The Humming Room by Ellen Potter Read Free Book Online Page B

grayish green islands. She looked for the island where she had seen the boy on the ice floe, but it wasn’t visible from the window. The sky was uniformly gray, with no hint of a break in the storm.
    After she finished eating, she examined the stolen envelope. It was addressed to P. Fanshaw and was marked F RAGILE. H ANDLE WITH C ARE .
    Who was P. Fanshaw?
    The return address, stamped in dark blue letters, said it was from Taylor-Baines in Philadelphia. Roo tore open the envelope and looked inside. There was something hard and rectangular, swathed in bubble wrap. She pulled it out, picked off the tape at the seams, and unwrapped it. Inside was a plastic box and in the box was a small bone. It might have come from anything—a dog, a cat. Maybe even the bone of a finger? She shoved it back in the envelope, walked down the hall, and put the envelope in the wooden box under the floorboards in the girls’ dormitory.
    There, she lay on the chilly floor. The silence in the house had a sound of its own. Thick, pulsing. Waiting. She listened hard for the humming, but it never came.
    It was the loneliest afternoon Roo had ever spent.
    True, she had never felt the need for other people’s company, but she now realized that she had never ever been absolutely alone. Even in the trailer’s crawlspace, there were living things all around her. Field mice, ants, spiders. There was even a pretty garter snake that would, if she kept very still, slide right onto her sneakers and rest on them. And in the Burrows’ woods there were wildflowers and foxes darting past and chipmunks weaving in and out of the underbrush.
    But here, in this huge house, life seemed to be hiding from her.
    She closed her eyes and thought about the mystery of the walls again. She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she heard was Violet laughing.
    â€œThere you are!” Violet said. She was holding the empty tray from Roo’s lunch and staring down at her with an amused expression on her face. “You’re a strange little person. Have you been sitting here all afternoon?”
    Roo scrambled to her feet.
    â€œWhy are there no doors along one side of all the corridors?” The question sprang from her mind as though she had just been dreaming about it.
    â€œI don’t know,” Violet answered, looking surprised. “I guess it was just built like that.” She turned and started back up the hall, and Roo followed, jogging to keep up with Violet’s long-legged stride.
    â€œBut there’s all this space in the middle of the house, just sitting there,” Roo persisted. “Why would someone waste it?”
    Violet shrugged. “I guess rich people don’t think about things like that. The Summer People around here seem to live by their own rules.”
    â€œBut my uncle isn’t Summer People. He lives here in the winter too,” Roo said.
    â€œHe didn’t always. He only started living here year-round after he was married.” Violet blushed, the deep, ruddy blush of a dark-haired girl who has said too much.
    â€œUncle Emmett is married?” Roo asked, stunned.
    After a hesitation, Violet admitted, “Was.”
    â€œAre they divorced now?” Roo asked.
    â€œListen, Roo.” She stopped by Roo’s bedroom door. “It’s not my place to tell you this stuff. Why don’t you ask your uncle?”
    â€œHow can I ask him anything when he’ll barely speak to me?” Roo cried.
    Violet’s eyes locked onto Roo’s. “My mother says that poking around at people’s private lives is like rummaging through their bedroom closets. You might find a few interesting knickknacks, but eventually you’ll discover something in an old shoebox that you’ll wish you hadn’t seen.”
    â€œI’ve seen everything,” Roo replied evenly.
    Violet looked at her with pity—a thing that Roo generally detested but somehow with Violet she