Walls within Walls

by Maureen Sherry

  “Yes, I know. That was the rule of sale, that the walls stayed put.”

  “Yeah. In the last few years, all the apartments were selling for big bucks, all but those Post ones. Not too many people wanted a place with restrictions and crazy rules. So the apartment just sat until your family found it.”

  “Yeah. My parents didn’t mind that. My mom is into restoration and stuff.”

  “Yeahdatsnice. Your mom’s working? I never see her around.”

  “Yeah. Sorta, volunteer stuff, you know,” said CJ, not wanting to talk about how his mother used to be around all the time, but now she always had meetings about things like furniture or buying just the right light fixture. “So you didn’t know the Posts?”

  “Nah, just the daughter. They were gone before my time.”

  “You knew the daughter?”

  “Yeah, you will, too. It’s too bad about her.”

  “What do you mean, I will, too? Is she some sort of celebrity?”

  “Yeahright. She lives on the twelfth floor.”

  “What? Eloise Post still lives here?” CJ felt dizzy.

  “Yeah, well, her life is quiet, ya know? She was tired of people asking about her family all the time, so sometimes she uses a fake name—Eloise Munn. People don’t know about her or her family anymore; it’s like they all vanished. Poof.”

  “Hard to believe she lived in all that splendor,” CJ said, thinking of the Post family photo. “And it’s just her?”

  “Her and that bossy maid, Annika. Lady had some bad luck in her life, never married. After her mother died, she moved back here. I guess she likes hanging around all these old memories. I can’t tell you why.”

  “Did you ever hear rumors of the Post family treasure being left in our apartment?” CJ asked.

  “DidIhear? Kid, it was all over the papers. The dad kicked off and never explained to the Post kids how to actually get their inheritance. The guy didn’t trust banks anymore after the stock market crash. So he hid it himself, somewhere so safe that nobody, not even his kids, could ever get to it. Not very thoughtful, if you ask me. They took that apartment apart, found bits of clues here and there, but I think the guy was playing with people’s minds.”

  “Yes, but he had to have left it somewhere, right? I mean, a lot of things they owned never showed up again.”

  “Yeah it’s somewhere, but it ain’t here. This place was under a microscope for years. Still, that guy had country houses and a place in Europe, even though those were sold by his widow. I think they all got the wrong joint, if you know what I mean.”

  CJ’s mind was spinning. He was sure that he and Brid and Patrick had been able to get a little further in solving this mystery—because they had carried out Mr. Post’s wishes. He thought of the older lady who lived below them: Was she really Eloise Post, the solemn girl in the portrait? Had she really come about the noise upstairs, or did she just want to see her old place, now that people were living there? He tried not to appear too excited, but some strange expression must have come across his face, because Ray’s next comment was, “Don’t worry, kid, it’ll be freezing before ya know it.”

  CHAPTER 12

  After CJ left the apartment, Brid deftly lifted the lid of her father’s laptop and continued the work CJ had left unfinished. Moving each letter in turn to the back of the sequence of letters, she made new words that she could search on the internet. She learned that Vinogusta was a wine guide. Too modern, Brid thought, but she wrote it down anyway. She tried ustavinog and got the message Do you mean ustavnog? Brid felt her heart pounding. Did she mean ustavnog? She entered the alternative spelling and was led to a site for Russian newspapers. She wrote that down, too. Then she typed gustavino. This time she got numerous responses. The first was for a restaurant in Manhattan. Doubtful, she thought. It probably wasn’t around when Mr. Post was alive. The next was a reference to a tiling system named for a builder, Rafael Guastavino. “Guastavino, whose name has sometimes been spelled Gustavino, came from Spain and made his mark on the New York City skyline,” Brid read. Skyline? Buildings? Like structures?

  Brid could hear Patrick, still pounding a basketball up and down the main gallery hall. She wanted to tell someone what she’d found. “CJ!” she yelled, before remembering he had gone downstairs. She thought about leaving Patrick and going to find CJ, but then thought better of it. She would have to wait.

