The attic of the Donovan house breathed out a thin, papery exhale when she lifted the trapdoor. Dust turned in the shaft of late-morning sun, each mote a slow gold coin falling toward the floor. Iris Donovan stood on the third step of the pull-down ladder and looked across the space the way a reporter learns to look at any scene: catalog, do not feel, catalog.
Cardboard boxes lined the slope of the eaves, stacked two and three deep along the western wall, their flaps gone soft at the corners. A pine dresser missing two drawers sat near the chimney breast. The insulation above her head was the loose, gray-pink kind that she'd its skin whenever anyone moved, and the single bulb in the ceiling fixture had burned out some time during the Reagan administration. She had brought her own lamp, a battered clamp-on with a bendable neck, and she set it on the top step before she climbed the rest of the way up.
She had not been up here since the funeral. That was nine months ago, and the year before that, and the year before that. There had been no reason to come. Their father had taken the things that mattered to him when he moved into the rental off Grouse Ridge Road, and the things that did not matter to him he had left for the girls. The girls were gone. Maeve first, and then Colleen. The boxes had stayed where they were, biding their time under a crust of dust and the slow, indifferent weight of seasons.
She knelt beside the first stack of boxes and read the labels her father had written in his careful, slanted script. KITCHEN, MISC. CHRISTMAS, OLD. COLLEGE, C. That one was on top of the stack nearest the window. She set it in her lap and folded back the flaps.
The smell that came up out of the box was a soft one, dusty and faintly sweet, the smell of paper and pressed flowers and a perfume that had almost completely faded. Iris closed her eyes for a count of three. Then she opened them again, and she began to take the box apart, one layer at a time, the way she would take apart a source. You did not grab. You did not rip. You set each thing aside in the order in which it had been packed, and you looked at every single thing, because you never knew which thing would be the one that mattered.
That was the rule. That had always been the rule, even when she was twenty-two and green and sitting across from her first confidential source in a strip-mall coffee shop in Tacoma.
The first layer was a folded quilt in a pattern of yellow and white, hand-stitched, the kind her mother had made for each of them at birth. Underneath the quilt, a pair of scuffed saddle shoes, the kind Colleen had refused to give up in senior year, even after the heels had worn down to nothing. A paperback copy of The Secret Garden with a cracked spine and a pressed fern between the pages. A laminated bookmark from the public library, dated the summer of 1998.
She set each thing down carefully on the bare floorboards around her, and she wrote nothing down. There would be time for notes later, when she had a clear picture of what was here. Right now she needed to see.
Underneath the books and the shoes and a small bottle of perfume that had gone to a thin amber puddle at the bottom, she found a folder of photographs. They were the snapshots that had not made it into the family albums, the loose ones that lived in shoeboxes and in the backs of drawers and, in this case, in a manila folder tied with a length of kitchen twine. She undid the knot and tipped the folder toward the lamp.
The first photograph was of her mother. Maeve Donovan stood in the backyard of this house in 1984, her hair long and loose down her back, a pair of Iris's baby shoes dangling from one hand. She was laughing at whoever was behind the camera, her mouth open, her eyes creased. She had been thirty-one in that picture. She had died at thirty-four. Iris looked at the picture for a long time. Then she set it on top of the quilt, face up, so her mother could watch the rest of the sorting.
The next photograph was of Colleen at sixteen, sitting on the porch rail of the house on Birch Street with her chin in her hand. The porch rail of the house they had lived in before their father moved them to the bigger one out by the marsh. Colleen's hair was dark and straight and cut blunt across her forehead in the way she had worn it until the end. She was not smiling in the photograph, but she did not look unhappy either. She looked like she was listening to something just out of frame.
The photograph after that was a stranger. A girl about Colleen's age, dark hair pinned back with a tortoiseshell clip, standing in front of what looked like a church social banner. The handwriting on the back read, in Colleen's careful script, Sadie R., parish picnic, July 1997. Iris turned the photograph over and over in her fingers. She had never heard the name. She set it in a separate pile at her right knee, the pile of people she would need to identify.
