What to do now? She returned to her bed and sat on the edge. There was no going outside—not outside-outside and possibly not outside this room. She looked at the wall, the gently lumpy, overpainted surface where the message had appeared all those weeks ago. Between the cottony view out the window and the post-nap fuzz in her head, reality distorted and a ball of adrenaline shot through her system. This place was dangerous. She should have heeded the warning on the wall. She kept brushing up against death’s sleeve, avoiding it by inches and moments. It was at the end of a tunnel, under the floor, at the other end of the phone. She should have gone home, left this terrible place, because her luck suddenly felt fleeting. Now there was no escape.
Just as she felt the first ramp up into an anxiety attack, there was a gentle rapping on her door, and Janelle poked her head in. She had her comforter wrapped around her like a regal cape. It dragged along behind her as she came in.
“I thought I heard you,” she said. “You’re up.”
The mental monsters ran away in Janelle’s presence. She had that effect, and Stevie almost welled up with appreciation.
“Where’s Vi?” Stevie asked, casually wiping at her eye.
“Up in David’s room. They’re reading. David, Hunter, Vi.”
“Nate?”
“He’s writing?” Janelle said. “I think? At least he has some sense. I’m surprised you’re not up there.”
“Yeah.” Stevie smoothed out her blanket. “I’m still not welcome.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Janelle said. “Forget him.”
There was an extra edge in her voice now, and a bit of a rasp. Stevie wondered if she had been crying this morning.
“Are you two fighting?” Stevie said. “You and Vi?”
Janelle sat on the bed and tightened the comforter cloak around herself.
“It’s not a fight,” Janelle said. “It’s a disagreement. Vi is an activist. I know this about them. They have strong opinions and want to do good in the world. That’s what I love about them. But I don’t think they should be . . . David’s ideas aren’t good. This isn’t good. Well, maybe the part where we all stayed. But . . . I mean. Yeah. We’re fighting.”
She put her head in her hands for a moment, groaned, then looked up.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking at the wall,” Stevie replied honestly.
“Guess it’s as good as anything else,” Janelle said.
“Walls are more interesting than you think,” Stevie said, realizing that she may have just uttered the most boring statement anyone had ever uttered. “In mystery stories, a lot of things are behind or inside of walls,” she said. “But it’s true in life too. People find stuff in walls all the time. Letters. Money. Witches’ bottles. Razors. Mummified cats . . .”
“Wait, what?”
“It’s a thing that used to happen,” Stevie said. “Bodies have been found. There are stories of people who lived in walls—well, that happens in books more. People tend to live in attics, like this guy Otto who lived in his lover’s attic for years and used to sneak down when they were out, and eventually he murdered the husband. Or this guy they call the Spiderman of Denver who lived in these people’s house and murdered the owner one night and then kept living in the house for a while. You can usually tell when you hear strange noises at night and food goes missing. . . .”
“Oh,” Janelle said.
“I mean,” Stevie said. “Cases get solved because of walls. For instance, there was a case in England of a man who was accused of sexually assaulting lots of teenagers in the 1970s. They all talked about the fact that he had a wall in his house where victims wrote their names and phone numbers. So the police went to that house, in the present day, and they brought in some decorators to strip the wall, because decorators have the equipment to do that. They took off layer after layer of paint until they literally uncovered the 1970s, and there was the wall with all the names and numbers and dates, just like everyone said. The evidence was all there. They peeled back the past. I was thinking about it because this friend of Ellie’s in Burlington said that Ellie talked about stuff being in the walls here.”
Janelle considered the blank space of wall for a moment. Then she dropped the comforter and stood up.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be back. I have to do something.”
Stevie waited in the same position for several minutes. Ten, fifteen. Stevie didn’t hear her upstairs, or even in her room. Stevie listened to the house groan and move. She leaned back against her pillows and pulled both her own and Janelle’s comforter over her. Finally, there was a noise in Janelle’s room. Doors opening and closing. Then Janelle cracked open Stevie’s door and slipped inside, shutting it tight behind her. She was wearing different clothes than she had been before—she had changed back into her fuzzy cat-head pajamas, furry slippers, and a robe. She was flushed, her body damp from snow and exertion, the freezing chill still on her body. She had snow in her hair, on her eyelashes. She had a small object in her hand. It looked a bit like an oversized phone.
