The kitchen door opened. It was Grandma, back from Mrs. Stanley’s across the street. Grandma had taken her chicken soup because Mrs. Stanley was feeling poorly. So Grandma said anyway, but even at not quite eleven, Chuck had a good idea there was another reason. Mrs. Stanley knew all the neighborhood gossip (“She’s a yente, that one,” Grandpa said), and was always willing to share. Grandma poured all the news out to Grandpa, usually after inviting Chuck out of the room. But out of the room didn’t mean out of earshot.

“Who was Henry Peterson, Grandpa?” Chuck asked.

But Grandpa had heard his wife come in. He straightened up in his chair and put his can of Bud aside. “Look at that!” he cried in a passable imitation of sobriety (not that Grandma would be fooled). “The Sox have got the bases loaded!”

3

In the top of the eighth, Grandma sent Grandpa down to the Zoney’s Go-Mart at the bottom of the block to get milk for Chuck’s Apple Jacks in the morning. “And don’t even think of driving. The walk will sober you up.”

Grandpa didn’t argue. With Grandma he rarely did, and when he gave it a try, the results weren’t good. When he was gone, Grandma—Bubbie—sat down next to Chuck on the couch and put an arm around him. Chuck put his head on her comfortably padded shoulder. “Was he blabbing to you about his ghosts? The ones that live in the cupola?”

“Um, yeah.” There was no point in telling a lie; Grandma saw right through those. “Are there? Have you seen them?”

Grandma snorted. “What do you think, hantel?” Later it would occur to Chuck that this wasn’t an answer. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to Zaydee. He’s a good man, but sometimes he drinks a little too much. Then he rides his hobby horses. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

Chuck did. Nixon should have gone to jail; the faygelehs were taking over American culture and turning it pink; the Miss America pageant (which Grandma loved) was your basic meat-show. But he had never said anything about ghosts in the cupola before that night. At least to Chuck.

“Bubbie, who was the Jefferies boy?”

She sighed. “That was a very sad thing, boychuck.” (This was her little joke.) “He lived on the next block over and got hit by a drunk driver when he chased a ball into the street. It happened a long time ago. If your grandpa told you he saw it before it happened, he was mistaken. Or making it up for one of his jokes.”

Grandma knew when Chuck was lying; on that night Chuck discovered that was a talent that could go both ways. It was all in the way she stopped looking at him and shifted her eyes to the television, as if what was going on there was interesting, when Chuck knew Grandma didn’t give a hang for baseball, not even the World Series.

“He just drinks too much,” Grandma said, and that was the end of it.

Maybe true. Probably true. But after that, Chuck was frightened of the cupola, with its locked door at the top of a short (six steps) flight of narrow stairs lit by a single bare bulb hanging on a black cord. But fascination is fear’s twin brother, and sometimes after that night, if both of his grandparents were out, he dared himself to climb them. He would touch the Yale padlock, wincing if it rattled (a sound that might disturb the ghosts pent up inside), then hurry back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder as he went. It was easy to imagine the lock popping open and dropping to the floor. The door creaking open on its unused hinges. If that happened, he guessed he might die of fright.

4

The cellar, on the other hand, wasn’t a bit scary. It was brightly lighted by fluorescents. After selling his shoe stores and retiring, Grandpa spent a lot of time down there doing woodwork. It always smelled sweetly of sawdust. In one corner, far from the planers and sanders and the bandsaw he was forbidden to touch, Chuck found a box of Grandpa’s old Hardy Boys books. They were old-timey but pretty good. He was reading The Sinister Signpost one day in the kitchen, waiting for Grandma to remove a batch of cookies from the oven, when she grabbed the book out of his hands.

“You can do better than that,” she said. “Time to step up your game, boychuck. Wait right there.”

“I was just getting to the good part,” Chuck said.

She snorted, a sound to which only Jewish bubbies do true justice. “There are no good parts in these,” she said, and took the book away.

What she came back with was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Now this is a good mystery story,” she said. “No dummocks teenagers running around in jalopies. Consider this your introduction to actual writing.” She considered. “Okay, so not Saul Bellow, but not bad.”

Chuck started the book just to please Grandma, and was soon lost. In his eleventh year he read almost two dozen Agatha Christies. He tried a couple about Miss Marple, but he was much fonder of Hercule Poirot with his fussy mustache and little gray cells. Poirot was one thinking cat. One day, during his summer vacation, Chuck was reading Murder on the Orient Express in the backyard hammock and happened to glance up at the window of the cupola far above. He wondered how Monsieur Poirot would go about investigating it.

Aha, he thought. And then Voilà, which was better.

The next time Grandma made blueberry muffins, Chuck asked if he could take some to Mrs. Stanley.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Grandma said. “Why don’t you do that? Just remember to look both ways when you cross the street.” She always told him that when he was going somewhere. Now, with his little gray cells engaged, he wondered if she was thinking of the Jefferies boy.

Grandma was plump (and getting plumper), but Mrs. Stanley was twice her size, a widow who wheezed like a leaky tire when she walked and always seemed to be dressed in the same pink silk wrapper. Chuck felt vaguely guilty about bringing her treats that would add to her girth, but he needed information.

She thanked him for the muffins and asked—as he’d been pretty sure she would—if he would like to have one with her in the kitchen. “I could make tea!”

“Thank you,” Chuck said. “I don’t drink tea, but I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.”

When they were seated at the little kitchen table in a flood of June sunshine, Mrs. Stanley asked how things were going with Albie and Sarah. Chuck, mindful that anything he said in this kitchen would be on the street before the day was out, said they were doing fine. But because Poirot said you had to give a little if you wanted to get a little, he added that Grandma was collecting clothes for the Lutheran homeless shelter.

“Your gramma’s a saint,” Mrs. Stanley said, obviously disappointed there wasn’t more. “What about your granddad? Did he get that thing on his back looked at?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said. He took a sip of milk. “The doctor took it off and had it tested. It wasn’t one of the bad ones.”

“Thank God for that!”

“Yes,” Chuck agreed. Having given, he now felt entitled to get. “He was talking with Grandma about someone named Henry Peterson. I guess he’s dead.”

He was prepared for disappointment; she might have never heard of Henry Peterson. But Mrs. Stanley widened her eyes until Chuck was actually afraid they might fall out, and grasped her neck like she had a piece of blueberry muffin stuck in there. “Oh, that was so sad! So awful! He was the bookkeeper who did your father’s accounts, you know. Other companies, too.” She leaned forward, her wrapper giving Chuck a view of a bosom so large it seemed hallucinatory. She was still clutching her neck. “He killed himself,” she whispered. “Hung himself!”