Chapter 13: What the Walls Remember

The hammer was still in her hand when the floorboard moved.

Mathilde was on her knees in the upstairs hallway, pulling up rotten boards near the leak James had mentioned. The wood came away easier than it should have. Wet. Soft at the edges. She dropped each piece into a pile and reached for the next one. That was when her fingers hit something that wasn't wood.

Metal. Cold. A hinge.

She sat back on her heels. The board she'd just lifted had been cut—deliberately, cleanly—and fitted back into place over a small compartment in the floor joists. Someone had gone to the trouble of hiding it. Someone who knew this house.

"James."

He was downstairs. She heard the saw stop. Footsteps on the stairs. He appeared at the top, saw her face, and crossed the hall without a word.

"What is it?"

She pointed. He knelt beside her, worked his fingers under the hinge, and lifted the board free.

Inside was a metal box. Green. Rusted at the corners. About the size of a shoebox. James pulled it out and set it on the floor between them.

"Your father's?" Mathilde asked.

"Has to be." He didn't open it. His hands stayed flat on the lid. "I don't know what's in here."

"Only one way to find out."

He looked at her. Then he lifted the lid.

Papers. Photographs. A small leather notebook. And on top, a single envelope, sealed, with three names written across the front in the same neat handwriting Mathilde had read the night before.

Caspian. Theo. James.

James picked it up. His hand shook once, then steadied. He broke the seal.

Mathilde didn't read over his shoulder. She looked at the photographs instead. A woman she didn't recognize—dark hair, wide smile, standing in front of this house with her hand raised against the sun. A man holding a baby. The same man, older, standing with two toddlers, one on each hip. Richard Ashford. She knew it without being told. The jaw was the same as Caspian's. The eyes were the same as James's.

"There's a third one," James said.

She looked up. He was holding out a photograph. She took it.

Three boys. Older now. Maybe five. Standing in a row in front of the porch, holding a wooden sign between them. The sign was blank—Richard must have been planning to paint something on it. The boys were laughing. All three of them. Identical grins. Identical faces.

"I don't remember this," James said. "I don't remember any of this."

"You were five."

"I should remember my father."

Mathilde looked at him. His jaw was tight. His eyes were fixed on the photograph in her hand. She didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

He opened the letter.

She watched him read. His face didn't change. But his breathing did—shallow, then deep, then shallow again. When he finished, he folded the letter and put it in his pocket. Same pocket as the first one.

"What did it say?" she asked.

"He knew he was going to die. He wrote it a week before the accident. He said—" James stopped. Started again. "He said if anything happened to him, we should go to our mother's family. Not Julien. Her family. He said they would take care of us."

"Did they?"

"I don't know who they are. He didn't say. He just said 'your mother's people.'" James looked at the box. "We never knew her family. Julien told us they were dead. All of them."

"Was he lying?"

"Probably."

Mathilde looked at the photograph again. The woman with the dark hair. She had a face that looked like it laughed a lot. Like she would have been warm to hug. Mathilde wondered if the boys remembered her. She wondered if they remembered anything at all.

The floor creaked behind them. Theo. He stood in the doorway, saw the box, and stopped.

"What's that?"

"Come here," James said.

Theo crossed the hall and knelt beside them. James handed him the letter. Theo read it. When he was done, he handed it back without a word.

Caspian appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked at the three of them on the floor, at the open box, at the photographs spread out between them.

"Did someone die?" he asked.

"Everyone died," Theo said. "That's the problem."

Caspian knelt. He picked up the photograph of the woman. Held it for a long time.

"Her name was Claire," he said quietly. "I remember that much. I remember her singing in the kitchen. I remember the smell of her hair."

James looked at him. "You remember her?"

"Not much. Just—" He turned the photograph over. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a name and a date. Claire, 1989. "I remember she used to call us by numbers. One, two, three. Because she couldn't tell us apart either."

Theo laughed. It was a short, wet sound. "She couldn't tell us apart? Her own sons?"

"She said we were a handful. Three of a kind." Caspian set the photograph down. "I haven't thought about that in twenty years."

They sat there in the hallway. The sun came through the window at the end of the hall, dust floating in it. Mathilde could hear a bird outside, something small and insistent. The house creaked. Old houses did that. They shifted and settled and talked to themselves.

