“They aren’t all the same,” she said, her voice unsteady. “But… they repeat.”
“But what do they mean?” Samson twisted one of the papers toward him, his thumb skimming the edge of it. “And are they supposed to look like that, or was it just hard to carve into the wood? I mean, they aren’t very big.”
“And the other question is, who carved them? They look like they’ve been here a while but there’s no way to know, is there?” She looked up at him hopefully.
“You don’t remember seeing these as a kid?”
“I never looked at the tops of the window frames when I was a kid.”
“Right.” He nodded, his focus on the pages on the table, a furrow between his brow. “I don’t even know where you’d start trying to figure out what these are.”
“Maybe the answer is in one of Grandpa’s books.”
The look he gave her was stricken, his face pale with it. “That’s a lot of books to go through to look for it.”
“I haven’t come across anything like it so far, but it should be easy to tell, don’t you think? With two of us, it might go faster?” Okay, so she hadn’t wanted his help, but now, well…she didn’t see how she could do it without him.
He was the only friend she had.
His shoulders slumped, and he nodded. “Let me get the window fixed up there, first, then I’ll bring a couple of boxes down, and we can get started.”
She worked in the study while he returned upstairs. The hammering and drilling was faint, but she was pretty sure that meant he’d left the attic door open.
She was paying closer attention to the books than she had before, now determined to see if something held a secret to the codes etched on the windows.
She hadn’t told Samson about the painting, or the white figure in her room, because, well, she couldn’t be sure the white figure hadn’t been a dream, and the painting, well. She didn’t have a reason not to tell him that. But she getting an inkling that maybe these symbols were somehow related to those events. She wouldn’t say anything to Samson until she was sure, but she couldn’t shake the feeling.
So she looked at book after book, all disgustingly normal. And, well, just plain disgusting. She had a box half-full, ready to go to the dumpster, when she heard Samson’s footsteps on the stairs, slower than she would have expected.
She stuck her head out of the study to see him carrying two stacked boxes, peering around them to try to see where he was stepping.
She hurried forward, not sure why, maybe to catch him if he pitched forward. Both of them would be crushed under the weight of the books. “What are you doing?”
“You said you wanted this stuff downstairs. Honestly, I don’t know how your grandfather got them up the stairs, because they are heavy.”
“I did want them down here.” She didn’t want to go through them in the humid dusty attic. “But you didn’t need to risk your life carrying two at once.”
His eyes glinted as she tugged the top box—heavy enough that she staggered back when the weight shifted—to take from him.
“Maybe I was just showing off.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, would have done you a lot of good if you’d missed a step and broken your neck.” Just what she needed, another ghost in this house.
“I was careful. Where do you want these?”
“The front porch, maybe? In case anything that’s living in there wants to make a run for the swamp, and not the kitchen.”
He crossed the foyer and dropped the box on the stack of other boxes already there. Naturally the box disintegrated with the force, sending up a cloud of dust, and books tumbled out.
Well, sheets of paper, no longer bound in book form, the glue disintegrated. She crouched to pick them up.
He sighed and dropped to his knees beside her to help gather them. “Not to add to your current project list, but you do have a pretty bad leak. You’re going to need to get it fixed or you’ll have more damage to the floor below. As it is, that wood needs to be replaced. No telling if there’s damage to the rooms below that.”
She wiped a loose strand of hair back from her face with the edge of her hand. “Cal did mention that. Do you think it can be patched? Or maybe a tarp? Until I can get the money?”
“I’ll need to get up there to see, and the sooner the better. We’re scheduled to have rain all week.”
Disappointment speared through her. First of all, she didn’t have money, either to pay him or to buy supplies. Secondly, she really wanted to go through these books to see if they had answers.
