhaust go?” he asked.
“Out toward the riverbank,” Marlow said, pointing toward the eastern wall that faced the roaring, half-frozen waters of the Pemigewasset. “The draft had to pull through to keep the air moving over the ash boards so they wouldn't rot while curing.”
She stopped in front of a low archway bricked up with rough cinder blocks. It looked like an old chimney breast, roughly six feet high and four feet wide, sealed off with mortar that looked fresher than the surrounding 1930s brick.
James grabbed an iron pry bar from the tool rack beside the workbench. He jammed the chisel edge into the seam between two cinder blocks and threw his entire weight onto the steel.
The mortar groaned, cracked, and gave way with a puff of gray dust.
“Help me with this,” James said, his breath coming hard.
Marlow seized a second bar—an old runner-bending lever—and wedged it into the crack beside his. Together, they leaned back, using the leverage that every woodworker learns in their first week on the south line.
With a heavy crash, three cinder blocks tumbled inward, revealing a pitch-black opening that smelled intensely of freezing river mud, rotten willow bark, and the sharp, clean ozone of the open air.
James shone the flashlight into the darkness.
It was an old brick exhaust flue, four feet square, sloping upward at a thirty-degree angle toward the river bluff. It was choked with dead leaves and fifty years of cobwebs, but at the far end—perhaps forty feet up the incline—a faint, gray pinprick of moonlight filtered through a rusted iron vent grille.
“It comes out behind the old sawdust dump,” Marlow said, coughing as the draft pulled cold air into the cellar. “Right above the riverbank.”
“Can you climb it?” James asked, looking down at her velvet dress, now coated with gray mortar dust.
Marlow didn't answer with words. She grabbed the black pigskin ledger, tucked it into the front of her coat, and zipped the heavy wool up to her chin.
“I’ve been crawling under timber conveyors since I was eighteen, Mr. Bridger,” she said. “Go first. You have broader shoulders. If you get stuck, I’ll pull you back by your boots.”
James didn't hesitate. He dropped to his knees, gripped the flashlight in his teeth, and hauled himself into the narrow brick tunnel.
The climb was agony. The bricks were slick with black slime and ice where snow had drifted down from the top. Every movement kicked up clouds of ancient ash and mold that burned their throats. Marlow followed three feet behind his boots, her knuckles scraping against the rough walls, her knees taking the brunt of every jagged mortar ridge.
Halfway up, James stopped.
“The grille,” he grunted around the flashlight. “It’s bolted to a concrete curb.”
“Use the bar!” Marlow called up, her voice echoing strangely in the pipe.
“I didn't bring it—there wasn't room to swing it!”
Marlow reached down to her ankle. Her church boots had a thick, three-quarter-inch steel shank in the arch—standard issue for line workers who spent ten hours a day standing on concrete. She wrenched her right boot off, reached past James’s legs in the dark, and shoved the heavy leather heel into his hand.
“Use the steel heel on the rusted carriage bolts!” she shouted. “They’re eighty years old!”
James took the boot. From above came the sharp, rhythmic *clack-clack-clack* of steel striking frozen iron. Once. Twice. Five times.
With a sharp *crack*, the corroded bolt sheared away.
A blast of freezing river air hit them full in the face, blowing away the dust and the stench of decay. James shoved the heavy iron grille upward with both hands, throwing it aside into the snowdrifts, and pulled himself out onto the riverbank.
A moment later, two strong hands caught Marlow by the wrists and hauled her up into the clean, freezing night.
She collapsed onto the snow, gasping for breath, her face smeared with black soot, her hands bleeding from a dozen small abrasions.
Above them, the sky was already turning that deep, bruised violet that precedes the winter dawn.
Across the valley, the clock tower of the Bridger Sled Company struck seven o'clock.
Two hours until the board meeting.
James stood over her, his suit ruined, his hair wild, looking more like an ironworker than an executive heir. He held out his hand to help her up.
“My truck is parked by the south gate,” James said, checking his watch. “Deirdre’s driver took the road to Concord last night to pick up the Apex legal counsel. They’ll be arriving at the main administration building by eight-thirty.”
Marlow stood up, brushing the frozen crust from her knees. She pulled the black ledger from her coat. The leather was scuffed, but the binding was unbroken.
“We don't need your truck,” Marlow said, pointing down the riverbank toward the dark silhouette of the south residential borough. “If we take the county road, Carl will spot us from the guard shack before we get within three miles of the gate. But the old logging flume runs along the lower canal right into the basement of the finishing shop.”
James looked down the steep, snow-covered bank toward the frozen canal. “That flume hasn't carried timber since 1974.”
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“It hasn't carried timber,” Marlow agreed, a fierce, bright spark igniting in her dark eyes. “But Pippa and I sled down it every Sunday after church.”
***
