Angel looked down at the plans.
"There was something in the attic," she said.
"What! What?"
"Nothing, most likely. But you know the chimney comes up from the living room, runs up one end of your bedroom where you have a fireplace, goes through the attic and out the roof."
"Right."
"It seemed to me that in the attic there was too much chimney."
"They might be sealed up in there," I said breathlessly.
"They might not. But we can see."
"Who can we call to knock it down?"
"Shoot, I can do it. But you got to think, here, Roe. What if there's nothing there? What if you're just knocking down a perfectly good chimney for the hell of it?"
"It's my chimney." I crossed my arms on my chest and looked up at her. "So it is," she said. "Then let's go. You go up there and look, and I'll go to the garage and get a sledgehammer and one or two other things we might need." I let down the attic steps and climbed up. In the heat of the little attic, with sunlight coming in through the circular vent at the back of the house, I calmed down. The attic was floored, with the old original floorboards, wide and heavy. They creaked a little as I crossed to look at the chimney. Sure enough, the bricks looked a little different from the bricks downstairs, though I couldn't say they looked newer. And the chimney was wider. I remained skeptical. I felt sure the police would have noticed fresh brickwork.
Angel came up the stairs in a moment, the sledgehammer in her hand. She eyed the bricks. She slid on a pair of clear plastic safety goggles. I stared at her.
"Brick fragments," she said practically. "You should stand well back, since you don't have safety glasses."
I retreated as far as I could, back into an area where I could barely stand, and on Angel's further advice I turned my back to the action. I heard the thunk as the hammer hit the bricks, and then more and more thunks, until gradually that sound became accompanied by the noises of cracking and falling. Then Angel was still, and I turned.
She was looking at something in the heap of dislodged bricks and mortar chips.
"Oh, shit," she breathed.
I felt my skin crawl.
I scuttled over to Angel and stood by her looking down as she was doing. In the rubble was a small figure wrapped in blankets blackened by smoke and soot.
My hand went up over my mouth.
We stood for the longest moments of my life, staring down at that little bundle. Then I knelt and with shaking hands began to unwrap the blanket. A tiny white face looked up at me.
I screamed bloody murder.
I think Angel did, too, though she afterward denied it hotly. "It's a doll," she said, kneeling beside me and gripping my shoulders. "It's a doll, Roe. It's china." She shook me, and I believe she thought she was being gentle.
Later on, after we'd both showered and Angel had called a mason to come repair the chimney, we speculated on how the compartment had gotten sealed up, how the doll had been left inside. I figured that the story of Sarah May Zinsner's desire for a closet and her husband's sealing one up out of sheer cussedness had its basis in whatever had happened by the chimney. We ended up deciding that she'd ordered an extra frame of brickwork for shelving, to store—who knew what? Maybe she'd intended the shelving for the use of the maid who may have been living in the attic. But that final change had been the straw that had metaphorically broken John L. Zinsner's back. He'd had the shelves bricked up, and while the mason was working, perhaps one of the daughters of the house had set her wrapped-up "baby" temporarily (she thought) on the shelves. Now I had it, all these years later, and it had scared the hell out of Angel and me.
Somehow, when my mother called while I was slicing strawberries for lunch, I didn't tell her about my morning's adventure. She would be horrified that I was looking for the Julius family; also, I didn't care to relate how deeply upset I'd been when I'd seen that tiny white face.
For once, she didn't sense that I was less than happy. That was remarkable, since we spoke on the phone or in person almost every day. She was all the family I had, since my father had moved with my stepbrother to California. That was something I had in common, I realized, with the Julius family. They had been nearly as untangled from the southern cobweb of family connections as I was. "I had a closing this morning," Mother said. She was as proud of each sale as though it were her first, which I found sort of endearing. When I was in my early teens, when she'd begun to work but before she was independent and very successful, I'd felt each house she sold should be celebrated by a party. Mother seemed just as driven now as she had been after she'd separated from my father and become a needy wage earner; my father had never been too good about sending child support payments.
"Which one?" I asked, to show polite interest.
"The Anderton house," she said. "Remember, I told you I had it sold last week. I was scared until the last minute that they were going to back out. Some idiot told them about Tonia Lee Greenhouse." Tonia Lee, a local realtor, had been murdered in the master bedroom. "But it went through." "That'll make Mandy happy. By the way," the similar names had reminded me, "we're going to dinner at Bill Anderson's tonight. You sold them a house, didn't you? What's his wife like?"
"Nice enough, not too bright, if I remember correctly. They're renting, with an option to buy."
After we said our good-byes, and I returned to my task at the sink, hurrying because the attic escapade had made me late, I tried to imagine what my mother would do in my present predicament—but it was like trying to picture the pope tap dancing.
Sally arrived punctually, in a very expensive outfit that she intended to wear to rags. Sally had been forty-two for a number of years. She was an attractive woman with short permed bronzey hair. She was neither slim nor fat, neither short nor tall.
During the past two or three years, Sally had been close to breaking into the big time with a larger paper, but it just hadn't happened. She had settled for being the mentor and terror of the young cub reporters who regularly came and went at the Sentinel as they learned their trade. For the first time, Sally gave me a ritual hug. It was a recognition of the big things I'd undergone since last we met, the fact that I was now a respectable married woman, and not only married, but married to a real prize, an attractive plant manager who presumably had an excellent income. This really can all be conveyed in a hug.
"You look great, Roe," Sally pronounced.
I don't know why people seem impelled to tell brides that. Is regular sex supposed to make you prettier? A number of acquaintances had told me how great I looked since we'd come back from the honeymoon. Maybe only married sex made you look better.
"Thanks, Sally. Come on in and see the house."
"I haven't been in here in years. Not since it happened. Oh, who would have known there were hardwood floors! It looks wonderful!" Sally followed me around, exclaiming appropriately at each point of interest. As I put lunch on the table, she told me all about her son Perry and the wonderful girl he'd met in his therapy group, and about her husband Paul and the shakiness of their new marriage.
"Surely you can work it out, Sally! You had such high hopes when you married him, and it's only been a few months!"
"Fourteen," she said precisely, spearing a strawberry with her fork. "Oh. Well. Would marriage counseling help, do you think? Aubrey Scott is really good."
"Maybe," she said. "We'll talk about it when Paul gets back from Augusta." "So, can you tell me all about the disappearance?" I asked gently, when she'd poked at her dill pickle for a few seconds of recovery. "Do you have the stories from the Sentinel?"