“Mr. Harris won’t be coming back until tomorrow,” Mrs. Greene said.

Lora stepped forward, took the bills, and made them disappear into her fanny pack.

“Thank you so much, Lora,” Patricia said.

Mrs. Greene and Lora left the kitchen and the vacuum cleaner roared back to life, and Patricia looked out the back window to see if she could spot Slick coming up the path, but it was empty. She turned and walked through the wide front hall and looked out the window by the door. The glass was artfully rippled to make it seem as if it were antique. Slick’s Saab wasn’t in the driveway. It wasn’t like her to be late, although if she’d lost her nerve at the last minute maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. She didn’t know how Lora would react to two of them searching the house.

Besides, there wasn’t much in it. The kitchen drawers were empty. The cabinets barely contained any food. No junk drawer. No magnetized advertisements from the exterminator or the pizza delivery people on the fridge door. No toaster on the countertops, no blenders, no waffle irons, no George Foreman grills. It was the same all over the house. She decided to go upstairs. If he had anything personal it was more likely to be hidden there.

She started up the carpeted stairs, the vacuum cleaner noise falling away below her. She stood in the upstairs hall lined with closed doors and suddenly felt like she was on the verge of making a terrible mistake. She shouldn’t be here. She should turn around and leave. What had she been thinking? She thought about Bluebeard where the bride was told not to look behind a certain door by her husband and of course she did and discovered the corpses of his previous brides. Her mother had told her the moral of the story was that you should trust your husband and never pry. But wasn’t it better to know the truth? She headed for the master bedroom.

The master bedroom smelled of hot vinyl and new carpet, even though the carpet must be two years old by now. The bed was made neatly and had four posts, each one crowned with a carved pineapple. An armchair and table sat by the window. On the table was a notebook. Every page was empty. Patricia looked in the walk-in closet. All the clothes hung in dry-cleaner bags, even his blue jeans, and they all smelled like cleaning chemicals.

She searched the bathroom. Combs, brushes, toothpaste, and floss, but no prescriptions. Band-Aids and gauze but nothing that told her anything about the occupant. It smelled like sealant and Sheetrock. The sink and the shower were dry. Patricia went back to the hall and tried again.

She went from room to room, opening empty closets, looking inside empty drawers. Everything smelled like fresh paint. Every room echoed emptily. Every bed was carefully made up with pristine pillow shams and decorative pillows. The house felt abandoned.

“Find anything?” a voice said, and Patricia leapt into the air.

“Ohmygoodness,” she gasped, pressing her hand to the middle of her chest. “You scared me half to death.”

Mrs. Greene stood in the doorway.

“Did you find anything?” she repeated.

“It’s all empty,” Patricia said. “Slick hasn’t come by, has she?”

“No,” Mrs. Greene said. “Lora is having lunch in the kitchen.”

“There’s nothing here,” Patricia said. “This is pointless.”

“There’s nothing in this entire house?” Mrs. Greene said. “Nowhere? Are you sure you looked?”

“I looked everywhere,” Patricia said. “I’m going to leave before Lora changes her mind.”

“I don’t believe that,” Mrs. Greene said.

Her stubbornness provoked a flash of irritation from Patricia. “If you can find something I missed, by all means, feel free,” she said.

The two of them stood, glaring at each other. The disappointment made Patricia irritable. She’d come this far, and now nothing. There was no path forward.

“We tried,” she finally said. “If Slick comes, tell her I came to my senses.”

She walked past Mrs. Greene, heading for the stairs.

“What about that?” Mrs. Greene said from behind her.

Wearily, Patricia turned and saw Mrs. Greene with her neck craned back, staring at the hall ceiling. More specifically, she was staring at a small black hook in the hall ceiling. Using it as a landmark, Patricia could just make out the rectangular line of a door around it, the hinges painted white. She got a broom from the kitchen and used the eyelet in its handle to snag the hook. They both pulled and, with a groan of springs and a cracking of paint, the rectangular edges got bigger, darker, and the attic door dropped down and the metal stairs attached to it unfolded.

A dry, abandoned smell rolled down into the hall.

“I’ll go up,” Patricia said.

She gripped the edges hard, and the ladder rattled as she climbed. She felt too heavy, like her foot was going to break the steps. Then her head passed through the ceiling and she was in the dark.

Her eyes adjusted and she realized it wasn’t completely dark. The attic ran the length of the house and there were louvers on either end. Daylight filtered through. It felt hot and stuffy. The end of the attic facing the street was bare, just joists and pink insulation. The back was a jumble of dim shapes.

“Do you have a flashlight?” she called down.

“Here,” Mrs. Greene said.

She unclipped something from her keychain and Patricia came down a few steps and took it: a small, turquoise rubber rectangle the size of a cigarette lighter.

“You squeeze the sides,” Mrs. Greene said.

A tiny bulb on the end emitted a weak glow.

It was better than nothing.

Patricia went up into the attic.

The floor was gritty, covered in a layer of cockroach poison, mouse droppings, dried guano, pigeon feathers, dead cockroaches on their backs, and larger piles of excrement that looked like they came from raccoons. Patricia started walking toward the clutter. Cool air formed a cross breeze blowing from the vents at either end. The white powder ground against the plywood beneath her feet.

It smelled like dead insects up here, like rotten fabric, like wet cardboard that had dried and mildewed. Everything downstairs had been meticulously cleaned and polished, scoured of anything organic. Up here, the house lay exposed: splintery joists, filthy plywood flooring, construction measurements penciled onto the exposed plywood beneath the shingles. Patricia played the flashlight beam over the mound of items at the rear and realized that this was the graveyard of Mrs. Savage’s life.

Blankets and quilts and sheets were draped over all the boxes and trunks and suitcases she’d once seen in the old lady’s front room. Studded with cockroach eggs, sticky with spiderwebs stretched between every open space, the filthy sheets and blankets were stiff and rank.

Patricia lifted one tacky corner of a pink quilt and released a puff of rotten wood pulp. Beneath it, on the floor, lay a cardboard box of water-damaged paperback romances. Mice had chewed one corner to shreds and brightly colored paperback guts spilled onto the floor. Why had he brought all this garbage into a new house? It felt wrong. In his entire, new, meticulously blank home, this stood out like a mistake.

Her skin seethed in revulsion wherever she touched the blankets. They were covered in grime, white cockroach poison, and mouse droppings. She walked around the boxes to where the blankets ended, where the brick chimney rose through the floor and then the ceiling. She recognized the row of old suitcases sitting next to it, surrounded by furniture she remembered from the old house: standing lamps completely obscured by spiderwebs that were thick with eggs, the rocking chair with its seat chewed into a mouse nest, the cross-stretcher table whose veneer top had warped and split.

Not knowing where to start, Patricia lifted each of the suitcases. They were empty except for the second-to-last one. It didn’t budge. She tried again. It felt rooted to the floor. She slid the brown, hard-sided Samsonite bag out, sweat dripping from her nose. She undid its first latch, stiff with disuse, then the second, and the weight of whatever was inside popped it open.

The chemical stench of mothballs exploded into her face, making her eyes water. She squeezed the light Mrs. Greene had given her and saw that it was crammed with black plastic sheeting speckled with white mothballs that rolled onto the floor. She pulled aside some of the plastic and a pair of milky eyes reflected the light back at her.