"There's more," James said. He pulled the leather notebook out of the box and opened it. Pages of handwriting—Richard's handwriting, the same as the letters. Dates. Names. Numbers.

"It's a journal," James said. "He kept a journal."

He flipped through it. Stopped. Read something. His face did something complicated.

"What?" Theo asked.

James didn't answer. He turned the book around and showed them.

One page. One entry. Dated three days before the accident.

Julien came by today. He wanted to talk about the will. He said if I didn't change it, he would make sure I regretted it. I told him to leave. He didn't. He stood in the doorway and told me he knew about Claire's family. He said if I didn't do what he wanted, he would make sure the boys never saw them again. I told him to get out. He left. But he'll be back.

Below that, in smaller writing, pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the paper:

I'm afraid. Not for me. For them.

Nobody spoke.

Mathilde looked at the three brothers—at Caspian, whose hands had gone still on the photograph; at Theo, who was staring at the wall like it had something to say; at James, who was reading the entry again, his lips moving slightly over the words.

"He knew," James said quietly. "He knew Julien was going to kill him. And he stayed anyway."

"Why?" Theo asked.

"Because he didn't think he had a choice."

"He could have run. He could have taken us and run."

"And gone where?" Caspian's voice was flat. "Julien had money. Connections. He would have found them. He would have taken us back. And then—" He stopped.

"And then what?" Theo said.

Caspian didn't answer.

Mathilde reached out and closed the notebook. She put it back in the box. She put the photographs back too. The envelope. Everything. She closed the lid.

"We should go downstairs," she said. "It's getting cold up here."

Nobody moved.

"Theo," she said. "You said there's a stove in the kitchen. Does it work?"

He blinked at her. "What?"

"The stove. Does it work?"

"I don't know. Probably."

"Then let's find out. We have tea. We have whatever's in the cupboards. We have a table and four chairs." She stood up. Her knees cracked again. She ignored it. "We can sit down there and read this. Or we can sit up here and freeze. Your choice."

Theo looked at her for a long moment. Then he stood.

"She's right," he said. "It's cold."

He walked past her and went down the stairs. Caspian followed. James stayed on the floor for a minute longer, looking at the box. Then he picked it up and stood.

"You're good at that," he said.

"At what?"

"Getting people to move."

"Someone has to."

He nodded. Then he carried the box downstairs.

Mathilde stood alone in the hallway. She looked at the spot where the board had been, at the empty hole in the floor, at the dust and the nails and the years of quiet. Someone had hidden this box here. Someone had known it would matter.

She pulled the board back into place. It didn't fit right anymore. It never would again.

She went downstairs.

They sat at the table. The box was open in the middle. James read the journal aloud—not all of it, just the parts that mattered. The threats. The fear. The small, ordinary details of a man who knew he was running out of time.

Claire made bread today. The boys helped. Flour everywhere. I've never seen anything so funny.

Caspian tried to climb the apple tree. Fell out. No broken bones. He didn't cry. Just got up and tried again.

Theo found a frog. Named it Gerald. Gerald lives in the kitchen now. Claire is not happy.

James drew a picture of the house. It's terrible. I'm going to frame it.

Élise listened. She didn't say anything. She just sat with her hands wrapped around her cup, watching the three brothers read their father's words.

When James finished, he closed the journal. Nobody spoke.

The fire in the stove crackled. The wind pushed against the windows. The house creaked and settled.

Theo was the first to move. He stood up and walked to the mantel. He picked up the photograph of the three boys with the blank sign. He looked at it for a long time. Then he set it back down, turned it so it faced the room.

"I'm going to paint that sign tomorrow," he said. "Something. I don't know what. But something."

Caspian looked at him. "You can't paint."

"I can learn."

James stood up. He walked to the bookshelf and pulled out Where the Wild Things Are. He sat back down and opened it. He started to read. Not aloud. Just to himself.

Mathilde watched them. The three of them. Identical faces doing three different things. Caspian staring into the fire. Theo staring at the photograph. James reading a children's book.

They looked nothing alike. Not really. They never had.

She got up and put the kettle back on the stove.