Learning Between The Walls

     After I had pried enough boards off of the wall to get inside, I began to pull things out of the walls. There were two filing boxes filled with paperwork, and most importantly, a map of the united states, covered in marks and post-it notes. I drug them out through the hole I had torn out, and we started to sift through the papers, as morning light rose into noon, and barely fell though the windows.
     The map was the simplest thing to understand. The locations on it were places that Gregory had hidden clues for Allen. Most of them, it turns out, he had already recovered. There were a couple in the midwest that were unaccounted for, but we weren't sure we needed them. The boxes, meanwhile were loaded with new information. We pored over it, lists of names, mostly, a lot of them, Allen pointed out, were probably the same names of people who had been on the list he found on the servers in the desert. We sifted through the names for most of the day, and didn't feel like we had gotten anything new.
     I decided to climb back into the wall, and give it a second look, just in case. The first thing I found in the wall was the latch that would have opened the wall up. There was a cable from a bike's brakes running along the wall, connected on one end to a latch, and disappearing into the wall. I flipped the latch, and realized that the wall over the bathtub was the door I should have been looking for. The other end of the brake cable was hooked to the toilet paper roll. When you pulled on the handle, the door would unlatch. Oops.
     But, looking from the outside of the tub, I saw what I really wanted to find. Right across from the hole, on the opposite wall, was a little shelf between two studs, and on top of that, was a newspaper. I brought it out, and I started looking through all of the articles. The newspaper was printed funny, and the word draft was all over it, which I guess meant that this wasn't a published issue. I looked though it, until I found a smallish article near the middle "Children Poisoned By Popular Toys". I read the article and took it to Allen. The children had been poisoned by an additive to the plastic used to extend the plastic, making higher volumes of plastic at lower cost. In theory, the additive was a real game-changer, because it would cost a lot less to produce plastic, and would also mean that recycling plastic would be able to produce more plastic. Unfortunately, the plastic made with the extender, when left in sunlight for extended periods of time became incredibly toxic, and a lot of children had died from it. It was on my second reading that I noticed the name of the author. It stuck in my head, because it sounded familiar, and then I realized why: the author was on the lists I had been reading earlier. I looked back through the paperwork, and found him, listed as deceased.