Her breath made frosty puffs in the air, but the chickens didn’t seem bothered by the cold.

“Punkin, let’s go!” she called. The setter was joyously racing around the yard, barking and romping through the remains of the snow.

He reluctantly abandoned the squirrel he’d treed and followed her back inside the house.

“The Roses must have had a Christmas tree stand,” she told the dog as he lapped water from his bowl. “But the question is where? I’ve looked in all the closets.”

The dog sat on his haunches, stuck his muzzle in the air, and whined.

Ivy looked up and for the first time noticed the rectangular door cut into the kitchen ceiling. A piece of stout rope hung down from the edge.

“I guess that’s the pull-down stairs to the attic, right?”

Punkin thumped his tail.

“I think there are mice up in that attic,” she said. “That’s what that scratching sound we hear at night is. Mice.”

He sprawled out on the floor and gave a short, enthusiastic bark.

“Just this once I wish you were a cat,” Ivy told him. She sighed and reached for the rope. The hinges creaked in protest as the wooden stairs unfolded.

Ivy grabbed a flashlight and looked over at the dog. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, go find Ezra, you hear?”

She climbed the wooden stairs slowly. “Hey, mice!” she called, poking her head through the attic opening. “If you’re up here, consider yourself evicted. I mean it. Head for the hills!”

Ivy turned on the flashlight and flicked it around the cavernous attic space. The ceiling was higher than she’d expected, and the space was cluttered, stacked with trunks and boxes and outdated bits and pieces of furnishings the Roses had long ago abandoned.

She pulled herself to a standing position and began looking around at what she realized must be several generations of family belongings. There were dusty cribs and dressers, a folded-up wheelchair, racks of plastic-draped clothing. She spotted a wooden rocking horse, a mahogany armoire with a mirrored door, and an old treadle-powered sewing machine that reminded her of the one her grandmother had kept in a spare bedroom.

In one corner of the slope-ceilinged space she saw a tall stack of wooden fruit crates with a hand-lettered sign: CHRISTMAS.

“Thank goodness these people were organized,” she muttered. She played the flashlight over the crates and saw that they were labeled: LIGHTS, ORNAMENTS, TINSEL, GARLAND.

She flipped the top of one crate and saw what looked like hundreds of big, old-fashioned C9 colored Christmas bulbs with thick intertwined red and green electrical cords. She moved the crate aside and found another containing extension cords and an electric color wheel. A faded box behind it was labeled: ALUMINUM TREE.

“Oooh,” she whispered, lifting the lid. “Awesome.” She’d seen retro stores in Atlanta selling trees like this for over a hundred bucks. Maybe when Ezra came back he’d help her take the tree downstairs. It might be fun to set it up on the porch.