by Fran Stewart
“. . . the wee holes,” Dirk added with a glare at my friend.
A faint buzz sounded from across the table. Harper pulled out his phone, looked at it, and stood. “Gotta run. Duty calls.” He cringed. “How trite is that, I ask you?”
“Treit? What would be this treit?”
“T-r-i-t-e. Commonplace, unoriginal,” I muttered, and Harper’s shoulder’s tensed.
“That was trite when I was alive,” Dirk observed.
“You’re working days and nights both?” Gilda sounded awestruck.
Harper looked a bit sheepish. I thought he was going to answer, but he must have decided against it. Either he was mad about my “trite” explanation or maybe he wanted out of here. All this was my imagination. He didn’t really want to spend time with me. He was working. He was investigating. I was insane.
I let him out the front door, and Karaline, too, locking it behind them before Sam and Gilda could leave. “Would you two help me move the bookcase?”
“Again? How many times you gonna move that sucker?”
“Those holes bother me, Sam. Maybe if we take a closer look at them, we can tell what’s going on and help Shoe out.”
Sam looked at Gilda and shrugged. “You mind waiting a little longer, sweetie?”
Sweetie? Sam and Gilda? I thought Shoe was—
“That’s fine, honey. I’m not in a hurry.”
Without waiting for me, they both headed toward the back and began removing items from the shelves. Good idea. I’d hate to break anything else moving that sucker, as Sam called it.
Movement to my left caught my eye. My own reflection in the shop windows where Karaline had opened the blinds. As dark as it was outside and with these overhead lights on, we might as well be spotlighted. The thought of Harper walking by and seeing us still here brought a momentary qualm, but I squashed it decidedly. I backtracked, closed the blinds on the courtyard side, and drew the curtains behind the mannequins on the street side. We didn’t use them often—only when the sun was exceptionally bright—but tonight we needed privacy for what I was planning to do.
“Sam,” I said, “be sure you go by the hardware store in the morning and get a dead bolt lock. We need four keys, too.”
“Don’t have to.” He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a bedraggled white paper bag. “Harper took care of it. I’ll install it in the morning.”
“You can install it tonight.” I took the bag. “That was so nice of him.”
“Yeah. Here’s the receipt.” He grinned fiendishly. “He said you could pay him later.”
15
Hidden
Between the three of us, after Sam installed the dead bolt, and with Dirk watching and muttering under his breath, it took a lot longer than I’d expected. Maybe it should have been two big men struggling with it, I thought. We managed to rock the bookcase away from the wall, far enough that we had room to stand behind it.
I couldn’t help it. I imagined the effort it would take to get that bookcase falling. If I leaned against the wall and put one foot up against the back of it . . .
“Why are you just standing there?”
“What are you looking at?” Gilda and Sam spoke at the same time, her voice coming from somewhere behind him. She peeked around Sam, whose arm was braced against the wall at a spot higher than my head.
I peeled back the Scotch tape I’d put there this morning, and a strip of antique wallpaper drooped down like a brown-flocked retriever’s ear. The Sheetrock, when I touched it, left a white trace on my fingertips. I remembered the Easter Sunday two years before, when Mason had shown up at my house right at dawn toting rolls of wallpaper as a birthday surprise for me. For a week or two before that, I’d been halfheartedly stripping off the wallpaper in the downstairs half bath, but I’d kept getting sidetracked. He helped me steam off the rest of the old paper, and when I asked him how long it was going to take—because, even though the shop was closed on Mondays, I did have to open it on Tuesday—he waved away any answer. It took us all day Sunday and a great deal of Monday; that old Sheetrock was spewing dust at the slightest touch. It stuck to our hair, our clothing. We ended up having to replace one sheet of it, and that was a job from hell. I’d never want to do that for a living. Mason was, had been, so nice in so many ways. Except when he was stealing town money. Or pawing through my purse. Or messing around with Andrea and whoever else.
