The Hand on the Wall(48)

“Oh,” Janelle said.

“I mean,” Stevie said. “Cases get solved because of walls. For instance, there was a case in England of a man who was accused of sexually assaulting lots of teenagers in the 1970s. They all talked about the fact that he had a wall in his house where victims wrote their names and phone numbers. So the police went to that house, in the present day, and they brought in some decorators to strip the wall, because decorators have the equipment to do that. They took off layer after layer of paint until they literally uncovered the 1970s, and there was the wall with all the names and numbers and dates, just like everyone said. The evidence was all there. They peeled back the past. I was thinking about it because this friend of Ellie’s in Burlington said that Ellie talked about stuff being in the walls here.”

Janelle considered the blank space of wall for a moment. Then she dropped the comforter and stood up.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be back. I have to do something.”

Stevie waited in the same position for several minutes. Ten, fifteen. Stevie didn’t hear her upstairs, or even in her room. Stevie listened to the house groan and move. She leaned back against her pillows and pulled both her own and Janelle’s comforter over her. Finally, there was a noise in Janelle’s room. Doors opening and closing. Then Janelle cracked open Stevie’s door and slipped inside, shutting it tight behind her. She was wearing different clothes than she had been before—she had changed back into her fuzzy cat-head pajamas, furry slippers, and a robe. She was flushed, her body damp from snow and exertion, the freezing chill still on her body. She had snow in her hair, on her eyelashes. She had a small object in her hand. It looked a bit like an oversized phone.

“What did you do?” Stevie said. “I thought you were on your computer or something.”

“You wanted to look in the walls,” she said. “I went to the maintenance shed and I got the wall scanner.”

“You went out?”

“You don’t have a monopoly on busting rules,” Janelle said, shaking out her legs to warm them and restore circulation. “You want to have a look and see what’s under there? Let’s look.”

The wall scanner was a simple device, with a small screen. Janelle tried to look up a video on how to use it, but the Wi-Fi didn’t cooperate. She worked it out on her own without too much difficulty.

“Okay,” she said. “The idea behind these is to look for things like pipes, wires, studs, stuff like that. So let’s try this wall.”

She went over to the wall that Stevie had been staring at, then slowly ran the device over it.

“See here?” She ran it back and forth near a light switch. “Wires.”

She ran it along another strip of wall.

“Studs,” she said. “Lots of pockets of space. See? We can look for things too, just like they are. Except this is legal and constructive.”

She surveyed the room. “Can you take everything off your nightstand? I’ll use that to stand on. And we need to move all the furniture away from the walls.”

The room, which had been so gloomy a short while ago, was a sudden hub of activity. It turned out, shoving furniture around was a pretty good way to clear your head. Janelle was so focused that she didn’t even mention the large dust clumps behind the bureau and under the bed. Once they’d moved everything aside, Janelle began a sweeping scan. Along the outside wall, it was all structural materials. When Janelle moved in, she found more wires, voids, a pipe or two. Aside from something that might have been another dead mouse, there was nothing of note.

“Okay,” Janelle said when they had done all four walls. “We have a sense of how this thing works. Now we try in Ellie’s room. Do you think Hunter would let us?”

“There’s a bit more wall to do,” Stevie said, pointing at the closet.

“Good point.”

It took only a minute or two to dump out the contents of Stevie’s closet onto the bed. Her room was completely in shambles. Janelle climbed into the closet and began running the machine over the walls.

“Oh,” she said. “I think we have a bunch more dead mice in here.”

“Cool,” Stevie said. “That’s fun to know.”

“When you open the door to knowledge, you have to take what you get— Wait.”

Janelle was down low, running the machine along the seam of the wall and the floor.

“There’s something there,” she said. “Not metal. It’s sort of . . .”

Janelle set down the scanner and felt around the base of the wall, around the molding.

“There’s a lot of paint on this,” she said. “We’re going to need to get through it. Hang on.”

She went to her room and returned a moment later with her crafting tool belt. She started with a utility knife, working the edges. She moved from there to a screwdriver, working slowly and methodically to pry the board loose. Stevie heard a few promising pops and cracks. Out came a larger flathead screwdriver. More pushing and tapping and wedging, then . . .

Pop. The molding cracked as it came off.

“Whoops,” Janelle said. “Oh well. It’s in the closet. Who cares. I need a . . .”

She made a pinchy-pinchy motion with her fingers.

“A crab?” Stevie said.