Mystery

He hits the bottom stair and jumps down on the concrete floor, claps his hands over his ears, and runs between a shabby green couch and a wooden rocking chair to the heavy, scarred workbench which stands against the wall. Like the furniture, the workbench is his father’s: despite all the tools—screwdrivers and hammers, rasps and files and tin cans full of nails, C-clamps and pliers, a jigsaw and a coping saw, a gimlet and a chisel and a plane, stacks of sandpaper—nothing is ever created or repaired at this bench. A thick layer of dust covers everything. The boy runs beneath the bench and puts his back to the wall. Experimentally, he takes his hands from his ears. One moment of quiet lengthens into another. He can breathe. The basement is cool and silent. He sits down on the concrete and leans against the grey block of the wall and closes his eyes.

The world remains cool, dark, and silent.

He opens his eyes again and sees a cardboard box, half-hidden in the gloom beneath the bench. This, too, is covered with a thick grey blanket of dust. All around the boy are the tracks of his passage—lines and erasures, commas and exclamation points, words written in an unknown language. He slides toward the box through the fuzz of dust, opens the lid, and sees that, although it is nearly empty, down at its bottom rests a small stack of old newspapers. He reaches in and lifts the topmost newspaper and squints at the banner of the headline. Though he is not yet in the first-grade, the boy can read, and the headline contains a half-familiar name. JEANINE THIELMAN FOUND IN LAKE.

One of their neighbors is named Thielman, but the first name, “Jeanine,” is as mysterious as “found in lake.” The next newspaper in the stack also has a banner headline. LOCAL MAN CHARGED WITH THIELMAN MURDER. The next paper down, the last, announces MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY. Of these four words, the boy understands only “in.” The boy unfolds this issue of the paper and spreads it out before him. He sees the word “Shadow,” the words “wife,” “children.” None of the people in the photographs are people he knows.

Then he spreads out all the newspapers and sees a picture of a woman who looks something like his mother. She would like to see this picture, he thinks: he could give her the present of these interesting old newspapers he found beneath the workbench.