Page 71 of A Very No Strings Halloween
She starts to roll her eyes at me, but then she notices what I’m wearing. “Are you sexy Harry Potter?!”
I give her a wink. “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.” But it’s a short-lived break from the chaos. Now the shutters are banging against the siding all around the house. “We gotta get movin’.”
“I remember Lars saying the letter might have gotten mixed up with things that were put in storage. I’ve looked everywhere, even the garage. Everywhere except…” She looks up through the skylight, toward the darkened top floor. “The attic.”
Right on cue, there’s thunder and lightning.
I grab her hand. “Come on.”
We jog out to the front hall and up the stairwell. The lights are still flickering. The pipes are rattling inside the walls like the last time we were here. The walls are shaking and framed paintingsfall to the floor. Donna pulls me toward the end of the hall. I tug on a chain to unlatch the panel to the attic hatch and then grab the pull-down ladder. I am a gentleman, so I let Donna go up first, hanging behind her in case she falls. The house seems to be collapsing around us, but I still have the wherewithal to check out her magnificent booty under that miniskirt. The knee-high socks and patent leather shoes are really a nice touch.
When we reach the attic, it’s incredibly dark and the air is thick. It’s like wading through a sea of angry black ink. The only light is from the flashes of lightning through the dormer windows to one side. I have no sense of how big the space is, but we can both stand up without ducking our heads.
I take out my cell phone and turn on the flashlight. With that I’m able to find a single bulb hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the unfinished room and tug on a string to switch it on. The attic is now illuminated with a soft yellow glow. Donna and I glance around the space. It’s big. Impossibly cavernous. There are tons of wooden crates and a few dusty metal boxes and trunks.
“You start with that trunk and I start with this one?” Donna says, pointing.
“Sounds good.”
I start searching through a big trunk and so does she.
“So…how was the party?” she asks out of nowhere asshe frantically rifles through things. Sounding casual, but there’s something underneath it.
“Aw, it was a bust. Not really my scene.”
Donna stops searching for a moment and looks over at me. “Since when?”
I shrug. I could tell her now, but I don’t want to ask for forever when it feels like the world is ending. “I dunno.” There’s a cannon blast of thunder that’s so powerful, the whole house shakes. I pretend I didn’t hear or feel anything. “Why, did ya miss me?”
She shrugs. “Y’know. Chelsea is great company. But you’re…”
“I’m what?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
The thunder cracks again, and the panel in the floor below slams shut. I don’t even know how that’s possible since you’d have to use a pole with a hook at the end to pull the folding ladder up.
“Shit,” I mutter and walk over to it. “The door’s stuck! I can’t open it.”
“What?”
The light bulb begins to flicker, and the house shakes from more thunder.
“Billy…” Donna moans. “I have a really bad feeling about this.”
“It’s okay, baby. We’ll figure it out.”
There’s a huge roar of thunder. Donna shrieks and crashes into me. I grab hold of her.She’s shaking so hard. That’s when I realize how fucking cold it is in here.
Then all of a sudden a small wooden box tumbles off the top of a stack of crates and its contents spill out.
Papers fly everywhere, but a single envelope drops to the floor, separate from the rest.
Donna and I stare at each other, wide-eyed.
“Do you think…” I ask but don’t finish.
Donna nods, leaves the safety of my arms, and goes to pick up the letter. “This is it. It saysFor my darling Lars!” She peers around like she’s expecting something to happen now that she’s found it, but if anything the storm only grows more furious outside.