“What did you do?” Stevie said. “I thought you were on your computer or something.”
“You wanted to look in the walls,” she said. “I went to the maintenance shed and I got the wall scanner.”
“You went out?”
“You don’t have a monopoly on busting rules,” Janelle said, shaking out her legs to warm them and restore circulation. “You want to have a look and see what’s under there? Let’s look.”
The wall scanner was a simple device, with a small screen. Janelle tried to look up a video on how to use it, but the Wi-Fi didn’t cooperate. She worked it out on her own without too much difficulty.
“Okay,” she said. “The idea behind these is to look for things like pipes, wires, studs, stuff like that. So let’s try this wall.”
She went over to the wall that Stevie had been staring at, then slowly ran the device over it.
“See here?” She ran it back and forth near a light switch. “Wires.”
She ran it along another strip of wall.
“Studs,” she said. “Lots of pockets of space. See? We can look for things too, just like they are. Except this is legal and constructive.”
She surveyed the room. “Can you take everything off your nightstand? I’ll use that to stand on. And we need to move all the furniture away from the walls.”
The room, which had been so gloomy a short while ago, was a sudden hub of activity. It turned out, shoving furniture around was a pretty good way to clear your head. Janelle was so focused that she didn’t even mention the large dust clumps behind the bureau and under the bed. Once they’d moved everything aside, Janelle began a sweeping scan. Along the outside wall, it was all structural materials. When Janelle moved in, she found more wires, voids, a pipe or two. Aside from something that might have been another dead mouse, there was nothing of note.
“Okay,” Janelle said when they had done all four walls. “We have a sense of how this thing works. Now we try in Ellie’s room. Do you think Hunter would let us?”
“There’s a bit more wall to do,” Stevie said, pointing at the closet.
“Good point.”
It took only a minute or two to dump out the contents of Stevie’s closet onto the bed. Her room was completely in shambles. Janelle climbed into the closet and began running the machine over the walls.
“Oh,” she said. “I think we have a bunch more dead mice in here.”
“Cool,” Stevie said. “That’s fun to know.”
“When you open the door to knowledge, you have to take what you get— Wait.”
Janelle was down low, running the machine along the seam of the wall and the floor.
“There’s something there,” she said. “Not metal. It’s sort of . . .”
Janelle set down the scanner and felt around the base of the wall, around the molding.
“There’s a lot of paint on this,” she said. “We’re going to need to get th
rough it. Hang on.”
She went to her room and returned a moment later with her crafting tool belt. She started with a utility knife, working the edges. She moved from there to a screwdriver, working slowly and methodically to pry the board loose. Stevie heard a few promising pops and cracks. Out came a larger flathead screwdriver. More pushing and tapping and wedging, then . . .
Pop. The molding cracked as it came off.
“Whoops,” Janelle said. “Oh well. It’s in the closet. Who cares. I need a . . .”
She made a pinchy-pinchy motion with her fingers.
“A crab?” Stevie said.
Janelle looked up and around, then stood and grabbed two empty hangers from the closet bar.
“Get the flashlight and hold it in there,” she said.
Stevie snagged her flashlight and shone it into the space Janelle was working in. Janelle delicately pushed the ends of two of the hangers inside and pressed them together, creating a claw. It took her a few tries, but she eventually fished out a small, crumpled paper. She pulled on it. It was a degraded pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. The pack still contained several cigarettes, which looked extremely fragile.
“These look old,” Janelle said. “Someone was using this to hide their stuff.”
She picked up the scanner again and ran it back over the spot.
“There’s still something else,” she said. “Higher up. About eight inches high, maybe five across? Perfectly rectangular.”
