“It’s a shame Gertie’s room is a no-go: a free bedroom just sitting there.”
“Andy, you’ve got problems.”
“Iwouldn’t sleep there, but”—Dad drops his voice—“does Rob strike you as the kind of guy who’s never slept on the mattress of someone recently deceased?”
“It’s still a crime scene. Go grab some clean sheets from Gertie’s room, though. They’re in the wardrobe. Top shelf. Try not to touch anything.”
That’s when I see my chance and nudge Dylan so hard he slides off the armchair. He looks up from the floor resentfully, and I definitely don’t laugh.
“We’ll grab the sheets,” I say, jumping to my feet and yanking on Dylan’s elbow to pull him up.
“You don’t have to do that,” Dad says.
“It’s fine.”
Dad’s expression crosses the line dividing curiosity from suspicion.
“Andy!” Shippy shouts even though he’s just one room away. “This pinot’s okay to go in pasta sauce, right?”
“Okay,” Dad says to me, leaping toward Shippy and the open wine bottle in the kitchen with the vibe of a mother rushing into a burning house to rescue her baby. “Thanks, I guess.” Dylan and I are out the door before Dad can grab the knife from the hands of a red-eyed Rob (so on-brand for Shippy to make him cut the onions) and use it on Shippy.
“What’s this about?” Dylan says, nearly crashing into a lamp as I drag him up the stairs.
“Obviously, this is our opportunity to search GG’s bedroom without anyone busting in to ask what we think we’re doing.”
“I’m pretty sure the cops have already done that.”
“Yeah, but there might be a clue only we would understand.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know—we haven’t found it yet.”
“Flawless logic.”
Being inside GG’s room again is creepier than sleeping in a bedroom full of faceless dolls. There’s no dark stain on the floorboards, the broken glass from the window has been swept up, and the bed has been stripped. But the gloom in the room is real, thanks to a square of cardboard taped over the broken window, and it doesn’t entirely go away when we snap on the light.
“Okay, Enola, where do we start?”
“The wardrobe?”
Dylan starts pulling out drawers while I reach for GG’s dresses and coats, passing one after another between my hands as I go through the pockets, with no idea what I’m looking for. Nothing that I find (three tissues, a pencil, one single gold earring) strikes me as beinga clue, but I lay them out on top of the bare mattress anyway because it’s always the seemingly innocuous stuff that winds up being important, isn’t it?
“Is it weird for me to be going through her stockings?” Dylan asks, holding up a single stocking, the nude kind with a black seam. “I feel like a pervert.”
“They’re stockings—don’t make it weird. This stuff will all have to go to the secondhand shop or the dump or something.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Someone’s going to have to go through it all.”
“You could pull off these stockings,” Dylan says, waving one of them at me. “You’ve got a retro face.”
Because I don’t want to interrogate what Dylan might mean by “retro face,” I focus instead on dragging over the stool from GG’s dressing table to stand on so I can look on top of the wardrobe. Dust lines show where the typewriter that killed GG used to live. There’s the suitcase I noticed last time, plus a few old shoeboxes tucked toward the back: One contains stacks of photos bound together with elastic bands, another has three pairs of old glasses, and the third has a bunch of old chargers. There’s no sign of the big cardboard box, the one that was apparentlyfor M.
“What’s wrong?” Dylan asks, having presumably gotten a good look at my face.
“There was a box,” I say, slowly because I’m trying to think and talk at the same time, which is always a tough proposition. “GG asked me to get it down from the wardrobe the night she died. Now it’s gone.”
