He followed her down the hall and stood where she pointed, by the linen closet, under the attic hatch. He sniffed. He held up his meter, which didn't click. He sniffed again, frowning.
"Huh," he said. "That's not gas."
"What is it?"
"Smells like kerosene to me. Faint. You got one of those heaters going?" He looked at her with real seriousness, the cheer gone out of his face. "Because I'll tell you, ma'am, I've been doing this twenty years, and those things are the best thing that ever happened to my business. Carbon monoxide. You can't smell it, you can't see it. You just get a headache and then you get sleepy and then you get real sleepy." He tapped the wall by the closet. "You run one of those, you crack a window. Every time."
Janet felt the skin on her arms prickle. "We had one," she said. "It's gone. Somebody borrowed it. Or—it's gone."
Ollie shrugged. "Then maybe it's coming in from outside. Smells travel funny in the winter." He wrote something on his clipboard and tore off a pink copy and handed it to her. "Anyway, you're clean on the gas. You smell real gas, you call us."
When he'd gone, she stood in the hallway with the pink slip in her hand and looked up at the attic hatch.
It was a square of plywood painted the same beige as the ceiling, a little smudged at one edge from hands. She got the step stool from the kitchen and the broom from the utility closet and climbed up and put the end of the broom handle against the hatch and pushed.
It didn't move.
She pushed harder. The hatch gave maybe an eighth of an inch, and then stopped dead, as if there were something heavy sitting on it. The springs of the folding ladder groaned. She pushed one more time, up on her toes, her arms shaking, and felt it press back against her—not hard, not like a person, just solid, like a box, like a weight.
Then she stopped, because it occurred to her, standing on a step stool in her empty house in the middle of a Wednesday, that she didn't know what she would do if it opened.
She stood there with the broom handle against the ceiling and listened.
The house ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere above her, very faint, she thought she heard something shift, a soft dragging sound, like a bag being pulled across a floor.
And then the phone rang.
She nearly fell off the stool. She stumbled down and went into the kitchen, her heart going like a rabbit's, and grabbed the receiver off the yellow wall phone. "Hello?"
"Jan, honey, it's Bev. Listen, I'm sorry, I know you're off, but Carla called in and we've got two admits coming up from the ER and I'm drowning here. Any way you could come in for four hours? Just till Patty gets here?"
Janet looked down the hall at the step stool standing under the hatch, the broom leaning against the wall.