Jake climbed the wooden ladder to the loft, his heavy boots knocking against the dry pine rungs. I tucked the wet paper into my pocket and followed him, using the sturdy handrail to take the weight off my right knee. The air up here was warmer than the main floor, thick with the smell of cedar shavings and dry rot.
“He wouldn’t have left just a scrap of paper,” Jake said, his fingers tapping a rapid, nervous rhythm on his thigh. He was looking at the dust-covered joists where Grandpa used to store long cuts of air-dried walnut.
I held the brass workshop key tightly in my hand. The metal felt cold, even after minutes of holding it against my skin.
We began feeling along the tops of the horizontal beams, our fingers dragging through gray cobwebs and decades of fine wood dust. My fingers found nothing but rough-sawn pine and the occasional rusty nail bent flat against the grain. My knee throbbed from the climb, a dull ache that usually meant a change in the weather.