  She sat at the second computer, the one with the DigiSpy logo. She touched the desktop icon that repeated the introduction to the game. It looked spectacular. Then she noticed an icon for a DigiSpy tutorial on the desktop. There was no harm in reading through a tutorial, right? At least then she would know what her dad was up to. She looked over her shoulder, making sure she was really alone, and for once, she was.

  Delicately, almost as if it were an accident, she brushed her pinky finger against the return key. The screen filled with a rainbow of graphics, a mesmerizing explosion of light and cacophonous sound. Patrick must have heard it, because the thumping of his basketball stopped, and he came running back to the office. When the explosions mellowed, the screen narrowed to focus on a boy about Brid’s age, who was demonstrating what appeared to be some sort of spy game. Brid and Patrick sat watching, their mouths hanging open in awe.

  However, it wasn’t a game. Their dad’s latest invention seemed to work like a robotic spy. It featured a simple, nozzle-shaped attachment that could be moved anywhere while feeding live footage back to the user’s computer. The nozzle worked like a robot, able to slide around and film at the same time, while continually sending digital images to the home computer. As the DigiSpy’s different uses were demonstrated, Brid found herself lost in thought about what could be done with such a software.

  “Hey,” Patrick said, “that’s so cool.” Brid felt surprised that he didn’t say something like, “I’m going to tell Dad on you.” Little Patrick was growing up, and Brid thought they could really trust him with their secret.

  “Do you think Dad keeps the game attachment in this office somewhere?” Patrick asked, looking around the room.

  Brid said, “Do you think that thing attaches to the computer’s camera, and that’s how it knows if it’s going to bump into something?”

  “No,” Patrick replied, “I think you get the robot to move around by pressing the arrow keys on your computer.”

  “That’s smart, Pat,” said Brid. “Where do you think the robot is?”

  They bent under the desk, looking for the knobby robotic thing they’d seen in the tutorial. There was nothing like it around.

  “Looks like Dad has another winner coming soon,” Pat said.

  “Pat, you know what I’m thinking?”

  “No.”

  “I’m thinking we could use a DigiSpy to see what else is behind the walls of this place. No need to send you upside down behind a wall again, right?”

  “I like going behind the wall. I don’t mind, and besides, this thing is useless without that robot thing.”

  Just then, they were interrupted by the sound of footsteps, heavy ones like their dad’s. “Turn it off!” said Pat. “I’ll block Dad while you get that off the screen.” He ran from the room while Brid frantically hit the escape key, trying to get the tutorial to stop. Why would Mr. Smithfork be home at this time of day?

  The steps the children heard were heading toward the back of the apartment, near the laundry room. Pat rounded the corner at full speed, only to come face-to-face with a strange man. He was tall but stooped a little with age. He had the look of a wizened teacher, neat but not formal. His eyes were bluish gray, and his gray hair almost touched his shoulders. He had just come out of Patrick’s room.

  Pat gasped, thinking the man looked pale like a vampire. The man seemed equally surprised to see someone home. They stood still, summing each other up. The man looked more lost than scary, but even so, Patrick shook with fear.

  “Can I help you?” Pat asked politely, though he was uncertain how a boy should address an intr
uder.

  The intruder seemed to think it best to get a move on. “That’s okay,” he said, brushing past Patrick into the laundry room, where he unlocked the back door and walked out onto the fire stairs, letting the door slam loudly behind him.

  Just then Brid came running up behind Patrick. “Dad?” she asked uncertainly.

  Pat shook his head. “No, Brid, it was some man. A creepy-looking man.” His hands were shaking, and he sank down onto the sturdy floor.

  CHAPTER 13

  CJ could not believe what he had just heard. Thanks to Ray, he knew that not only was Eloise still alive, she was living just one floor below them. He wondered if she knew that Pat had gotten behind her wall through the grille opening. He wondered if she knew about Treasure Island.