“Like the size of a book?” Stevie said.
Janelle craned her arm up into the space as well, but soon pulled back and dusted herself off.
“I don’t think we’re going to get at it that way,” she said. “I think we’re going to have to go through.”
“Through?”
Janelle got up and returned a moment later with a mallet and a large, heavy knitting needle.
“What don’t you have in your room?” Stevie asked admiringly.
“A circular saw. And I tried. Turn up some music. This may be loud.”
Stevie went over to her computer and looked around for something that seemed like passable music, pushing the volume as high as her laptop could manage. It rattled through the bass speakers. Janelle shrugged, as if to say that the poor sound would have to do. She tested the wall again, tapping until she found the spot she wanted. Then she set the knitting needle against it and gave it a hard whack with the hammer. This made a small pockmark. She did it again, and again, until a small hole appeared. She worked around the small hole, creating a series of small holes until there was a small honeycombed pattern. From there, it took only a few taps with the mallet before the patch dented, and one more before a hole about six inches across opened up.
“Flashlight,” Janelle said. “The good one, not a phone.”
Stevie scrambled over to her set of drawers and retrieved the high-powered flashlight the school provided for emergencies. Janelle shone this into the wall, revealing a small cavern of dust and dark. She reached her hand inside. This time, it took very little effort.
“Got it,” she said to Stevie.
After a minute of maneuvering, plus a few more taps of the mallet, Janelle pulled a small red book out of the opening.
The wonderful thing about reality is that it is highly flexible. One minute, all is doom; the next, everything is abloom with possibility. The terrible feelings of the night before were replaced with a glow, a heartbeat that shook her arm and hand as she took up the book. It was bound in red leather, which had probably been bright originally and now was a bit blackened with grime, but not so much as to mar its appearance too badly. The corners of the book were rounded, and the word DIARY was written on the front in gold lettering. The paper edges were also gold in color. Seeing it come out of the wall filled her with a sensation she had no words for. It was a kind of wild, high focus, a feeling that time was collapsing and the past was popping out to say hello.
“Open it!” Janelle said. “Open it!”
The book made a gentle cracking sound as the brittle binding and leather gave way for the first time in decades. Directly inside were several black-and-white photos. It was instantly clear that these were part of the set she had found in the tin. Francis and Eddie. Eddie was stretched out on the grass, looking into the camera, a naughty smile on his lips. There was another of Francis in her Bonnie Parker outfit. There were other scenes as well. Whoever took the photos was making an attempt at art. There was a dramatic photo of the Great House, another of the fountain splashing, Leonard Holmes Nair painting on the lawn. The book was thick with clippings, with writing.
“Holy shit,” Stevie said.
“See?” Janelle said. “You come to me for results.”
There was a quick knock on the door, and Pix peeped in.
“Dinner!” she said.
February 25, 1937
THE DRIVE LASTED ALL NIGHT—A WINDING PATH THROUGH THE Adirondack Mountains, past lakes, down roads that were thin paths through ice and snow.
As George suspected, Jerry knew where to go, generally speaking. He knew the town—Saranac Lake—and had a rough set of directions beyond that. Jerry was not bright, but even he wouldn’t completely misplace the most valuable kidnapped person on the planet.
The car struggled, and had the weather been a bit less temperate, there was no way they would have made it. As dawn approached, they were on the outskirts of Saranac Lake, and he seemed surer that this was the right area. He guided George to a series of small roads outside town.
“Tell me about Iris,” George said.
Jerry was in a stupor from exhaustion and fear. He lifted his head and lolled it toward the window.
“Andy thought we were being suckered,” he said tiredly. “That’s how it started. He said you got a big head since you’d been living with Ellingham. He showed me all the papers, all the stories about Ellingham. He said that he was one of the richest guys in the world and that a couple of thousand was nothing. He said this was the big score. This one-and-done. It was coming to us on a plate. We would take the woman and use you to get us more money. But then, we stopped the car, and there was a kid in there. It all went wrong right at the start.”
