'Impossible,' I said.
'Impossible how?' Michael asked.
I knew what he meant. Impossible for Resnick to have fathered a child with his girlfriend? No. These things happened, even circa 1950. But impossible for the girlfriend to be Mother? Yes, if you asked me. I remembered all the tales Mother told of her years in Paris--the art and music lessons, the exhibitions, the galleries, the fashion shows, the opera, the ballet, the midnight meals in bistros, the flirtations in cafes. How could even Mother talk so blithely of that time if she'd spent the first nine months of it waiting out an unwanted pregnancy?
'I still don't believe it,' I said. 'But if he publishes that damned book, someone will believe it. Think of the embarrassment.'
'Oh, I don't know,' Michael said, the corners of his mouth twitching. 'I'm not sure your Mother wouldn't like a wild unsubstantiated rumor that in her youth she was the mistress of a famous artist.'
'She'd eat it up,' I agreed. 'But Dad would be mortified. And the cops would have yet another reason for suspecting him of Resnick's murder.'
'True,' Michael said. 'Look, it's freezing out here; can't we finish reading this inside?'
'What if someone sees it!' I protested.
'I'll pretend it's a master's thesis from one of my students,' Michael said. 'I won't let anybody else read it, and I'll hide it in my suitcase, under the dirty socks, where no one would want to touch it even if they found it.'
'Oh, all right,' I said, smiling in spite of myself. 'I have to admit, I'm not sure I can take much more of this cold.'
And is Dad out in this cold? I wondered as we walked back to the house. Or has he hung on to his knapsack, with the chemical hand warmer and the body heat-conserving blanket? Is he curled up warm and dry somewhere? Is he…
No, I'd worry about that tomorrow.
When we arrived back in the living room, Rob had disappeared. Michael settled down with the manuscript. I picked up the photo albums and leafed through them until I found the pages that showed Mother and the young Victor Resnick, and brooded over the smiling black-and-white images.
Mrs. Fenniman appeared occasionally with plates of food, sighed when she saw our third helpings of everything were untouched, and clomped back out into the kitchen without speaking.
Suddenly, a shower of plaster rained down on our heads. I looked up, to see a large muddy Reebok protruding from the ceiling.
'Oh damn,' came Rob's voice from beyond the Reebok.
'Rob? Are you all right?'
The Reebok wiggled slightly, dislodging more plaster. I adjusted my plate to make sure my unwanted coleslaw got its fair share of debris.
'Yeah, I guess so.'
'Do you need any help?' Michael called.
'No, I'm fine,' Rob answered.
The Reebok gyrated wildly for a few seconds, then dropped down another six inches and was joined by its mate.
'Actually, I guess I could use a little help after all,' Rob said.
Michael and I abandoned our plates, grabbed our flashlights, and climbed upstairs, where, at the end of the hallway, the trapdoor in the ceiling gaped open and a small rickety ladder led up into the attic.
The attic didn't have a floor, just a rolling meadow of fluffy pink insulation crisscrossed by the two-by-fours that formed the rafters. Here and there, large flat pieces of plywood placed across the rafters formed storage spaces for boxes and trunks. None of them anywhere near the ladder, unfortunately. Evidently, Rob had stepped on a piece of plywood too light to hold his weight. Both feet disappeared into a rough-edged hole in the plywood, while he lay sprawled backward on the pink insulation.
'I see you found the jigsaw puzzles,' I remarked. Several cardboard puzzle boxes lay nearby, and Rob lay half-covered by the brightly colored pieces of several enormous puzzles.
'I was looking for something to do,' Rob said. 'I saw the puzzles up here when I fetched the photo albums.'
'You're lucky you didn't fall through,' Michael said. 'You're in the part of the attic over the living room. It'd be a long way down.'
Rob shuddered.
'What's going on up there?' came Mrs. Fenniman's voice.
We extricated Rob from the plywood, helped him back to the trapdoor, and watched as he limped away to be patched up and cosseted by Mrs. Fenniman. Michael was about to follow him, but he turned to see why I wasn't coming.
'I'll be down in a little bit,' I said.
'You've found something?' Michael asked eagerly.
'No, but it occurs to me that there's an awful lot of old junk in the attic besides the photo albums,' I said. 'I'm just going to poke around for a while and see what turns up.'
'I'll go down and guard the manuscript,' Michael said.
Nothing much turned up in the first dozen boxes I opened. Actually, I'd have found some of the stuff fascinating at another time. Vintage clothes, trinkets, and souvenirs of bygone eras. More photos, this time in boxes. Even letters and diaries. A collection of taxidermy, including a stuffed squirrel wearing a jeweled collar and a wolverine in a Groucho Marx nose and a neon Hawaiian-print shirt. Fascinating stuff, really. But most of it more than fifty years old and none of it relevant. At the bottom of the last box I found about a dozen faded brown manila file folders, tied in a packet with some string. I was struggling to untie the knot when I suddenly heard a commotion down in the main part of the house.
Now what? I thought, tucking the file folders under my arm and carefully walking along the rafters to the trapdoor. I heard Mother's voice wailing.
'I don't believe you; she's lost, too!'
I stuck my head down out of the trapdoor. Mother stood at the edge of the upper hallway, one hand clutching the railing, the other pressed to her forehead, and her eyes raised heavenward. Vintage Sarah Bernhardt.
'How could you let her do it, Michael?' she asked mournfully. 'How can you sit there when Meg is out there in the storm, frantically searching for her father?'
'Because I'm not out there in the storm, Mother,' I said. 'I'm up here in the attic.'
Mother turned, looked at me, and blinked.
'Well, what are you doing in the attic?' she asked in an aggravated tone. 'Why aren't you doing something useful? Looking for your father, for example?'
I could see her working up to another dramatic scene, and I was tired of the game. I'd been calm, patient, and reassuring the last million times she'd popped out of her room. So by way of a change, while she continued to wail about poor Dad out in the storm, I stuck the folders under my arm, climbed down the ladder, and went downstairs, where I stepped over a pile of croquet mallets, dodged around an upended picnic table, and jerked open the front door.
A gust of wind burst in, carrying with it a half-crushed lobster pot, sending Rob's papers flying like giant snow-flakes, knocking flowerpots and other breakable objects onto the floor, and spraying showers of rain halfway, across the room.
'Damn it, Meg, close that door!' Rob shouted, snatching at his notes. Mrs. Fenniman and Michael tried to grab as many breakable objects as they could and hold them down. Mother simply sighed and limped back into her room.
Having presumably made my point about the impossibility of searching for Dad in the middle of a hurricane, I stuck the folders under the umbrella stand, got a better grip on the door, and began forcing it closed. But suddenly, I suddenly noticed something outside.
There was a body on the porch.