There was another stranger after Sadie, and another. A girl with a sharp nose and an old camera around her neck, captioned Cora B., fall '96. A boy she did not recognize at all. A group shot of six kids standing in front of a storefront, none of them labeled. Iris turned each one over, read each caption, and set each one in its proper pile. By the time she had gone through the folder, the lamp on the step beside her had begun to throw a faint smell of hot plastic, and the sun had moved a full inch across the floorboards.
She was not here for photographs. She was here for the ledger that the Hollow Rock Gazette had run in 1999, the one the new owner had refused to let her see, the one that might have explained how four women had died in a fire on the edge of town and no one had ever been charged. She was here for the things that did not make it into the official record, because the official record, in her experience, was almost always a kind of slow, careful lie.
She set the folder of photographs aside and moved on to the next box in the stack. The next box was labeled, in her father's hand, MISC, ATTIC. The flaps were sealed with a length of packing tape that had yellowed to the color of old piano keys. She slit it open with a box cutter she had brought from the car, and the smell that came out was sharper than the last. Cedar and dust and something faintly metallic, the smell of a hinge that had gone to rust.
Inside the box, on top, was a folded square of green canvas. She unfolded it. It was an old tarp, the kind people used to cover boats or woodpiles, with a smell of mildew and motor oil. Underneath the tarp, set into the corner formed by the eaves and the chimney breast, was a chest.
The chest was the size of a small footlocker, made of cedar, with a curved lid and brass fittings that had gone green with age. Iris put her hand on the lid. The wood was cool and smooth under her fingers, and it gave off a faint, resinous breath, the smell of closets and of winter coats put away for the summer.
The hasp was old. The lock was new.
She knelt down beside the chest and looked at it for a long moment without touching it. The hasp itself was pitted and orange with rust, the kind of rust that came from years of damp and no one to wipe it down. The screws that held the hasp to the wood of the lid were the same color as the hasp. But the lock itself, the small brass padlock that hung through the hasp, was clean. The brass was bright. There was a faint, dark ring of oil on the metal of the hasp where the lock had been lifted away from it, and there was a faint, dark ring of oil on the metal of the lid where the lock had sat.
Someone had been here before her. Someone had lifted the lock away from the chest long enough to open it, and someone had put the lock back when they were done. And someone had wiped the lock down afterward with a rag that had been lightly oiled, so that the metal would not catch the eye of anyone who came up here later.
She thought about that for a moment. Then she reached into her jacket pocket and took out the small flashlight she always carried, the one with the rubber grip, and she turned it on and ran the beam along the seam between the lid and the body of the chest. There was a thin line of dust along the seam, broken in two places. One break was near the front left corner, the other near the back right. The breaks were the same width apart as the fingertips of a hand.
She sat back on her heels and switched off the flashlight. The attic was quiet. From down in the kitchen, somewhere far below and behind her, she could hear the refrigerator in the house cycling on, a low hum that came up through the floor like a slow, mechanical pulse. Outside, a woodpecker was working at something in the big cedar by the marsh. The light from the window had moved another inch.
She had not expected this. She had expected cardboard boxes and old clothes and the kind of soft, forgotten debris that accumulates in a house when the people who lived in it stop paying attention to the upper floors. She had not expected someone to have been here ahead of her. She had not expected someone to have oiled a lock that was not theirs to oil, and to have put the lock back when they were done, and to have closed the lid of the chest and tucked the tarp back over it as if nothing had happened.
She had not expected, in other words, to be exactly on the right track.
She stood up, slowly, and brushed the dust from the knees of her jeans. The chest sat in its corner under the eaves, half-hidden by the tarp, its brass lock bright in the thin light from the window. She did not have a key for it. She did not have a bolt cutter in the car. She did not have any way, at this moment, to know what was inside it.
She had, however, a small voice recorder in her other pocket, and a notebook, and a mind that had been trained to keep moving even when the path was not yet clear. She took the recorder out and held it up to her mouth and said, into the quiet of the attic, the time and the date and what she had found.
