The plaster came off the pantry wall in one long sheet, and behind it the lath was black and soft as wet cardboard.
Nora Vance laid the sheet flat on the floor of Salt-Spray Cottage and stepped back with the pry bar still in her fist. The pantry ran narrow off the kitchen at the back of the house on Tern Island, one window facing the spruce and a sill that had been soaking that wall for decades. Fog had burned off by nine. Wind through the window carried the cold smell of low water and wet rock. The pantry's west wall was the other face of the wall she had marked on Sunday, the one with the saw-clean seam in the back hall, and that was why she had started here instead of up on the roof.
Money voted too. Her pantry and ceiling line stood at $1,840, plywood had gone to sixty-eight dollars a sheet at the yard in Ellsworth, and every board she cut had to be a board she needed.
She put her palm on the stud beside the doorframe and pushed. The wall gave. Not much — the soft shift of a header that had stopped carrying its share, and enough of it to tell her not to cut.
Boots on the steps. Ben Carter came through the screen door with two coffees and set one on the shelf by her elbow.
"You started without me."
"I wanted the seam while the light was flat." She drank. "It's the same wall, Ben. This is the back hall from the other side."
"You said Sunday you'd leave it till the roof was on."
"The roof's half on. Put your palm on that stud by the doorframe and push."
He did it. "Header's tired."
"Cut that stud and the joists over the kitchen drop onto the floor I just sanded."
He stood with his hands in his pockets and read the studs the way some men read a letter. "That one's proud of the others."
"I noticed."
"Face-nailed, too." He ran a thumb down the lath. "Every other nail in this wall goes through the edge."
"And that one?"
"Set out ahead of the rest. The plate above it's been notched so the joint hides."
She wiped plaster dust off her hands. "Say it plain."
"It's a false front."
"That's what I thought, and I was hoping to be wrong."
"Reckon so." He stepped back and looked up at the ceiling. "You going to prop the header first?"
"Whether it needs it or not. I'm not betting the kitchen ceiling on a Tuesday morning."
"Do it, then. I've got the truck meeting me at nine."
"What truck?"
"Your plywood. And I want to get to the Hannaford before the summer people take every parking space in the lot." He picked up his coffee. "Anything else while I'm over there?"
"A whoopie pie from the Chart and Compass, if Marge has them."
"That's a separate errand."
"I'll pay for the errand."
"You'll pay for the plywood. The pie's on me." The screen banged twice behind him.
She wedged two posts under the header and shimmed them until they took weight, then checked the doorframe with a level and tapped the shims again. The pry bar slid into the gap at the top of the false stud, and the panel leaned out and away, hinged on nothing, and came loose in her hands.
Behind it was dark. She checked for the marks a later hand would have left. No plaster crumbs along the bottom plate. No sawdust drift. The lath on either side had never been nailed near the joint, and the studs facing the gap had been planed flat to meet the panel.
Her hand went in. The air inside was cool and dry as a hayloft in July. Low, resting on the bottom plate, something was wrapped in oilcloth. Once yellow. Creases still sharp.
"You find something?" Grace Carter stood in the pantry door with a clipboard and dripping rubber boots.
"Come look at this seam."
"I'm checking the north stakes. Your seawall's still walking." She crossed the room anyway. "That's not a stud bay."
"No."
"So what is it?"
Nora looked at the tarred string knotted twice and did not touch it again. "I don't know yet."
"Whatever it is," Grace said, "don't take it to Cora Jean. She's been in a mood since they moved the records to Portland."
"Friday," Nora said.
"Friday." Grace checked her watch. "I've got stakes to read before the water drops off them." She went down the path, boots knocking on the planks.
Nora sat on the pantry step with the parcel in her lap and worked the knot loose. The oilcloth opened flat. Inside was a book, small and leather-bound, the color of strong tea, the pages still square because the pocket had held them dry.
Her phone buzzed against her hip.
"Hey, just checking in." Boston loud behind him.
"I'm in the pantry."
"Of course you are. How's the roof?"
"Half on. I found a hole in a wall."
"A hole."
"A built one. A pocket between the studs, dressed to look like a stud bay."
"There's a book in it. Wrapped in oilcloth. I haven't turned a page yet."
"Mom." A pause, and the traffic. "Tell me you're not doing this by yourself."
"Ben's on the mainland for plywood. I have half the town's phone numbers in my jacket."
He was quiet a second. "That's not what I meant."
"I know what you meant."
"Call me tonight. If you don't, I'm driving up."
"I'll call."
She squared the book on her knee. The first page had foxed brown at the edges. In ink gone rust-brown, in a hand that pressed hard on the downstrokes, someone had written a name and a place.
Agnes Miller, Port Blossom Lighthouse, 1923.
Nora knew the light. She passed it on every crossing, a gray tower on the rock at the harbor mouth. A keeper's wife keeps her diary in the keeper's house, on government rock, behind a door with a lock on it. She does not carry it to a cottage on Tern Island and have a carpenter frame it a room of its own.
The pocket was original, and that was the part Nora trusted least. The framing in this wall went up with the rest of the house in 1921. The book carried a later date. So the hiding place had been built before there was anything to hide, and it sat empty until somebody from the lighthouse had something worth hiding.
An engine dropped to an idle at the float, and Ben's boots hit the boards.
She wrapped the diary, tied the string, and pushed it into the deep inside pocket of her jacket. Then she set the false front back into its opening and tapped two shims under it. From the doorway it read as an old stud bay waiting for new lath.
Ben came up the steps with sawdust on his sleeves. "Plywood's on the dock. The truck driver wanted to talk about his brother's deck."
"Did you get the pie?"
"Two of them. Marge wants to know why you haven't been in for breakfast."
"Tell her Thursday."
He looked at the stud bay a beat longer than the question needed. "Stud come out clean?"
"Clean."
"Anything behind it?"
"Rot."
"We'll see," Ben said, and went back down for the plywood.
Nora put her hand flat over her jacket pocket, where the diary lay hard and square against her ribs, and left it there. Why a lighthouse keeper's wife had carried her private book across the water and had it built a room inside a stranger's wall was not a question she could answer with Ben Carter on the porch.
Comments
Loading the conversation…