“Let’s get him up.” CJ huffed from the strain of Pat’s weight.
He and Brid hoisted Patrick right side up and helped him to sit on the bed. Slowly his breathing calmed down. “Cool,” he said finally.
It was the next morning after breakfast, and Brid and CJ were rehearsing Pat’s descent into the space behind the wall. They had been practicing raising and lowering him, to make certain they had enough strength to hold on to him. It was CJ’s idea to do a test run.
Patrick was light and lean for a six-year-old, and the fact that he was on the tall side made him more likely to be able to reach the hallway behind the wall. He acted fearless about his mission.
Brid was growing impatient, wanting to try the trick for real. “Are you ready, Pat?” she asked, flicking her hair out of her eyes.
CJ seemed more cautious. “Remember, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“C’mon,” Brid said. “There’s nothing to this—stop worrying him.”
Patrick nodded solemnly. “Ready,” he said, but inside he was trembling. The opening was very narrow and very dark. He had only agreed to do this to score points with his big brother and sister and show he wasn’t a little kid like Carron.
The three children stood at the opening of the grille. CJ reached forward and tore off the construction paper Brid had taped over the eye last night, to keep herself from imagining it was winking at her. “Good, the light down there is off,” CJ said. “That means the people below us aren’t around. Now is the time.”
“You’re sure you’ll have my ankles?” asked Patrick.
“We will, Pat,” said Brid. “Go ahead.”
Pat looked straight ahead of him, right into the eye. “Why is she crying words?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” CJ responded.
“This lady’s face,” Pat said. “She has these funny words in her tears.”
“Hey,” snapped Brid, “we don’t have time for your delaying tactics. Are you scared? If that’s what it is, just say so. I can do this for you, too, you know.”
“Shush,” said CJ. “Patrick, what exactly are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Pat said, embarrassed. “It’s just the words she has coming out of her eye. I can’t read them.” He pointed his index finger at the eye.
“Pat, where do you see words? Because we can’t see anything,” CJ said.
“In her tears,” Pat said.
Patrick had begun to read last year in kindergarten, but it wasn’t as easy for him as for the other kids. He jumbled things; he forgot letters. His teachers thought he was lazy. But their mom insisted something was different about Patrick. He noticed more than most people. He had a great memory and an unusual way of learning. Their mom always made Pat feel special about himself, even when the school gave her the official word that he was dyslexic. She taught him to speak up when he noticed things other people didn’t, even if he was embarrassed to. This was one of those times.
Though Brid and CJ had shone a flashlight on the eye last night, neither had noticed the fact that the lines around it were filled with tiny letters. To Patrick, they looked like a small stream of tears; to the older children, they looked like wrinkles. But upon close examination, there were, in fact, tiny words.
CJ pulled a magnifying glass from his desk drawer. He thrust a paper and pencil into Brid’s hands. “It does say something, but I can’t read it. Brid, I’ll recite the letters to you, and you write them down.”
“Okay,” Brid said solemnly. She looked at Pat’s face, and his eyes were all twinkly. She felt a twinge of jealousy.
“Here goes,” said CJ. “LXOXG space VENXL space HG space LXOXG space LMKNVMKMXL period. ZQM space PTMXK space YKHF space TUHOX space MH space KNIMNKX period.”
Patrick peered over Brid’s shoulder, trying to figure out what the words meant, thinking it was writing that he just couldn’t read. “What’s it say?” he asked.
“It’s a secret message,” Brid said. “Like maybe a word jumble.”
CJ was already moving the letters around. He loved puzzles, crime shows on TV, and mystery books, and he knew a lot about clues. “I don’t think this is a word jumble, but I do think these are words. Look at the erratic spacing. Maybe it’s some sort of skip writing,” he said, thinking out loud.
“What’s that?” asked Pat.
“It’s when you take your message and shift a fixed amount of letter spaces in the alphabet to conceal the real message.”
“I don’t get it,” Patrick said.
Brid answered. “Say you wanted to write the letter A, and you were doing a one-skip message. Instead of just writing A, you would write a B, or one letter further into the alphabet than you mean. The reader needs to know how many letters you shifted in order to get the message.”
Pat scratched his elbow. “Why would someone do that? Why wouldn’t they just write an A if they wanted to say A?”
“Because they were trying to hide the message from…”
“From who?”
“Good question. Could be from anyone,” CJ said. “Or maybe they just liked puzzles and jumbles.”
“So, should we try and read it first?” asked Pat, secretly relieved to not be heading into the wall just yet. “What if it says ‘Danger Keep Out’? We’d want to know that, right?”
Nobody answered him. CJ was trying to shift the alphabet one, then two, then three spaces, to no avail. Then he tried it backward, where A=Z, B=Y, etc., and that didn’t work either.
Brid was restless. “Let’s have Pat look around down below. We can figure this code out anytime, but who knows when we’ll have another chance to be alone here when the people below have their lights off?”
CJ looked up from his scribbling to meet Pat’s gaze. “You don’t have to do this, Patrick,” he said again.
“Brid’s right,” Patrick said bravely. “It’s time.”
