Without a word or a glance, Mark turned to them and went up.
Jimbo came through the attic door and saw that the roof formed an inverted V with its peak about eight feet above the floor. From this peak, the roof slanted steeply down over a hodgepodge of tables, chairs, and dressers.
Ten minutes later, Jimbo wiped sweat from his forehead and looked across the attic to see his friend methodically searching the drawers of a highboy. How many hours would Mark insist spending on this search?
Sweat seemed to leak from Jimbo’s every pore. When he leaned over a chest or opened a box, sweat dripped into his eyes and plopped softly onto the surface of whatever he was trying to look at.
Just off to the right, Jimbo thought he saw an upright human body wrapped in a sheet, and fear blasted through his system. With a small cry of shock, he straightened up and turned to face the shrouded figure.
Jimbo was staring at his own pop-eyed, shiny face looking at him from within a full-length mirror in an oval wooden frame. He had turned himself into a horror movie cliche.
“Nothing. Jesus, it just feels creepy, messing around up here.”
“There has to be something,” Mark said, mostly to himself. He wrenched a tiny drawer out of a flimsy-looking lamp table. “Whoever they were, they left in a hurry. Look at the way this stuff is crammed in here. Even if they were trying to hide shit, probably they got too sloppy to do it right.”
“You know,” Jimbo said, “I’d just like to get out of this attic.”
Twenty minutes later, they were going back down the narrow staircase. The second floor felt ten degrees cooler than the attic. As a result of having kicked the legs of a little wooden table into splinters, Mark limped slightly during the descent.
Thinking of what waited for them on the ground floor, Jimbo almost hoped that they would spend a long time upstairs.
The second floor of 3323 North Michigan Street consisted of two bedrooms and a bathroom linked by a common hallway. In the smaller of the bedrooms, two single beds, one with a deeply stained mattress, had been pushed against opposite walls. The bare wooden floor was scuffed, scratched, and dirty. Mark followed Jimbo into the room, frowned at the stained mattress, and flipped it on its side. Dull brown smears in a pattern like paisley covered the bottom of the mattress.
“Ugh, look at that shit.”
“You think it’s shit? I don’t, I think—”
“You don’t know what it is, and neither do I.” Mark lowered the awful mattress back into place. Then he bent down and looked under the bed. He did the same on the other side of the room.
Mark gave the bathroom a desultory once-over. Dead spider webs hung in tatters from the window, and a living spider only slightly smaller than a mouse fought to scale the inner slope of the bathtub. Gritty white powder lay across the floor tiles.
A double bed butted against the inner wall of the larger bedroom. The same gritty white powder covered the floor, and when Jimbo looked up he saw yellow-brown wounds in the ceiling. A wooden crucifix hung over the headboard.
Mark dipped down and looked under the bed. He uttered a sound that combined surprise and disgust and duckwalked backward, trailing his finger along the dusty join between two planks.
Before Jimbo could ask what he was doing, Mark jumped up. He wandered to the opposite wall.
Jimbo went to the window. Again, the unfamiliar angle distorted a well-known landscape. The buildings tilted forward, diminished by perspective and also by what felt like someone else’s hatred, suspicion, and fear. He shuddered, and the scene before him snapped back into ordinary reality.
“I have this feeling . . .” Mark was leaning against the inner wall. Slowly, he turned his head and regarded the closet.
“About what?” Jimbo said.
Mark moved along the wall, opened the door, and leaned in.
“Anything there?”
Mark disappeared inside.
Jimbo moved toward the closet and heard a sound as of something sliding off a shelf. Smiling, Mark reappeared through the door. He was holding a dust-covered object Jimbo needed a moment to recognize as an old photo album.
Jimbo had no way of knowing, and Mark had no intention of telling him, that the smile on his face had been inspired not by the photo album, but by something else altogether—a door set into the back of the closet. A certain theory about the house he was at last exploring had begun to form in his mind, and the door inside the closet seemed to confirm it.
“Bingo!”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “Let’s take a look.” He went to the window and held the album in the light. Dark gray with accumulated dust, it had once been a deep forest green. Quilted plastic rectangles made to resemble cloth surrounded a central plate that read FAVORITE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS. Mark opened the cover to the first page of photographs.
A heavy-set young man wearing a long black coat and heavy boots bent sideways on the bumper of an old Ford and shielded his face with a hand. In the second photograph the same young man’s face was a stationary blur as he stood with his arm around a smiling girl whose dead-straight hair fell nearly to her waist.
“I don’t believe it,” Mark said. “Look at this.”
Shrouded by his long coat, his back to the camera, the man bent over a table littered with clamps, sanders, and jars of nails.
Then came a photograph taken directly outside this house. The lawn was barer, the trees looked smaller. Showing only the top of his head, the man held the branchy arms of a small boy of five or six.
As if having a son had released something in him, the three photographs that followed caught him in the midst of a social gathering seemingly located at a lakeside tavern. Wearing his usual garb, the man had been photographed in conversation with other men of his age or older. Here he was standing on a dock next to the tavern, here he perched on an overturned rowboat with two other men and a woman with plucked eyebrows and a cigarette in her mouth. In every photograph, the man’s stance made his face unavailable to the camera.
“What’s your name, you asshole?” Mark said. “Don’t want to show your face to the camera, do you?”
“I’m sorry, this is creeping me out,” Jimbo said. “The guy in your kitchen didn’t show his face, either.”
“Because this is him, get it? He’s
“This is way too scary for me,” Jimbo said. “Sorry. We should never have come in here. We should have left the whole thing alone right from the start.”
“Shut up.”
Mark was scowling down at the photographs. He abruptly bent his neck and lowered his head closer to the page. “I wonder . . .” He raised his hand and pointed at a rangy, cowpoke-like man also seated on the overturned rowboat. “Does that guy look familiar to you?”
Mark was never going to let him off the hook. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes, I heard you, but I can’t do anything about it. Now look at the guy I’m pointing at.”
Jimbo thought the man looked a little like the Marlboro Man in old advertisements, but he knew better than to say this out loud.
“Come on, look close. Imagine him with a lot of wrinkles.”
“
“Sure, it is. Hillyard knew this guy, see? He’s talking to him, they’re having a few beers together. We have to talk to Old Man Hillyard.”
“I could do that,” Jimbo said, seeing an excuse for getting out of the house.
“Yeah, he likes you now, doesn’t he?” After twisting his ankle the week previous, Mr. Hillyard had signaled to Jimbo and asked him to pick up his groceries for him. “Go see him this afternoon. In fact, talk to everyone on the block who looks old enough to have known this guy.”
Now Jimbo’s gratitude at an honorable reason for escaping the genuinely oppressive atmosphere of the house
