The Death of Perry Many Paws (17 page)

Our attic is huge. There are several rooms and then rooms within rooms. There are stairs leading up a few feet and then stairs leading down. The one thing I really needed was a map because it was very possible I could get lost in here and not find my way out again. I should have left Cam a note telling him where I was in case I couldn’t get cell phone reception this far from civilization. I should have brought more than one candy bar.

The attic isn’t a total wasteland. There are lights and I switched one on when I opened the door. The naked bulbs were so dirty that the light was almost imperceptible but I figured I could dust them as I went and that would light the way. I had the flashlight in case I ran into an area of burned-out light bulbs. I should have brought light bulbs, too. I grabbed my notebook and made a note for my next trip.

Room one was like a large entrance hall. I cleaned off the bulb and swung my broom at the cobwebs. Not much here. I picked up a broken pair of scissors, a couple of dusty yellowed magazines, some plastic spoons and forks, three old soda bottles, several empty but still gross mouse traps and threw them all in my large garbage bag. There was one door across the little entrance way so I opened that and reached for another light switch. I found it and three dull bulbs lit up,
displaying a long narrow room with windows along the right side and three more doors leading who knows where on the left. I labeled this as room two. I was making a map.

I made my way over to the first window and gave it a shot of glass cleaner in a failed attempt to let some light in. I needed a pail of soapy water for this task. After three more shots I was able to get one window pane clean enough to look out. I could see our bedraggled gardens and the path to Franklin’s cottage. The attic windows that looked out over the front of the house must be through the three doors on the other side of the room. I cleaned off the first light bulb and set my garbage bag and backpack on the nearest chair, an old Victorian-style thing with a very faded gold velvet seat and some stuffing coming out of one of the arms. Why did people keep such things? Perhaps the chairs were valuable. I would ask Grace’s husband, Hugh, who was an antiques dealer. I took a picture of it and wrote a reminder in my spiral notebook. There were a lot of lamps lying around, a few of them Tiffany style. I doubted they were authentic but I grouped them all together and posed them for a sort of lamp family photo. Hugh might be able to sell some of them in his shop.

I had to decide what my focus was going to be, scouting for antiques or looking for information about Franklin. I needed to find papers or trunks of old clothes and pictures. Personal items. Insights to Franklin were not going to be found in old chairs or lamps. A fast walk through the long, narrow room revealed that it was all discarded parlor and dining room furniture. It all seemed pretty impersonal. I made a note to come back sometime and take more photos for Hugh or, better yet, get him up here to look around. I swung around and faced the three doors trying to decide which one to tackle first. I felt like I was on a rerun of “Let’s Make A Deal” trying to decide what was behind door one, door two and door three. In the end I opted for the most systematic approach and pushed open door one.

Room number three via door one, opened up to expose one of the windows that looked out at the front of the house. It was rectangular with the door at one end and the window at the other. I was thinking that if the other two doors opened to rooms identical to this, the attic would have made a good apartment with an entrance hall, the long living room and then three nicely sized bedrooms. Of course we would have to have a family of at least fifteen members before we would have to resort to making the attic an apartment for anyone.

Not for the first time I wondered if Cam and I should have done something more with this house and all the space. What it would have been I don’t know. But we had really neglected all but the rooms we had used. Suddenly I had the urge to clean out every room in the house, inventory all the furniture and things, get rid of what we didn’t want and make the house our own rather than living in a house borrowed from Cam’s ancestors. I sat down on the nearest hard surface and began writing furiously in my notebook. I felt the urge to get a huge flag with Cam’s and my names on it and plunge it into the attic floor declaring this to be
our
house and not Claudia’s or Alden Sr.’s or Roger’s. It was the Mack family house, not the Behrends. And only good-looking people were going to have their portraits on my walls.

After several pages of notes, I pulled myself back to my task and began to look around room three for something that might have been Franklin’s. More old furniture, mostly chairs. Not even a drawer to peek into. I needed to move on.

Door two opened to a room which was, as I had suspected, identical in shape and size to the room next door. So now I jotted down room four via door two out of room one in my notebook and looked around. More chairs. Dining room chairs, upholstered chairs, footstools. I marked the room as “miscellaneous seating”, and opened door three. Same room architecturally as the others but this one held
some dressers and desks. I set my supplies down and randomly opened dresser drawers. Empty for the most part, although I did find a few interesting old buttons and put them in my shoe box. I got out a couple of wet wipes and cleaned off my face and hands, opened a can of diet soda and sat at one of the desks. I systematically pulled out the drawers and tentatively reached in to see if there was anything in them. I wish I knew whose desk this was because I didn’t really want to waste a lot of time looking for hidden drawers and messages in an old desk of Alden’s or Claudia’s, not that that might not be interesting at a future time. I let my mind wander into a scenario where I would find an old diary of Claudia’s that would expose her adoption by the Behrends family, the child of an under-aged prostitute and the Behrends’ milkman. I could hold it over her head and threaten her with it whenever she was being especially annoying. But there was nothing in the desk at all. Apparently the Behrendses really cleaned out their things before they brought them into the attic.

I carried all my things back into the long narrow room and headed to the end of the room, looking for more doors. I found one at the farthest end of the room. It opened to a small set of six stairs, so I climbed them and pushed open yet another door. Whereas the other rooms had been rectangular, this one was more of a trapezoid with zigzags in the walls. There were three windows to my right and two to the left. The lights worked and the windows were less dirty. This room wasn’t as well organized as the previous ones; this was promising. Maybe it meant furniture had been hastily shoved into these rooms and not cleaned out for proper storage. I labeled a new page in my note book as “room six, zigzag room”. I took a picture from the door of the room, as I had in all the other rooms. If we ever decided to have a party where we wanted a dozen velvet chairs with the stuffing coming out, I would know right where to find them.

