Chapter 20 of 24The Hollow Behind the Stone

"The hearing's Friday," Nora Vance said. "If Silas holds on to that claim, the land goes with the wreck. The house, the chimney, all of it."

Ben Carter set his canvas bag on the hearth and looked up the throat of the chimney. "Then we'd better not waste the morning."

The fog was still sitting on the water at Tern Island, and the day was going to be hot. Ben had brought coffee and cinnamon rolls from the Chart & Compass in a Hannaford bag. Little of either remained.

Nora knelt at the firebox and laid her palm flat against the back wall of it.

"Tell me what you see."

"I see a chimney."

"Tell me what's wrong with it."

Ben stepped back and tipped his head, sighting up the flue the way he'd sight along a board. "It's wide."

"Twice what that fireplace can use."

"That's the truth." He crouched beside her. "I've laid up a few in my time. This one's got more draw than it knows what to do with."

Nora took the diary from her jacket pocket and read him the line again, though he'd heard it twice already. "A place safe from fire and water."

"That could mean a hundred things."

"It means this." She rapped her knuckles on the stone. "It stands on the ledge, outside the framing. Nothing in this house can burn it and nothing in that cove can flood it."

"You're saying there's a hole behind the stone."

"I'm saying that flue runs wide above the smoke shelf. Nobody sizes a flue that way for smoke."

Ben sat back on his heels. "Then why not hide it up in the flue itself?"

"Because the flue draws. Soot falls, creosote builds, and anything you leave in a chimney comes out burned." She tapped the wall lower down. "Below the shelf the stone stays cold. That's where you'd put a thing you meant to fetch back."

"You've been thinking about this all night."

"Since Monday afternoon."

"All right." Ben stood and went to the bag. "Show me the stones."

She showed him three: two the size of loaves set low in the back wall, and a smaller one fitted at the top corner above them. The mortar around all three was paler than the rest, with no trowel drag in the joint.

Ben ran his thumb along it and grunted. "That's not the same mix."

"No."

"And the coursing runs wrong on the little one."

Nora nodded. "Somebody repaired this wall for a purpose, and did a decent job of it."

"Decent enough that nobody's looked at it in a hundred years." He straightened. "Reckon you could be right."

"Reckon?"

"Reckon so." He pulled a drop cloth from the bag and a roll of painter's tape. "But it's your house and your theory, so we go slow. If that wall starts talking to me, we stop."

"Slow is fine."

"One more thing." He held up a plugging chisel. "We don't knock anything out from the bottom up. If that wall's carrying anything above it, I want to learn that with a chisel, not a sledge."

They taped a drop cloth inside the firebox and a second one over the rug. Ben fitted a dust mask, handed her one, and took up the small stone at the top corner, light tap after light tap, the way a man taps a nail he doesn't want to bend.

Mortar came off in gray flakes. Outside, the fog was burning off the water in strips, and a lobster boat worked the string off Sedge Head, its engine a low knock that came and went on the wind.

Halfway down the second side, Ben stopped. He rapped the stone with the flat of his hammer: dead. He rapped the next one, and it answered with a note that had air under it.

"There," he said.

"There what?"

"Hollow behind the stone."

Nora's phone buzzed in her back pocket. She stripped the mask off and stepped out onto the porch, where the fog was thinning and the spruce tops were showing through it.

"Hey, just checking in," Liam said.

"You caught me at a bad time, honey."

"You always catch me at a bad time lately. What's today's?"

"I'm taking apart my chimney."

"Is that a euphemism?"

"It's masonry." She looked back through the door at Ben, who had taken up the next joint. "The hearing's Friday. If Silas wins, the claim covers the ground the house stands on, not just the wreck."

"I know. I took Friday off. I'll drive up Thursday and sleep in the truck if the inn's full."

"Liam—"

"Don't. I'm not coming to rescue you." His voice went lighter. "I'm coming to sit in the back row so that when you win, somebody in that room is on your side."

Nora laughed once. "Bring a jacket. It's cold on the water even in July."

"It's a furnace here. I'll bring the jacket."

She put the phone away, stood a moment with her hand on the doorframe, and went back inside.

"Everything all right?" Ben asked.

"My son's coming up for the hearing."

"Good," he said. "Hold the light."

She held the light. He took the two big stones out in order, working the chisel down each side and lifting with his fingers. He set them on the drop cloth and brushed the dust out of the opening.

The cavity behind them was dark and lined with soot and went back farther than the wall was thick. The air in it was cooler than the room.

Ben put the flashlight in the opening. The beam went in and stopped.

"Something's in there," he said.

Nora took the light and lay down on the drop cloth with her cheek near the hearthstone, her arm going in to the elbow and then past it.

Her fingers found the back of the cavity. Then, farther left, something else.

Cold, smooth, hard, with a corner on it.

"Ben."

"What."

"There's more in here than a hole."

Iron, she knew it the moment her fingertips found the seam. Flat-sided, squared at the corners. Her hand closed over an edge and the thing didn't give. She got her other hand in along the top and pulled. It moved a fraction of an inch and stopped.

"It's wedged," she said. "Behind the lip."

"Don't yank at it. Feel where it's caught."

She worked her fingers down the front face and found the stone shelf it had settled behind. "Here. Under the sill stone."

"Hold on." Ben put the cold chisel in her hand, handle first. "Lift the lip, and I'll take the weight."

She levered. The iron came up over the shelf, and then Ben's hands were in the opening beside hers, and together they worked it forward, through the hole, onto the drop cloth.

It was a box. Iron, black with soot, small enough to hold in two hands and heavy as a fence post. The corners were joined with care. A raised plate sat on the front face with a narrow slot cut in its edge.

Nora knelt over it and put both thumbs under the lid. She pushed. The lid didn't move.

"Locked," Ben said.

"Locked."

"There's a slot in that plate. That's a keyhole."

"I see it."

"So where's the key?"

Nora sat back on her heels and looked at the chimney, at the hole in it, at the two stones lying on the cloth, at the little black box in front of her. "I put my hand on every inch of that cavity. There's no key in there. He didn't leave one."

Ben wiped his palms on his jeans. "Then he kept it somewhere else."

"Or." Nora picked the box up in both hands and felt whatever was inside shift, soft-edged and heavy, sliding into the low corner. "Or he never needed one."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning tomorrow I stop looking for a key and start asking what he would have used instead."