I loosened my clenched fist. It took some effort.
Dirk was fascinated by the Sheetrock. “What is this?
Sam and Gilda seemed to be paying no attention to me, except that I heard Sam say something about la-la land. I poked him in the ribs with my elbow. “See the holes?”
He looked over my shoulder. “Yep. Drilled. That’s what I said.”
I ran my finger carefully over one of them. “Why on earth would anyone do this?”
Dirk peered over my other shoulder. “What is behind the wall?”
“There’s nothing behind the wall,” I said, “except the storage area and a little bathroom.”
“We know that,” Gilda said.
“I meant, ye wee stubborn lass, what’s behind this wall and in front of the one on the ither side.”
“You mean, what’s in between the walls?”
Sam reached over my shoulder and cupped his hand under my chin, pulling it toward him. “Her eyes are clear. Her jaw is firm.” He snapped his fingers beside my head with his other hand and I flinched. “Her ears seem to be working just fine.” He looked at Gilda and back at me. “Why do I get the feeling she’s going bananas on us?”
“Bananas?” Dirk sounded confused.
Gilda poked her head under Sam’s arm again, like a yellow mushroom springing up after a rainstorm. “Because she’s not making any sense?”
“Stop it, guys. I’m perfectly sane. I’m not going bananas—going crazy.” I glanced at Dirk, and he nodded his understanding. “I’m just . . . answering my own thoughts.” And those of the resident ghost. “Doesn’t it make sense that maybe something is in the wall? Something the murderer wanted?”
“Maybe Mason surprised him in the act.”
Gilda poked Sam in the side. “What act?”
“I dunno. Whatever he was looking for.”
That wouldn’t hold up grammatically, but I got what he meant. “You think Mason saw him somehow or other?”
“Mayhap he was in on it himself.”
I stared at Dirk. “Ohmigosh, I never thought of that.”
“Thought of what?” Sam said, as Gilda said, “Huh?”
“Maybe Mason was the one drilling the holes.” Even as I said it, though, I didn’t believe it.
“But why?” Gilda sounded as plaintive as a mewling kitten.
“I dinna ken.”
“I don’t know.”
“Beats me.”
After that little trio, we were all silent for a minute or two—even Dirk, who ran a finger up and down over the strip of wallpaper without moving it a hair.
“I know what we have to do,” I finally said. “Let’s cut into the wall and see what’s back there.” I will admit to a momentary qualm about destroying a wall that didn’t belong to me, but the qualm didn’t last long. Curiosity wins every time.
A circular saw is not one of those tools I normally keep around the shop. Nor did I have a drill. But I did have a hammer. Sheetrock would be easy to put a hole into. Picking a likely spot between two of the drilled holes, I gave it a good whack.
And about broke my arm. The hammer bounced off something solid. Behind the Sheetrock, as we soon found out, was a layer of unappetizingly gray wallpaper and a solid wall of tongue-and-groove wooden slats fitted together.
“Who built this?” Sam shook his head in disgust. “Can you imagine how much it musta cost?” He grabbed the wallpaper strip and ripped it off, all the
way down to the floorboard. “I say we find out what’s behind all this.”
“And how were ye planning to do that, wee manny?”
“Good question,” I said. “Maybe we should start by stripping off the wallpaper?”
“What question?” Sam twirled his finger around his ear. “I still say she’s going barmy on us.”
I ignored him. “Pull it off carefully. We don’t want to damage anything that’s going to show when the bookcase is back in place. Just from here”—I drew an imaginary line in an arbitrary spot about a foot inside the limits of where the bookcase sat and just to the left of the first hole—“to here.” Another line on the other side.
“No,” Sam said. “Leave on the wallpaper. It’ll help hold the Sheetrock together.”
He fetched a knife from the workroom and slit the Sheetrock along those imaginary lines. As we worked, I had to push Dirk out of the way. Well, not push him exactly, because there was no way to do that, but I kept making little shooing motions.
