Part 30 (2/2)

They called four more times that day and then twice on Tuesday. I stopped answering the phone. I realized that any minute they would be coming over to hara.s.s me in person, so I needed to pack Sophie's stuff back into those boxes and haul it all back to the storage room. That took most of the day, and by the time I was finished, I was exhausted. I took a moment to sit in that lost room and think about what to do next. The boxes were in place. The light was evaporating. And then the ghost started up, mournful and frightened and inevitable. She murmured inside the wall, gently complaining about her traps and her losses and the impossibility of her life. She wept and worried in her unknown language, right there with me and unbearably far away. I let her go on, thinking that maybe she would be able to explain something to me, even though I didn't understand a word she said. She couldn't explain anything at all.

”What are you doing in there?” I asked. ”Why are you so stuck?”

”I'm not stuck,” said a friendly voice. ”It just takes a minute to get out of here. It's pretty tight.” And with that, the ghost voice disappeared and Jennifer clambered into the room, dusting herself off with teenage disgust. ”Ugh, it's so gross in there. There are live things in there. We have to figure out a better way to talk to each other.”

”You could call me on the phone,” I reminded her.

”It's too dangerous,” she said, quite serious. ”Someone might hear me. There's no privacy in our apartment. You wouldn't believe the stuff I heard today. They're going to try to kick you out.”

”I know that part.”

”You do? Because it's supposed to be top secret.”

”Vince Masterson told me they were going to try it last week, but his dad couldn't be at the meeting.”

”Well, he's going to be there tonight,” Jennifer informed me grimly.

”Tonight?” I said, startled. ”It's tonight?”

”They're meeting at six. Oh. That's ten minutes ago.”

”Thanks for the notice,” I told her, not sounding particularly grateful. ”And thank you, Vince,” I muttered to myself.

”So where are they meeting?” I asked her.

”The Gideons' apartment on eleven,” she told me.

I looked up at that horrible bricked-up staircase, inhabited by rats and spiders and G.o.d knows what else. My hands started to sweat.

”This thing goes all the way up through the building, right?” I asked.

”How am I supposed to know?”

”Look,” I said, ”if I don't come back in six hours, tell somebody I might be stuck in the wall. Tell Frank.”

”You're going up there?”

She sounded aghast. And why not? It was an idiotic idea. No one in their right mind would even consider it.

”I think I am,” I said. And with that I climbed up onto the edge of the tiny doorway, put my fingers on one of the steps, crouched forward, and started to climb. ”You need a flashlight!” Jennifer called after me. ”It's dark in there! What if the Gideons blocked off the entrance? What are you going to do when you get there? What if someone ...” Her voice trailed off as it became obvious that I was going through with it.

There are advantages to being someone who thinks rules are made to be broken. Finding yourself stuck in an airless, dank, Victorian crawl s.p.a.ce that might very well lead nowhere is not one of them. Even though Jennifer had opened the wall plug in Katherine's room, only a faint amount of light came in, and once I climbed beyond its friendly solace-the last moment that I might have bailed out of this insane endeavor-it was pitch black. I had to lead with my hands, which more than once landed on something crunchy and alive, and then my face went through some weblike, sticky stuff filled with little nublike things that were probably dead bugs. At some point I realized that I didn't know how far I'd have to climb to get to the Gideons' apartment and that I might have pa.s.sed it already. I didn't know if I should go back down or continue up. Then, when I reached over to steady myself against the wall, I grabbed at something that moved and actually hissed; terrified, I jumped back and hit the wall, which had somehow transformed itself from brick to wood. It made a big thump.

”What was that?” someone asked. I froze.

”Did you hear something?” the voice asked again.

”Margarita thinks there are rats in that old crawl s.p.a.ce,” another voice announced. It was Mrs. Gideon, and you could tell even without seeing her that she thought Margarita was a moron. ”I'll mention it to Frank.”

”Frank's the doorman, Mother,” the other voice, the beautiful Julianna, replied.

”You really are sentimental about him,” her mother replied with a little sneer.

”I'm not sentimental, I'm respectful.”

”You encourage him, and it's ridiculous.”

”We are not talking about Frank, Mother, please! I think I heard something, I know I did. It sounded like a rat or something in that crawl s.p.a.ce. I think Margarita is right, there's something in there. You need to mention it to the super-or why don't you tell the board, since they're all here anyway.”

”We are not gathered to talk about rats. Or perhaps we are,” Mrs. Gideon observed. Then Julianna said something I couldn't quite pick up, as she clearly had moved away from the wall and the giant rats inside it. There was some further murmuring and then silence, as the two women apparently went into the next room or someplace beyond.

