Walls within Walls (2 page)

Brid was staring straight into a giant almond-shaped eye. The eye wasn't moving, nor was it blinking. It was simply there, behind the wall of CJ's room, where a radiator should have been. Brid wanted to scream because, really, the eye had been spying on them through the grille. She even thought it had winked. Concentrating on the fact that her brothers were watching her and she had to act brave in front of them, Brid put out a shivering hand to touch the eye.

“Ahhh!” she screamed, making contact.

In a flash of chivalry, CJ pulled her hand back and examined it for bite marks or amputation, while Patrick ran from the room as if his pants were on fire, waving his hands and screaming.

There was a pause.

“Cobwebs,” Brid said quietly, filling the heavy silence in the air. She grinned. “I'm screaming because of cobwebs.” She giggled, and CJ couldn't help himself; he joined her. Finally, when both kids had regained their ability to breathe, CJ went back to the grille and touched what now appeared to be a very large and realistic painting, extending far down an inside wall that seemed to be behind the wall on that side of his bedroom.

“What in the world…” began CJ.

“Who in the world?” Brid answered.

They looked at each other, enjoying the moment, and CJ shook his head. Things were getting more interesting in this old apartment—their new home.

In the next room, Carron continued bawling, and they could hear Maricel trying to soothe her. Their noise had put an end to nap time. CJ locked the bedroom door, while Brid went over to the eye and touched it again.

“It's part of a painting,” she said. “I can see that it goes down a long way, and at the bottom there is some sort of light.” She pulled her head back to let CJ look through the narrow space.

CJ pulled a flashlight from a box and pointed it downward. There was silence in the apartment, except for the fussy noise coming from their sister. “The light is actually…” His voice trailed off. “The light is on a small
hallway or a big shelf. It's coming from the apartment below us.”

As luck would have it, Maricel banged on the door just then. “What's going on in there?” she asked.

Brid leaned against the grille, forcing it back into place and quickly swept up the pieces of the shattered wooden frame. CJ swung back the door and looked at Maricel innocently.

“Nothing,” he said in his sweetest voice, widening his eyes.

Maricel was a short, round woman. She and CJ were about the same height: five feet tall. Already, CJ knew how to shrink himself down and appear smaller and more deferential when he needed to gain favor with her.

“Um, really nothing,” CJ said.

Maricel's face softened. “Watch your sister,” she said. “I have to make dinner.” Maricel put two-year-old Carron on the bare floor with a loud exhale, before turning and leaving the room. Carron, her brown hair standing on end, looked relieved to be with her siblings. Patrick picked that moment to tiptoe back into the room, his blue eyes transfixed on the grille, the place where the eye was. The older kids could tell that Pat hadn't told Maricel anything about the eye. Patrick just knew about these things.

“Pat, here's the deal,” said CJ. “The eye is part of a painting on a big wall behind our wall. There is nothing
to be afraid of. There is also a shelf, or hall, far below us with some kind of light coming from it, but it's nothing to freak about.”

Patrick just stood there with his eyes wide. He didn't say a word.

“Patrick…” said Brid, “we need you to keep quiet about this while we investigate. If Maricel finds out, she'll think she needs to tell Mom and Dad. They'll either take over the investigation or make us promise to mind our own business. Can we have your word?”

Patrick nodded. In the past, CJ and Brid would never have included him in a top-secret investigation. This was his chance to act big, and so that was what he did.

“Urgh!”
Patrick was hanging upside down alongside CJ's bed, his feet sticking up into the air, while Brid and CJ each held a leg. His face had turned an unusual hue of purple.

“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 like 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.