When we’d all tramped up to the attic, I could see why. Frances occupied one end of the floor space: a camp cot, a crate with a few books ranked neatly inside and a candle lamp on top, another crate used an open-fronted dresser and filled with folded clothes. It was spare and obsessively neat.

The rest of the attic contained what looked like the pasts of the last three generations of every family in town, in boxes, in overflowing trunks, in storage cabinets made from the crawl space under the rafters, and a two-door closet built into the end wall. “I thought this was a new building,” I said, rather faintly.

“I moved it all from the old one,” said LeRoy. “There wasn’t time to sort it.”

“Yes, there was,” Sherrea said as her head appeared on the landing. “If you hadn’t put it off until the day before we needed to tear the old place down. Santos, what are you all doing, up here?”

“Looking for a needle,” Frances said.

“Huh. I was going to invite myself to dinner.”

“Great!” said LeRoy. “As soon as we find these books.”

“We’ll starve,” Theo sighed.

The possibility seemed to send Sherrea into action. She pointed each of us at a box or cupboard, and took one for herself. I got the two-door closet.

The floor was stacked with magazines, and if they were sorted, it was into an organization that I didn’t understand. Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, Wigwag, The Utne Reader, Air and Space, Convolution Quarterly, something called Dirty Linen…

I felt as if I’d fallen, with a bad toothache, headfirst into a candy box. The urge to sit and read was unbearable.

Not that the magazines were the only things there. I pulled out a smelly wool quilt, three fluorescent tubes, an electric fan with a blade missing, a fat-bellied painted reed basket, a stack of stamped-tin ashtrays bearing the legend “Reynolds Radiator: A Good Place to Take a Leak,” and an enormous framed brown photograph of a beaming blond woman, from around the mid-19408. I sneezed and raised my eyes, daunted, to the closet shelf.

There were some books there, the bindings disguised by a barely arrested cascade of newspapers and an inverted pyramid of cardboard boxes that, if anything in that closet had seemed to be arranged by intent, I would have called a booby trap. I recognized that. I pointed it out to myself, almost in so many words, in mingled amusement and dismay. And still my hands went out to ruffle under the heap of newspapers, to try to draw the books from the very bottom of the stack.

Newsprint slid, one fold, then two. The boxes trembled and rocked. At last, inexorably, in the same style as avalanches filmed for documentaries, the boxes tipped forward and poured their contents and themselves over my head and shoulders. I think I yelled.

I stood finally at the end of a long drift of mixed paper, sneezing. The mess eddied gently around Frances’s knees, where she sat cross-legged in front of an open box. “Just think,” she said mildly. “It could have been paint… What’s that?”