  CJ just wanted to be away from people so he could think. He stumbled down the back wooden stairs to the storage area with his mind reeling. No wonder their visitor had known where the kitchen was in their apartment. CJ wondered if Eloise thought there was treasure, her treasure, somewhere in this building, maybe even in their apartment. Was that why she still lived here? Maybe she could make sense of the seven poems in Mr. Post’s book.

  His mind ran through a checklist of clues and facts. They had traded Treasure Island for a book of seven poems and a key. They had uncovered skip writing that said to find seven structures, each related to one of seven poems. Since the poems were all about New York City, he was certain the treasure was hidden somewhere in the city—if not in this building, then in one of the structures. It had something to do with water that flows from above. Would that mean rain?

  We have so many dots, thought CJ, and no way to connect them.

  They needed to start somewhere, he thought as he unlocked the storage room, breathing in the stale scent of dust and old books. He started dutifully moving boxes away from the wall with no idea what he was looking for, but it felt good to be busy. If he could clear some space, he thought, he could have a real place to be alone and to think. In a few minutes, CJ saw letters on the back wall, written with elaborate strokes of a pen on the fading, yellowed paint. It appeared to be a poem, and a funny poem at that:

  I LOVE corned beef—I never knew

  How good the stuff COULD taste in stew!

  I love it WET, I love it DRY,

  I love it baked and called MEAT PIE.

  The poem went on and was signed “a soldier.” CJ touched the fading ink marks and wondered if that was what someone returning from war would be thinking about, the food of home.

  To CJ, the poem read like Dr. Seuss, because it was funny, rhyming, silly, but with a touch of sadness behind it. He felt a little surprised to be thinking so long about the meaning of a poem. Maybe his old teacher at PS 149 was right. He’d said poetry could get under your skin and into your heart, especially if you gave a poem a chance by reading it three times. So, out of deference to the poet-soldier, CJ dutifully read about corned beef two more times.

  Then he caught sight of something else on the wall. It was a seam, no wider than a fraction of an inch, running straight up to the ceiling. It was covered with paint and slightly raised. Wanting to see where the seam started, he began moving boxes off the lowest shelf. He stayed at this laborious work for a while, till he glanced at his watch. He had been downstairs for over two hours and had left Brid and Pat upstairs the whole time. He dashed up the hall, leaving the storage room open, while he went to find his brother and sister.

  As Ray opened the elevator door into the Smithfork apartment, CJ could hear Brid’s frantic voice. “I swear, Maricel, CJ is home. He is just hiding or something. He didn’t go out and leave us alone. He would have told me if he was leaving.”

  Why was his sister so upset? He hadn’t technically gone outside the apartment building. Was going to the basement considered leaving people home alone? He didn’t think so. As he ran down the hallway, CJ rehearsed his excuse. He would just tell the truth. He had never left the building. It wasn’t like he’d gone to the park or the store, right?

  Maricel was seething. She didn’t even let him have a chance to state his case. She pointed a finger at him and spoke in a way he had never heard her talk. “Listen, little big-man. You are not the biggest kid I have been the nanny for, and you are not the smallest. But if there is one thing you and I need to be straight on, it is that your parents trust me to take care of you, and you have to let me do that.”

  Maricel was standing so close to CJ that her saliva landed on his shirt. He wiped it with his hand and looked beyond her, not right at her face. “Look at me when I address you,” she continued. “You are my responsibility, and you’ve proved to me that you cannot be trusted. From now on, I will tell you what we will be doing each day. If we are going to the playground, then you are coming to the playground, too. You will not run around free, and I am not going to get fired just because you make your own rules. Are we clear on this?” CJ wanted to scream at her, but he just stood in that grand hallway, staring at the angels stenciled on the ceilings, waiting for the avalanche of words and spit to end.