They all stood in front of the opening in the wall. Brid and CJ each grabbed hold of one of Pat’s legs. Ever so gently, they helped him ease himself from a squatting position into a slow-motion dive, face forward, down into the dark hole.
A full ten seconds passed, and Patrick’s body started to feel a little heavy to CJ and very heavy to Brid. Finally, they heard, “Mhhh mhit.”
“What?” Brid inquired.
“Mhhh mhit,” came out again, while Pat’s legs seemed to kick.
“Pull, Brid!” CJ said.
“I can’t understand him!” Brid said.
“Who cares, just get him up!” said CJ, a hint of panic in his voice.
Together they lifted him up, groaning and straining. As he rose to the surface, Patrick banged his face on the edge of the opening. His arms were tucked in front of him, tightly clutching something. CJ helped him back in through the opening and brushed a bit of debris off his face. Pat spat some cobwebs out of his mouth and began sweeping the dirt off the flat thing he was carrying. He had sawdust in his hair, but his big blue eyes were shining with pride.
“You did it, Pat!” said CJ, hugging his brother, surprised both by Patrick’s success and his own relief.
Brid was more interested in the thing Patrick was carrying. It was a dusty, yellowed book, covered with cobwebs.
“What is this?” Brid said, taking it from his hands and opening the front cover. A piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. The edges of the paper were discolored and slightly torn.
“Hey,” said CJ, noting the spine of the book. “This was taken out of the New York Public Library. I wonder if whoever took it out is still getting fined.”
Brid picked up the paper from the floor, and there, in a large scribble, were the words Please return. “Please return?” she said. “Guess someone forgot to do their chores way back then.”
“Way back when, exactly?” said CJ, looking in the back of the book. “See, they had no scanners then. The due dates are all handwritten on a card. This book was due April twenty-ninth, 1937.”
“Seems l
ike someone was very naughty and does not deserve their allowance,” Brid said in a singsong voice.
“Or maybe they thought they could get out of their chores by sticking it on a high shelf where nobody looked?” Pat said, thinking this was something he would do.
Then CJ said, “I’m not sure the kids who lived here really had chores. Those little rooms in the back of the apartment are servants’ rooms. They probably had servants, and returning a library book seems like one of those jobs you would have a servant do.”
Patrick and Brid looked at each other before Brid said, “He’s right. What’s the title of the book?”
“It’s Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Great book,” CJ said.
“There are probably a hundred copies of this at the library. They might never have missed it. I wouldn’t be too worried about getting it back to them anytime soon.”
“But look at this heavy leather cover,” said CJ. “Most library books aren’t so ornate. It’s probably valuable. I mean, it’s a pretty early printing.”
“We should probably return it,” said Pat.
“Return it?” said Brid. “Like, ‘Hello, here is our library book and sorry it took us seventy-three years to get it back to you’?”
“Yes,” said CJ, “but isn’t it sort of like stealing when you find something that belongs to someone else, if you know how to get it back to them but you choose not to?”
“No,” Brid said. “Because it’s going to look like either we or our ancestors just never got around to returning it. I mean, why bother?”
“I guess I see your point, especially because we’d be giving them back a defaced book,” CJ said as he gingerly turned the pages.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone wrote the words The Seven Keys to right above the title of the book, Treasure Island,” said CJ.
“I don’t get it,” said Pat.
“Someone wrote in pen above the title of the book so that it reads all together, The Seven Keys to Treasure Island.” The kids sat in silence, each contemplating what this meant.
“Hey, CJ?” Pat said. “Did you try seven skips?”
“What?”
“To break the skip code, you know, from the lady’s eye? Did you try skipping seven places? The borrower of the overdue book seems to have liked the number seven.”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, maybe you should,” Patrick said. “I kind of like the number seven, too.”
CJ rolled his eyes. Then he glanced again at the text from the painting. Slowly he skipped seven places for the first word. “LXOXG would become, umm, well SEVEN. Geez, Pat! You’re right!”
“Keep going,” said Brid impatiently. “Keep skipping seven places.”
“Okay, um, VENXL becomes CLUES.”
“So it says ‘seven clues’ what else?” Brid insisted.
Quickly, CJ went through the other words, scribbling down, “Seven clues on seven structures get water from above to rupture.”
“What does that mean?” asked Pat.
“Excellent question, little man,” said CJ. “Excellent question.”
“Hey, guys,” said Brid, “I think we should do as this little piece of paper says. I think we should return this library book.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” CJ said.
“Yes, definitely the right thing,” said Pat, happy to agree.
“It’s also the only thing I can think to do next,” replied Brid, covering up the eye again with construction paper.
CHAPTER 4
Just as the Smithforks were about to leave for the library, a loud buzz sounded from the front of the apartment.
“What’s that?” asked Patrick.
“I think it’s the front door,” said Brid.
“Front door? How can there be a front doorbell ringing when nobody can even get to our front door?” said CJ, suddenly furious. “When anyone wants to visit this apartment, they have to go through a doorman, who then calls upstairs, who then waits for someone to say it’s okay to have that person visit. Then that person has to get in the elevator with the elevator man, who takes them to our front door. Nobody just walks in and rings the front doorbell like they did in our old life. Nobody.”
