DO YOU HAVE AN ATTIC?

DO YOU HAVE AN ATTIC?

EXPLORE ALL THE CORNERS!

He sat across from me in the corner booth. He was bruised and bandaged, but smiling underneath his pain. “I’m sure glad you came to get me at the hospital. I don’t think I could spend any more time there…it’s depressing!”

“We are both the lucky ones, aren’t we? I get you back—a little roughed over, but whole and fixable, and you get to go home and paint the rest of the nursery!”

I smiled as he winced a little, but then he beamed back as though he was picturing a nursery with a happy baby in it. “With all this stuff going on trying to catch the drug runners, I don’t think about home and happy wife and future children as much as I’d like. I guess that’s why I’m usually the one getting beaten up because I just put everything else out of my mind to concentrate on the mission and then…”

“And then you jump right in the middle of the fracas and take the hits. I know you, Officer Gray. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I am proud of you. I just wish you’d stand at the back of the fight occasionally so I don’t have to take you home in pieces to put back together. This kid I’m carrying has to be able to recognize his or her daddy as the handsome, dashing man I’m married to.”

“Aw, that’s sweet, ma’am. Now, where’s that breakfast you promised?”

“I see the waitress headed our way. We can eat and then head home. Scruff will be wondering who put his breakfast on hold!”

“Silly dog, he knows us better than that. I think we spoil him. He will be jealous when we start spending more time with baby bonkers than him. Have to condition him to be patient and how to be a guard dog, or something.”

Okay, my man, let’s eat. I’m having one of your bacon slices, and then I’ll be set to eat what I should, not what I want. Is Sonny coming over later to bring your vehicle?”

“Yeah, probably Sonny and Sarge. Maybe we’ll have a report from HQ about the amount of substance in that heist. It looked like a lot!”

And then we’ll have a nap, I thought, as I smothered my toast with jam. All of us, napping. Good afternoon!

Officer Gregg Gray and I have been a pair since our first police training classes. I haven’t been on duty since the pregnancy began to show, but they keep me apprised of cases and investigations in case I have any input or theories or just praise now and then… the “good job” kind.

At home, we cleaned up Gregg’s surface wounds and started him on another round of pain meds according to the doc's orders. He was a little skittish, but I know he’s as brave as most of his comrades in arms. At least, that’s the face that shows. Done, and Scruff attended to, the guys drove in the driveway in Gregg’s vehicle and a squad car. I invited them in, but said they couldn’t stay if they had no up-to-date info on the sting operation.

Sonny and Sarge just hung around long enough for some fresh coffee, and a few words of encouragement for Gregg. No completed report yet, they said, but the guys were working on it. The arrests were complicated by the facts that none of the perps were using their real names, and who they were working for.

“Okay guys, time for us to get some rest. We’ll be in touch tomorrow, one way or the other.” The hint was taken with a thumbs-up goodbye, and they piled into the squad car and drove away. Scruff didn’t chase them. He seemed intent on staying close to the injured party here as if he could help.

After a good two-hour nap, we were hungry (me, mostly), so I foraged some soup and toasted cheese fixings and we were just quiet. For us, that’s amazing. I was being beaten from the inside by legs, or arms, or a combination thereof. It made me giggle, and daddio was fascinated.

We live in a house in the country that had been in Gregg’s family for generations. We moved out of town when his Uncle George passed and left the house to us. We hadn’t had time to even inspect all of the belongings, buildings and ins and outs of the workings of the old farm. We kept saying we’d get to it, but Gregg had been busy with this latest investigation and sting, and I was adjusting to myself, and my thoughts of a future life as a family. I didn’t think it was wise to go snooping around the place by myself, even though I was sure it was all pretty standard, old, and perhaps auctionable eventually. I couldn’t picture us doing any farming other than a garden, or a plot of sweet corn and pumpkins or something similar. Whatever treasures there might be from the generations before us might not be so worthy of our care and keeping.

Gregg and I enjoyed a couple of quiet days for his recovery and my entertainment. I’m a ball of laughs with this big belly looming in front of me, and between us when we hug! But we can wait a few more weeks, and the nursery walls keep calling, “Paint me, paint me, please. We can’t stand this urple purple from Great Aunt Mable any longer. We’ll start peeling ourselves if you don’t do it first.” That’s basically what I hear when I close my eyes against the fading mismatched colors. Gregg doesn’t hear it, but he hears me…

So today—a bright, sunny Saturday morning, I have the paint cans lined up, the ladder is already there, the brushes and rollers are fresh and clean, and I have rags and drop cloths already stationed at the ready to catch the drips of bright new color! When Gregg walks in the room, he’s in overalls, with a painter’s cap, and gloves sticking out of his pocket, and a look of determination has replaced his usual good-morning-honey, I-love-you-and-bonkers look. Scruff, the mighty guard dog, has disappeared under a bed, or better, out to the porch to stay for however long the smelly paint takes to dry. I will join him soon, as the smell of paint does not agree with my state of being right now. Lucky for me? Maybe.