  But Maricel wasn’t finished yet. “Do you know that while you were out, your brother found a man in the hallway?” she screamed.

  This got CJ’s attention. “What?” He looked at Brid quizzically.

  “It’s true,” Brid said, looking upset. “There was a man in the hall—we think he came out of Patrick’s room. I swear, CJ, we both saw him. And then he just left, right out the back fire stairs. Ray didn’t see anyone come in or out of the elevators. How is that possible? What if that man is still around here? What if he’s the man the librarian said was looking for Mr. Post’s poetry book? What if he knows we have it?” she finished, her voice rising to a shriek.

  “Listen, guys, let’s just be calm and figure out how he got in.”

  “We’ve looked everywhere! That fire door was locked. He opened it from the inside, so how did he get into our apartment in the first place?”

  “Definitely a ghost,” said Patrick, whose eyes were huge and round. He was actually holding one of Maricel’s hands.

  “Geezum, Pat, there isn’t such a thing. Give that a rest.”

  “We’ll give you a rest,” shouted Maricel. “Just go to your room. Something terrible could have happened to these children while you were gone!”

  CJ walked past all of them back to his bedroom. He slammed the door with enough force to tell everyone what he thought. In the back part of his mind, he bristled, thinking Brid was right, that the man looking for the Post book at the library had followed the children home, and he knew the book’s secrets and wanted the book for himself. CJ pulled out the book, and as he began to read, the words became unfocused as wet, hot, salty tears filled his eyes.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hours later, CJ woke up, still wearing his clothes, his jeans sticking uncomfortably to his body. How long had he slept? Why hadn’t anyone woken him for dinner? The house was completely silent, and his digital clock read 3:32 AM. Had he really just slept for twelve hours? Moonlight fell across his bed. His window was made up of many panes of glass, and the shadows from the window frames reminded CJ of bars in a jail cell. That was how CJ felt—like he lived in a jail.

  He had fallen asleep still holding the book of poems. He wished they could speak. He turned on the bedside light and reread the note to the Post children from their father. Now that he knew Eloise lived below him, he felt he should just hand the whole thing over to her. The older woman had seemed perfectly nice. Technically the poetry book belonged to her—or did it?

  He read, “Dear Treasure Hunters (hopefully Eloise and Julian).” That meant the Smithforks, since they had found it, right? Maybe Eloise was too old to go looking all over the city. Maybe she had lost interest after all these years. Maybe she was so angry with her father for leaving things the way he did that she wanted nothing to do with this project. Maybe.

  But what if that wasn’t true? The treasure would belong to her, but maybe CJ, Brid, and Pat could help her find it. M
aybe the Smithforks could help solve a few of the puzzles, just to get Eloise on her way toward finding it herself. He read the salutation yet again: “…hopefully Eloise.” Deep down, CJ knew the right thing to do. But then he had another thought: What if Eloise had no idea that any of these clues existed?

  He reached down for his backpack and the list of clues. But where was his backpack? It took him a few seconds to remember that in his haste to leave the servants’ quarters, he had grabbed the poetry book but left everything else downstairs. At least nobody besides the Williamson kids ever went down there, and they were in England now. His backpack was safe.

  He flipped through the book. To understand where Mr. Post was coming from, CJ decided to examine the poems the way he had learned last year in English class. He would read each poem three times. The first time he would try and have no opinion; he would just read to get a sense of the author’s frame of mind. The second and third times, he would read with a little more concentration.

  Because he had slept so long, he wasn’t tired at all. It was quiet now, the quiet of the middle of the night. He turned to the first poem, “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes.

  Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

  Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

  I heard a Negro play.

  Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

  By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

  He did a lazy sway….

  He did a lazy sway….

  To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

  By the third time CJ read the poem, he could almost feel the beat in his head. He knew Lenox Avenue was a main street in Harlem, only about twenty blocks north of their apartment. Had Mr. Post taken his family there? That would be his first question for Eloise.