“You could have left the kid on the road.”
“I said that! But Andy said we had to keep going—that it would be even better with the kid. And it was at first. The woman—she was quiet; she wanted to make sure the kid wasn’t hurt. Everyone was behaving real nice. I thought we would let them go after the score we got that night on Rock Point, but Andy thought we could get a million. A million bucks is nothing to a guy like Albert Ellingham. He said we should hold out a little longer. He found this place, some farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. He said they couldn’t look in every farmhouse in the country. I think you turn right up here.”
George turned the car, watching Jerry out of the corner of his eye.
“It was a few days in,” Jerry said. “We kept them comfortable. I’d talk to them. I even brought in a radio for them to listen to. We kept the woman tied up, but the kid, I would let her play sometimes when Andy was out. As long as”—he couldn’t seem to say the name Iris—“she could see the kid, she would stay still. She saw I was feeding her. I even brought her a doll. I kept telling her it was all going to be okay. She was quiet for a while. She and the kid would sleep together. It was all going to be all right. But then, that day . . .”
Jerry had to stop for a minute.
“Keep going,” George said.
“I let the kid play a bit one day when Andy was out getting food. All of a sudden the woman said, ‘Alice, go play!’ And that kid took off running. I think she had been coaching the kid to do that, like it was a game or something. Before I could run after the kid, the woman jumped at me. She had gotten her hands loose. She was strong. You never met a broad so strong. She jumped on top of me, dug her thumbs into my eyes. I dropped my gun. I didn’t want to hurt her. I thought, Just let her go; let her run. But something in me . . . I don’t know, i
f you fight all the time you can’t not fight if you get jumped. She was going for the gun, and I grabbed a shovel or something from the wall and hit her with it, hard. There was blood, but . . . she was still standing. She started running. I can still see her running across that field, screaming for the kid to run. The kid was nowhere. In my head, I’m thinking, It’s over. Good. It’s over. We can just go now. But she was screaming so loud I got scared. I caught up to her when she fell. She had blood on her face, in her eyes. I told her to shut up, shut up and everything would be fine. I hit her once or twice, just to try to get her to stop. And she started . . . laughing.”
At this, Jerry stopped and seemed genuinely puzzled by the story. George tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
“Andy came back when this was going on. When I saw him, I let her go. Because I knew. I thought, Give her a chance. She got up and started screaming again. And Andy, he just . . .”
The picture was complete and all too clear to George. Iris was one of the most alive people he had ever met. She loved a dance, a party . . . she could swim for miles. That moment in the field—she had trained for that her whole life. She was a Valkyrie. She went down fighting.
“. . . shot her,” Jerry said simply. “It all happened so fast.”
Jerry fell silent, lost in the moment of Iris’s death there in the field.
“Alice,” George prompted him.
“It took us an hour to find the kid,” Jerry went on quietly. “I told her her mother had gone home. She started crying. We moved to another place. We wrapped the woman’s body up and Andy drove back to Lake Champlain and put it there to make it seem like we were closer to Burlington than we were. After that, Andy started getting nuts, talking about the FBI all the time. He never left me alone with the kid again. We’d drive from place to place. We slept in parks, sometimes hotels, but usually out in the open, in the car. Then one day he decided he could leave me with the kid again for a little while. He went out for an hour and came back and said he’d found this place. We were going to leave the kid for a bit and come back when it was less hot for us. This couple would watch her. We told them she was his sister’s kid, and that the husband was no good and we wanted to keep the kid safe for a bit while we dealt with it. They seemed to buy it, and they liked the money. We slept in a barn that night. Andy talked about Cuba, that he knew a guy with a boat who would take us there for five hundred. He said we should go there. We’d drive to Boston and get in the boat. When I woke up, Andy was gone. He left a grand in my pocket. I didn’t know what to do. I got cousins in New Jersey, so I went there. But I don’t know what to do in New Jersey. So I came back to New York. I knew at some point you’d show up.”
The Hand on the Wall Page 15
