Chapter 1/Episode 5: The Wardrobe With a Hollow Back

She Knocked On The Wardrobe And It Answered Wrong

The sewing room was the smallest in the house and the most untouched, as if her grandmother had shut the door on it one day and simply never gone back in. A treadle Singer under a vinyl cover. A dressmaker’s dummy in the corner, draped, standing patient guard like a headless nun. Pinking shears gone orange with rust. And against the far wall, a wardrobe.

It was a good piece, old country furniture, dark walnut with a single tall door and a drawer beneath, the kind of thing immigrants either carried over or commissioned the first year they had money, a piece of the old world made solid in the new. Lila ran her hand down the cool wood. There was a competence to it that pleased her. Then she opened the door, and the competence stopped making sense.

It was too shallow.

She did not think it; she felt it, the way you feel a stair that is shorter than the others. The inside of the wardrobe came to a wooden back perhaps eight inches sooner than the outside of it said it should. She had spent fifteen years photographing and measuring furniture for estate inventories, training her eye to the geometry of old things, and her eye told her plainly: the box was deeper than the room inside it.

She got her tape from her kit and measured, because measuring was what she did when she did not want to feel something. Outside depth, twenty-two inches. Inside depth, fourteen. She knelt and measured the drawer below. The drawer was shallow too, and short, and when she pulled it all the way out and reached into the cavity behind it, her fingers found, not the back of the cabinet, but a panel. Cedar, by the smell that came up. Fitted so well she could find no seam by feel.

She knocked on the wardrobe’s interior back, low down, and it gave the dead thunk of solid wood. She knocked higher, behind where the hanging clothes would have been, and it answered her differently. A lighter sound. A hollow sound. The sound of a space behind a wall.

Lila sat back on her heels in the cold little room with her heart going harder than the work warranted, and she thought about the worn place in the windowsill dust, and the deed dated nineteen forty-nine, and Joseph Mazur’s voice cracking on the word right, and her mother going white at a careless joke about a body in the ground. She thought about her grandmother saying there is nothing there in the exact tone of a woman guarding everything she had.

People built false backs into furniture for ordinary reasons. Money, mostly. Jewelry. A pistol. The deed to the very parcel she could not stop thinking about. She told herself that. She told herself it was probably an empty cavity and a string of rosary beads, that she was a tired divorced woman spinning a story out of an old lady’s clutter because she needed something in her life to be more interesting than it was.

She felt along the top edge of the false back with her fingertips. Nothing. The bottom. Nothing. The left side, and then the right, and on the right, low, where a kneeling woman’s hand would naturally fall, the wood was worn smooth and faintly greasy, the way the windowsill had been worn smooth, the way a thing gets when one particular hand touches it ten thousand times across the years.

She pressed it.

Something behind the panel gave with a soft wooden cluck, a little catch releasing, a sound like a tongue against teeth. The false back shifted a quarter inch toward her and stopped, held now by nothing but its own fit, ready to lift away.

From the front of the house, the kitchen door banged open against the runner, and her mother’s voice called up the hall, sharp with something that was almost panic.

“Lila? Lila, where are you? You’re not back there, are you? Lila, answer me.”

Lila knelt frozen in the cold room, her hand flat against the loosened panel, the hollow space breathing its faint cedar breath into her palm, and her mother’s footsteps came fast down the hall toward the sewing room door.