The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

themselves, the ones who vanished into Mexico, the one they found buried under old newspapers. She returned to the book many times, to trace the lines of the small, gray jaws with her pinky. Great-aunts and distant cousins. Her grandfather, Gamaliel, as a long-haired boy in a dress. (His mother, Violet, not a Devohr by birth and not a Devohr for long, merited mention only as “another suicide.”) Zee had never met any of them. Gracie’s parents died before Zee was born, and Gracie’s brothers were all “degenerates” to whom she no longer spoke. No cousins ever visited, no aunts. The Devohrs weren’t people so much as sea turtles that laid their eggs and then crawled back to the ocean, not particularly invested in meeting their progeny ever again. That she and Gracie were relatively close was a miracle.
    Gracie said, “Do you think the college might find a job for Case as well? Something in the business office?”
    Zee was still contemplating what kind of response this merited when Gracie’s phone rang. She answered it and handed it to Zee. It was Doug.
    “Hey!” he said. “You’re at your mom’s!” He was a terrible actor.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing, no, I just wondered. So you won’t be back for a while?”
    “Maybe an hour.”
    “Okay. Like, a whole hour? Okay!”
    She hung up and told her mother she needed to get going right away.
    “It’s just as well. Some poor fellow’s coming over to take pictures. The architects are sending him. I don’t know what on earth he wants.”
    Zee put her teacup in the sink, kissed her mother’s cheek, and ran out the side door. A car was pulling up to the front, the beat-up black Saturn of the architectural lackey, who had no idea what Gracie would put him through.
    In the coach house, it seemed eerily like a normal Thursday afternoon. Miriam on the sunporch, fully clothed, working on her unloved dress collages. Case sulking at the kitchen table. Doug sprawled on the bed with Sports Illustrated , smiling, as if he’d been expecting her.

25
    O n the phone, Leland had said the pictures turned out but he wasn’t sure what the hell he was looking for. Doug didn’t know why this was disappointing. He hadn’t really believed Leland would find a cardboard box labeled “Parfitt’s Memoirs.” But somewhere between getting Leland into the attic, and getting Zee out of the house in time, and arranging this meeting down at the beach, Doug had come to assume there would be a major payoff. He’d stopped considering the possibility that Bruce was wrong about the file cabinets. That there might be nothing there but a pile of dusty bed frames. He’d forgotten that even if there were colony files, they might have just been heating bills.
    It was a cool, sunny day, and Lake Michigan was Caribbean blue. Doug found Leland and Miriam at separate picnic benches on the grass between the sand and the cars. He introduced them, and Leland poured out an envelope of snapshots: windows, bureaus with missing drawers, piles of headboards and desk chairs, and yes, four black metal file cabinets, each two drawers high, with no visible locks.
    “They were old enough. You see the script on the logo?” He’d managed to sneak a close-up of the manufacturer’s plaque on one cabinet. “Looks like what, forties? Fifties? That fits, right?” Leland attempted to lay the photos into the general shape of the attic. “It wasn’t easy,” he said. He was taking up one whole bench, his legsspread wide, looking at Miriam in her yellow shirt in a way that implied Doug had sold her short. “I didn’t tell her it was the attic I wanted till I’d thanked her a million times, told her what a jackass my boss was, how I was afraid I’d get fired. So by the time I said ‘attic,’ she’d feel bad saying no. Oh, and I told her my girlfriend was from Toronto. That helped. I don’t have a girlfriend, but hey. So she did say no, she told me there were bats and she hadn’t been up there in