Then she switched off the recorder and put it back in her pocket, and she sat down again beside the chest, and she rested one hand, very lightly, on the cool, smooth wood of its lid.
She sat for a long moment with her hand on the lid. The wood was cooler than the air, smoother than she had expected. Whoever had oiled the lock had not been rough with it. They had been careful. That bothered her. She had come up here thinking she would be the first to disturb whatever the Donovan women had left behind in this house, and now she understood she was the second.
She took her hand off the lid and stood up, slowly, and looked around the attic again with the thought that someone might still be hiding behind one of the trunks, though she knew there was no one there. The dust on the floorboards was undisturbed except for her own footprints and the faint trail leading from the foot of the attic stairs to where she now stood. Whoever had come up here had come up before the dust had settled from the last time the chest was opened. A long time before. Maybe years.
She went back down the steep stairs, holding the rail because the wood was slick and her grandmother had never believed in sanding the treads. The second floor smelled of lavender and old paper. Her own breathing sounded loud to her. She went down another flight to the kitchen, where the linoleum was cool under her boots and the clock on the wall was still ticking in the way that clocks in empty houses keep ticking for years after the people who wound them have gone.
She stood in the kitchen for a moment with her hands on the counter, thinking. Her grandmother had been a practical woman, and a suspicious one. She would not have put all her valuables behind a single lock with no spare key somewhere in the house. Somewhere in this kitchen, or in the pantry, or in the drawer of the sideboard in the dining room, there would be a key.
Iris started with the drawer by the sink. It contained a screwdriver with a worn wooden handle, a ball of twine, a pencil sharpener, and a small tin of buttons that had belonged to her grandmother's mother. She opened the tin. Under the buttons there was a key on a length of red yarn. It was small and brass and it looked as if it might fit something.
She held it in the palm of her hand and looked at it for a long moment. Then she went back up the two flights of stairs, slowly, and across the dusty floor of the attic to the chest.
The key fit. It turned with a soft click, and the lid of the chest gave a little sigh as the seal broke and the air inside moved for the first time in a long time. The smell that came out was not the smell of cedar. It was the smell of lavender and mothballs and something sweeter underneath, something that reminded her, with a sharpness that took her breath, of her sister's hair on a summer afternoon.
She lifted the lid all the way and set it back against the wall. Inside the chest, lying on top of everything else, was a folded quilt. It was hand-stitched, made of small squares of fabric in faded blues and grays and the soft yellow of old paper. Iris recognized the pattern. Her grandmother had made it the year before she died, sitting in the chair by the window, her fingers moving slower than they used to.
Iris lifted the quilt out and set it on the floor beside her, carefully, the way you would set down something that belonged to someone you loved. Under the quilt, in the chest, there was a stack of photographs held together with a rubber band that had lost its elasticity years ago. The rubber band crumbled slightly when she touched it. She lifted the stack out and sat down with her back against the wall, the photographs in her lap.
There were thirty-seven of them. She counted them twice because she did not want to make a mistake. They were Polaroids, all of them, with the white border at the bottom and the date stamped in faded orange ink in the lower right corner. June 1999. Every single one.
She turned the first one over and looked at it.
Three teenage girls were standing at the edge of a stand of fir trees, the kind of dark, wet woods that grew right up to the back of the houses on the north side of town. The girl on the left was tall and thin with dark hair that fell past her shoulders. She was not smiling. The girl in the middle was smaller, with lighter hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she was laughing at something out of frame. The girl on the right was Iris's sister.
Iris looked at her sister's face for a long time. Colleen was fourteen in the summer of 1999. She had been, that summer, a girl who had not yet become the person she was going to become, a girl who was still soft at the edges, still capable of surprise. In this photograph she was squinting into the sun and there was a smudge of dirt on her chin. She looked happy.
