Chapter 4
Chapter Four
She stood in the middle of the library wreckage and turned in a slow circle.
Books were everywhere. They lay in piles on the floor and desk and leaned against chair legs like tired soldiers. After nine hours of work, books were stacked everywhere except on the shelves. Somewhere behind one of these walls, there might be a room.
"In the movies, you pull a book and the whole shelf swings open," she said.
"Which book?"
"That's the problem. It's always the right book." She glanced at the shelves they hadn't touched yet—the last wall, with at least four hundred books.
Rowan was looking at the walls the same way she was.
“Window, so it’s not that one,” she said, more to herself than him.
"The wall we came in through leads to the hall. What's on the other side of those shelves?" She pointed at the far wall, lined with books from floor to ceiling, the last part they hadn’t searched. "What's back there?"
Rowan frowned at it. "The bathroom."
"The little one off the hall?"
"The only one down here."
She tried to picture the downstairs bathroom. She'd used it a hundred times. It was a tiny room, with a toilet and a sink barely big enough to wash your hands. It was a room you could barely turn around in.
She walked to the end wall and put her hand flat against a shelf. "How wide is this room?"
"I don't know. Twelve feet?"
"How wide is the bathroom?"
She watched him think it through. He looked at the wall, then at the door they had entered, and then back at the wall.
"Not twelve feet," he said slowly.
They were both moving before either of them said anything else.
She led the way down the hall, Rowan following. The only light came from the ceiling fixture near the stairs. First, they passed the library door, then a stretch of wall, and finally the bathroom door. She stopped at the bathroom, looked at the wall, and tried to figure out the measurements.
Rowan went into the library. She heard him counting under his breath, the slow, measured tread of him pacing the width of the room. Then he came out and went into the bathroom, and she heard it again.
He came back out and stood with her in the hall.
"Library's twelve paces," he said. "Wall to wall."
"And the bathroom?"
"Six."
They both looked at the stretch of hallway wall between the two doors.
"Six feet," she said. Her pulse had picked up, a flutter high in her chest. "There's six feet of this house unaccounted for."
They went back into the library. A narrow console table stood against the suspicious wall, and a lamp with a pleated shade sat on it.
A wooden chair with a cushion sat beside the table—a very uncomfortable chair.
No one would choose it over the other more comfortable pieces of furniture in the room.
Just furniture. Just camouflage. Something for the eye to slide past.
"That's the whole trick,” she murmured. “You don't hide a door. You put a table in front of it, and everybody stops looking. A chair that is a lot easier to move than the larger ones over there.”
"Move the chair," he said.
She pulled it away. Rowan lifted the lamp. They moved everything clear, and now they stood in front of six feet of empty wall.
“It has to be here, right?” Leah asked. She hoped he would say yes. She needed to hear that she wasn’t imagining things.
Rowan ran his hand along the wall at shoulder height, then lower, fingers flat, pressing lightly as he went. She watched his hand travel the plaster and stop.
"There's a seam," he said.
She came close. At first, she couldn't see anything. Then she turned her head, letting the light catch the wall at an angle, and there it was. A hairline, vertical cut running from the chair rail down to the baseboard. It didn't match any of the other seams in the plaster—a cut, not a crack.
"There's another one." He was further along now, crouching, his hand near the baseboard. Two vertical lines, three feet apart. A door-shaped absence in the wall.
"How does it open?"
He ran his fingers along the chair rail where the seam met it, then along the baseboard.
She watched him press, one section of trim at a time, working down the length.
His hand stopped at a piece of molding near the floor.
He pressed it, and there was a click. Forty years of secrets behind a latch like a kitchen cabinet.
The panel swung inward, silent on its hinges, into the dark.
Cold air came out of the opening and washed over them. It smelled old. Air that had not been breathed in a long time. She couldn’t see anything inside, only darkness.
Rowan reached through the opening and felt along the inside wall. A moment later, a light came on, a single bare bulb hanging from a cord, the kind of light that belonged in a cellar.
The room was about the size of a walk-in closet. That was her first thought. It was maybe four feet deep and eight feet wide, with bare stone on one wall and old plaster on the other. Boxes covered every inch of the floor.
Boxes were stacked two or three high. Some were sturdy banker's boxes, while others were old cardboard boxes with soft corners. Each one was labeled.
"It's the family archive," Rowan said quietly from the doorway. "The real one.”
She hardly heard him. Her eyes moved past the years, down the row, to a box set apart on the floor with nothing on top. It looked as if it had been taken down and put back more often than the others.
