Chapter 3

After holding me in silence for a long moment, Mrs. Gable let go of me.

"I'm going to put the kettle on, Clara," she said.

The door opened, then closed again. I was left alone in my grandmother's room.

I looked at that wall for a long, long time.

Eventually I went out to the hall to get my coat and take my pills.

I stood in my grandmother's parlor for a while, and I couldn't hear anything except sound of a gull somewhere and my own breathing.

I stepped onto the foot of the stairs and got a hand on the banister.

Suddenly, the board went down half an inch under my foot, but I didn't fall.

I jumped, my heart pounding in my chest.

Then I looked at what I was standing on.

That's my spot. That's the circle.

My grandfather's iron stool sat on that board and I sat on that stool.

And I have spun on that board ten thousand times, and it has never once moved.

I got down on my knees.

I got my fingers in the gap and I lifted.

The inside nails were gone.

Four little dents at the corners where feet had stood a long, long time.

Something had been hidden beneath these floorboards for years.

As I stood up, something hit the floor with a sharp metallic clang.

I looked down. It was the key from my grandmother.

Its head was shaped like a dogwood flower.

I picked up the key on the floor and tried it in everything my grandmother owned.

The front door. No.

The back door. No.

The cellar hatch. No.

Eleanor's writing desk, no, and I know that desk, I know it has a lock because she used to turn it.

Nothing. Not one. There wasn't a single lock in that house the key fit.

I sat down on the bottom stair and thought about what I could try to do.

Mrs. Gable dusted this house the first Sunday of the month.

Ask her?

I didn't think that it was a good idea.

I made my way up to the floor above.

Third floor. End of the landing, where the roof comes down.

I rarely went up there.

My grandmother always told me it was nothing more than an ordinary storage room.

It was full of dust and germs, she said, and if I didn't want to get sick, I should stay out of it.

And that's when I saw the door at the end of it.

It was a white door, coated in layers of white paint, with a tarnished keyhole.

Something was wrong. I was certain this door had never been painted white.

Maybe it was the medication. The memories were still there, but they felt strangely muffled.

When I was small, this door was the whole point of the third floor.

Rosie Alvarez and the Pratt twins would come over, and we'd dare each other up the stairs to it.

One afternoon I let them creep right up to it, close enough to hear their own breathing.

Then I pressed my mouth to the wood and whispered that something on the other side had whispered back.

They went down those stairs so fast that Rosie left a shoe behind.

I stood up there by myself and laughed until my stomach hurt, and then I stopped laughing, because for just a second I thought I had heard it too.

I forced myself forward, pushing past the fear that had haunted me since childhood.

Finally I stood before the door.

Staring at the white paint covering its surface, I felt that something wasn't right.

Roller marks still in it, two coats, no sanding --- same as the parlor's white wall.

However, the door wasn't locked. It stood slightly ajar.

I reached for the doorknob and something in my chest was going so hard I could hear it, and I pulled---

Suddenly, somebody knocked on the front door.

"Clara?" Preston's voice came up through two floors. "Honey? Where are you?"

I didn't move.

"Mrs. Gable called me." The front door opened. "She's worried sick about you."

I came down the stairs to meet him.

"There you are," he said.

He was standing in Eleanor's hallway with my trench coat over his arm and his keys still in his hand.

And I looked at his keys.

Worn smooth in the middle was a dogwood flower.

He followed my eyes and opened his arms.

"Oh, sweetheart," he said. "Come here."

"Back here to dwell on the past again, Clara?"

I wanted to ask about the ring of keys in his hand, but I knew this wasn't the time.

"I just came to see if there was anything I'd left behind," I said.

Preston didn't seem the least bit surprised.

"I know, sweetheart." His expression remained calm. "In thirty days, that house will be gone. It's only natural to come back and see it one last time now and then."

He gently rocked me from side to side, the way someone would soothe a frightened child.

And through his coat, I could feel his keys against my hip.

Thirty days. Just thirty days. I was running out of time.