The Hand on the Wall(79)

Without a word, Janelle stepped forward, tapped the wall, then, with one seamless movement, drew her arm back like a bow and struck the wall once with the heel of her hand. It cracked loudly. She wiggled her fingers and returned to the loveseat, where Vi put a proud arm over her shoulders.

“Holy shit,” David said quietly.

“Force equals mass times acceleration,” Janelle said, checking her nail polish. “Or, more importantly, force times time equals mass times the difference in velocity over that time. Basic board-breaking physics. Takes about eleven hundred newtons. It’s more intention than strength.”

Charles openly gaped at this. He may have anticipated many things, but Janelle Franklin bashing in his office walls with her bare hands was probably not one of them.

“I love you,” Vi said.

Janelle grinned in a way that suggested this was not the first time she had heard those words.

“I gotta learn physics,” Stevie mumbled to herself.

“All right,” Larry said, pushing past this romantic interlude. He pulled his flashlight from a clip on his belt and stuck it into the hole. The sound of the clock drowned out everything else in the room. Stevie heard the hollow, heavy sound of her heart, thudding away in her chest. She couldn’t bear watching Larry staring into the void, so she looked at the clock instead, the one that had held the codicil, the one that had survived revolutions and beheadings.

What if she was wrong?

The idea was funny. She almost laughed. She was dizzy. The room seemed to go gray and white and spin a bit. Charles had the calm expression of someone watching something happening in the far distance—a storm, maybe an accident. Something that could not be helped. Germaine, she noted, was trying to video the whole scene without being noticed.

“I need gloves,” Larry said.

Stevie bolted upright like someone had yanked on her spine from above.

“Gloves,” she said, pulling a handful of nitrile gloves from the front of her backpack.

“Why do you have nitrile gloves?” Janelle asked.

“Same reason you know how to break a wall,” Stevie replied.

Janelle smiled with pride.

Larry put on the gloves and resumed work with the knife, picking at the cracked bit of wall until he had a large enough space to get his hand through. He reached in farther to get hold of a bit of the wall and pulled back hard, making a larger flap. He shone in his light once again, then shut it off and stepped in front of the opening.

“I need this room cleared,” he said.

“I’m not going to be tossed out of my own office,” Charles said. His face had lost some of its color.

“This is not your office,” Larry said simply. “This is a potential crime scene. You will go next door and wait in the Peacock Room, and Mark and Dr. Pixwell will wait with you. Dr. Quinn, if you wouldn’t mind taking the students downstairs?”

“I would not mind,” she said.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Charles said, but some of the conviction was draining from his voice. The Funko Pop! figurines on the windowsill seemed to make a mockery of him. When Pix and Mark stood up to him, he followed them without another word.

Stevie got up in a haze to follow everyone else out.

“Where are you going?” Larry asked.

“You said everyone go downstairs.”

“I didn’t mean you,” Larry said. “Shut the door.”

Stevie shut the door with a trembling hand.

“Do you want to see?” Larry said soberly.

“What . . . what’s in there?”

The words came out dry. After all of that—all she had done—she was out of wind. Out of air. She knew what was in there—who—but the words were too much to say. The concept was too large.

“It’s not easy to look at, but you have seen a lot.”

She had no choice.

The space between Stevie and the wall was only a few feet, but it seemed to expand to the size of a grand, mad ballroom. She stepped up to the dark opening and accepted the flashlight from Larry, as well as the hand on her shoulder.

At first, Stevie thought she was looking at a large gray bag, rough, frayed with age and exposure. But as the light worked the edges and her mind and eyes adjusted, she could see the shape of a hand. A head. There was a shoe.

It was too small a space, Stevie thought.

“We need to get her out,” she said.

“We will. We need to wait for the crime scene unit. We can’t go in without them.”

Stevie nodded numbly and turned back to the figure in the wall.

“Hello, Alice,” Stevie said. “It’s okay. It’s over.”





26


THE ELLINGHAM BALLROOM HAD BEEN BUILT TO HOLD A HUNDRED AND one dancing couples. That was Iris Ellingham’s design. A hundred couples was an elegantly large number while maintaining the intimacy a ballroom should encourage. The one extra couple, she had said, was the one that counted; that couple was always the one you were in.

Iris Ellingham had been a special, creative woman. That was why she had been friends with so many artists. That was why she had such loyal friends. That was why Albert Ellingham wanted to marry her and not any other woman in the world. Stevie wanted to believe Iris would have approved of the one couple in her ballroom now, the one resting side by side in the center of the floor. Iris would have smiled at the girl who found her Alice.