I decided to look upstairs first because I knew if I started downstairs I’d hear above me those floorboards creaking, which my grandmother said were from Goog’ooks walking around, and in hearing it I knew I’d get creeped out and wouldn’t go upstairs, just like I did when I was little and refused to sleep anywhere but in bed next to my grandmother. But there was nothing upstairs except dust and boxes of pictures and old frames and empty plant pots and this cedar chest full of baby stuff that belonged to my mother. I did find an empty carton of cigarettes, Mistys, the kind my grandmother said she quit years back but we always knew she kept on smoking.

I found some change near the couch: a dime and two pennies under the cushions, and a quarter way back under the couch near the wall. But there was nothing else in the living room, nor in the kitchen. There was the bathroom to check, but why would there be money in there?

My grandmother’s room felt like a display, like everything in it—the brown dresser, the bed with the long blue skirt, the two matching nightstands each with a lamp, and the closet behind whose white-colored doors hung all my grandmother’s clothes—was never used but not never used, was just a room in an abandoned furniture store.

The rain outside picked up and hit hard the glass of the bedroom window.

You won’t find anything, I told myself, yet I had a feeling I would find everything.

It was in a safe no larger than a cinder block, and it was half under the bed, half sticking out under the blue skirt. I slid it all the way out. The key was in the hole, like it had been waiting for me, like it had been put there for this very moment. Not a test, no. An alignment, an alignment of something I could not name. I turned the key, and its ridges and grooves lifted the cylinders with such assurance it took my breath away.

Papers, documents, pictures. A rosary. A letter from my sister. Pictures, documents, papers. A letter my grandmother never sent to my sister in an envelope with blue penmanship so sharp I could not read it.

The sound of floorboards creaking above me pulled my head like it was on a rope.

And then they were gone like the Goog’ooks themselves.