“Anything,” she said. He loved her fearlessness. Although she was two years behind him in school, she knew more about almost everything and she never minded getting dirty or wet. She’d walk up a creek bed, scale a gritty cliff, reach into a hollow tree just to see what might be hiding. Once, when they’d found a mummified bat, she’d stroked the fur on its back against her cheek.

“Careful,” he said, steering her past the boiler. He pulled at a dirty string and the big room lit up, revealing the freshly built wall.

“Is that new?”

He nodded. The wall stretched across the house, separating off the back third of the basement and pierced by one big door awaiting a padlock but for now simply closed. Charlie lifted the hasp bar from the eye and showed Alice the new storage rooms lined along the narrow corridor. Each room had its own door, ajar for now, and each was labeled. Nana. Sylvie & Madeleine & Clementine. Leon & Opal. Jasper. Didier & Chloe. No label for him; he was too young. But for everyone else an enormous locker, smelling of wood, lined with shelves and dividers. Tidy lists hung inside the doors: how many cases of champagne, sherry, reds and whites from this vintage or that stockpiled for each person. Sawdust still marked the floors, and here and there lay the dollies used to wheel in the crates. Soon these doors would be padlocked too.

“So much,” Alice said. “It looks like a warehouse.”

“Doesn’t it?” Charlie said. “But no one knows how long this will last—years, probably—and when they were sitting around the table, calculating so many bottles a week, times so many weeks in a year . . . it got to be a lot pretty quickly. Plus one party like this”—he pointed at the ceiling—“is a whole stack of cases. Did your family stock up?”

Alice laughed. “A few bottles of whiskey. I think Aunt Henrietta bought a case of wine. She’s so clever, though—I bet she’ll start making her own.”

“It’s not illegal,” Charlie said. “Any more than this is.” He gestured at the row of little rooms. “But it’s strange when you see all the bottles together.”

The gallon of clear liquid they found in Jasper’s locker made Charlie laugh: grape brandy, he said. Fantastically strong, for fortifying the wine. For a while after they found that, they stood chatting easily, watching the dogs weave through the storage rooms. Oscar jammed his snout under Nana’s lowest shelf and emerged with his beard and eye tufts heavily coated with sawdust. Olive’s paws turned white. When they were puppies, Charlie remembered, before their backs had darkened to gray, they’d been that pale all over. Their heads, now a warm brown, had been closer to fawn. Olive scrabbled under a shelf and fished out a wad of paper, which she batted his way.