Another booming clap of thunder, louder than the first, provided his answer.

Dax scrubbed a hand down his face, remembered the golden-haired beauty that was worth whatever it took to bring her back for good and uncovered the closest piece of furniture, a tall highboy dresser. He opened each of the drawers, slid his hand inside to check for contents and found none.

What was he looking for, anyway?

“One down. A thousand to go.”

He moved to a box nearby, rummaged through its contents and found a variety of antique kitchenware. Old-fashioned sifters, potato mashers and even aluminum Jell-O molds were stuffed inside. He moved to another box filled with crocheted doilies of various shapes and sizes, which brought back an early memory of his grandmother, crocheting in the Bentwood rocker in her sitting room. He dropped the doilies back in the box, then sat on the dusty floor and surveyed the eternity of furniture and boxes surrounding him. Wasn’t that just his luck? He was the descendant of packrats, and finding whatever he was looking for in two centuries’ worth of their accumulation could very well take him longer than he had, longer than Celeste had.

Kitchen gadgets and doilies. Dax couldn’t imagine how any of those items were supposed to help him get Celeste back. Narrowing his search was necessary, but he had to determine how. Boxes were scattered sporadically throughout the room, some sitting solo, others stacked up four high. It’d take longer to go through them than the furniture, particularly if every box was packed with dreegailles, the Cajuns’ popular term for junk.

Then again, one man’s junk was another man’s treasure. And his treasure, the answer to bringing Celeste back, was somewhere in this attic. He decided the best plan of action was to actually have a plan. There were way more boxes than pieces of furniture, so he decided to tackle the job according to ratio. He guessed three boxes for every one piece of furniture, so since he was already two boxes down, he grabbed another, and prepared for a long night.

After thirty minutes, he’d been through nine boxes mostly filled with ancient knickknacks and three pieces of empty furniture. So far, he’d discovered nothing that looked remotely useful. In fact, he hadn’t found the first thing that even suggested his ancestors had ghosts visiting the plantation at all, which wasn’t that odd, since the family did its best to protect their secret. But his grandmother had indicated that what he needed was here, and since what he needed would certainly have something to do with ghosts, he knew he simply hadn’t found it yet. Whatever it was.

Closing up a box filled with antique dolls, he scanned the remaining pieces of furniture to decide which one to tackle next. One plastic-covered piece was taller than the rest, and seemed to sit away from the others. Maybe that was why it seemed to capture Dax’s attention.

In any case, he stood slowly, his back slightly stiff from sitting on the floor, and then crossed the room. His skin bristled as he neared the tall piece. This was it; whether Adeline Vicknair was somehow leading him in this direction, or he simply sensed that he’d found what he was looking for, Dax had no doubt. Whatever was hidden under the heavy gray plastic was going to help him bring Celeste back.

Grabbing one side of the tarp, he pulled it to the floor and viewed an antique oak chifforobe. A tall door formed the right side of the well-sculpted piece, and five drawers formed the left. He opened the top drawer and found it packed with papers and cards. He held the top one up to the light and saw a greeting card, so faded and yellowed from the test of time that the image on the front wasn’t discernible, but when Dax opened it, the writing inside was intact.

Humbly and forever yours, John-Paul.

“John-Paul,” Dax repeated. John-Paul Vicknair. He could see the name, not only on the card in front of him, but also on a paper he’d recently viewed. One of the Vicknair ancestry logs at the parish courthouse, he believed. Nanette had copied the handwritten parish records from the Civil War years in the hopes of finding someone living in the house at the time, and naturally she’d asked Dax to help her. John-Paul Vicknair had been one of the names from back then, from 1861 to 1865, which meant that the card Dax was holding was well over a hundred years old. He lifted several more cards and letters from the drawer, and found that all of them were either to or from John-Paul Vicknair, and that the other correspondent was his wife, Clara.

“Mon dieu, you scared me to death!” Nanette exclaimed, entering the attic.

He squinted at her in the dimness of the room. She squinted back, her eyes puffy and her black hair tousled from sleep. “I’m looking for something,” he said.

“Looking for what?” The warped planks of the wooden floor creaked loudly as she crossed the room to peer over his shoulder. “And this better be good. I thought a monster-size rat was roaming around up here, right above my bedroom. And do you know it’s three in the morning? I have a herd of ninth-graders that would love to take advantage of a tired Ms. Vicknair tomorrow morning, and I don’t like giving them the one-up on anything.”

Opening the second drawer, Dax found more letters and cards. The third drawer yielded the same thing, as did the fourth and fifth. All were from John-Paul Vicknair to Clara, or vice versa, and all of them were apparently written during the mid-to-late 1800s, including those Civil War years that he and Nanette had been searching.

“I got a note from Grandma Adeline tonight,” he said, still scanning the cards and letters as best he could in the limited light.

“A note? You mean another assignment?”

“No, a note, telling me that the information that you need is in the attic.”

“The information I need?” she questioned.

“These cards and letters,” Dax said, waving at the mound of them crammed in the drawers. “Some of them are from the Civil War. I know that may not prove anything, but you never know.” He frowned. Maybe he’d been drawn to the chifforobe because it held what Nanette needed. Maybe what he was supposed to find was somewhere different entirely.

He turned and scanned the room again, while Nanette eagerly started thumbing through the letters.

“You think what we need for the National Register is in here? Proof that the house was inhabited during the Civil War? Seriously?” she asked, suddenly much more alert.

“I think that’s what she was talking about, as far as you’re concerned.”

“What do you mean, as far as I’m concerned?” Nan asked, holding up a letter to the light.

“She said that the information I want is up here too.”

“You mean about Celeste?” Nanette asked, surveying the letter in her hand.

Dax nodded, but she was too preoccupied with trying to read the letter to notice.

“I can’t see anything up here,” she complained.

“Yeah, I know.” He spotted a couple of empty boxes and pointed to them. “Grab those, and we’ll gather the letters and take them downstairs where the light is better.”

He began scooping up the letters from the top drawer, waited for her to open the first box, then gingerly placed them inside. The paper was old, and in some cases already torn from age, or from their Vicknair ancestors rereading each other’s correspondence. He moved to the other drawers and did the same, until both boxes were full. Then he rubbed his fingertips along the bottom of each drawer to verify he hadn’t missed any letters. No way did he want to miss one that might help Celeste get back.

Looking at the boxes, both filled to the brim, he realized that while he may have found what they were looking for, identifying it was going to take time. And time was something he didn’t have to spare.

“Want to take them to the kitchen?” Nan asked. “So we can spread them out on the table?”