An hour goes by, then two, then I fix some lunch and holler upstairs. I hear pounding, not painting! “Hey hubby, no remodeling, just painting please!”

Gregg comes bounding down the stairs with a grin of amazement on his handsome face. “Guess what?” he says. I reply with a silly comment about him being done already, and adding the attic room to the nursery with all that pounding….

“Well not exactly, but there was this old sealed door in there… like a small entrance to the attic, so I pried it open, and there’s stuff in there!”

“Stuff? What stuff?” I wasn’t going to fall for the general “stuff” comment. That could be anything. “Like mice, bugs, bats, butterflies, skeletons, old books, a piano? Details, Gregg, details, and here’s your sandwich.”

He says, with a mouthful of ham and cheese, “No mice. There may have been bats at one time, but not now. There’s an old desk full of papers and stuff.”

“Stuff? That’s so general. Did you look through any of the stuff?”

“I did, dearest, and I found this old ledger and a black book tied up together in a stack of books. The desk is small, and thank goodness for that old gable window in there. Otherwise I wouldn’t have found this…”

He pulled down the overall straps from his shoulders and there are bills, like money. I see a twenty, a few hundreds, and then a whole bag filled with cash falls out from his front. “Whoa! You’re not kidding, there’s really money stashed up there?”

“Yup, and quite a lot of it, although I haven’t taken a good inventory. I think the black book and the ledger will maybe explain. It’s been there a while. Good ol’ Uncle George, or probably his dad or uncle, or even someone more ancient… had plans for this, but hid it away until it was my investigative nature to find it and claim it!”

We sort of let the rest of our lunch wait, and Gregg brought the book and ledger downstairs and laid what he had gathered out on the table for an inspection and a count. I sorted the bills, got rubber bands from the junk drawer, and sticky notes for labels, and he cracked open the stiff old books to see what secrets were written in those pages.

It was a grand afternoon. I stopped counting at $20,000 and change, and that didn’t include the foreign cash that was interspersed in the small stuffed bags. Gregg said there were some pieces of old luggage stacked in the corners, and he hadn’t opened any of those yet. Plus, he thinks there is more cash in the desk, but it was dusty and smelled old and musty and didn’t want me to have a reaction to any dirty, smelly air…

“Well, I certainly appreciate the thoughts, but maybe we can put the fan up there. Does the end gable window open? Do I need to string a line and get some clothespins—hang it all out to freshen?”

Gregg laughed and said it’s a good thing we don’t have close neighbors… Can’t imagine them seeing money hanging all over the yard.

We discussed logistics, as in who needs to know, and know what, and if there are legal ramifications and if we should hire an attorney, and that we need to change our wills, and decide how to keep the money and books safe—the local bank may be too local…

The county seat is a larger community with more than one bank, and we decided to check out their vaults with the safe deposit boxes. Or, we even discussed putting it all back in the attic, but it’s an old house… so we’ll sit on it for a while and decide soon—sooner rather than later.

We celebrated in our laid-back style by having fresh apple pie a la mode. Gregg was too hyper to paint, so we spent the rest of the afternoon discussing our lives moving forward. Investments? Property? New car? Taxes? College fund? Donations? I realized how easy it would have been to just put the money and the ledger and the journal away and forget it. The complications to our lives were enough to scare us into putting it all back and sealing up the small door.

As it turned out, that’s exactly what we did. Cleaned up the space and the "stuff," stored it more carefully, and then closed and painted over the door. We kept out some cash for fun or emergencies, or whatever we wanted or needed, and I began writing my own journal in one of those elegant Moleskine books, and kept it locked. I mean, without a record, who would believe what we found, and most certainly, it was going to be a story told down through a couple more generations. Our child is going to benefit from the “stuff” and the story, and we’ll have a heckuva graduation party, or a wedding celebration, or just an enormous Christmas some year.

Note: Baby Bonkers was born 3 weeks later. Her name is Dustin Hope. I know, kind of corny, but it fits. She will have a brother some day, and his name will be Finn Atticus… just kidding.

Janna Kohl Bruns