Lance took Julia's hand and led her around the corner of the house. They'd gone patio door to patio door in less than two minutes. The Italian Job people didn't have anything on them.
As they stepped into the keeping room, Julia knew for certain that Myrtle wasn't playing with a full deck. The mess that filled the room went far beyond sloth. Julia looked at the mountains of junk on every free surface and became impressed that Nina had made it silently through the obstacle course that lay between the keeping room and the patio doors. Old newspapers were stacked everywhere, each pile two or three feet tall. Julia did some quick calculations and remembered that Caroline and Steve had moved in at the end of the summer, roughly eight months before. Myrtle had moved in at about the same time, and Julia guessed from looking at the piles of papers that the woman hadn't thrown a single one away during all that time. The sight of all the newspapers made Julia cringe with the thought of how difficult it might be to find the manuscript if it was anywhere other than in its box, and if the box was somewhere other than the garage.
She felt a tug on her sleeve and turned to see Lance wordlessly urging her forward. Nina was already trotting into the kitchen, dodging unopened bags of flour and cases of canned food. She moved as though the bulk groceries were laser beams, using the swift, precise motions of someone who's watched way too many episodes of Alias.
Better make it an exotic vacation for two, Julia decided, realizing that both Nina and Caroline needed to find a legal outlet for their energy.
Lance and Julia followed Nina's lead, with far less precision, When the three of them reached the door that led to the garage, | Lance placed his hand on the knob, and Julia felt him silently count to three. Then he opened the door, and they all piled in, with perfect SWAT team precision. Well, almost perfect. I Lance collided with a bicycle. Nina knocked a rake, a hoe, and a snow shovel off a rack. Julia stubbed her toe and turns' bled onto the hood of Myrtle's Cadillac. For a minute, they were all as quiet as church mice, looking at each other through the diluted glow of Lance's flashlight.
"Caroline," Nina whispered into the walkie-talkie.
"Caroline," she said again, risking a little more volume. "Do you see lights?" she asked, then nervously added, "Over."
Julia's mind flashed back to the diagrams spread across the changing table. She recalled the layout of the first floor, remembering that the master bedroom was upstairs—upstairs, above the garage. Ridiculous excuses log jammed in her mind. Oh, yes, officers, we're the community yard-sale committee. . . termite. inspectors . . . sleepwalkers?
"Caroline?" Nina asked again, this time not hiding the panic that they were all beginning to feel. A long, eerie silence followed before Caroline's static-riddled voice came through the walkie-talkie.
"Sorry guys. Nick was wet." ! "Caroline," Nina snapped, "are there lights?"
A terribly long moment passed while, presumably, Caroline checked the window. "You're clear, Alpha team, proceed as planned. Operation is a go."
"Alpha team"? Maybe it wasn't a vacation Caroline needed—maybe it was there a— "Pit bull!" Nina hissed.
Julia spun around to see a big brown dog in a spiked leather collar standing at the top of the concrete stairs. The dog was looking at them as if it didn't know whether they were intruders or circus performers hired for his entertainment. Its front legs were perched on top of a giant bag of dog food. In the glare of the flashlight Julia could just make out the swinging flap of the doggie door.
"Oh, boy," Lance said. He eased toward the now-growling animal. "Hey, boy," he said. "How ya doing there, big guy? You don't need to bark. No. You don't need to bark." Then Julia saw Lance's hand move to his pocket, and moments later he was holding an uncooked hot dog. With a gentle flick, he tossed it onto the concrete landing. But the dog was unsure which piece of meat looked better, the weenie or Lance; it looked between the two of them, sniffing. Then it lowered its head and began to eat.
Julia watched in amazement, but Nina summed it up best: "Holy crap."
Lance didn't stop to marvel at his accomplishment. Instead, he turned to them and whispered, "Let's get out of here, quick. I've only got a few more with me."
"How did you know to bring hot dogs?" Nina asked.
He raised his eyebrows. "Not all crazy people lie."
"Okay," Julia said. "Let's spread out and find that manuscript. It's in a medium-sized brown box."
"You mean like those brown boxes?" Nina said and turned. The beam of her flashlight swept across the garage, illuminating a mountainous pile of boxes, each nearly identical to the one Myrtle had hauled from Caroline's curb.
"What kind of freak is she?" Julia asked, no longer trying to mask her voice.
"The kind who's gonna send us to prison if she finds us," Lance said softly. "Now let's look and get out of here."
With the mountain before them, it was pretty safe to assume that new arrivals were at the top. Plus, upon closer inspection, Julia noticed that not all of the boxes were plain or brown. Some had mailing labels, or black-and-white pictures of TVs and computer monitors, with instructions written in English, Spanish, and Japanese.
"It was plain?" Lance asked.
"Yes. A plain brown box. No writing of any kind. Probably two feet square."
"Like that one?" Nina asked, and sent a beam of light upward to a shelf that must have been fifteen feet above the concrete floor. The three of them stood with their heads craned back so far that they could have seen straight up to Heaven if it hadn't been for Myrtle's bedroom directly above them.
"How in the world did she get it up there?" Julia asked.
"You're sure that's the one?" Lance asked.
There wasn't a doubt in Julia's mind.
Lance steadied a ladder while Julia climbed almost to its highest rung, teetering. Don't look down, don't look down, she chanted to herself. She pried open the four corners of the box and, with a mini-flashlight in her mouth, saw what she hadn't seen in years. She pulled out early drafts of Table for One, old short stories she desperately wanted to stop and read, letters she'd received from Caroline and Nina that had inspired her to keep writing.