Forgotten homes of spiders dangled from the rafters, the errant dust the only prey caught in their clutches. The air smelled of the sea. I began moving toward the south side of the house, away from my room.
Boxes and trunks dotted the walls, arranged haphazardly wherever they were deposited. The grime of long memories coated the containers I ran my fingers across. Locks and old tape kept time out. Nothing here that I could see had been disturbed. But someone had been here. If not taking something-perhaps hiding something?
I looked for the signs that any container or object in sight was new. Nothing gleamed as freshly unwrapped from plastic. There was little here that spoke of recent years.
I stared down at my shoes, now smeared with dust. The floor itself was dirty and I should have thought to see if the intruder had left footprints in his wake. I began backtracking along the floor, keeping the candle's gleam close to the boards.
I heard the wind gust against the glass, the rain building. I thought again of Aunt Sass, yelling out in the rain for her son. I felt a tug of concern for her, to my surprise. Perhaps it was easier now to understand her vitriolic reaction to my wavering about Bob Don's status in my life. She knew what hell he'd been through after Paul's death; maybe she felt he needed a new connection of family and I was his best chance, something gone right after the fabric of his old family became irreparably stained.
Then I saw it-a tennis shoe's tread in the grit. Then another. And another, stepping back over the first. The prints stopped at an array of boxes and trunks, outwardly indiscernible from the rest of the Goertz family detritus that clogged the attic. I put the candle close to the cartons, looking for signs of recent contact.
I finally found one trunk where the dust had been brushed away from the clamps. A fat blot disturbed the grit on the floor. I guessed someone had knelt here, and I believed it had been a man-the knee and shoe prints were large, like the Goertz men. I eased the trunk's lid open. It moaned in quiet protest.
Clothes lay in militarily perfect folds, creases still sharp, although the garments themselves smelled musty. I fingered through the stacked shirts and pants.
They were a boy's clothes, long unworn.
A catcher's mitt, a cracked softball nestled in the web of its leather, lay on one side of the trunk. I brushed fingers against the glove. It was silky with wear, softened in the way only a child's sweat will. I had a shortstop's glove with the same feel back home, and I smiled with the memory of it. A baseball cap for the Houston Astros, fitted for a child's head, lay perfectly next to the mitt. The logo was old, the colorful stripes left over from the early 1980s. I remembered it-I'd worn a similar cap myself.
I pulled the cap out carefully. For some reason, I felt compelled to treat these items with reverence, as though I'd unearthed them from a long-buried time capsule. Below the cap was a stack of familiar blue-backed books. I smiled again as I withdrew the top volumes from the stack. The Flickering Torch Mystery. The Secret of the Caves. The Shattered Helmet. All classics from Franklin W. Dixon's Hardy Boys series. The spines were worn with reading and rereading. These books had been loved. This series had been my favorite boyhood reading as well, tagging along on adventures with the intrepid Frank and Joe. I had even bragged once to Sister that when they made a Hardy Boys movie, I'd be the natural choice for Joe. She'd laughed at my arrogance.
These belongings could have been mine.
I put the books back in the trunk. I rooted about in the clothes some more. Finally I found, at the bottom, a V-neck burgundy sweater, the kind every boy is given during some Christmas and naturally loathes. A diamond-shaped monogram of BGR, the G huge and pointed for the surname, was sewn on the right breast of the sweater.
Brian Riley Goertz.
I felt as though I'd just brushed the satin in a coffin and my hand had come away smeared with some noxious substance. I wiped my fingers against my khaki shorts, feeling uneasy.
I groped through the clothes. Either something had been taken from this trunk, or someone wanted to mull over memories of Brian, or-
Someone wanted to hide something, and chose this as their cubbyhole. My fingers brushed through the garments again, and I touched cardboard. Sandwiched between two shirts was a small box, the sort used to store jewelry. It had been taped shut, but I peeled the tape off and opened the box.
An assortment of men's jewelry lay inside. An old elastic watchband snaked its way through two rings. I examined the booty; the watch was an old Timex, and the face of it was smashed. One ring was a simple wedding band with no inscription; the other ring was a college ring, for Corpus Christi State University.
A man's jewelry, secreted among a dead boy's belongings.
This jewelry, then, wasn't young Brian Goertz's. Paul's, perhaps, given to his son? But if so, why pack it away after Brian's death? Unless Deborah couldn't bear to have her father's effects, or didn't want them. The jewelry box seemed an intruder in the trunk of Brian's belongings, and-
Realization shuddered down my spine. A wedding band. A smashed watch. A college ring from the city that was the cradle of the Goertz family. Paul Goertz's body had never been found, according to the family.
This jewelry might be confirmation of everything Gretchen told me. I imagined a dimly lit sculptor's studio in Corpus Christi, Nora Goertz's dead body sprawled across the putty-speckled floor, her face a wet red mess, the smell of gunfire crisping the air. So what then? Paul Goertz turns from the carnage and calmly slips off his watch, his wedding ring, and his college ring before he goes to stalk Gretchen and meet his own death? It made no sense.
The picture seemed all wrong. Maybe not-if he was going on the run, and the jewelry could be used to identify him. Had Paul's mind worked that way? And perhaps he'd removed his broken watch, if Nora had smashed it while fighting for her life. Perhaps.
Or perhaps the family, complicit in their burial of Paul's body to shield Bob Don, stripped the corpse of its jewelry before disposing of it forever.
That made no sense. Did they plan on presenting the watch and rings to Brian one day- here, my boy, these belonged to your disappeared, presumed dead daddy. Wear them in health. No.
Why would the Goertzes save this? It could be found one day, and implicate them all. A slim chance, yes, but why even take the risk?
I thought for a minute. No easy answer reared its head.
I emptied the rest of the trunk and found nothing else that piqued my interest. I ran my fingers along the trunk's lining, but no mysterious catches or bumps to indicate hidey-holes presented themselves. I leaned back on my heels and sighed. An armor of falsehoods covered this damn family, an unyielding barrier I'd have to blast my way through to get to the protected core of truth.
I stood and hurried down the length of the attic, looking for other entrances. I found one. Over Candace's room, at the other end of the house. Damn. She was probably out and whoever came up here took advantage of her absence. I walked slowly back toward the trapdoor leading to my room, feeling an odd coolness descend on the attic, as though the outside rain robbed the air of its July heat. I knelt again by Brian's forlorn trunk.
What happened here? A strange heat kindled in my heart, as though I could reach past time and death to touch my cousin's hand. My father killed your father. I'm so sorry.
My fingers brushed the trunk's surface, and as if in answer, a chill blasted through the attic, freezing me to the spot. Iciness prickled my skin through my T-shirt and walking shorts. I kept my head bowed, stunned by the sensation, not daring to look up.
Because I was certain that if I did, I would see a young boy standing there, shimmering in the light, insubstantial as air, with silvered, blank eyes.
No, I chided myself. You and your stupid imagination.