“Why?”
“Because,” she says, jutting her hands out wide. “He has one of your boxes. In his office. I opened the wrong door on the way to the bathroom, and I saw it.”
“What?”
“I saw a box that’s definitely one of your grandmother’s. This one had the same flood mark. That line across the bottom, about four inches up. I’ve seen that line. I swear to you. It’s one of the same boxes.”
I shake my head at her. “If there was a flood in this house, there was probably a flood next door.”
“Nope,” she says. “This one had an orange ‘2’ on it.”
My stomach drops. “While you were in the bathroom, I asked about the divorce. He said it never happened.”
“He lied,” Aisha says. “And this isn’t like one of those things he forgot.”
“How do you know?”
“The box. It was open. It was next to his desk chair, and it was open.”
We stay up late formulating a plan to get a chance to look at the box. It’s tough, because there’s no conceivable way to get Aisha and him talking while I sneak back to his office.
“Maybe you could do an exotic African dance for him?”
She shoots me a sideways look, and I realize that she can joke about race. I can’t.
We simply can’t come up with a way to get me in there.
“We need to see the box when he’s not around,” I say, and Aisha nods.
“How bad do you want to see it?” she asks.
“Pretty bad,” I say. “I mean, the fact that he’s actively lying is creepy.”
“Well. What if I told you we could get in without breaking and entering?” she asks. “Did he have an alarm system?”
“The dude doesn’t have a computer. I’m sure he wouldn’t know what do with an alarm system.”
“Up to you,” she says. “I have a feeling there’s an easy way to get in.”
I have trouble sleeping, and I wake up around three in the morning and curse myself for not having a glass of water nearby. I go upstairs and pour myself one, and I drink it by the light of the moon, next to the open window over the sink. I stare up at the gray-black Billings sky, barely lucid, and I let my eyes wander over to the pastor’s place, where, tomorrow — today, really — we will be entering-but-not-breaking. How? And what will happen if we get caught?
My eyes scan over a small, round, second-story window, right under an arch. I see what I swear are eyes, staring back at me.
And then, just like that, they are gone.
FIVE MINUTES AFTER the pastor leaves for work in the morning, Aisha leads me to his front door and illustrates her devious plan. She turns the doorknob and pushes open the door.
“This is Billings. Lots of people don’t lock their doors here,” she says as we walk into the living room. It feels weird to be in there without him knowing, but on the other hand, at least we haven’t broken and entered; we have simply entered.
The door to his office is closed. She pushes the door open.
She exhales. “Shoot.” There is no box there.
“Damn,” I say back.
We wander the house, peeking into other rooms. The box is nowhere to be found. I begin to wonder if she was seeing things yesterday. We scour his bedroom. No box anywhere. Then I think about last night, and seeing him in an upstairs room. I know it’s a two-story house, but we open all the doors and don’t come upon a staircase.
“There has to be a way upstairs,” I say, leaving out the part about me seeing him last night. I don’t need to make this any creepier than it already is. Aisha takes the lead, wandering until she comes to a stop next to the bathroom. We look up. A string dangles from a square in the ceiling.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, there is.”
She pulls the string and slowly a hatch opens. A ladder comes down, and we climb up. She goes first, and I follow, staring at her apple-shaped ass.
The room upstairs has such a low ceiling that we both have to hunch our shoulders. At the far end sits a window alcove with a brown, high-backed, weathered leather chair facing the attic. I maneuver behind it to the window and see that it looks down into our house, through the window above our kitchen sink. As I do, the chair swivels a bit.
Next to the chair is a small table with a half-full coffee cup on it. Probably from last night, when I saw him up here. There is an album cover next to the cup. At the mouth of the alcove is a record player with a record on it. I’ve never seen one in real life before.
“Uh,” Aisha says, pointing across the room. I turn around. The “2” box. A shiver runs through me.
She opens the box, and I walk over to the pastor’s chair. On the table next to the coffee cup, the album cover reads “Steve Forbert” in big red letters. Mr. Forbert has a mullet and a pug nose. He looks like no one who is alive in the world currently. The eighties. Wow. I pick up the album, turn it over, and a name is scrawled across the top in black Magic Marker:
Smith.
“My grandfather’s,” I say, almost like I’m croaking out the words, and Aisha comes over and takes the album cover from me.
“It was just out on the table?” she asks. I nod. The album itself is on the record player.
She hands the album cover back to me, and as she does, an envelope falls out. Its corners are frayed and yellow. I pick it up, and the first thing I see is that it is addressed to “Pastor John Logan, 923 Rimrock Road, Billings, MT 59041.” There is no return address, but there is a postmark in the upper right corner, on top of a twenty-cent stamp with Eleanor Roosevelt on it. The postmark reads, “Thermopolis, WY, 7/19/82.” The envelope has been opened carefully with a letter opener, with the letter neatly folded inside.
I remove the letter from the envelope. Even the paper feels old.
I turn the letter over and back again, scanning for a name. I find it on the bottom of the second page: R. S.
“Those are my grandfather’s initials! Holy crap!”
We look at each other, amazed.
“Well … Read it,” Aisha says.
I read the letter out loud.
I look at Aisha and crack up. She looks horrified, so I keep reading.
“My dad and my grandma,” I say.
Aisha nods. I look back at the letter and speed up my reading.
I look up at Aisha and hiss, “What the …?”
“Wow,” she says. “Just, wow.”
Suddenly, I’m very aware that we’re in the pastor’s house without his permission, and I am in possession of something he surely does not want me to have. A piece of information, maybe, but there are more questions than answers in it.
“It was in the album the pastor was listening to?” Aisha asks.
“Yup.”
“He must have been rereading it,” she says.
I think about him watching our house last night, and I get this chill, like he’s been thinking about me. It’s super creepy. “Well, we’re definitely taking this,” I say.
She nods slowly. “Just know, if we take this stuff, he’s gonna know it’s missing. You were just asking about your grandfather and the divorce. He’s gonna know you took it.”
I think about that, and then I stuff the letter into my pocket. My grandfather had a secret. A nightmare and a secret we take to our graves? I have to find out what this is.