The Voice Behind the Plaster
Chapter 01 - The Voice Behind the Plaster
The first thing Ryan Whitaker noticed was the smell of bread.
Not the pleasant smell from Emily's oven, which had stopped working the previous spring, but the sour, close smell of old crusts in a place where nothing living should have been. It came through the narrow opening behind the bedroom bookcase. He had pulled the bookcase aside to investigate a tapping noise that had followed him through the second floor since supper. The house was ninety years old. It tapped and sighed and complained in winter. But this noise had come in groups of three, with a pause between them, as though somebody were waiting for an answer.
Ryan loosened the painted wooden panel with a screwdriver. The brass hinge gave a small, tired squeal. He switched on his phone flashlight, leaned into the darkness, and found a child sitting on the other side of the wall.
She couldn't have been more than five. Her long brown hair hung in knots over a charcoal dress too large for her shoulders. Bare feet were tucked beneath her, knees hugged tight, a half-eaten heel of bread balanced in her lap. She blinked against the light without moving away. When her eyes settled on Ryan's face, something changed in them. Not quite relief. Recognition, perhaps, though he had never seen her in his life.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
He had expected mice. Rotten insulation. A water pipe he would have to replace before the first frost. There was no reasonable way to fit a little girl into the list.
“Sweetheart,” he said, keeping his voice low, “I'm Ryan. Are you hurt?”
She studied him with a solemnity that made him uncomfortable. “That's what he told me you'd say.”
“Who told you?”
A floorboard creaked behind him. Emily stood in their bedroom doorway, still wearing the cream blouse she'd put on for her afternoon shift at the library. She had one hand on the frame and the other pressed hard against her stomach.
“Ryan,” she said. “Don't ask her that yet.”
He turned. There was something terribly familiar in his wife's expression: the same fixed look she'd worn at the hospital when Lily, their daughter, was born four years earlier and the monitors briefly went quiet. Emily wasn't someone who frightened easily. She once confronted a contractor twice her size for threatening an elderly neighbor over an unpaid bill. Tonight she looked as though opening a wooden door might have ruined all their lives.
“There's a child in our wall,” he said.
“I know.”
“You know?”
Lily appeared behind Emily, a small figure in pink pajamas. She was holding a stuffed rabbit by its good ear. “I told her you'd come back,” Lily said to the child. “He always comes back from work.”
Ryan looked from one daughter—his own daughter, with her crooked bangs and sleepy eyes—to the stranger sitting in the dust. Something inside his chest tightened. “Emily. How long?”
“Since this morning. Not weeks. Not months. Since this morning.” Emily glanced at the bedroom window. “I was trying to get her somewhere safe.”
“You put her inside a wall?”
“I didn't put her there. She ran there when the car came up the driveway.”
The little girl lowered her head. Ryan noticed she was shaking. He stepped away from the opening, leaving enough room for her to come out without having to pass him. “No one is putting you back in there,” he said. “There's a blanket on the bed. You can sit wherever you like.”
Her eyes lifted toward him again. As she did, tangled hair slid away from her left ear. Beneath it lay a dark crescent-shaped birthmark, no bigger than a thumbnail.
Ryan's free hand went to his own neck. His mark sat in precisely that place. His mother had always said it was a Whitaker mark, inherited from some ancestor who had lived before photographs were cheap. Ryan had never believed much in family legends. But his fingers were trembling now, and the girl had noticed.
“See?” she said quietly. “Same moon.”
Emily caught her breath.
A slow footstep sounded within the passage. The little girl gathered the bread into her fist. Ryan angled his phone toward the darkness and saw a gray-haired man emerge from behind a timber beam. He was lean, stooped, and dressed in an old work coat dusted with plaster. He stopped well back from the child, as though he understood how the scene appeared.
“My name is Caleb Marsh,” he said. “I worked for your father, a long time ago.”
Ryan knew that name. Caleb had been the groundskeeper at Whitaker House when Ryan was little. His mother had dismissed him after an argument, and the household had stopped speaking of him. Ryan remembered hands that smelled of machine oil, wooden whistles carved from fallen branches, and a man who never seemed to mind if a child followed him around the garden asking questions.
“You were told he moved to Vermont,” Caleb said, reading the recognition on Ryan's face. “I didn't.”
“You need to tell me why there's a frightened child hiding in my house.”
“I will. But first, she's called Nell. She's five. She's had almost nothing to eat today because she's scared to swallow. And if that black sedan comes back, we mustn't open the front door.”
Ryan could have asked a hundred things. Instead he went downstairs, filled a glass with water, and brought up a clean towel. Emily took Lily into the hall long enough to find a sweater. Nell crawled out by herself. There was room to stand once she reached the bedroom; she seemed surprised by it. Ryan kept the flashlight pointed at the floor and looked away while Emily helped her pull on socks.
At the kitchen table, Nell ate buttered toast in small, careful bites. Lily pushed her own plate nearer without being asked. Neither child spoke for a while. The ordinary sounds of chewing and a refrigerator motor struck Ryan as almost indecent against the questions gathering in the room.
When Nell had finished, Caleb set a faded photograph on the table. The corners were creased. A dark-haired man stood beside a woman in a garden, holding a newborn wrapped in a pale blanket. His hair was longer than Ryan's, and his smile had an odd, guarded quality. Otherwise, it might have been Ryan in the picture.
Nell touched the man's face with a crumb-covered finger. “My daddy.”
Ryan stared. “That's not possible.”
Caleb sat across from him and took off his cap. “You look more like him than I expected.”
“Who is he?”
Caleb's gaze went to Emily, then back to Ryan. “Your brother.”
Ryan laughed once, an ugly little sound that surprised him. “I don't have a brother.”
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“You did,” Caleb said. “Before your mother told you he'd died.”
And on the back of the photograph, beneath a date written five years earlier, were two words in a handwriting Ryan recognized from his childhood: **Tell Ryan.**
