Chapter 1

He died in February. Mom died seven years before him, so my sister Megan and I have been clearing out the house to get it ready to sell. We only found the room because of a water stain on the ceiling of my old bedroom. The roofer went up into the attic to take a look, and about ten minutes later he came back down and asked if we knew somebody had put plywood up behind the insulation.

We didn't know anything about any plywood.

The attic is low enough that you have to crouch between the rafters to get around. Dad kept the Christmas decorations near the hatch, and when we were kids we weren't allowed any farther in than that, because he was convinced one of us would put a foot through the ceiling.

Behind the plywood was a space maybe six feet long and three feet wide. Inside it we found a sleeping pad, a bunch of food wrappers, a plastic cup, two pencils worn down almost to the wood, one of our old water jugs, and the portable camping toilet Dad bought when Megan was little because she refused to use the campground restrooms after dark. There were also thirty-seven drawings.

The first one I picked up was drawn on the back of an electric bill. It was my parents' bedroom, seen from above. Mom was asleep on her side and Dad was on his back. I recognized the headboard right away because Dad had built it himself, with three square panels across the top, and whoever drew the picture had bothered to get all three of them right.

Dad's eyes were open.

The drawings weren't all equally good. Some of the early ones were rough, with crooked beds and hands that were basically lumps, and it was obvious whoever made them was a lot better at furniture than at people. The later ones were different. The lines got lighter and more confident, and the faces started to actually look like faces. Dad improved fastest. I know how that sounds, but it's true. By the later pictures I could recognize him before I'd even worked out which room he was in. Whoever it was had learned the crease between his eyebrows, the way his hair went flat on one side after he'd been lying down, even the shape of his hands. The rest of us mostly stayed simpler.

The first thing that came back to me was the granola bars. Mom bought them for our school lunches, and two or three at a time would just disappear. She blamed me, I blamed Megan, and Megan blamed me right back. Dad said it was rats. Then bread started going missing, and cookies, and once half a roast chicken. That one turned into an actual argument, because Mom was sure Dad had eaten it after everyone went to bed and Dad swore up and down he hadn't. She told him that if we had rats big enough to carry off half a chicken, he needed to do something about them.

That weekend Dad bought insulation. I remember him spending most of that Saturday up in the attic. The noises stopped for a few days and then came back.

What I remember is creaking more than scratching, something shifting above my room and then farther along the ceiling. Sometimes I heard it over Megan's room too. Dad still called it rats.

When I was ten I tried talking to them. It was a hot night (we didn't have air conditioning upstairs back then) and the box fan by my bed clicked every time it turned. Something creaked above me. I had a plastic baseball bat next to the bed, so I flipped it around and knocked the handle against the ceiling three times.

After a few seconds, something knocked three times back.

I thought this was the greatest thing that had ever happened. I knocked twice, but before anything could answer, Dad came into my room and took the bat away.

"Don't do that."

He wasn't whispering. He was just a lot quieter than he usually was when he caught me doing something stupid. I asked him why, and he said, "Because I told you they're rats."

The next morning he went up into the attic, and not long after that there was a metal sliding bolt on the hatch. I asked what it was for.

"Rats."

I told him rats couldn't open the attic hatch, and he said, "Exactly."

Megan came upstairs while I was looking through the drawings and made it through about three before she went back down. When I followed her into the kitchen she said we needed to call somebody.

"Who?"

"The police?"

"And tell them what?"

She just stared at me. "Someone was living above our bedrooms."

She had a point. She called the non-emergency line while I called the roofer back. Two officers came out and photographed the hidden space, and the roofer pulled back more insulation and found a flattened path running along the joists over the bedrooms. Above mine there were two tiny holes in the drywall. There were more over Mom and Dad's room, and one over Megan's. From underneath, they disappeared into the ceiling texture. I'd slept under two of them for twelve years.

The roofer went over the rest of the roof space and couldn't find a second way in. Nothing through the garage, no usable opening at the eaves, no vent big enough for a person. Whoever had been using the attic came and went through the hatch.

When he climbed back down, I asked him how much I owed him, and Megan said, "Seriously?" But it was still the first thing I asked.

The police gave us a case number, told us not to throw anything out, and left. Megan and I sat on the upstairs floor with the drawings spread out between us.

One of them showed me asleep with a cast on my left wrist. I broke that wrist when I was eleven, two days before summer vacation, which meant the bolt was already on the hatch by then. Whoever made the drawings was still up there after it went on.

Dad was in eleven of the pictures, and he was awake in every single one. In one he was sitting next to my bed. I remembered that night. I'd been sick and kept waking up, so he sat in my room with me for a few hours. In the drawing I'm asleep, and Dad isn't looking at me. He's looking at the ceiling.

Dad wasn't easy to talk to, but you could count on him. When the water heater burst in my first apartment, I called him before I called a plumber, and he showed up with towels and a toolbox and didn't ask how I'd managed it until the floor was dry. That was how he handled most things. He fixed whatever part of the problem he could get his hands on. Getting him to explain anything was a lot harder.

