Now she stood in David’s dusty and windowless attic, a flashlight in her hand. She had very little knowledge of what was up there; she had only seen David venture into and out of it to retrieve and store the ancient sleeping bags they used for overnights. She was surprised to see the number of boxes that, in fact, he had stored there: all of them must have come with him from the apartment in the Theater District when he had bought the house.
She began with the first one. It was so thickly coated in dust that it sent a flurry upward, making her cough. But it, along with the rest of the cardboard boxes around it, contained only clothing and bric-a-brac: old sweaters, old and outgrown clothing of hers; books and more books; scholarly journals; old and ragged beach towels. Some boxes contained items she was surprised to see that David had: silver candlesticks and platters; china dishes they had never used.
In David’s bedroom, she opened his top dresser drawer, took out the picture of his family that she had grown so used to seeing. There was young David, in grainy black-and-white, surrounded by a brown paper frame that was disintegrating with age. The picture itself was rotting slightly—its color fading, its lines blurring from the humidity inside their old, damp house. She turned it over, looked at the back, but found nothing there that might give her any clue. She put it back in its home.
The rest of David’s bedroom yielded nothing but more clothes, which was not a surprise: she had gone through it fairly thoroughly when packing him for St. Andrew’s. Still, the sight of some of his old and favored shirts made her falter for a moment.
She sidled, next, into his office, which felt like the most illicit place to go. She had never been specifically forbidden from entering it—certainly she had spent a great deal of time inside it, whenever David asked her in—but her many years of hovering at its threshold without an invitation to come inside had served to make it feel off-limits. She rarely went into it alone.
It was a small office, a former pantry, stuffy in the summertime even with the window open. There were built-in bookshelves on either side of the room, nice-looking dark-wood bookshelves; but years of stacking books first vertically and then horizontally had rendered them unusable as a library. Only some of the spines were visible. There were a few odd pieces of art on the wall: two small framed prints of Leonardo da Vinci drawings (Ada had the feeling David had acquired them from a yard sale, or something equally eccentric); a little landscape that included a country lane.
The computer itself was clear of any debris, and everything that was out on the desk was stacked precisely, at right angles. David was neither neat nor messy; he disliked clutter, and had a mortal fear of the sort of knickknacks that Liston collected and kept on her desk and in her home. He did not like framed photographs. He did not like unnecessary objects. But his places of work were overrun with stacks: piles of papers and books and letters and bills, many of which were obsolete or had already been attended to.
Ada had never fixed, or hired someone else to fix, the computer in David’s office, which he’d crashed while working at it in the months following his retirement. When she turned it on, it still displayed the sad Mac face that David had chuckled at, its X’d-out eyes cartoonish and silly. Its hard drive disk was still stuck inside it. Whatever information it contained—some of it, perhaps, revealing—would be contained until the next time it was successfully started.
She turned in a full circle, took in a deep breath. She did not know where to start. The cream-colored filing cabinet caught her eye. Though she had never seen David use it, she put her hand out and tried the top drawer. It caught hard against her grip: locked. A tiny lock sat next to it tauntingly: no key in sight.
She went down into the basement and approached David’s workbench. Above it, in a somber row, hung the strange and helmetlike objects he had been working on for years. Some resembled goggles; some resembled masks. They looked at her jarringly now. She did not like to see them. She grabbed a crowbar that hung below them on a peg, which she had seen David use only once before. He had levered open the door to the small shed in their backyard when he had lost the key to a padlock.
Now, returning upstairs, she tucked its hooked head up beneath the highest drawer in the filing cabinet and angled down as hard as she could. She used all of her insubstantial weight to push against the lock. But the only result was the bending of the metal—a bucktoothed look to the top drawer, a slight indentation in the one below it. Breathing heavily, her hands sore, she finally gave up, and dropped the crowbar on the floor.
At last Ada turned to the nearest stack of paper on David’s desk. She lifted one leaf from the top. It was a letter from a collection agency, demanding that the electricity bill be paid. Below it was a photocopy of a journal article on language acquisition in children. Below that, an invoice for work that had been done on the roof of the house perhaps two years ago.
Quickly, she worked her way down the pile, until she reached a layer (she had begun to think of the pile as an accumulation of strata, and herself as a geologist) that consisted of perhaps two dozen tickets and receipts. She picked each one up and examined it. Mainly they were meaningless, evidence of items purchased at the local pharmacy or grocery store, one the stub of a ticket to a movie that they had seen together, perhaps a year ago. But one item caught her eye: it was the stub of a train ticket dated August 11, 1984, from Boston to Washington, D.C. On the back of it was scribbled one name, George, and an address.
She lifted the ticket up, pondered it for a moment. When had David last been to Washington? The two of them had gone together several times when Ada had been younger; but never this recently. George was his friend from childhood, an artist, who now lived there; she had met him perhaps twice that she could recall.
Suddenly she realized the significance of the date: it was the day David had first gone missing. The first time she had spent the night at Liston’s. She recalled it exactly: recalled the police report that served as evidence of the necessity of intervention by the DCF. The way that David had studied it sadly.
He had told her, and Liston, and the police, that he’d gone to New York.
Had the disease already overtaken his brain by then? Could it have been a mistake? Or had he been lying intentionally, covering something up?