At least, she thought gloomily, the Hermit Hoarder hadn’t been able to do too much permanent damage here. The black-and-white penny tile floor was filthy, but the tiles were all intact. The ballerina-pink toilet and matching pink sink and bathtub were still standing, though coated with what looked like decades of grime.

The chrome towel bars and toilet paper holders had been wrenched from the walls, and a lone, nearly empty roll of toilet paper stood atop the toilet tank.

“Bleach,” Drue muttered. “Gonna need a lot of bleach.”

Swallowing hard, she stepped into the bathtub and wrenched the aluminum sash of the window there upward, letting in a welcome rush of fresh air.

Drue tiptoed into the larger of the two bedrooms. By current real estate standards Nonni’s room was tiny, hardly the stuff of a real master bedroom suite. The carpet here was a purple red, the walls painted to match. In Nonni’s day, the walls and carpet were baby blue. The picture window opposite the wall where Nonni and Papi’s bed had been was covered with venetian blinds, giving the room the overall effect of a burgundy cave. Without another thought, she went to the window and yanked the blinds free of the wall, flooding the room in welcome sunlight. This window had been painted shut too.

She stood in the center of the room, waiting to see if she could sense her grandparents’ presence here. On the right side of where her grandparents’ bed had been, she imagined the mahogany nightstand, with its ever-present box of tissues, Nonni’s Avon hand cream and, always, her white-leather-covered missalette. She glanced over the door frame and was jolted, and then reassured, by the presence of the hand-carved wooden crucifix. It was still there!

Reluctantly, she moved on to the second bedroom, “her bedroom,” Nonni always called it. She’d furnished Drue’s room with a frilly white-canopied bed and a fussy French provincial dresser and nightstand, which Drue had adored until she turned fourteen and decided she hated everything, including this room.

In the intervening years someone had painted Drue’s room mud brown. Two walls were covered with crudely constructed sagging wooden bookshelves still loaded down with rows of paperback books. Obviously this had been the hoarder’s den. The double window, which had been adorned with ruffled, white dotted-swiss curtains during Drue’s youth, was now covered with a beige woolen blanket, which had been nailed to the wall. Maybe the tenant had been a vampire?