Iris knew the other two. The tall one on the left was Cora Bellamy, who had moved to town the previous fall with her mother and who spoke in a low, careful voice that made people lean in to listen. The smaller one in the middle was Sadie Reyes, who lived in the house behind the church and who had a habit of humming while she walked. All three of them had been in the woods the summer before they died.
Iris turned to the next photograph. The three girls were walking along a logging road, the gravel pale under their sneakers. Colleen was in the middle again, and this time her eyes were downcast and her mouth was set in a way that Iris recognized. She had seen that mouth on her own face in the mirror, years later, on the days when the work was hard and the answers did not come.
The third photograph. The three girls were sitting on a fallen log at the edge of the marsh. The water behind them was dark and still. Colleen was crying.
Iris turned the photograph over in her hand. The tears on her sister's face were unmistakable. They caught the light. Her mouth was open, the way a mouth opens when you are trying not to make a sound. Sadie sat on one side of her with her hand on Colleen's knee, and Cora sat on the other side, looking off into the trees as if she did not want to intrude.
Iris set the photograph down on her knee and looked at the ceiling of the attic for a moment. Then she picked up the fourth.
The fourth photograph was taken in the same woods but closer in. The trees were thicker. The light was thinner. The three girls were standing in a small clearing, and Cora was holding something out in her hand. It looked like a piece of paper, or a card. The other two were looking at it. None of them were smiling.
The fifth photograph. The three girls were walking through a patch of ferns, their jeans wet to the knee. Colleen was not crying in this one but her eyes were red and she was holding her arms around herself as if she were cold.
Iris went through the photographs one by one. She did not skip any of them. She looked at each one for as long as it deserved, and she set them down in a careful pile on the quilt beside her. By the time she had looked at twenty of them she understood the pattern. The photographs followed the three girls through the woods around town over what must have been a series of afternoons in June 1999. They were taken in different locations, by different cameras, sometimes by one of the girls herself, sometimes by someone who was not in the frame. The woods were the same woods each time but the light changed and the girls' faces changed with it.
And in half the photographs, more or less, Colleen was crying.
Not always in the same way. Sometimes the tears were fresh and her face was twisted. Sometimes her eyes were red and her cheeks were streaked but her mouth was set and she was looking off into the middle distance as if she were listening to something far away. Sometimes she was crying and trying to smile at the same time, the way a person does when they want the person taking the photograph to stop worrying.
Iris stopped at the twenty-third photograph and looked at it for a long time. In this one, Colleen was standing at the edge of a pond, alone in the frame, the water behind her dark and unmoving. She was not crying. She was looking directly into the camera with an expression Iris had never seen on her sister's face before. It was the expression of a person who had understood something that no one else in the photograph was going to understand with them. It was the expression of a person who was already somewhere else.
Iris set the photograph down and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. She sat like that for a long time. The attic was quiet except for the soft tick of the house settling and, very faintly, the sound of the wind in the cedars outside.
When she took her hands away, the light from the window had moved another inch across the floor.
She picked up the rest of the photographs and went through them one by one. The thirty-seventh was the last. It showed the three girls sitting on the porch of a house Iris did not recognize, in the failing light of a summer evening. The porch light was on behind them. Colleen was in the middle, and she was not crying. Her hand was in Sadie's hand. Cora had her arm around Colleen's shoulders. All three of them were looking at something out of frame, something the photographer had wanted the viewer to wonder about. None of them were smiling. None of them looked unhappy. They looked like three girls who had agreed to keep a secret together and were sitting with the weight of it on a porch in the woods at the end of a long day.
Iris turned the photograph over. On the back, in her sister's handwriting, which she would have recognized anywhere, there were three words.
We found it.
She should have left the attic then. Every instinct she had developed in fifteen years of investigative work, every lesson learned in the long hours of listening to other people's grief, told her to stop. To put the photographs back in the trunk. To close the lid. To walk down the narrow stairs, past the warm smell of the kitchen, out the front door of the house that had been her grandmother's, and to keep driving until she reached the motel on the edge of town where the bed was clean and the walls were thin and no one knew her name.