I performed my wet wipes ritual and opened another can of diet soda and the candy bar. I knew all this drinking would catch up with me eventually and I dreaded having to go back downstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of my explorations. I surveyed the room to see what item had the most possibilities. A trunk! I hadn’t opened any of those yet, and despite visions of scurrying mice, I knelt down by the trunk nearest me and pushed open the top. It was empty.

“Oh, come on!” I yelled in annoyance. Either the mice had eaten everything in the attic or else there were no mice because there was nothing to gnaw at. “What’s wrong with you people?” I really did dislike each and every one of the Behrendses. What kind of a stupid name was that anyway? It was probably an old Native American name that meant ‘runs with ass showing’. Claudia had tried to persuade us to saddle Abbey with Behrends as a middle name. I had been horrified and Cam had held strong. Abbey’s middle name was Elizabeth, after my mother. Suddenly I missed Abbey so much my chest began to hurt and I started to cry. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed her number. It was the middle of the morning and she was probably in class with her phone off, but at least I could leave her a message.

“Hi Mom! What’s up?” She sounded so cheerful and full of life and I wished she were home and helping me look for clues in the attic.

“Hi Abs. Nothing’s up. I just miss you and wanted to hear your voice. What’re you doing?”

“Walking to Anthropology class.”

“Still studying the Bog Man?”

“No, we’re learning how to lay out an archeological dig on a grid. It’s like making a map.”

“Hey, that’s what I’m doing, too!”

“You’re making a map? Why?”

“I’m up in the attic, making a map of all the rooms up here and what’s in them. I know it sounds stupid but …”

“No, it sounds like fun! I wish I were there. Save some of it for Thanksgiving and I’ll help you. I bet Dad would like doing that, too. Oh, gotta go. I’m the last one to class. Good luck hunting. Love you!”

I sat and cried for a few minutes. There is no greater reward in life than happy, well-adjusted children. None.

Time for another round of wet wipes. Should have brought tissues. Which reminded me of the handkerchief, which put me back on track and I moved over to another trunk. Next to the trunk was a perfectly proportioned pyramid of rolled-up socks. It was a work of art and I carefully skirted past it so I wouldn’t knock it over.

I carefully laid a pair of dusty skates on the floor so I could open another trunk. I was almost hoping for mice at this point because it would mean there was actually something inside it. Abbey must have brought me luck because there were no mice but there were some boxes and papers and clothes. Yippee! Something to paw through at last.

Hats. Lots of hats. Some with wrinkled veils; some with crushed crepe flowers. I lifted them out and put them on the floor. Would Hugh want these? I’m sure someone would buy vintage hats. I picked up a small wooden box and shook it. It rattled. I opened it up and there were about twenty coins in it. They were foreign coins, probably souvenirs from someone’s trip. I put them in the pile for Hugh. If he didn’t want them he might know a coin dealer who would. The next wooden box held marbles. They were beautiful and I wish I had some sunlight to hold them up to. These would look good downstairs in a glass jar on one of the shelves in the library. Or maybe in the solarium where the direct light could hit them and flash the colors all over the room. I pushed some clothes out of the way and found two more boxes. One was empty but the wood was pretty with an inlaid design on the top that
was striking. I set that with the box of marbles to take downstairs. The second box rattled seductively and I opened it with childlike anticipation. It was full of teeth. Ugh. Someone must have kept all their baby teeth. Or else this was the Tooth Fairy’s depository. I would have to ask Claudia if they had the Tooth Fairy when she was growing up. My hand waivered over which pile to put these in. I decided to put them back in the trunk.

Next to the trunk was an old desk that looked promising. One of the drawers was jammed, exposing some yellowed papers. I gave the drawer a vigorous tug and it flew out of the desk and onto the floor, barely missing my toes. I gathered up the papers and sat down to thumb through them. They were Franklin’s school papers. Finally I’d found something that I could say for sure belonged to Franklin. I read through several dull essays on American history. It sounded as if they had been copied from a text book. Tucked in among the school papers was a scrap of paper folded in half. I opened it up and read:

         
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told—mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave
.

         
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” 1840

Disturbing. I turned the paper over but there was nothing else written on it. I reread it several times, caught up in the poetry of the words as well as their creepiness. I was suddenly very tired and no longer interested in exploring the attic. I added the piece of paper to my other “to go” items and worked my way back through the attic and down the stairs. I dumped everything on my bedroom floor and then went to take a shower. I even washed my hair.

love Grace’s bookstore. Trenary Booksellers is where Grace and I first met many years ago and forged a deep friendship based on mutual love of all kinds of books. She’d gone all out when my first Perry Many Paws book had been published and featured it in her shop window and in her monthly advertisements and, eventually, on her website. The bookstore had a huge bay window where a mannequin family lived. Her grandfather had purchased his first mannequin a year after he’d opened the bookshop in 1940. She was a perfectly proportioned size 8, with thick auburn hair and full red lips. Grace’s grandfather had named her Willoughby and she’d taken up residence in the store. He’d enjoyed posing Willoughby in different parts of the bookshop, one week browsing in the children’s books and another in the mysteries. During World War II, Willoughby had acquired a square-jawed, black-haired husband and the young couple had assumed their current residence in the display window. Eventually husband William had donned a uniform and been banished to the storeroom until V-J Day, when he triumphantly returned home to the arms of the lovely Willoughby.