‘Well, Norma was supposed to call over to the farmhouse on the day it happened. Young Shayna Millard had asked her for some cooking lessons and Norma went there on Fridays at eleven. Everyone knew that. Shayna was getting quite good at it. She wanted to enter her teacake into the town fair. Anyway, when Norma got there, she knocked and there was no answer. Shayna’s car was parked outside the farmhouse, but Brett’s car wasn’t there. Norma assumed that the family had gone out in Brett’s car and Shayna had forgotten about the cooking lesson. She didn’t think much of it and went home. It only came out later that they were both dead inside, and the little one was in there, hungry and alone.’ Nan shivered and pulled the rug over her knees with gnarled old hands. ‘If only she had’ve tried the front door; it was open. She could’ve gone in and found the little girl.’

‘Where was Brett’s car?’ I asked, to distract Nan away from if onlys. In my experience, if only questions hurt too much. The little girl—Crystal—had been in the house for days, alone with her dead parents, scavenging for food, snuggling up to her dead mother, and no one could change that.

Nan sighed. ‘It turned out that he’d had a car accident the week before and the car was at the repair shop. Norma wasn’t to know that.’

‘Of course not,’ I said soothingly. As we were speaking, so many memories of little Bretty Millard came flooding back. I hadn’t thought about him in years—and it occurred to me now there were some complex reasons for that.

CHAPTER 15: THE NAUGHTY BOY IN THE ATTIC

CHAPTER 15

THE NAUGHTY BOY IN THE ATTIC

Waffles greeted me at the gate as usual, and I resisted the urge to plant my foot and speed us both up the driveway. I also resisted the urge to climb the narrow staircase off the kitchen that led to the attic; I had to feed Waffles first. He liked his routine.

As soon as he was wolfing down his kibble and scraping his bowl on the wooden floor, I grabbed my old police-issue torch from the kitchen dresser. The ancient stairs made horror-movie creaks as I climbed to the top, praying the light would still work. It did. A dim bulb cast shadows across the space, making all the stored bulky furniture look like looming bears.

It was dusty. I had been up there a couple of months ago in the daylight, not long after moving in. The attic was so cluttered that any thought of clearing it out had gone into the too-hard basket, and I had shut the door on the overflowing boxes, old lamps, trunks and baby cribs.