Twelve Rooms with a View by Theresa Rebeck

Author:Theresa Rebeck
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307592361
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-11T20:00:00+00:00

14

IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE MUCH, BUT THERE WAS NO QUESTION THAT she had found something: a perfect square, about three feet by three feet, that had been cut out of the wall and then dropped back in, tightly fitting the hole from which it had been cut. Then it had been painted over, and a laminated picture of Noah and the ark taped over that. It was pretty well hidden, but there it was, right in the wall.

“Wow,” said Katherine. “How do you open it?”

“It doesn’t open, Katherine,” Louise said. “It’s not a door, it’s just a hole, left over from the crawl space for the workers who built the building. After they finished, they made a plug and sealed it up. They were all sealed up ages ago.” Not content to have made such a deflating statement, Louise droned on, “This is an old building and it has its quirks, but there’s nothing more to it than that. This isn’t one of your storybooks. I don’t know why you’re encouraging her, Jennifer, you’re not a child. And isn’t it past her bedtime?” This she directed to me with a kind of pointed superiority. Those nuns are doing a good job with this one, I thought. Louise moved to the closet and flicked off the light with a quick impatient gesture, then stood in the shadows with her hands on her hips. “Mom really wants the little kids to get to bed on time.”

Jennifer stood up and glided into the hallway, then, quiet as a ghost herself, disappeared behind the door to her own room. Sanity regained its footing. One by one my charges went to sleep, and at half past twelve their parents returned, paid me a surprising amount of money, and sent me back downstairs to my own life.

I let myself in to my apartment with all my multiple keys. Lucy was long gone, of course; the place was deserted. There was no sign of the guy from the city page of the Times, if in fact he had shown his face and prowled around and invaded the empty corners of my enormous empty apartment. And compared to the Whites’—so cluttered with children and toys and furniture and uneaten dinners and coats and shoes and arguments over nothing—my apartment seemed especially enormous and empty. Feeling both exhausted and spooked, I went into each room and turned on all the lights everywhere, as if that would populate the vacant spaces. But a lot of the bulbs were dead, and the ones that worked put out only the shadow of an actual glow. The effect was so painfully lackluster and grim it made everything worse, and I started to panic. As I looked around that empty apartment, I honestly didn’t know how I was supposed to go on. After spending the night with six messy and unfinished girls who hadn’t yet made a single disastrous life-altering mistake, I was not in the mood to spend any time alone with shadows. Besides, I was now somewhat convinced that there was a ghost in my apartment.

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