Here is where the true stupidity of my plan revealed itself. I had succeeded in landing right in the middle of the Gideons' apartment without anybody knowing I was there, but I had no way to get out of that wall. I hung in there, my heart pounding, my head leaning against some sort of old cabinet, and let my fingers probe the wood. I found a giant bolt, but there was no way to open it. My fingers continued to probe it, and I told myself that if I were anything like a functional thief I would have brought picks for the lock. But then I thought, it's a deadbolt, you can't open it from this side, you'd have to saw through the wall to get that thing off-or an axe, a short-handled axe, or a gun, maybe a gun would do it. I ran through all the possible solutions for opening a deadbolt, none of which were feasible in any kind of reality other than the movies. I was stuck in the wall; there was no way to get out.

Then a voice whispered, right next to my head, ”Tina? Are you in there?”

It took me a second, honestly. I couldn't quite catch up.

”Tina. Tina. If you're in there, knock or something. I don't have a ton of time.”

”Jennifer?” I said.

”Knock where you are, knock where you are, I can't tell, and we have to do this fast,” she told me. I rapped gently on the wall several times.

”Okay, that's good, that's good,” she said, rapping on the panel right in front of me. ”Is this it? This is the doorway?”

”There's a bolt,” I told her. ”Right in front of you, they've got a deadbolt holding it shut.”

”Yeah, I see,” she said, working on it. ”It's painted shut. Shoot. It's-oh. Hang on. I have to find something-oh wait. Not so bad, the paint's pretty old. Oh!” And with that, the door swung open three inches and she smiled in at me. ”Come on, come on,” she said, excited, pulling the door open against the resistance of the paint, which was half of what was holding it in place. She reached in and grabbed me by the arm, forcing me to climb out. ”It's a good thing you're little,” she observed.

”What are you doing here?” I whispered. I was shaking, half with relief and half with the sheer terror of what I had just been through. ”G.o.d, it's horrible in there. Don't go in there anymore.”

”Yeah, it's not nice. I knew you weren't going to be able to get out of there. You didn't think of that. Get down, you don't want them to see you,” she advised me. She shut the cabinet door carefully, holding it in place with her shoulder while she flipped the ancient deadbolt back into place. The kid was a marvel. She was grinning with delight at her own cleverness. ”Anyway,” she said, dropping down to the floor so she could talk to me, ”as soon as you left, I knew you were going to need me, so I took the elevator and interrupted the meeting and said I needed to talk to my mom. So she came to the door, and I told her I had a fight with Louise, and she told me they were busy and to go home, so then I told her I needed to use the bathroom, which is supposedly what I'm doing now. I've got to go. They're all in the living room, it's down that hallway, you pa.s.s the dining room and some sort of den, and then it's right there. There's a whole lot of them in there. The whole board, and then a couple others, they look like lawyers. We'll make for the den, you can hide behind the door and hear everything, I checked it out on the way. Come on, we have to go. I'll make a lot of noise when I go back out through the meeting, so I can distract them while you're finding some place to listen. Ready? Let's go.”

I was still so freaked out from being stuck in the wall that my brain was not functioning fully, so I was glad to have an excited teenager telling me what to do. She breezed ahead of me silently, glancing back to make sure I stayed down and hidden by furniture in case anyone suddenly appeared looking for a gla.s.s of water or something; then she took me into a dark room with plush couches and low lighting, all done in red with the slightest touches of gold sprinkled through. I got nothing more than a sense of its opulence as Jennifer quickly waved her hand behind her, pointing to a corner behind the open door. She stood in the doorway for a moment, waving her hand impatiently, and then she marched deliberately into the next room.

”Thanks for the use of your bathroom, Mrs. Gideon,” she announced to the whole room. ”Mom, can you at least call Louise and tell her that I don't have to put Gail and Mary Ellen to bed, they're big enough to get themselves to bed anyway, and it's not my job and plus I have a lot of homework.”

”That's fine, Jennifer,” Mrs. White noted tersely.

”Well, she's being horrible. Can you call her at least?”

”Jennifer, I said go home,” Mrs. White told her with finality.

The door from the den to the living room was wide open, and a couch stood against the wall, just inside. Behind the door and beside the couch was a clever little area of carpet invisible to either room: that was my spot. Fully half of the room was out of my line of sight, but the other half was completely visible. I could see Jennifer scoot into the hallway by the front door, pa.s.sing that ridiculous table with the spindly legs where Mrs. Gideon had given me the evil eye, then she quickly disappeared from view. The sound of the door opening and closing behind her was obscured by the rustle and settling of fifteen people in the room next to me.

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