The Walkthrough

The invoice was a map, and the treasure was a crime scene. Iris folded the pink onion-skin paper and shoved it into her back pocket, the crinkle of it loud in the quiet study. She grabbed the heavy, rubberized flashlight from the utility drawer and the metal tape measure she used for sizing shipping boxes.

She opened the door to the cellar. The air that rose up to meet her was cool and smelled of wet stone and ancient coal dust—the breath of the house's lungs. It was a smell she associated with fear, with childhood dares to run down and tag the furnace before the monsters grabbed her ankles.

She flicked the flashlight on, the beam cutting through the gloom, and descended.

The stairs groaned under her weight, unfinished pine treads worn smooth by generations of servants and boiler repairmen. At the bottom, the concrete floor was uneven, cracked like a dry riverbed.

Iris swept the beam across the space. It was a standard, terrifying Victorian basement. To the left, the oil tank hulked like a rusted submarine. To the right, the laundry area with its deep utility sinks and the ghost of detergent smell.

There was no drywall. There was no acoustic batting. The walls were fieldstone and mortar, weeping with damp in the corners. The ceiling was exposed joists, cobwebs draping between them like tattered lace.

"Forty-two thousand dollars," she whispered, her voice flat in the dead air. You could build a guest cottage for that price in 1990. You didn't spend it on invisible renovations.

She walked to the center of the room, under the main support beam. Above her was the kitchen. She knew the kitchen was thirty feet long from the hallway door to the back garden wall. She had mopped every inch of it.

She extended the tape measure. The yellow metal strip snapped out, rigid and bright against the gray floor. She hooked the end on the bottom step of the stairs and walked toward the back of the house.

Ten feet. The furnace rattled as she passed.
Fifteen feet. The water heater hissed.
Twenty feet.

The tape measure hit the back wall.

Iris stopped. She looked at the tape. Twenty feet.

She looked up. Above her, the kitchen floorboards continued. She could see the copper pipes for the sink running along the joists... and disappearing into the darkness *past* the wall she was standing in front of.

She wasn't at the foundation. She was standing in front of a partition.

The wall looked like the others—rough, gray, covered in a layer of grime that matched the rest of the cellar. It was a masterpiece of camouflage. A wall built to look like it had been there since 1920.

Iris reeled in the tape, the metal snapping back with a hiss. She stepped closer.

The mortar between the bricks here looked slightly different. Less crumbly. Darker.

She raised her hand. She needed to know. She needed to prove that the forty-two thousand dollars hadn't vanished into thin air, but had been solidified into a barrier.

She tapped the brick wall behind the furnace. It didn't sound like brick. It sounded like hollow wood.