Patrick and Brid stared at CJ as the doorbell sounded again.
“I’m going to answer the front door,” Brid said simply. She crossed the mahogany-paneled hallway, unlatched the heavy brass dead bolt, turned the elaborate brass handle, and let the enormous, heavy door groan open to reveal…
Children.
They weren’t ordinary children, the sort who might have come by to watch television or throw a ball around. They were a boy and a girl—about CJ’s and Brid’s exact ages. They were wearing church clothes, even though it was Wednesday. On their feet they had blue surgical booties, the kind a doctor wears in the operating room. Brid felt rather underdressed in her T-shirt and leggings.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hullo. We’re so pleased that you have moved in,” said the boy. “I’m Lukas Williamson. We’re from the other elevator bank in the building, the south side. We live in the apartment on the other side of your living room wall, so we thought we’d come and introduce ourselves.”
CJ came up behind Brid, not saying a word, as the girl said, “Hullo. I’m Lily Williamson. So pleased that people our own age finally live in this building. Once we heard you had moved in, we just had to meet you. This has been home for us since we were born, but we aren’t around much.”
These children had an unusual accent and seemed to talk a lot, thought CJ. He wondered if they were from England. “Come in,” he said. Their guests padded into the apartment, the swish-swish of the surgical booties marking their every step.
“Why the footwear?” Brid asked.
“Excuse me?” said Lily.
“Why do you wear those booties on your feet?”
“Well, we don’t wear shoes in the home,” said Lily, “as Sonia, our housekeeper, likes things extra sanitary. We weren’t sure what your house rules were, so we brought our own booties.”
“Do you go to Saint James’s School?” CJ asked Lukas.
“The local private school?” asked Lukas with a hint of snobbery.
“Yes,” CJ said.
“Oh, no, we both go to boarding school in England. Our parents mostly travel, so they think it preferable that we should go to the best schools in the world, no matter where they are.” Lukas said this with great enthusiasm.
CJ, Pat, and Brid exchanged knowing glances as they led the way into CJ’s room. They all thought the same thing: do not tell these kids about the eye behind the wall.
“Do you know the history of this apartment?” asked Lukas, brushing back his blond hair and hiking up his pants a bit before he sat down on a moving box. Brid thought he acted like a thirty-year-old man instead of a boy of about twelve.
“Not really,” said Brid. “Our mom liked it because it was built at an interesting time in New York City—when things were really thriving and changing.”
“That’s right,” said Lily. “Grand buildings were going up everywhere.” She ran her hand along the intricate woodwork of CJ’s bookcase. “Our parents say it’s hard to find places like this anymore.”
For a girl of about ten, Lily had an uncanny ability to speak like an adult. She had red-framed glasses and dark red hair held in place by a neat headband. Brid felt squirmy and uncomfortable.
“Our apartments used to be connected, you know,” said Lukas. “They were owned by a family, the Posts, of the packaged food empire. They merged with the Huttons, a family that had a banking empire.”
“What do you mean, they merged?” Pat interrupted. He had said nothing the entire time the Williamsons were present, which Brid thought was admirable and unlike him.
“A young man from a rich banking family married a lady from the food industry, a family that pretty much invented packaged food for supermarkets,” Lily said. “Before that, you had to go to
the bakery to buy bread, the butcher to buy meat, and so on.”
“Anyway,” Lukas continued, “they were married, and at first they lived in a fantastic town house around the corner from here. When the Posts constructed this building, they demolished their old house and rebuilt the entire town house on the top two floors here. They could enjoy views of the skyline and Central Park, while living in one of the grandest apartments in New York City. They were fabulous entertainers and had many grand fêtes here.”
Even CJ felt like he needed a dictionary to talk to this boy. “So then years later, when they wanted to sell it, they split their big apartment in two?”
“Four,” interjected Lily. “Two apartments on both the twelfth and thirteenth floors. Our living rooms used to be one giant ballroom. When they created our separate apartments, they split it down the middle. That’s why your living room is so enormous.”
“But we’re on the fourteenth floor, not the thirteenth,” Patrick piped in.
“Well, they call our apartments fourteen north and fourteen south, but really we’re on the thirteenth floor. Nobody would live on a thirteenth floor; people thought it unlucky, so this building goes from twelve to fourteen,” Lukas said with a strange gleam in his eyes.
“What do these poems on the moldings mean?” Brid asked as she pointed to the intricate writing far above their heads.
“The Posts adored collecting art and literature,” said Lukas. “It was a culturally rich apartment. I’d imagine the poems were just decoration, though we don’t have the same sort of detail on our side. You know, a lot of their fortune went missing soon after Mr. Post died in 1937. Because Mr. Post insisted that walls be built in front of the original walls, the search was always focused on them. But everything was searched after his death and before the apartment was split up, and nothing’s ever been found.”
“Yes,” said Lily. “Obviously the fortune was hidden somewhere else.”
“Kind of strange it was never found,” CJ said.
“Well, the rumor was that someone did find it and kept it,” Lily said. “Though much of it would have been difficult to hide: enormous jewels, famous paintings, things like that.”
Walls within Walls Page 2