Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

doing that a lot here. I scrubbed the wall, and Chad mopped the floor. There was nothing I could do about the dents in the wall—and looking at them, I thought maybe some of them were old.
    Once everything was as good as it would get, I fixed sandwiches and chips for lunch. Thus fortified, we continued our explorations by going up to the attic.
    There were actually two attics. The one above Chad’s room was accessible by a narrow stairway hidden in a hall closet (maybe the last remnant of a servants’ stair). I half expected dust and storage boxes, but the attic held only a modern office with a professional-looking computer set up on a cherry desk. There were skylights for an open, airy feeling to offset the walls of cherry barrister’s book-cases weighed down by leather-bound legal tomes. The only whimsical feature was a lacy pillow on the narrow window seat in front of the only window.
    â€œYou said there was another one?” I asked, standing on the stairs because entering the room seemed intrusive.
    Chad led the way to the other side of the second floor and into his parent’s bedroom. I wondered why the office had been personalized and charming while the bedroom suite, professionally decorated until it would have been as equally comfortable in a department store as it was in the old house, was impersonal and cold.
    Inside the walk-in closet, there was a large rectangular door in the ceiling. We had to get a chair and pull it under the door before I could reach the latched hand pull, but the door turned out to be a folding staircase. Once we pulled the chair away, the stairs dropped all the way to the floor.
    Flashlights in hand, we intrepid explorers climbed into the attic more suited to a house like this than the previous one had been. Structurally, it was the mirror image of the office minus the skylights and gorgeous view. Light battled through the coating of white paint that covered the only window, flickering on the motes of dust we had disturbed with our presence.
    Four old steamer trunks were lined up against the wall next to a pedal sewing machine with SINGER scrawled in elaborate gold lettering over the scratched wooden side of the cabinet. There were more empty milk crates here, but in the attic, at least, someone had found a way to keep the spiders out. I didn’t see any creepy-crawlies at all. Or even very much dust. Trust Amber to dust her attic.
    The trunks were locked. But the look of disappointment on Chad’s face had me digging out my pocketknife. A little wiggling, a little jiggling with the otherwise-useless toothpick, and the slimmest of the blades had the first trunk open before you could sing three verses of “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer.” I know because I hum when I pick locks—it’s a bad habit. Since I have no desire to become a professional thief, though, I haven’t bothered to try to break myself of it.
    Yellowed linens with tatting around the edges and embroidered spring baskets, or flowers, or some other appropriately feminine imagery filled the first trunk, but the second was more interesting. House plans (which we took out), deeds, old diplomas for people whose names were unfamiliar to Chad, and a handful of newspaper articles dating back to the 1920s about people with the same last name as the people in the diplomas and deeds. Mostly death, birth, and marriage notices. None of the death notices were about people who had died violently or too young, I noticed.
    While Chad was poring over the house plans he’d spread over the closed lid of the first trunk, I stopped to read about the life of Ermalinda Gaye Holfenster McGinnis Curtis Albright, intrigued by the excessive last name. She’d died at age seventy-four in 1939. Her father had been a captain on the wrong side of the Civil War, had taken his family west, finding his fortune in timber and railroads. Ermalinda had eight children, four of whom had survived her and had a huge number of children themselves. Twice a widow, she’d married a third man fifteen years before her death. He’d been—reading between the lines—far younger than she.
    â€œYou go, girl,” I told her admiringly—and the stairway closed up and slammed shut so hard that the resultant vibration from the floor had Chad looking up from his plans. He wouldn’t have heard the snick of the lock, though.
    I dove for the door—too late, of course. When I put my nose to it, I