And yet, I thought, it was more unlike than like the room I had imagined. I had thought that Bob Bandolier would provide his family with devotional pictures, the Sermon on the Mount or the Feeding of the Multitude, but there were no reproductions or chromographs on the walls, only wallpaper. I had imagined a small shelf of books with the Bible and paperback Westerns and mysteries, but the only shelves in the living room were shallow, glass, and rimmed with black metal piping—once they had held china figurines. A high-backed brocade chair with rolled arms stood beside the telephone table, and another matching chair without arms faced into the room from beside the other, empty table. His and hers.
'It's like a—like a museum of 1945,' John said, turning to me with an incredulous smile.
'That's what it is,' I said.
I sat down on the chaise and looked sideways. Through a window in the unadorned wall, I could just about make out the side of the Belknap house. Through a matching window in her own living room, Hannah had seen the adult Fee sitting just where I was now. John was looking behind the chairs and beneath the couch. Fee came at night and used only a flashlight, so he had never noticed the grease spots on the brocade chairs or the rim of grime along the edges of the couch cushions.
John opened the door opposite that into the common entry. I stood up and followed him into the bedroom where Anna Bandolier had died of starvation and neglect.
A rusty black stain wavered down the middle of the bare mattress on the double bed. John looked under the bed, and I opened Bob Bandolier's walnut clothing press. Two wire hangers hung from a metal rail, and a third lay deep in forty-year-old dust on the bottom of the press. 'The drawers,' John said, and we both opened one of the big drawers on either side of the little mirrored vanity table against the wall. Mine was empty. John pushed.his drawer closed and looked at me with both impatience and exasperation.
'Okay,' he said. 'Where are they?'
'After Bob Bandolier got rid of the Sunchanas, there were no more upstairs tenants. So he might have put the boxes there.' Then I remembered something else. 'And there's a basement, where they used to do the washing.'
'I'll look upstairs.' He brushed the dust off his knees and gave me another tight-mouthed look. 'Let's get out of here as soon as we can. I don't trust this fog.'
I could almost
'All right?' John asked.
I nodded, and he left the bedroom. I turned my back on the boy and walked out through the mists and vapors that emanated from everything I thought about him and went back through the living room toward the kitchen.
As in my old house, the basement door was next to the stove. I went down the wooden steps in the dark, letting my eyes adjust.
A long wooden workbench stood across the gray concrete floor from the bottom of the stairs. Against the wall above the back of the bench hung a row of coffee cans and jam jars filled with nails and screws. Soon I made out the shapes of boxes beneath the bench, and I exhaled with mingled relief and triumph and went to the bench and bent down and pulled the nearest box toward me.
It was about the size of a case of whiskey, and the top of the box had been folded, not taped, shut. I wrestled with the interlocking cardboard panels before all four of them sprang free at once, revealing a layer of dark fabric. Fee had wrapped his notes in cloth after seeing what the rats had done to them in the Green Woman. I grabbed a loose handful of cloth and pulled up. The cloth came out of the box without resistance. Sleeves flopped out of the bundle. It was a suit jacket. I dropped it on the floor and put my hands back into the box. This time I pulled out the trousers to the suit. Beneath the trousers, carelessly folded, were two more suits, one dark blue, the other dark gray. I stuffed the first suit back into the box, pushed it back under the workbench, and pulled another carton toward me. When I got the top open, I found a pile of white shirts with Arrow labels. They were grimy from the dust sifting down from the workbench and stiff with starch.
The next box held three more suits folded onto a layer of wrinkled boxer shorts and balled-up undershirts, the next a jumble of black shoes, and the final one at least a hundred wide, late-forties neckties tangled together like snakes. My knees creaked when I stood up.
Fee Bandolier had expelled the Dumkys, cleaned up what was important to him, and turned the lock on the door, sealing the past inside a bell jar.
A wide gray spiderweb hung between the wringer of the old washing machine and the slanting ledge of the small rectangular basement window in the wall behind it. I walked slowly down the length of the basement. A black bicycle the size of a Shetland pony leaned against the wall. I turned toward the bulky furnace in the center of the basement, seeing another row of boxes in the darkness. I moved forward, and the row of boxes mutated into the long rectangular dish of a coaster wagon. I pushed it with my foot, and it rolled backward on squeaking wheels, dragging its wooden handle with it. When it moved, I saw another box hidden between the coaster and the furnace.
'There,' I said, and bent down to get my hands on it. Wisps and tatters of old spiderwebs hung from the box. It had been moved recently. I braced my muscles and jerked the box off the ground. It was nearly weightless. Whatever it contained was not hundreds of handwritten pages. I carried the box around the furnace toward the foot of the stairs and heard John walking across the kitchen floor.
I set the box down and opened the four flaps on its top. There was another box inside it. 'Damn it,' I said, and jumped up to go to the front of the furnace.
'Find anything?' John was at the top of the stairs.
'I don't know,' I said. I pulled down the handle and swung open the door.
'There's nothing upstairs. Just bare rooms.' Every other stair groaned beneath his weight. 'What are you doing?'
'Checking the furnace,' I said. 'I just found two empty boxes.'
The interior of the furnace was about the size of a baby carriage. Fine white ash lay across the bottom of the furnace, and black soot coated the grate. John came up beside me.
'I think we lost them,' I said.
'Hold on,' John said. 'He didn't burn anything here. See that stuff?' He pointed at a nearly invisible area on the furnace wall, a section slightly lighter in color than the rest of the interior that I had taken for some kind of stain. John reached into the furnace and dragged it down with his fingers—the ancient spiderweb pulled toward him, then broke and collapsed into a single dirty gray rope.
The boxes lay where I had left them, the flaps of the outer box open on the smooth side of the one inside it. When I shook them, something rattled. 'Let's pull them a,' I said.
John came forward and flattened his hands on the box. I thrust my fingers inside and tugged. The inner box slid smoothly out. The brown tape across its top flaps had been slit down the middle. I bent up the flaps. Another, smaller box was inside it. I pulled out the third box. About the size of a toaster, it too had been cut open before being inserted into the nest. When I shook it, a papery, slithery sound came from inside the box.
'Guess you found the easter egg,' John said.
I righted the box on the floor and opened it. A square white envelope lay in the bottom of the carton. I picked it up. The envelope was thicker and heavier than I expected. I carried it to the light at the head of the stairs. John watched me open the flap.
'Pictures,' he said.
The old square, white-bordered photographs looked tiny by contemporary standards. I took them out of the envelope and stared at the first one. Some Dumky child had scribbled over its surface. Beneath the crazy lines, the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn was still visible. I moved the photograph to the bottom of the pile and looked at the next. At first, it looked like a copy of the photograph I had just seen. There were fewer scribbles on this one. Then I saw that the photographer had moved a few feet nearer the opening of the tunnel, and the fan of vertical bricks at the top of the arch showed more clearly through the overlay of scribbles. The next one showed a neatly made bed beneath a framed painting invisible behind the mirrored explosion of the flash. Beside the bed, half of a door filled the frame. A little Dumky had scratched XXXXXXXXXXX across the door and the wall. He had run out of patience before he got to the bed, and the X's broke down into scrawls and loops. 'What's that?' John asked.
The next photograph was of the same bed and door taken from an angle that included the corner of a
