Walls Within Walls

After everyone goes to bed, CJ sneaks into his father’s office to check the hearth for clues. He finds none and falls asleep on the floor. The following day, his dad greets him but does not stop to have a conversation; CJ goes back to sleep, and when he wakes again, he sees numbers written in a circular pattern scrawled into a brick inside the chimney. After writing them down, he goes to the other hearths with Brid and Patrick to find more numbers. Brid figures out that the numbers correlate to letters of the alphabet, and soon, they have another clue to Mr. Post’s puzzle—three words.

Brid has figured out that the three words are “tavinogus,” “servants,” and “dumbwaiter.” While Brid tries to make sense of the first word, CJ and Patrick notice a spy game on one of the computers in their father’s office. CJ storms out of the office and into the elevator, bitter that their father now has employees to test his games, so he no longer lets his kids play them as testers. On the elevator ride down to the servants’ quarters to look for the dumbwaiter, CJ talks to the elevator attendant, Ray, and discovers that their downstairs neighbor’s real name is Eloise Post—the daughter of the man whose treasure they are hunting.

Back in the office, Brid searches the internet for hits related to their unknown word. When her curiosity gets too intense, she plays the tutorial for Mr. Smithfork’s newest invention—DigiSpy, a robot they could use to explore behind the building’s walls if they could find the robot part. They hear footsteps in the apartment and rush into action, believing their dad is home. Patrick hurries to catch him before he enters the office while Brid shuts down the tutorial. However, Patrick runs into a strange man leaving his room. When Patrick asks who he is, the man does not answer and hurries out the fire stairs door.

In the basement, CJ clears boxes away from the wall and finds a poem about corned beef from “a soldier.” After reading the poem three times, he notices a seam in the wallpaper; he follows it until two hours pass. He rushes upstairs, where Maricel yells at him for disappearing and tells him about the stranger in the apartment who got in without Ray seeing him and without using the fire door as an entrance. She sends him to his room, where he reads Mr. Post’s poetry book and speculates that the man is the same one the librarian said wanted the box they received from the library.

CJ wakes up at 3:32 am, wondering why nobody woke him for dinner. To pass the time, he rereads the poetry book; during the final rereading, he remembers he left his backpack in the basement. While getting it, he tries to talk to the night elevator operator, who is not talkative. In the servant’s quarters, he continues investigating the hidden dumbwaiter when the elevator worker asks if he needs any help; CJ says no.

The Smithforks spend Labor Day weekend together and visit friends in Brooklyn on the holiday. After the Labor Day weekend, CJ and Brid start at their new schools. CJ does not enjoy his first day, where nobody talks to him outside of the question-and-answer session the teacher encourages at the start of the day. When he gets home, he tells Brid about Eloise Munn’s true identity, the secrets of the storage room, and how the night elevator man did not like him looking around. He assumes he overloads Brid with information when she does not respond, but she cannot speak because she sees the shadowy figure of a man entering Patrick’s room again.

CJ traps the stranger in Patrick’s room while Brid fetches Maricel and Ray. The adults find nobody in the room when they come to get the intruder. Ray believes the kids saw a ghost or have overactive imaginations; the kids think there’s a way in and out of the apartment through Patrick’s room. They prepare to talk to Eloise Post because they have more questions than answers.