She did not leave the attic.
Instead, she gathered the thirty-seven photographs into a single stack and tapped them against the floorboards until the edges lined up. The sound was a small, dry percussion, almost musical. The smell of the cedar closet behind her had deepened as the afternoon cooled, and somewhere below her a door opened and closed, the soft knock of it traveling up through the bones of the house. Someone was bringing in the mail, or feeding the cat, or doing any of the small ordinary things that people did in houses where nothing terrible had ever happened.
She began again at the beginning. She looked at every photograph the way she had been trained to look at crime scene photographs, which was to say slowly and without mercy. She looked at the corners and the backgrounds and the spaces between the subjects. She looked at the way light fell on collars and on hands. She looked at what was in the frame and at what had been deliberately excluded from it.
The first six photographs she had already inventoried. The family group at the lake. Maeve, who looked nothing like the photographs Iris remembered of her and who looked exactly like them, standing in a field of summer grass with one hand raised to shade her eyes. The priest at the church picnic. Cora Bellamy standing beside a Volvo with a flat tire. Sadie Reyes at a confirmation, her white veil slipping back from her forehead.
She kept going.
Photograph fifteen was the one she had lingered over the longest. Sadie, holding a sketchbook against her chest, the cover closed and the elastic band stretched around it. Photograph eighteen was Colleen alone, looking at the camera with the expression that had so unsettled her sister the first time through. Photograph nineteen was Sadie and Colleen in what appeared to be a school hallway, their heads bent together over something Iris could not see.
Photograph twenty was the one she had not noticed.
She knew the moment she turned it over that she had not seen it before. The image itself was unremarkable. It showed the three girls again, Sadie and Cora and Colleen, standing at the edge of a road that ran through deep woods. The light was flat and gray. None of them were smiling. Colleen was in the center, her dark hair falling across her forehead, her hands shoved into the pockets of a jacket that was too big for her. Sadie was on her left, her head tilted slightly toward her friend. Cora was on the right, her arms crossed, her face turned partly away from the camera. The trees behind them were enormous. The road disappeared into a mist that looked, in the gray light, almost like a living thing.
Iris turned the photograph over.
She read the words once, and then she read them again, and then she sat very still.
The handwriting was Colleen's. There was no question about it. She would have known it on a thousand different surfaces, in a thousand different lights, after a thousand years. It was the same careful, slightly slanted script she had used to label her school notebooks. The same script she had used to write birthday cards and grocery lists and the long, looping letters she had sent her sister during the summer Iris had spent in Seattle. The same script she had used to sign her name on the last photograph of her that existed, the school portrait that still sat on their grandmother's dresser in a tarnished silver frame.
Three lines. Written in ink that had faded from black to brown but was still legible, still sharp at the edges of every letter, as though the hand that had formed them had been steady.
They know. They know. God help us all.
Iris set the photograph down on the floor beside her. She placed it exactly where she had placed the thirty-seventh, with the written side up, so that she could read the words without picking it up again. Then she sat with her hands in her lap and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth and waited for the pulse in her throat to slow.
The attic was very quiet. The light through the window had moved another inch across the floor. Somewhere in the woods beyond the house a woodpecker was at work, the rapid percussive sound of it reaching her as though from a great distance. The cedar closet exhaled its slow, resinous breath.
They know.
She tried the words in her mouth, silently, the way a person tries on a coat that belonged to someone who has died. They did not fit any better the second time. They did not fit any better the third time. They were a sentence that made no sense outside of a context she did not yet have, and they were a sentence that made the most terrible sense in the world.
God help us all.
She picked the photograph up again. She studied the front of it once more, the way she had studied the others, looking for the thing she had not been meant to see. The trees. The road. The mist. The girls. She looked at the way Colleen's hands were buried in the pockets of the jacket. She looked at the way Cora's face was turned away. She looked at the way Sadie was leaning slightly, almost imperceptibly, toward her friend, the way a person leans toward someone they are afraid for.
