She climbed past her parents’ bedroom and Fee’s consulting room, standing across from each other on the first landing, and up to the top landing of the house, where Tom the lodger’s room stood opposite her own old bedroom. She retrieved the rickety ladder from the corner of the landing, pulled down the attic door, and scrambled up to the small, dusty space, crammed with the paraphernalia of nearly three decades of family life, boxes of baby clothes laid by for a generation that was yet to come, once-loved toys that no one had had the heart to throw away, piles of college textbooks that might yet be referred to, broken tennis rackets that maybe one day someone would take the time to restring.

Carefully, she picked her way through the narrow path between the piles to the corner, where, under a small window with raindrops drumming thunderously on the old warped pane, there sat a large trunk containing the family papers that Fee had had shipped from Boston when her own mother, Grandma Jojo, had died. Next to it was the bookcase, which Fee had been less than ingenuous in describing as small, because it came up to Lulu’s shoulders and held four shelves packed to overflowing with books, papers, and storage boxes of various sizes.

“Thanks, Mom,” Lulu muttered to herself. She switched on the electric light, thin and yellow, to augment the watery gray light from outside, dragged out a broken-down stool to sit herself on, and set to the task.

The top shelf of the bookcase held piles of photographs, some in albums, some not, ranging from old-fashioned sepia to the faded, once-bright colors of thirty years ago. Lulu rooted through those briefly, tracing the long Massachusetts faces of her mother’s family as they moved through the last century and more, stopping to inspect an old woman with a sweet expression, wearing a lace-edged cap and holding a baby in a large lace collar, a glamorous younger woman with permed hair and dark lipstick, smoking a cigarette and looking haughtily to the side, a couple of young men in American naval uniforms, and finally, delightedly, happening on one of a younger, thinner Fee, with wild curly hair and a stern expression, waving a banner that read THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL.

The second shelf held books, piles of them, as the family had been readers for generations, crammed higgledy-piggledy into the space until the shelf buckled beneath their weight. Poetry jumbled against Victorian romances, books of sermons jostled with The Pickwick Papers, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Raymond Chandler, and also, a little to Lulu’s surprise, with a series of penny dreadfuls from the 1860s, their covers illustrated with scenes of bandits, nuns, and fainting women. Nowhere among them, however, was a collection of recipes—Grandma Jojo, who had been a practical woman, must have packed it away into one of the storage boxes for protection.

The boxes filled most of the rest of the bookcase. There were a dozen or more of them, in canvas or cardboard, of differing sizes, and with their contents clearly labeled in Grandma Jojo’s square, firm hand. Lulu squatted on the floor, brushed aside a couple of the spiders that so alarmed Sophie, and set to examining them. The box marked JEWELRY she thought she could ignore, also the box marked MAPS. A shoebox labeled RECEIPTS looked promising but proved to hold a collection of financial documents on thin white paper, the numbers stamped out with an old-fashioned typewriter ribbon. An elegant container finished in cream-colored vellum and marked CISSIE raised her hopes, but on inspection contained only a series of battered journals scrawled in an all-but-illegible cramped hand—if this were Grandma Cissie’s handwriting, thought Lulu, it was no wonder that she had decided to have her recipes printed professionally. There was a box marked TRANSCENDENTALISM, which apparently had once interested someone in the family, and another box marked CONCORD. Nowhere either in any of the boxes or stacked between them was the book Lulu sought.