THE LETTERS IN THE WALL — CHAPTER THREE: THE WOMAN WHO REMEMBERED

The Dellwood Public Library had been in the same building since 1954, a low brick structure on Garrison Street with a handicapped ramp bolted to the front steps sometime in the nineties and a parking lot that had never been big enough. Ruth had taken her students here on field trips for twenty-six consecutive years. She knew the smell of it the way she knew all the smells of her life, completely and without thinking, the particular mix of old paper and central heat and the lemon cleaner they used on the floors on Tuesday mornings.

She sat in the parking lot for a moment before she went in.

She had told Sandra she was going to the grocery store. This was not entirely a lie because she intended to go afterward. She had become, in the space of forty-eight hours, a woman who measured her lies in degrees of distance from the truth, and she was not sure yet how she felt about that. She was not sure she felt anything about it. She was too busy.

The reference desk was staffed by a young man she didn’t recognize, which was fine, because the person she was looking for was not at the reference desk. She walked past the circulation counter and the new releases table and the children’s section and turned left at the end of the biography stacks, and there in the small office behind the glass partition, surrounded by the organized disorder of a person who has run things for a very long time, was Margaret Osley.

Margaret Osley was eighty-one years old and had been the head librarian at Dellwood Public for thirty-four of those years before she retired in 2009 and then continued coming in three days a week as a volunteer because, as she had once told Ruth at a school board function, a library without someone who knew where everything actually was would be like a brain without a memory and she was not prepared to let that happen on her watch.

Ruth knocked on the glass.

Margaret looked up from whatever she was reading, registered Ruth’s face, and waved her in with the unhurried gesture of a woman who had been expecting something to happen today and was mildly curious to find out what it was.

“Delia Marsh,” Margaret said.

She said it the way people say names they have not said in a long time but have not forgotten either, the name arriving intact, fully formed, as though it had been sitting somewhere close to the surface waiting to be called.

“You knew her,” Ruth said.

“I was twenty-six when she died. I had been here four years.” Margaret set down the reading she had been doing and folded her hands on the desk in the way of someone who has decided to give a conversation their full attention. “She worked here before me. Tuesdays and Thursdays for almost ten years. She was the one who taught me the filing system.”

The window behind Margaret looked out on the parking lot, and beyond it the street, and beyond that the hardware store that had been a dry goods store when Ruth was small. The afternoon light came through at a low angle and lay in pale strips across the floor.

“She died in November of 1971,” Ruth said.

“November fourteenth.” Margaret said it without hesitation. “Heart failure, the official cause was. She was thirty-six years old.”

“That’s young for heart failure.”

Margaret looked at her with the expression of a woman who had been waiting fifty years for someone to make that observation. “It is,” she said. “Yes.”

Ruth looked at her.

“I found some letters,” Ruth said. “In the wall of my house. The house on Millbrook Road. Delia’s house.”

Margaret was still for a moment. Then she stood up from her chair with the careful deliberateness of a woman whose knees charged interest and walked to a filing cabinet in the corner of the office. She opened the bottom drawer. She reached into the back of it, past what appeared to be folders, and withdrew a small padded envelope that had gone soft with age, the kind of envelope that had been handled many times over many years.

She set it on the desk between them.

“I have been waiting,” Margaret said, “for the right person to walk through that door.”

Ruth looked at the envelope.

It was addressed in handwriting she recognized. The same careful script. Delia’s penmanship, precise and slightly formal. But this envelope was not addressed to Thomas Aldrich.

It was addressed to Margaret.

“She gave it to me,” Margaret said, sitting back down. “Two weeks before she died. She came in on a Tuesday and she looked the way she had been looking for months, which was like a woman carrying something she could not set down, and she handed me that envelope and she said do not open this unless something happens to me. And then she walked out.”

Ruth sat very still.

“Something happened to her,” she said.

“Fourteen days later.” Margaret’s voice was even, the voice of a woman who had long since finished the work of grief and arrived somewhere quieter on the other side of it. “I opened the envelope.”

