The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [110]
There were round indentations where rubber coasters under the bedposts had been. She walked into the bathroom, tapped on the wall. She peeked in the large closet. Her spider calculated the angles, tried to imagine the upstairs like a blueprint, seen from above. There was a space behind this. Another room.
On her knees, it took her only a moment to find a keypad behind a piece of loose molding. Turning the flashlight to an off angle, she could see wear—a slight rubbing—on the four even digits: 2, 4, 6, 8. She began trying them in combinations, her fingers flying over the keypad, hoping the answer was as simple as a PIN, and in just about ten minutes, a section of wall popped two inches toward her.
She moved a shoe rack and opened it wide.
The room was black and, unlike the rest of the house, she discovered with a sweep of Hugh’s flashlight, not empty. An intercom hung on the wall next to a telephone just above a small refrigerator with six bottles of warm water. An impotent glass light fixture sat like a beetle on the ceiling. Feeling about in the dim residual light leaking from the bedroom, she discovered boxes—the name Blackburn on some of them, Woodward on others, another with her name: Gold. She stopped breathing. Patrick, of course. And Wes Woodward, the stair builder. Jameson’s twin obsessions. Nada found a light switch, which obviously didn’t work, then peered into the containers, which were stuffed with loose papers and expensive notebooks bound with faux-leather covers.
She dragged the boxes in pairs out to the bedroom and parted the curtains as much as she dared. Then she organized the dated notebooks into chronological order and, after a wary peek out into the street, crossed her legs and sat down on the floor.
She opened the heaviest box first. On top were a number of textbooks—medicine, math, history. She lifted them out and pushed them aside.
Tiles. More than a dozen painted tiles. Unmistakably Burning Patrick’s tiles.
Trembling, Nada removed several from the box and placed them one by one on top of the piles of papers on the floor. Her spider spun them in her head, rearranged them. She studied them up close with Hugh’s flashlight shaking in her hands.
Holy God.
Nada dug deep into her purse and retrieved her own tile, still wrapped in newspaper. She removed it carefully and placed it on the carpet, positioning it near the other tiles in the room’s best light. She began moving them like puzzle pieces, one just to the right of another or just below another, and then she rotated them and flipped their positions, one just to the left of this one or just above that one, and finally, she noticed one other tile with an image like hers, letters like hers, and, buried in the wiry lines, the hairs, the blacks and the reds, the same letters, in fact—a s s—and on the eighth or ninth or tenth rotation, she saw where the two fit together.
Perfectly. “An adjacent pair,” Jameson would call it.
She studied the precise strokes and drips and dabs and now she could start to see what Burning Patrick had been painting, could see the animal shape the figure was taking when the pieces were placed together.
Nada placed those tiles in her bag and examined the others for any connection to one another, for any other letters. Finding none, she placed them back in the carton and replaced the textbooks and turned her attention to the other boxes.
Fragments of personal journals, research notes, receipts, memos, printed e-mails, photographs, letters, some postcards. A nonlinear record of Marlena Falcone’s life’s work. Nada could find no order to it, no indication why she had kept this stuff, or why she had been hiding it. Perhaps she’d been planning on writing a book one day. Maybe she’d planned