It didn't have a year on it.
It had her name.
LEAH. She stood there, looking at it, and couldn’t make her legs move.
"Leah." Rowan's voice was very quiet.
"I’m fine.”
She wasn't. She forced herself to walk into the room.
“Let’s take it into the library,” Rowan said softly. “Warmer. Better light.”
He moved past her and picked it up. He stared at her until she finally turned and walked back into the warmth of the library.
Rowan put the box on the floor, one of the few spaces not covered by books.
She knelt and pulled the box toward her. Rowan sat beside her. She lifted the lid off, and the first thing she saw was a manila envelope, creased with age, unsealed, the flap tucked in. She lifted it out, opened it, and slid the contents onto her lap.
A typed report. Several pages, stapled. At the top of the first page was a letterhead she didn't recognize—a Seattle firm.
She read it. Client: William Ellsworth. Below that, subject names. Her mother's name. And then hers. Leah Ellsworth, age twelve.
The date on the report put her in sixth grade.
It listed a school—her middle school, the one with portables out back and a chain-link fence.
It listed an address, an apartment complex she could barely remember.
She did remember the broken concrete stairs where she'd skinned her knee so badly her mother took her for stitches.
It listed her mother's workplace. She turned the page, and a photograph slipped onto her lap.
It was her. Standing outside the school fence with her backpack on, the purple jacket she'd gotten at Goodwill and worn until the cuffs frayed. She was looking off to the side at something. The photo had been taken from somewhere close. Across the parking lot. From a car.
She had never seen the camera.
No one took her picture when she was growing up. School photos cost money, and they never had enough, so whole years of her childhood were missing. She accepted that long ago. Food and electricity mattered more than photos of her frizzy hair and crooked smile.
Rowan took the paper from her while she reached back into the box.
“A birthday card,” she whispered.
There was a stamp in the corner—an airmail stamp, affixed, ready. There was no postmark. He had written the card, sealed it, stamped it, and carried it as far as the hidden room and no further.
She turned it over and over in her hands. She didn't open it. She couldn't. She wasn't ready. She set it down and stared at the filled box. She knew there would be more proof of her life. A life lived without her father.
Underneath the card were newspaper clippings.
The first was from a small local paper, the kind that printed honor rolls, yard sales, and the school lunch menus.
It was the listing for a school play. The cast names ran in two columns, and hers was near the bottom of the second column.
It was circled in blue ink. She remembered that play.
She'd had one line. The train's coming. She had practiced it in the bathroom mirror for a week.
And on her big night, she messed up her only line.
Her mother hadn’t been there. Leah couldn’t remember where her mother had been, but she knew she hadn’t been there.
Her father had known about the play.
Rowan’s hand went to her back, gently rubbing up and down.
“He was watching me,” she said in disbelief. “I thought it stopped when I was little.”
“Keep digging,” Rowan said.
She realized then that she’d stopped and was staring at the box.
There were more clippings and more photographs.
She picked them up one by one. One showed her at about twenty, wearing the denim jacket she had for years, crossing a parking lot with groceries.
Another showed her on a street she didn't recognize.
The pictures were always taken from across a road or parking lot, where no one would notice.
The dates stretched over years. From kindergarten through her twenties, envelope after envelope, the stack of papers grew deeper in the box than she could bring herself to look.
“Cute,” Rowan quipped at the picture of her with no front teeth.
He had had someone watch her.
“He stalked me,” she said. “My whole life was recorded by someone I never even saw.”
Her father had hired people, more than once, to track her down and keep tabs on her.
“He knew where I lived. What schools I went to. The whole time.” Leah held up a photo of her and her mother.
“I was fourteen. We got evicted and spent six weeks in a motel with just a hot plate. Some charity paid for us to stay. When we had to leave, we ended up in a new town.”
Rowan nodded but said nothing.
What was there to say?
He had found her. He had known where she was. He had just never come.
She remembered all the nights she lay awake as a kid, believing her father was dead because that’s what she'd been told. It was always just the two of them. She thought about how it would have only taken one letter, one money order, or one knock on the door of one of those run-down apartments.
“I don’t know who I’m angrier with,” she said. “Him or her. It’s so unfair. Why? Why would they do this? And then she died, and he still never came forward.” Leah flicked one of the reports with an address she lived at five years ago. “There’s no excuse.”
Rowan reached out, his hand on her back again. He didn't speak. There was nothing in the world he could have said in that moment that would have made it hurt less.