Solid Walls

Chapter Fourteen

Nell walked around the outer-layer hall with the tape measure spooling behind her, the end hooked on an exposed nail. The numbers she'd been gathering over the past few hours were arranging themselves against every wall of the house. She was almost certain about the first floor now—but for her theory to hold up, the same would have to be true up here.

The second floor had few of the protrusions that made the first tricky to measure, except for some decorative towers, which she'd already passed and found empty. So, logically, this outer layer should form a perfect box, and since the hall was four feet wide from the edge of the building, it should measure 250 feet, give or take. But instead of circling around and eventually ending up where she started, she'd walked as far as she could in one direction and hit a wall. She knocked a knuckle against the plaster, then turned around and headed back the other way. When she passed the outermost hole cut into the walls, she paused. She listened to the murmuring of an intense conversation and glimpsed the back of Chloe's head, small in the distance through the odd tunnel. She continued on as quietly as possible.

At last she reached the other end, another wall blocking her from making a complete loop. She checked the measurement and added up the total length of the hall. She knocked on this wall the same way she had the other.

Then she actually smiled.

When she'd made it back around to the beginning, where the tape was hooked on the nail, she saw Sam O'Keefe standing at the top of the stairs. She'd taken off her work vest and pulled back her hair in an inexpert bun, from which rogue strands kept escaping.

"Hi," the girl said. "I, uh, well I'm off work now, and Talia told me you guys were up here. I thought maybe, I don't know—did you mean it when you said maybe I could help? I don't want to get in your way or anything."

"Of course," Nell said. "I'm just about to take some measurements of the next layer."

She led the way to the door Talia had taken her through yesterday, and they emerged into the first windowless room. Nell handed Sam the end of the tape and strode past the piano.

Sam watched in fascination as Nell knocked on different spots on the walls, listening so intensely it was as though she hoped someone might knock back. When she seemed satisfied, they continued to the next dark, sparsely furnished room.

"You told me yesterday that the upstairs makes you uncomfortable," Nell said, stretching out the tape again. "Are you uncomfortable now?"

"Um, kinda. It's not so bad out here, in the first hall or in this 'layer,' like you called it. It's worst right up next to Willa's room. Are you going to measure that part, too?"

"Eventually. Probably not today." Nell knew how important it was for Chloe's interviews to feel safe and private, especially at first, when she was establishing trust. The last thing Chloe needed while trying to get an anxious child to open up was a strange woman standing behind her examining the walls.

"Did you ever come up here when you were growing up?" Nell asked. "Before all this started with Willa?"

"Well, when Mom was around, it was her 'special place,'" Sam said. "Grandpa always told us not to disturb her. Then later, after she'd left, Grandpa told us it was too dangerous—he said the rooms were all boarded up and there might be rotten spots in the floor. But we didn't really need another excuse to stay away—I think we were just too heartbroken and angry to even think about climbing those stairs. Plus we always had plenty of space to explore downstairs and in the woods, so we didn't think about it much. I don't think me or Ed were ever, sort of, drawn to it the way Willa ended up being."

"What do you think was different about her?"

"You know, I've thought about that a lot. I think if it was ever going to be one of us, it makes sense it was Willa. Me and Ed have always had things to keep us busy outside the house, like me in the woodshop and him roaming around the woods and stuff. But Willa's always been a little more...tightly wound, I guess? Staying inside with her schoolwork all the time? Ed's a good student and everything, I mean, he's going to college. But he didn't ever have to work real hard at it. And forget about me—me and school never really got along. But Willa..." She shook her head. "Willa's a little obsessive."