There was nothing else. The photograph was ordinary. The photograph was the opposite of ordinary. The photograph was a door that had been standing open the entire time she had been in the attic, and she had walked past it twice without seeing it.
She laid the photograph on top of the thirty-seventh. She looked at the two sentences together. We found it. They know. They know. God help us all. One sentence was a discovery. The other sentence was a warning. They were written in the same hand, in the same ink, on the backs of photographs that had been taken in the same summer, by a girl who had died in a fire that autumn with three of the four other people in the images.
The fifth person in the photographs, the one she had not yet identified, was not in any of the pictures Iris had examined. She had assumed, when she first spread the photographs out on the floor, that the missing person was the photographer. She had assumed that the missing person was a boyfriend, or a friend, or a sibling of one of the girls, someone who had been there and had then stepped out of the frame, and whose absence from the images was no more significant than the absence of any other person who happened not to be standing in front of the camera at the moment the shutter clicked.
She was no longer sure.
She gathered the photographs into a stack and slid them back into the envelope. She did not close the envelope. She left the flap open, the way a person leaves a drawer open when they intend to return to it. She set the envelope on top of the trunk and then, after a moment, she picked it up and carried it downstairs with her.
The kitchen smelled of coffee. The light through the window above the sink had turned the color of weak tea. Her grandmother was sitting at the table with the crossword puzzle and a ballpoint pen, and she did not look up when Iris came in. She turned a page of the puzzle and tapped the pen against her lower lip.
"There's a box of your sister's things in the basement," her grandmother said, without preamble, the way she said everything. "I never opened it. I didn't have the heart for it then and I don't have the heart for it now. If you want it, you can have it."
Iris set the envelope of photographs on the table between them. The envelope made a small dry sound against the wood.
"There were five of them, Grandma."
Her grandmother looked up. The ballpoint pen stopped moving. Her face did not change, but something behind her eyes did, the way a window changes when a cloud passes over the sun.
"There were four," she said. "Colleen, and the Reyes girl, and the Bellamy girl, and the boy who lived up on Barlow Road. Four."
"There were five in the photographs."
"Four died, Iris. Four. That's what the paper said, that's what the priest said, that's what everybody said. There were four and then there was your sister, and your sister was three, and your sister died in a fire in the woods and there is nothing more to say about it. There has been nothing more to say about it for twenty years and there will be nothing more to say about it tomorrow. Is that clear?"
Iris did not answer. She put her hand on the envelope. Beneath her palm she could feel the slight ridge of the photographs inside, the way a person can feel the ridges of letters pressed into the back of a postcard.
"I'm going to find out who the fifth person was," she said.
Her grandmother set down the pen. The pen rolled a quarter turn on the table and came to rest against the salt shaker. The kitchen was very quiet. The refrigerator hummed. A car passed on the road outside, the sound of it rising and falling and then disappearing into the long silence that followed.
Her grandmother looked at her for a long time. Then she picked up the pen and went back to her crossword.
"There's a box of your sister's things in the basement," she said again, in exactly the same tone. "If you want it, you can have it. If you don't want it, you don't have to have it. But I am not going to talk about this with you, Iris. I have spent twenty years not talking about this, and I am not going to start now."
Iris stood in the kitchen for a moment with the envelope in her hand. The light through the window had moved another inch. The coffee in the pot on the counter had gone cold. Somewhere in the woods behind the house, the woodpecker had stopped its work, and the silence that replaced it was the kind of silence that a person listens to in order to find out what is making the noise they cannot hear.
She carried the envelope into the front room and set it on the desk beside her laptop. She did not open it. She did not need to. The two sentences were already written into the soft place behind her eyes where memory lived, where grief lived, where the things that a person carries without knowing they are carrying them lived.
We found it.
They know. They know. God help us all.
She sat down at the desk and opened the laptop. The screen bloomed with the pale blue light that she associated with the long hours she had spent in other people's grief. She opened the browser. She opened a search box. She typed the five names and waited for the machine to begin its work.
The cursor blinked once, and then the results appeared.