We both stepped back as the dust motes thickened, holding our hands over our noses and mouths. I choked on the air when I finally took a breath, nearly gasping. We waited for a moment for the dust to clear before stepping forward.
Crudely made shelves, consisting of two-by-fours and thin planks about three feet deep, covered the entire wall from floor to ceiling. They were constructed of raw wood, unstained and unadorned, crooked in places, with bent nails peeping out from various sections. I didn’t want to stand too near, afraid they might come crashing down, because despite the fact that the unit had obviously been there for a long time, it was apparent that an amateur who knew nothing about construction had made it.
As odd as the shelves were, they weren’t what drew our attention. It was the row upon row of what appeared to be large shoe boxes without lids—perhaps intended for short boots—tipped on their sides so that the openings faced out, that transfixed us.
“Dollhouses?” I was the first to speak, then regretted it. These were definitely not dollhouses—at least not like any dollhouse that I’d ever seen. Each box was a sort of tableau of a single room, but different from the other boxes, so that they didn’t all appear to come from the same house.
We peered closer, amazed at the intricate details of each little room, from the miniature furniture with tiny tubes of lipstick and a perfume bottle, to shoes with untied laces, and dressers with half-closed drawers. Tiny people with real hair and eyelashes lay in odd positions in the various boxes or, in one box, sat slumped over in an upholstered chair whose plaid fabric was faded in the way one would imagine a real chair that sat near a window might be. Right above the chair was a wall calendar with the bottom right corners curled up, the month and year emblazed in bold, black letters: May 1953.
“What in the . . . ?”
I found Gibbes staring into one of the boxes, an odd expression on his face. I moved next to him and peered inside. It was a replica of a 1950s-era bathroom, with separate hot and cold faucets—each tiny porcelain handle marked with a blue “C” or “H”—and an old-fashioned toilet. But it was the tub that was the center of attraction, and not because of the clawed feet or the chipped porcelain, but because of the figure of a woman whose top half was submerged in lifelike water, her pale blue eyes staring up at the ceiling in silent horror.
I stepped back, my gaze darting to the dozens of boxes that crowded the shelves, focusing on the miniature dolls and registering why they were strewn about in such odd poses. A man in a business suit with a pocket square in his jacket lay faceup on an oval braided rug, a puddle of red surrounding his head right behind a deep gash on his forehead. Red splotches on the wood floor in the shape of footprints led out the door.
Another was of a woman apparently asleep in her bed, the floral quilt neatly tucked under her chin, an empty vial of pills with a tiny label on the side on the nightstand. Rose-printed wallpaper above a woman bent halfway into a kitchen sink was peppered with red spray opposite a window with a clean round hole surrounded by a cracked web of glass.
“What is this?” Gibbes asked, his voice quiet, as if he didn’t want to disturb the dead.
I shook my head. None of the scenarios I’d gone over in my head of what I might find in the attic had come close to this. Nothing in my worst nightmares had come close to this. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. It’s . . . macabre.” I wanted to say sick and twisted, but I had to remind myself that Edith was Gibbes’s grandmother.
“I think I’ve seen enough,” I said, slowly backing up toward the door, unable to look away from the scenes of carnage in front of me.
“Wait. There’s something else.”
I took one more step toward the door, not completely sure I could handle seeing anything else.
On the floor to the far left, in the corner between the wall and the side of the shelves, was an oblong object about the size of a table lamp. I couldn’t tell what it was from where I stood, but I could at least be certain it wasn’t another dollhouse box.
Gibbes stooped down and picked it up, then carried it over to the table, brushing back the line of baskets with his forearm to make room.
“It’s a model airplane, but it’s missing its wings,” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice.
“Yes, it is,” he said slowly. Very carefully, he tilted the wingless plane on its side, displaying navy-colored stripes with no insignia on the tail and a gaping hole on the right side of the fuselage. “And look,” he said, pointing to the mosaiclike side where pieces alternated between transparent plastic and something that was a hard, pasty white. “There are people inside, and luggage still below.”
He considered something for a moment. Pulling out his phone, he flipped on the flashlight and returned to the corner where he’d found the plane. Squatting down to see into the dark space, he then pulled out an old brown paper bag.