Discovery of the treasure trove was purely gedanken. On my somewhat demonic tours of Chatterton’s ancestral acres, I was at times inattentively aware of the widow’s walk, but I had never found access to it on the rare occasion when I roamed the top floor—the third; nothing there but empty rooms. The brave brethren were foxholed on the deck below, while up here only one cubicle showed signs of habitation, presumably a workshop of sorts, with a carpenter’s bench, a scattering of tools, and a ladder on its side, angled against the wainscot.

Was the platform purely cosmetic? Or was it sandwiched like an end of cheese between the third-floor ceiling and the slab roof?

And then it hit me: the attic. Chatterton had said, the day we met, “I’ll get ’em from the attic,” referring to the oeuvre of his grandfather, that sterling editor-publisher and belletristic wag of the Cockeysville Clarion. That brown and brittle clump of newsprint resided there, with god knows what else?

Peering up through the gloam of the third-floor corridor I made out a trapdoor. It gave when I pushed against it, while beneath me the ladder protested, creaking.

The first thing I saw among the graveyard of junk was a sewing machine table and, on it, a framed photograph of a woman of about forty with wide, piercing eyes and a Gioconda smile. Beside it was a bud vase holding a dusky red rose too perfect for this world; it was made of plastic.

I gave it no more than a glance, eager as I was to get at the books, and now I was devouring them in great swinish gulps. For how long? I don’t know. I was only conscious, and vaguely, of a shaft of cathedral light that slanted through the bull’s-eye and pearled a patch of the attic and then moved on. The distance between my nose and the page narrowed as darkness fell; my sanctum had no electricity. I closed the book and stared at a dark spot at my feet; it became a beetle. I tracked its stiff, erratic trek. Rather than walk, it seemed to push and pull its black shell through the dust. Its joints creaked loudly, like some tiny primitive tank. Which couldn’t be; it must have been the floorboards, which also couldn’t be, not under the weight of an insect, and oh shit, I suddenly realized, it was the ladder in the hallway below. Chatterton was coming to catch me red-handed among the forbidden fruit.