Solid Walls

Chapter Twenty-Four

They followed Bea's directions, turning at the light and driving until they reached the end of the main street, where a modern, blocky building stood. A black and gold sign was posted in the patch of grass at the front:

Medina County Historical Society

Open Mon-Fri 9:00-4:00, Sat 9:00-12:00, Closed Sun

Chloe checked the time as they pulled in. They only had two hours before the building closed for the weekend. They hurried to the door and entered a reception area, where they explained their purpose to the woman at the desk. She led them through a quiet library with a single staff member at the reference desk, sipping coffee and looking surprised to see visitors. The receptionist left them to set up their things at a long table in the center of the empty reading room. Fifteen jittery minutes passed before a small, bespectacled man walked into the room carrying a thick roll of papers under his arm.

"Good morning," he said. "I'm Winston May, director of collections access here at the society. Georgia told me what you're looking for. Which one of you is Dr. Jones?"

Nell rose and shook his hand. Winston nodded as she introduced Chloe.

"We don't get many out-of-town visitors in person these days," he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. "You're lucky I found these buried in the archives on such short notice. They're uncataloged. I only had a hunch we had them at all because I've worked here so long."

He set the roll on the table and untied a piece of twine from around its center. The label attached to the string read in neat blue ink: Robinson & Bros. Architectural Records, ca. 1823-1899.

"Now, there's no guarantee the address you want is in here," he continued, fussing with the creases on the edge of the paper. "The brothers designed a lot of the houses in the area, and this is just whatever papers survived when the firm closed. They probably haven't been unrolled in fifty years, so you're going to have to be careful."

With that he unrolled the stack and weighed down the curving corners with small bean bags, explaining as he did the best way to flip through the delicate papers without damaging them. Nell assured him she was experienced in consulting architectural records, but he lingered over the table for a few minutes longer. He watched as she turned a page over and repositioned the weights, then he nodded in satisfaction and left them under the supervision of the librarian across the room.

It was tedious work, flipping through the hundreds of tissue-thin sheets, searching for the one address they wanted. They were about seventy pages into the thick stack when Chloe squealed.

"Wait...hang on, here it is! 3310 Sky Blue, right?"

They leaned over the drawing. It was a perfect rendering of the front façade of the O'Keefes' house, with every original feature down to the pattern of the bargeboards and the number of diamonds in the mullioned windows. It was odd seeing what the house was intended to look like before its sharp lines were marred by blooming bushes, before its walls were covered in pink paint and drenched in the sunshine of a natural paradise. Rendered here in stark black and white, inked all over with straight ruler marks and detailed measurements, the house wasn't a storybook cottage, ethereal and romantic. It was a mathematical set of interlocking boxes, a precisely constructed dollhouse for perfect little dolls.

They exchanged a glance, and Nell carefully flipped to the next page in the stack. To her relief there was another page of drawings for the O'Keefe house, this one separated into two floor plans, first floor and second. A block of text in the bottom left corner listed the specs of the property and the date the plans were drawn up: 13th of December, 1868. Chloe traced a finger over the lines separating the rooms.