The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,13

forgotten what a capital H in script even looked like.

It was already ten now, time for her tea break, and she forced herself to go ahead with this. When she came back to the parlor and stared up again at the wall, she experienced a moment of very intense shyness, as if there were a person in the room after all, and, having spoken those first words to her, it was now her turn to say something back.

She stepped back to appraise the wall from a distance. It was obvious that anyone writing on the wall would begin on the top left corner. They would have plenty of room that way, the window was well to the right, and the wide expanse of plaster would have suggested a blank sheet of paper or the empty page of a book. If that was the case, if her hunch was correct, then the sentence she uncovered would have occurred well down from the start. To expose the rest meant sliding the ladder over, putting it tight against the wall, reaching up as high as she could.

In the top left corner was wedged the name Alan, which she uncovered all at once, the wallpaper being friendlier there, more supple. The rest of the sentence was easy, too, as was the line below that, then the line below that—lines she didn’t let herself read until she had six of them exposed.

Alan has gone to the city with his lumber and planks. For five or six days he tells me. When you return I will have the paper on I promised when I kissed him goodbye. I had not kissed him in a long time and it is a long time since I have been alone. He is different than he used to be. Because of what he did? Because of what he did not do, could not do? He seemed surprised by my kiss. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to the light, stared down hard at me, then, just before he let go, nodded and I think maybe sobbed.

Vera read this twice, three times, running her nails along the letters trying to scratch off the stubborn specks of paper that still adhered. Her reactions came so fast they were hard to separate. The feeling of the past coming alive beneath her hands—prying open a coffin couldn’t have given her the sensation in such strength—plus the impression that light had flooded into the room, a radiance that had been captured and released from a shroud. Who had written this, when, how, why? The questions jumped out at her all at once, but even faster came the realization that the only way to find answers was to uncover even more.

She understood one thing immediately—she could not be the first person to read this. There was the top layer of knotty pine paper, the two nondescript layers beneath that or at least the flecked remains of that paper, then, on the bottom, the faded bits of papery peach that must have been original. That was the chronology, and all she had to do to understand it was reverse it, starting back when the house was new. Blank wall, words written on wall, paper pasted over words. New owners, lazy owners, paper pasted over paper. New owners, lazier owners, paper pasted over paper over paper. New owner, energetic owner, strip top layer, strip middle layer, strip bottom layer, uncover words, read words, cover them up again with the ugly knotty pine.

The next strip she peeled was nearly her record when it came to length, but there was nothing beneath it except blank plaster, which disappointed her greatly. So it was just a brief, random message after all, little more than a doodle, written there on a whim. But she was wrong on this. Once she cleared another eight inches the writing surfaced again—the writer, whoever she was, enjoyed beginning her paragraphs with deep indentations.

I was born on Christmas day in 1903 during the famous blizzard. I do not know the name of my father but Mrs. Hodgson once told me she thought he might be Selah Tompkins who worked with horses in the woods and was reckless and let a sled ride over him as everyone always knew it would. Mrs. H. sometimes seemed about to tell me who my mother was but always shook her head at the last moment. At the home there were four of us named Elizabeth so to