“What is this sheet of rock? It is no like any rock I have ever seen.”
I just shook my head. I wasn’t going to try to explain the building industry. I’d had enough trouble with horses under a hood. “No higher than six feet. We don’t want the bare wood to show over the top of the case.”
I’d forgotten how dusty Sheetrock is. My bathroom at home was nothing compared to this. Of course, this Sheetrock was probably five times the age of my house. This was not going to be fun to clean up. Dirk kept sticking his head in where I was just about to pull on the Sheetrock, and I shooed him away a couple more times.
“I’m not in your way,” Gilda complained.
“Boy, are you cranky,” Sam said. Not to Gilda. To me.
I pulled out one more chunk of Sheetrock, about waist high, and ripped away the gray wallpaper behind it. “Would ye look at that?” Dirk had stuck his head right in front of me. “Look at these lines.” He drew back and turned around, keeping his hand hovering in front of the wall behind him.
I leaned around him. “You’re right.”
Gilda stopped pulling on her section. “Who’s right?”
“Look at this.” A clear rectangle of solid wood, set into the tongue-and-groove boards, looked amazingly like a door, but without a handle. The top of it was just a bit lower than my waist; the bottom went all the way to the floorboard. Its right-hand edge was maybe three feet from the door into the back room, about a foot from where the edge of the bookcase would have been.
Sam reached past me and spread his forearm along the upper line of the door. “Eighteen inches wide,” he said.
“How do you know that?” Gilda sounded awestruck.
“From here to here”—he indicated two spots: his elbow and the bony protuberance on his wrist—“is exactly thirteen inches, and from here to here”—he pointed to his wrist and then to the middle joint of his little finger—“is five inches.”
“You measured all your body parts?” Gilda’s eyes widened suddenly and she blushed furiously. So did Sam. I just rolled my eyes and looked away from the two of them. Dirk snickered. Even the ghost got that one.
“Let’s get back to work,” I said. “I’m beginning to think that whoever broke in here was maybe looking for this door. Does that make sense?”
“What’s on the other side?” Dirk tapped noiselessly on the wall.
“I think we need a screwdriver or something.” I headed toward the back, but Sam grabbed my arm.
“You need to call the police, Peggy. There was a murder, remember?”
Damn him. “But if we knew what was back there—”
“Peggy.” I’d never heard Sam sound so forceful. “Call Harper.”
“I’ll call him tomorrow.” I looked at my watch. “That is, later today.”
Gilda laid her hand on Sam’s arm. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what’s in back of that door?”
Bless her. Maybe I should give that breathy little minx a raise. Sam furrowed his brow for a fraction of a second. “We . . .” His brow cleared. “Do you really want to know, little sweetie?”
I ignored his unctuous gushing and concentrated on letting her convince him.
It didn’t take long. A few batted eyelashes and he was a goner.
Sam took up the hammer. “Gotta get all these nails pulled, or we’ll rip our hands.”
The Sheetrock nails were spaced fourteen inches apart—I measured them before he started pulling. “I thought studs were eighteen inches apart.”
“Yeah, they are nowadays. Back a hundred years ago, buildings were built to last. Today, a two-by-four is really one and a half by three and a half.”
“It is?” Gilda sounded bewildered. “So, why did they need closer studs if they had wider two-by-fours? And why,” she went on doggedly, “are the studs fourteen inches apart, but the door is eighteen inches wide?”
“That is a verra good question.”
Sam looked at Gilda, then at me.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” I said, and Sam went back to pulling nails.
I sent Gilda to clean up the coffeepot and the table while Dirk and I watched Sam. Not the highlight of my day, but Dirk looked fascinated. Didn’t they have nails back then?
Sam dropped the nails on the floor as he pulled them. I thought about reprimanding him, but then I saw the force he needed to wrench them out with the hammer and held my tongue. I could pick up nails just fine with precious little effort.
