Janet felt her face go hot to the hairline. "Arliss, I—"
"No, no. It's all right. I would have done the same. I'm sure it looked peculiar." He turned his hat around in his hands. "I want you to know why I was there, that's all. I've been meaning to tell Del when I see him on his route, but I keep missing him, and then the officer—well. I was out with Buster on Monday night. Late. I don't sleep much." He gave a little self-deprecating shrug. "And I saw a light. Up in your gable vent, over the garage."
Del went very still.
"A light," he said.
"Flickering. Orange. Like a little fire. It was only there a minute and then it went out, or maybe somebody covered it, I couldn't tell. I thought maybe you had squirrels up there, chewed through some wiring, and it was sparking. I was going to knock, but it was one-thirty in the morning, and then it went out, and I thought, well, I'll tell Del. I meant to." He looked from one of them to the other. "I saw it again last night. Same time. That's why I came. I thought you should know, with the cold coming. I'd hate to see your house go up."
There was a silence on the front step. Buster sneezed.
"Thank you, Arliss," Del said. His voice sounded far away. "I'll look into it."
"Did you borrow Del's kerosene heater?" Janet heard herself ask.
Arliss blinked at her. "No," he said. "No, I've got electric baseboard. Why?"
* * *
Del went up into the attic that night. Or he tried.
He got the step stool and the big flashlight from the trunk of the Citation, the one with the square battery, and he climbed up and pushed on the hatch in the hall ceiling with the flat of his hand, and it didn't move, just the way it hadn't moved for Janet. He pushed harder. He put his shoulder to it, standing on the top step of the stool where you weren't supposed to stand, and the hatch lifted an inch and then thumped back down.
"It's stuck," he said. "Something's on it."
"Something."
"A box, maybe. I put the Christmas boxes up there. One might have slid." He was breathing hard. He came down off the stool and stood under the hatch with the flashlight in his hand, looking up at it. "I'll go in through the garage. The scuttle."
"Now?"
He looked at the scuttle hole in his mind; she could see him doing it. "I'd need the extension ladder. The stepladder's too short to get up past the freezer. And the extension ladder's—" He stopped. "It's at my brother's. Hal borrowed it in October to clean his gutters."