Hunter got up without a word, sat back on the sofa, and picked up the tablet.

Exhaustion dropped on to Stevie. The bubble burst, and the air was sucked back out of the room. David was twisting in the chair and the wind was howling. She was not needed.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

As she got up to go, David trailed her loosely in the hall.

“Are you following me?” she said.

“I’m going to my room to get a power cord,” he replied. “Like I said, I was reading all night. Looks like you had fun, though.”

Stevie gripped her doorknob so hard she thought she might rip it off.

“Not everything is about you,” she said.

Then she went into her room and shut the door in his face.

15

THE WHOLE HOUSE WAS SHAKING.

Stevie opened her eyes. The light in the room was dim. She blinked a few times and reached for her phone. It was almost three in the afternoon. There were no texts or calls from her parents, which suggested that there had been no signal.

She found she had made a nest for herself to keep warm—all the blankets, her robe, her fleece, even a few towels. At one point, she remembered she had considered tipping out her bag of dirty laundry on top of herself. She pieced together the events that had gotten her here. She had been with Hunter and David in the common room until early in the morning, then the exhaustion had come down on her and she had gone into her room to rest for a minute. The minute had turned to hours, and the day had vanished.

She slithered out of bed and went to the window. Outside, the snow was coming down sideways, even blowing back up. It had so coated the trees and ground that it was hard to figure out what was outside at all. It was impossible to calculate how much snow had collected on the ground, but it looked like it was now a few inches below the window. So, two feet? Three feet?

What to do now? She returned to her bed and sat on the edge. There was no going outside—not outside-outside and possibly not outside this room. She looked at the wall, the gently lumpy, overpainted surface where the message had appeared all those weeks ago. Between the cottony view out the window and the post-nap fuzz in her head, reality distorted and a ball of adrenaline shot through her system. This place was dangerous. She should have heeded the warning on the wall. She kept brushing up against death’s sleeve, avoiding it by inches and moments. It was at the end of a tunnel, under the floor, at the other end of the phone. She should have gone home, left this terrible place, because her luck suddenly felt fleeting. Now there was no escape.

Just as she felt the first ramp up into an anxiety attack, there was a gentle rapping on her door, and Janelle poked her head in. She had her comforter wrapped around her like a regal cape. It dragged along behind her as she came in.

“I thought I heard you,” she said. “You’re up.”

The mental monsters ran away in Janelle’s presence. She had that effect, and Stevie almost welled up with appreciation.

“Where’s Vi?” Stevie asked, casually wiping at her eye.

“Up in David’s room. They’re reading. David, Hunter, Vi.”

“Nate?”

“He’s writing?” Janelle said. “I think? At least he has some sense. I’m surprised you’re not up there.”

“Yeah.” Stevie smoothed out her blanket. “I’m still not welcome.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Janelle said. “Forget him.”

There was an extra edge in her voice now, and a bit of a rasp. Stevie wondered if she had been crying this morning.

“Are you two fighting?” Stevie said. “You and Vi?”

Janelle sat on the bed and tightened the comforter cloak around herself.

“It’s not a fight,” Janelle said. “It’s a disagreement. Vi is an activist. I know this about them. They have strong opinions and want to do good in the world. That’s what I love about them. But I don’t think they should be . . . David’s ideas aren’t good. This isn’t good. Well, maybe the part where we all stayed. But . . . I mean. Yeah. We’re fighting.”

She put her head in her hands for a moment, groaned, then looked up.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking at the wall,” Stevie replied honestly.

“Guess it’s as good as anything else,” Janelle said.

“Walls are more interesting than you think,” Stevie said, realizing that she may have just uttered the most boring statement anyone had ever uttered. “In mystery stories, a lot of things are behind or inside of walls,” she said. “But it’s true in life too. People find stuff in walls all the time. Letters. Money. Witches’ bottles. Razors. Mummified cats . . .”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s a thing that used to happen,” Stevie said. “Bodies have been found. There are stories of people who lived in walls—well, that happens in books more. People tend to live in attics, like this guy Otto who lived in his lover’s attic for years and used to sneak down when they were out, and eventually he murdered the husband. Or this guy they call the Spiderman of Denver who lived in these people’s house and murdered the owner one night and then kept living in the house for a while. You can usually tell when you hear strange noises at night and food goes missing. . . .”

“Oh,” Janelle said.

“I mean,” Stevie said. “Cases get solved because of walls. For instance, there was a case in England of a man who was accused of sexually assaulting lots of teenagers in the 1970s. They all talked about the fact that he had a wall in his house where victims wrote their names and phone numbers. So the police went to that house, in the present day, and they brought in some decorators to strip the wall, because decorators have the equipment to do that. They took off layer after layer of paint until they literally uncovered the 1970s, and there was the wall with all the names and numbers and dates, just like everyone said. The evidence was all there. They peeled back the past. I was thinking about it because this friend of Ellie’s in Burlington said that Ellie talked about stuff being in the walls here.”

Janelle considered the blank space of wall for a moment. Then she dropped the comforter and stood up.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be back. I have to do something.”

Stevie waited in the same position for several minutes. Ten, fifteen. Stevie didn’t hear her upstairs, or even in her room. Stevie listened to the house groan and move. She leaned back against her pillows and pulled both her own and Janelle’s comforter over her. Finally, there was a noise in Janelle’s room. Doors opening and closing. Then Janelle cracked open Stevie’s door and slipped inside, shutting it tight behind her. She was wearing different clothes than she had been before—she had changed back into her fuzzy cat-head pajamas, furry slippers, and a robe. She was flushed, her body damp from snow and exertion, the freezing chill still on her body. She had snow in her hair, on her eyelashes. She had a small object in her hand. It looked a bit like an oversized phone.

“What did you do?” Stevie said. “I thought you were on your computer or something.”

“You wanted to look in the walls,” she said. “I went to the maintenance shed and I got the wall scanner.”

“You went out?”

“You don’t have a monopoly on busting rules,” Janelle said, shaking out her legs to warm them and restore circulation. “You want to have a look and see what’s under there? Let’s look.”

The wall scanner was a simple device, with a small screen. Janelle tried to look up a video on how to use it, but the Wi-Fi didn’t cooperate. She worked it out on her own without too much difficulty.

“Okay,” she said. “The idea behind these is to look for things like pipes, wires, studs, stuff like that. So let’s try this wall.”

She went over to the wall that Stevie had been staring at, then slowly ran the device over it.

“See here?” She ran it back and forth near a light switch. “Wires.”

She ran it along another strip of wall.

“Studs,” she said. “Lots of pockets of space. See? We can look for things too, just like they are. Except this is legal and constructive.”

She surveyed the room. “Can you take everything off your nightstand? I’ll use that to stand on. And we need to move all the furniture away from the walls.”

The room, which had been so gloomy a short while ago, was a sudden hub of activity. It turned out, shoving furniture around was a pretty good way to clear your head. Janelle was so focused that she didn’t even mention the large dust clumps behind the bureau and under the bed. Once they’d moved everything aside, Janelle began a sweeping scan. Along the outside wall, it was all structural materials. When Janelle moved in, she found more wires, voids, a pipe or two. Aside from something that might have been another dead mouse, there was nothing of note.

“Okay,” Janelle said when they had done all four walls. “We have a sense of how this thing works. Now we try in Ellie’s room. Do you think Hunter would let us?”

“There’s a bit more wall to do,” Stevie said, pointing at the closet.