“What was in it?”

Margaret’s hands rested on the padded envelope without opening it. “A letter. And what she called the key — not to the box itself, but to understanding what was inside it.”

Ruth waited.

“The letter explained where the letters were. The ones she had written to your father. She had sealed them herself and put them inside the east wall of the house on Millbrook Road, in a section her neighbor had helped her open and then reseal. She wrote that she did not want them destroyed and she did not want them sent. She wanted them to stay in the house.” Margaret paused. “She said the house would know what to do with them when the time came.”

Ruth thought of Paul, knocking on that wall with his knuckles for thirty years. Saying there’s something different in it, Ruth. There’s a hollow.

“And the key,” Ruth said.

“To the box.” Margaret pushed the padded envelope across the desk. “She made a second key and sent me the copy. I did not know why at the time. I think now that she did not entirely trust herself not to take the letters back out and destroy them if things got bad enough. She was protecting them from herself.”

Ruth picked up the envelope. It was lighter than she expected.

She looked up at Margaret.

“She had a child,” Ruth said. “My father’s child. She wrote it in the first letter.”

“A boy,” Margaret said. “Born in April of 1970. She named him James.”

The word went through Ruth the way cold water goes through you on a day when you did not know you were warm. James. A name. A person who had been alive in the world for fifty-six years, possibly, if he had lived. A half-brother she had never known to look for.

“What happened to him,” Ruth said.

Margaret was quiet for a moment.

“She kept him,” Margaret said. “For four months. She kept him and she managed and she was, as far as I could see, managing better than anyone had expected. Better than she had expected.” She stopped.

“And then,” Ruth said.

“And then someone arrived in Dellwood in August of 1970,” Margaret said. “A woman. From out of town. She stayed at the motel on Route 9 for three days and she met with Delia twice. I do not know what was said in those meetings. Delia did not tell me.” Margaret’s hands were still on the desk, very still. “After the woman left, the baby was gone.”

Ruth’s mouth was dry.

“Who was she,” Ruth said. “The woman.”

Margaret looked at her with an expression that was not pity and was not apology and was not anything Ruth could name exactly, but was the expression of a person who has held a piece of information for a very long time and is about to set it down and does not know if that will make things better or worse.

“I knew her name,” Margaret said, “because Delia said it once. Just once. She said it the way you say something you are trying to make yourself accept.” Margaret paused. “She said the woman’s name was Eleanor Aldrich.”

Ruth heard her own breathing in the room.

Eleanor Aldrich.

Her mother.

Outside, in the parking lot, she sat in her car and did not start the engine for a long time.

The light was going the way it goes in November, quickly and without ceremony, the afternoon deciding to be over. A woman came out of the library with two children and loaded them into a minivan. A man walked past with a dog. Ordinary things happening in ordinary time.

Her mother had known.

Her mother had come to this town in August of 1970 and met with a woman named Delia Marsh who had a four-month-old baby and letters in a wall, and when her mother left, the baby was gone and Delia was, by November of the following year, dead of heart failure at thirty-six years old, which was young for heart failure, yes, as Margaret had said, and as something in Ruth had known the moment she heard it and had not allowed herself to follow.

She held the padded envelope in both hands.

There were six letters she had not yet read.

And there was a brother named James who had been four months old in August of 1970 and who was now either fifty-six years old or not alive at all, and who had been taken somewhere by a woman who had then gone home to her husband and her daughter and her house on Birch Street and never said a word.

Ruth started the engine.

She did not go to the grocery store.

She drove back to the house on Millbrook Road, which still had the contractor’s tape on the baseboard and smelled of sawdust and something chemical, and she went to the hallway closet and took the box down from the shelf behind the winter blankets, and she sat on the couch that still had the same cushions she had chosen in 2003, and she opened the envelope dated November 2nd.

She read the signature first.

Delia.

Then she read the first line.