Dirk bent over and inspected a nail. “Ridges. It has ridges. The nails I made never had ridges. How does the maker do that?”
I asked Sam and received a veritable lecture about the different kinds of nails.
“And they’re made with machines,” I said, knowing I’d get one of those sideways looks from Sam. I did.
“Do ye mean like with the wee horses under the hood?”
“Something like that,” I muttered, and bent to pick up more nails.
Gilda popped out of the back room with—oh lordy—a mug of coffee in each hand. I was going to float home once this was done. I took a sip.
Dirk shook his head. “I dinna ken what is so wonderful about that brew that ye imbibe it at all hours.”
I couldn’t figure out how to answer him without keying another barmy from Sam.
“The coffee’s good, Gilda. Thanks. But let’s get this done and over with.”
Sam groaned. Gilda placed a hand against his chest and he shut up.
Once all the nails were out of the way, Dirk offered his dagger to help pry open the door, but, because that obviously wouldn’t work, I sent Sam for a screwdriver.
Within moments I was watching him try to force the door open. The trouble was, it was fitted so tightly, he couldn’t get a handle on it. A handle. A handle? “Wait a minute, Sam! I’ll be right back.”
I scooted into the storage room, with Dirk right behind me, and rummaged in a junk drawer until I found a small package of sturdy three-inch screws. I tipped some out onto my palm.
“What are those?” Dirk sounded baffled.
“They’re called screws.” I held my hand out so he could see.
“These are made of metal?” His voice was full of wonder. “The only ones I have ever seen were carved from wood.”
I looked at them with a deeper appreciation. “Handy little things,” I said. “Come on. Let’s put them to use.”
I handed Sam three of them. “Screw these in about half an inch.” I waited for congratulations but met only blank stares from the two of them.
Sam rubbed the top of his head. “Why?”
It seemed so obvious to me. “So we can each hold one and pull the door outward.”
The light dawned. The operation continued.
My intention had been for all three of us to pull at the same time so we could share th
e fun, but Sam put in two and stepped back. “It’s your wall,” he said.
Technically, it wasn’t, but this was way too late to bother with the legality of putting a big hole in somebody else’s wall. Who owned this building anyway?
“You don’t suppose there’s a”—Gilda took a deep breath—“a body in there, do you?”
I hadn’t thought she had that much imagination. “Don’t worry, Gilda. A body wouldn’t fit in a space that’s only six inches deep. Anyway, even if there were a body, it’d be nothing but a bunch of bones after this long.” She didn’t look particularly reassured.
I’d been told that the wallpaper was the original, ordered all the way from New York City a hundred years ago by Mrs. Emelinda Pitcairn, whose husband had built the structure, the largest building in Hamelin at the time. Come to think of it, it still was the largest.
As I reminded Gilda of all this—and of course, Dirk as well—I rested my hands on the two screws, almost afraid to see what was back there. Maybe it was a skeleton. What would I do if . . . Get a grip, Winn, I told myself, and pulled on the screws, with Dirk urging me on from behind my right shoulder.
Nothing happened. The door was tightly wedged, as if the wood had swollen over the years. Sam and I both pulled. He inserted two more screws, one for each of us. We found gloves in the back room so we could hold on tighter.
Finally, after more than a few cuss words from me, the door moved. Sam let go, waved me on, and I lifted it out and up, over the ledge formed by the baseboard.
No body.
No bones.
A safe, looking like something out of an old B-grade movie. This wall was obviously deeper than six inches.
The safe, festooned with cobwebs, was gunmetal gray with gold curlicues at each of the corners and fancy lettering in red and gold that proclaimed Thos. Barnes, Pittsburg, PA. Holy crap, what were we going to do with this? Naturally, I tried the handle. Naturally, it was locked. The combination dial spun easily as I twisted it back and forth.
We stood there in the Sheetrock dust, congratulating ourselves on our find, berating ourselves for not having known about it sooner, and drinking Gilda’s coffee like crazy.