Solid Walls

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They sat on the edge of a trickling fountain in the middle of town square, surrounded on all sides by quaint gardens and storefronts. Only a light weekend crowd bustled down the sidewalks, the occasional dog walker or antiquing couple shooting the strangers curious looks. They unwrapped their sandwiches, and Nell took off her shoes to dangle a toe in the water.

Nell wasn't hungry, but she bit into her veggie sandwich hoping Chloe would attack her BLT with her old ravenousness. The most Chloe managed was a nibble around the crust as she flipped open her legal pad and stared at her notes.

"How about we start with a timeline of what we know?" Nell prompted.

"Right." Chloe sat up straighter. "Right. Yeah. So, we know the house was designed in...let's see, in 1868. And it was finished the following year."

Nell nodded. "And it seems two people had a hand in those designs. The father, George Witherns, signed off on the first set of plans—the ones for a typical country estate with a very atypical second-floor layout. But then the mother, Patricia, signed off on the plans that added even more strangeness—the hidden passages."

"Why two sets of plans?" Chloe asked. "Why not just draw up one very weird blueprint?"

"My first thought was the wife must've had the place altered behind her husband's back."

"You think she could've gotten away with something like that back then?"

Nell shrugged as she took another bite. "I guess it depends. One of the books said her father was an inventor, remember? So maybe she had some unusual training for a woman of the time, or at least enough know-how to design the passages and bell-ringing system. Of course the architects might have helped her draw up the plans, too..."

Her gaze trailed to the City Hall building across the street, also designed, Bea mentioned a few hours ago, by Robinson and Brothers. She scanned the imposing white facade all the way up to a tower protruding from the top. Hanging within, framed by cloudless blue sky, was a bell, shining like its miniature cousins between the walls in the O'Keefe house. She stared at it as Chloe flipped through the photos of documents on her phone.

"Mmm, okay, so let's say Patricia made those changes behind her husband's back," Chloe said. "Do you think he stayed oblivious? I mean, look at these floor plans, how the sizes of the rooms changed. He must've seen something was up during the construction process, right?"

"Well, he was a rich professional man, wasn't he?" Nell looked back down at her sandwich. "One of the books said he was in shipping, so maybe he was away a lot and didn't oversee the construction. Or he was just too self-important to get acquainted with the nuts and bolts of his estate. The home is the woman's world, isn't it?"

"This one certainly was," Chloe said as she zoomed in on a photo of Sue's room. "Even if George didn't know about the passages, he certainly did know about this. This...what? Prison? For his only daughter? He could have given Sue a whole wing lined with windows, a tower hanging over the trees. Instead she was assigned a sunless box surrounded by more sunless boxes. Why?"

"We only have two sentences to help us understand Sue Witherns," Nell said. "One: 'She was said to suffer from a nervous condition.' And two: 'God have mercy on a vanished soul.'"

"Let's not think about that second one for the moment, shall we?" Chloe touched her temple with her finger.

"Sure." Nell shot her friend a look. "Okay, so the 'nervous condition' thing. What did that mean back in the nineteenth century?"

Chloe shrugged. "Anything. Nothing. It could have meant she had an actual mental illness we recognize today, or it could have meant she complained about the temperature of her tea one too many times. There was barely any understanding of the mind back then, much less the mind of a woman. And unfortunately, there's no way to diagnose somebody if we can't talk to them."