Chapter 6 - The Child in the WallsBy midnight, the police had taken over Bellrose.
Guests were gone.
The reception tents stood abandoned beneath string lights swaying in the night wind.
Officers moved through the halls with evidence boxes and cameras while paramedics treated the wounded guard and finally examined Eleanor upstairs in Nathan’s old study.
Victoria sat under guard in the library.
She had stopped speaking.
Nathan didn’t care what she said now. Not until he understood the rest.
He stood in the blue room while Henry pried open the vent cover near the baseboard.
Dust poured out as the grate came free.
A narrow duct stretched into darkness.
Not large enough for an adult.
Possibly large enough for a child.
Henry shone his flashlight inside.
The beam caught scratches.
Fabric fibers.
And something farther back that looked almost like chalk marks.
Lily stood outside the room with Mrs. Warren and refused to go farther in.
Nathan had wanted her nowhere near this part of the house again, but whenever he moved too far away she panicked, so he kept her within sight.
Eleanor sat wrapped in blankets in the hall chair, too weak to stand long but too determined to rest.
“There,” she whispered. “About two years ago, I heard coughing from inside the wall. Then a voice.”
Nathan looked at her. “What did it say?”
Her expression hollowed. “It asked if I was the crying lady.”
Henry’s hands froze on the vent edge.
Nathan stared.
“You never told anyone?”
“I had no one to tell.” The bitterness in Eleanor’s voice was not theatrical. It was exhausted fact. “And I thought maybe I was losing my mind.”
Nathan had no right to ask for forgiveness, so he didn’t try.
Henry crawled partway into the duct with the flashlight clenched in his teeth. “There’s branching,” he called. “One line runs down toward the west service stair.”
The old servants’ routes.
The hidden arteries of Bellrose.
Nathan suddenly remembered childhood games, stories of passages that had once allowed staff to move unseen between wings before modern renovations closed them off.
Most had supposedly been bricked up.
Supposedly.
A crime scene tech arrived with a narrower camera scope, but Henry waved him back. “I can fit another yard or two.”
Nathan should have stopped him.
He didn’t.
A minute later Henry’s muffled voice echoed from inside the wall.
“I found something.”
When he backed out, his shirt and hands were black with dust. In his hand was a small object wrapped in cobweb and crumbled insulation.
A child’s shoe.
Tiny.
Faded red leather.
Old-fashioned buckle across the top.
Mrs. Warren gave a strangled cry from the doorway.
“That belonged to Charlotte.”
Nathan turned sharply. “Who is Charlotte?”
The housekeeper looked horrified she had spoken.
“Mrs. Warren,” Nathan said, fighting for calm, “now is the wrong time to decide silence is loyalty.”
Tears filled her eyes. “She was the gardener’s daughter. Years ago. Before Eleanor ever came to Bellrose. She used to play near the lower halls when her father worked weekends.”
Nathan frowned. “What happened to her?”
Mrs. Warren looked toward the floor. “She disappeared.”
The word rippled through the room.
“When?” Henry asked.
“Seventeen years ago.”
Nathan’s mind raced. He had been away at school.
“She was seven,” Mrs. Warren whispered. “The story was that she wandered into the woods near the lower orchard. Search teams came. Dogs. Police.” She swallowed. “They never found her.”
Nathan looked slowly at the duct.
Then at the small red shoe in Henry’s hand.
Eleanor’s voice came thin and cold from the chair. “She didn’t wander into the woods.”
No one answered because no one could.
An officer appeared in the doorway. “Sir?”
Nathan turned.
“We found a service hatch behind the wine cellar shelving. Old passage. It’s been wired shut recently.”
“How recently?”
“Not sure yet.”
Nathan took one look at Eleanor.
Her face was white.
Lily, from the hall, whispered, “Bad place.”
Nathan crouched beside her. “Did you see this place?”
She nodded without looking at him.
“With Victoria?”
“No.” Her voice dropped even smaller. “By myself.”
His stomach clenched. “When?”
“She said Mommy was gone and I wanted to find her. I heard somebody singing in the wall.”
Every adult in the room went still.
Nathan looked at Henry.
Henry looked back at him with the same thought already formed.
If Charlotte had vanished inside Bellrose seventeen years ago, then the voice in the wall might not have belonged to a child at all.
Not anymore.
“Take Lily upstairs,” Nathan said to Mrs. Warren.
The housekeeper hesitated.
“Now.”
She obeyed.
Lily cried and reached for him until Eleanor called softly, “Go with Mrs. Warren, darling. Daddy’s finding the truth.”
That was enough. Lily let herself be led away.
Nathan rose.
“You stay here,” he told Eleanor.
She almost laughed.
“I’ve already stayed here too long.”
He wanted to argue, but Henry cut in. “Let her sit by the service stair with an officer. No farther. If there’s anything in those passages, she may recognize a sound or a turn.”
Nathan hated that Henry was right.
Ten minutes later they stood before the hidden hatch behind the wine shelving.
Police had cut the wires and pulled the panel free.
A narrow stair descended into blackness.
Cold air breathed upward carrying a smell Nathan could not place at first.
Then he realized.
Mildew.
Rust.
And something sweet underneath.
Rot disguised by old perfume.
Henry lifted his flashlight. “Ready?”
No one was.
They went anyway.
At the bottom stretched a cramped corridor lined with old servant cubbies and sealed coal bins. The walls were scored with scratches in places too deliberate to be accidental.
Then the singing began.
Not from far away.
Not from behind them.
Ahead.
A thin woman’s voice, off-key and old, carrying a lullaby through the dark.
Nathan felt his blood turn to ice.
Eleanor, standing under guard at the stair top, made a strangled sound.
“That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s the song.”
Henry aimed the flashlight forward.
At the end of the corridor, just beyond the next turn, something moved.
Small.
Pale.
Fast.
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And then a girl’s voice called through the dark:
“Is the crying lady free now?”
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