Megan remembered something else, which was that Dad used to close our bedroom doors every night. After we'd gone to bed he'd walk the upstairs hallway and pull them shut if we'd left them open. He said it kept the heat in. He did it in summer too, and neither of us had thought about that in years.

We went back through the drawings. In every picture drawn from above one of our bedrooms, the door was shut.

Then Megan found the one of Dad in the attic. He's crouched near the hatch holding a plate with something rectangular on it, probably a sandwich, and he's looking toward whoever was drawing him.

Megan said, "No," and then again, louder, "No."

Until that moment I'd forgotten that Dad sometimes used to take food upstairs after dinner. It wasn't every night, maybe once or twice a week as far as I can remember. If Mom asked, he said he was putting bait down. I don't remember any traps, or dead rats, or an exterminator ever coming to the house. What I remember is the plates coming back downstairs. Sometimes.

Megan picked up the water jug. "Wasn't this ours?"

Dad used to write our last name on all our camping gear because he was convinced people stole stuff at campgrounds. Most of the marker had worn off, but you could still make out part of it. And the toilet was definitely ours. For about a minute that felt weirdly reassuring, in a way I can't really explain, like at least Dad hadn't just left someone up there with nothing. Then I started thinking about what using either of those things actually involved. The jug had to be refilled. The toilet had to be emptied. And once or twice a week isn't nearly enough food for a person to live on.

Megan worked it out at about the same time I did. She sat back against the wall and said, "So he opened it." I didn't say anything. "Obviously he opened it."

Maybe whoever it was stayed in the attic nearly all the time and Dad brought up everything they needed. Maybe once or twice a week was really a lot more often than that, and I just didn't notice. Or maybe the hatch usually wasn't locked at all. The bolt only went up after I knocked on the ceiling, and that was the first time it had occurred to me.

Megan got angry when I said that out loud, though it was less real anger than her needing me to stop. She said maybe it was family. Maybe Dad thought calling the police would only make things worse. Maybe this was exactly the kind of dumb thing he'd decide he could handle on his own. That last part sounded like Dad. It didn't make me feel any better.

I took the drawings home with me and started putting them in date order, which I should have done at the house. A lot of them were drawn on junk mail and scrap paper, but eleven were on something with a date on it: bills, permission slips, the back of a letter from the county. Others I could place roughly by what was in our bedrooms at the time. The earliest dated drawing was from March 1999, and the latest was from November 2005, when I was fifteen.

That bothered me, because that's about when Dad stopped talking about rats. It wasn't dramatic. The noises just stopped being a family thing. Megan remembered him taking the bolt off the hatch when he repainted the upstairs hallway, and she thought that was around Christmas 2005. I remember the repainting, but I don't remember the bolt coming off.

I called Megan and asked her where she thought the person went. She was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped, and then she said, "How would I know?"

We went through every relative we could think of, and nobody fit. Nobody went missing in 2005, nobody suddenly showed back up, and there was no uncle we weren't supposed to talk about. I went through all the paperwork Dad left behind too, the bills and tax stuff and receipts and manuals for appliances we hadn't owned in twenty years. There wasn't a single name I didn't recognize.

Once the drawings were in order, one thing got a lot more obvious. Whoever made them stopped drawing Megan first. There are no pictures of her at all after she moved into the downstairs bedroom when she was fourteen. There are still pictures of me, and of Mom, and of Dad.

The last six drawings are mostly Dad, and he isn't asleep in them. In one he's lying in bed with his eyes open. In another he's sitting at the kitchen table very early in the morning. I know it's early because of the time on the microwave clock. That one couldn't have been drawn through a hole in the ceiling, and I have no idea how I missed that at the house. Another one shows Dad at the bottom of the stairs, drawn from somewhere above him, and he's looking up.

That was when I stopped thinking of the hidden space as the place where whoever it was had lived the whole time. It might have been where they slept. That's not the same thing.

The last dated drawing is on the back of an electric bill from November 2005. Dad is standing under the attic hatch with one arm raised. You can't see his face because he's looking up, and the hatch is open.

I stared at that one for a long time. Then I turned over the drawing of me with the broken wrist. I'd never checked the back, because there was writing on it from school and I'd assumed that was all there was.

There was another drawing under the writing. Same pencil, same cast, same room, but it isn't drawn from the ceiling. The angle is low, right beside my bed, like whoever made it was crouched in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. I'm asleep with the cast resting on top of the blanket. The bedroom door is all the way open, and Dad is standing just outside it. He isn't blocking the doorway. He's off to one side with one hand on the doorknob, and his other hand is raised to his mouth, one finger pressed against his lips.

I haven't shown Megan that one.

After I found it I went back through all thirty-seven drawings again. Every drawing of one of us asleep has the bedroom door shut, except that one.

The attic hatch only locked from our side.