I set my pry bar down real slow because the first thing my light found in the dark behind that wall was a steel door, painted the same cream color as the house, with a heavy bolt on the inside. A door on the inside of a wall. I have been a tile man for twenty years and I will tell you, there is a feeling you get when a building keeps a secret from you, and it is not a good one. I said, “Mr. Dunning, you had better come see this,” and my voice did not sound like mine.
The fella who had hired me was named Craig Dunning, a quiet man of about fifty who worked in insurance and had bought the house in Grafton as a fixer upper. He came up the hallway in his reading glasses with a cup of coffee. When he saw the door, he stopped. He said, “That is not on the plans.” I said no, it was not. He looked at it a long time. Then he said, very quietly, “Whoever made that did not want to be found.” That was exactly what I had been thinking.
The bolt slid back with a dry scrape. Behind the door was a room the length of the bathroom and about three feet wide, with a bare bulb on a cord and a ventilation grille cut into the outer wall, a narrow cot, a shelf of canned goods, a battery radio, and a telephone with a long cord. On a small table lay a spiral notebook and a flashlight. On the wall hung a feed store calendar, frozen on March of 2004. And beside the cot, drawn in pencil on the plaster at the height of a small child, was a row of tiny, careful stars.
The strongest rooms are built by people who refuse to disappear, and they hold their courage long after they leave.
I let Craig go in first. He sat on the edge of the cot and picked up the notebook, and he read the first page aloud in a low voice. “This is the book of Margaret Haines. If you are reading this, then it is over, and I am sorry I did not come back for it. I built this room myself in 1999 with a hammer and a library book. I built it so that when Roy came home angry, there would be one place in the house where he could not reach me or the baby. I want you to know that it worked.”
There were forty pages. Craig read them to me in pieces, standing in the doorway so the light fell right. She wrote about the nights she had spent in the dark with her daughter Tess asleep against her, the radio turned down to a whisper. She wrote about the bruises she hid under her sleeves in the church parking lot, and how Roy would apologize at breakfast with flowers. The writing was calm, almost businesslike, a woman recording facts. But in the last entry the handwriting shook. “March 9. The police came. Roy is gone. I will never have to be in this room again.”
Craig put the notebook down. I could see his hands were shaking. “Her last line,” he said, “is a note to the person who finds it.” He cleared his throat. “If you are a woman living in fear, please do not wait. There is help. There is always help. And if you are a man who has found this, be kind to the next person who needs a place to hide.” I stood in the narrow room and felt the cold of that bolt on the wrong side of a door, and I swear I could smell old fear in the plaster.
The realtor gave us her name. Margaret Haines was seventy one and lived in Tucson, Arizona, in a small adobe house with a cactus garden. Craig called her that night. He told me later that she was silent for so long he thought the line had dropped. Then she said, “Oh, thank God,” and she began to laugh, and then to cry. She told him she had left the notebook behind in the panic of leaving, and had spent twenty years worried that the next owner would find it and not understand, or find it and tell Roy.
She flew in the following month. Craig picked her up at the little airport in Morgantown, and brought her to the house, and she stood in the front hallway for a full minute before she could walk in. I was there, finishing the new shower. She was a small woman with white hair cut short and a strong, upright back. Craig opened the door of the hidden room, and she looked inside and said, without any self pity at all, “I was so proud of that bolt.” We all laughed, and then we did not laugh.
Roy had died in prison in 2009. Tess, the child who had slept against her in that cot, was now thirty three, a social worker in Phoenix, with a daughter of her own. Margaret told us that Tess had counseled over four hundred women, and that the first thing she always said was, “My mother built a room.” Craig had a quiet idea, and he asked her whether she would be willing to give the notebook to a shelter for women in the county. Margaret thought about it. She said she would be honored to.
The shelter in Clarksburg took the notebook and framed it, and now it hangs in the intake room, beside a plain card that says: You are not alone, and there is always a way out. Craig and I finished the wall. In the end we did not seal the room. He kept it as a closet, with a shelf for linens and a new light, but we left the pencil stars on the plaster. Nobody who visits that house knows what they mean. I know. I check them every time I pass, and I think of a woman with a hammer.