Solid Walls

Chapter Thirty-Three

"Oh my God, we're too late." Chloe still whispered, but louder now that it seemed they were alone on the second floor. "They said she was so upset...what if she did something stupid?" She scanned the floor outside the window, unwilling to admit to herself that she was searching for a pile of dust.

Nell reached through the window to turn on the lamplight, which blinded them both until their eyes adjusted.

"Look," Nell said. "The desk's been moved out from the wall. That's exactly where the plans said the upstairs entrance to the passage would be."

"Wait, you mean Ed was right about Willa knowing about the passages?" Chloe said. "And she's been able to leave this whole time? Coming and going at night?"

"Maybe. But if I was going to use a secret doorway every night, I wouldn't put my heaviest furniture in front of it. My bet is she got to thinking after we found the passage across the hall, started looking for her own way through. And now she's hiding to keep from being taken away."

"Won't she be in terrible pain, though?" Chloe said. "She doesn't think she can survive away from the room. How long would she be able to last?"

"I don't know. But she had all day to find the right mechanism to open the door. We don't have that luxury."

Nell tucked her flashlight into her pocket and vaulted over the window ledge into the room.

"What the hell are you doing?" Chloe hissed. "Are you crazy?"

"How else are we going to follow her?" Nell said. "Sam's already blocked up the portion we uncovered yesterday." She nodded at the freshly re-nailed boards lining the hole on the other side of the hall. "We can't pry them out again without making a racket, so this is our best chance. Come on, if Willa could open it, so can we." She started running her hands along the wall behind the desk, looking for cracks in the plaster.

Chloe touched the sides of the window but hesitated. "Nell...how does it feel in there?"

Nell stopped her examination of the wall and considered. "Safe," she said.

"Really?"

"Mmm. But...not in a good way. I can see why they all felt like they had to stay." She looked across the room to Chloe. "We won't get sucked in, Chloe. It took months for the others to get trapped. We're not going to linger."

Chloe nodded, biting her lip. Then she took a deep breath and swung her legs over the ledge into the room. She stood there for a moment, feeling the slight but undeniable change in the air, the shift in energy that happened as soon as the threshold was crossed. And Nell was right. There was a sort of safety to the room. A sort of horrible safety.

"What can I do?" she asked Nell, who was now crouched on the floor, tapping on the baseboards.

"Just start knocking or pulling on anything that seems original to the room," Nell said. "Maybe there's a hidden button in the crown molding or some kind of lever in the old closet. Don't bother with the furniture or anything else that's new."

Chloe looked around the room. "Wait...there is some furniture that Willa said was already here, right? The bed, and...and a chest, I think. They were here before she moved her things up, so couldn't they be original?"

She searched under the discarded clothes and books and found the chest Willa talked about. It certainly looked old enough to have been there since the house was built, and so solid no subsequent owner would ever bother to move it. While Nell continued her search across the room, Chloe opened the creaking lid and dug between blankets and stuffed animals. She ran her fingers along the inner walls, hoping to find some metal catch or mysterious knot in the wood. But it wasn't until she'd pulled out the contents to reveal the bottom that she paused. The sides and top of the chest were all built of rough-hewn planks, softened with time. But the bottom felt smooth and solid.

"Nell? What am I looking at here?"

Nell joined her by the chest and felt along the edges of the bottom. "This wood couldn't be more than a few decades old. And the depth is wrong on the inside. Hang on...you're kidding."

"What?"

Nell leaned into the chest, put a hand on either end of the bottom plank, the tips of her fingers just barely clutching the edges, and pulled up.

"A false bottom," Chloe whispered.

Hidden beneath the plank at the bottom of the chest, in a gap of space about four inches high, were two books, one bound in worn leather, the other covered in bright orange fabric. Nell picked up the older book and Chloe the newer. They each flipped to the first page.

"This diary belongs to Sue Witherns," Nell read in the careful inked cursive of a girl a hundred and fifty years dead, the pages soft and brittle under her fingers. "It's dated 1869."

"And this one's dated almost thirteen years ago." Chloe took a shaky breath and touched the signature at the top of the first page. "It belonged to Moira O'Keefe."