It was poor planning that she hadn’t put her other ear against the wall. If she had, she might have been able to see the window and guess what time it was. It was too late now: She didn’t dare move and risk missing the sound. Something in the room’s shadows made her think it was morning again.
Caroline had searched with Ben and the others through the first day. The ice-glazed trees were terrible in their beauty, the air in the forest cold enough to make her teeth hurt. Full-grown adults swaddled in down and neoprene lasted barely a half hour outside, and yet that’s where they thought Bub was.
Charlie had trudged through the snow between them. They were not about to let him out of their sight. Not now. Not ever, probably. The little man hadn’t uttered a word of complaint. Had not said a word of any kind that Caroline could recall. He wanted to find his baby brother as badly as anyone, but it was clear he was too small for the search. The drifts in the woods were too deep and the wind was too cold. Caroline decided to stay at the Crofts with him. This might have been the most important decision she’d ever made.
After Caroline made hot chocolate for Charlie and some tea for herself, they’d gone upstairs. She’d meant to get Charlie dry socks, but they ended up in Bub’s room. Clothes covered the floor, emptied drawers lay against the walls, and pictures hung askew on their nails. Ben had torn the place apart looking for Bub, and so had Caroline.
Still ajar was that cabinet that swung into both Bub and Charlie’s rooms. Caroline checked it again, just in case. Then she made Charlie scamper through it into his own room, and she watched as he retrieved fresh socks from his dresser. When he returned through the cabinet, she made him sit between the two doors. While Charlie stayed there, she’d looked at him from the doorway of Bub’s room, then walked down the hall to his own room’s doorway to examine him from that vantage point.
It struck her as so strange that a boy could be in both rooms at once yet in neither one at all. She checked from both doors again and then joined Charlie in the cabinet that was in both rooms or in neither.
That’s when she’d first heard it.
Charlie had been right next to her, but he hadn’t caught it that time. They’d sat there through the night, and each time Charlie seemed to miss it. Between the howling wind and all the noises of the old house, it was a hard sound to grab hold of.
She’d tried to get Ben to hear it, too, but had no luck there, either. This wasn’t much of a surprise. He’d come in, stubble glazed with frost, skin raw from wind. So cold that his breathing was practically the only thing she could hear.
When he couldn’t hear what she heard, Caroline was sure she knew what would happen next. Time to call Dr. Hatcher, he would say. Have you been keeping up with your pills? he’d ask, with that pitying smile that he thought looked kind. But it hadn’t gone like that at all.
“Good,” he’d said. “That’s real good. You look in here and I’ll look out there. We’re doubling our chances. We have to try everything.”
That was the first time she’d considered letting herself cry since the night of the abduction. Finally, she thought, her insides swelling with gratitude and love. He’d hugged her then as fiercely as he used to. Not as if she was broken but as if she was the only thing he had left to hang on to. Finally. She’d flushed, thinking of the terrible things she’d said to him a week ago, about not being happy. She had come to feel besieged, she knew, by the rough acoustics of everyday living; every perceived slight, every misjudgment of tone was a dissonant note that could not be unheard. Each little failure building upon the others until you couldn’t hear a thing over the cacophony. But that was Before. She remembered now that Ben was the root of her happiness. Ben and Charlie and Bub were her reasons for living.
Then Ben had gone outside again. He was going to find their baby if she didn’t find him first.
Ben was depending on her to search the house, and that’s what Caroline would do. She was sure that the sound in the walls would show her the way. All she had to do was stay focused and—
“There!” she said. A cry from somewhere behind the drywall. She was sure of it. “Did you hear it?” she asked Charlie.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Maybe.”
“It was definitely from this wall.” Her ear rang as she pulled it from the wall for the first time in many hours. Some pictures hung above her: a photograph of Bub and Charlie in front of Belvedere Castle; a watercolor of a line of elephants holding one another’s tails. She tossed them into a corner, the shattering of their glass adding more voices to the conversation that rang through the hidden spaces of the Crofts. “But how do we get to him?”
“But…but how could he have gotten in there?” Charlie asked.
She smiled at him and ran her fingers through his hair. The boy was so young, but a child should know better than anyone. Impossible things happened all the time. No better proof of this than the fact that Bub had gone missing in the first place.
There was a grate by the door between Bub’s room and the hallway. Some kind of heating vent.
The vent’s grate was fastened into the wall. She could have pried it from its brackets with a screwdriver, but she didn’t have a screwdriver. She picked up a rocking chair and used one of its angles to batter the grate.
After a few tries, the vent’s cover finally buckled. Caroline kicked aside the warped metal and brushed away fragments of drywall.
I knew it, she thought as she peered into the opening. This was part of the heating system their renovators had added. This was why the wall’s original plaster had been replaced with drywall.
“Bub?” she yelled into the space. The vent was made of slick aluminum. “Bub!”