"She went to Woodstock. You never went to Woodstock."
"She probably just went to sell her necklaces."
"As weapons, I bet," Daphne said, recalling the clunky talismans. The old woman had given Daphne one on her seventh birthday, a stone thing on a necklace chain, and before the day was out, Daphne had nearly given herself a concussion with it, swinging it around; when her favorite cat had died six months later, she had buried the object with the cat.
She tried to project the thought to him: let's check out the shed.
"Hippies didn't have weapons. Okay, I'll look around in back of the shed."
He began walking forward, leading the way and holding her hand, stepping carefully through the dry grass and high green weeds. His brown leather Top-Siders ground creosote smells out of the bristly green stalks.
"Watch where you put your feet," he said over his shoulder, "she's got all kinds of old crap out here."
"Old crap," Daphne echoed.
"Car-engine parts, broken air conditioners, suits of medieval armor I wouldn't be surprised. I should carry you, your legs are going to get all scratched."
"Even skinny I'm too heavy now. You'd get apoplexy."
"I could carry two girls your size, one under each arm."
They had stepped in under the shade of the tree limbs, and her father handed her his brown corduroy jacket.
He shook his head as if at the silliness of all this, then waded through the rank greenery to the corner of the shed and disappeared around it. She could hear him brushing against the shed's far wall, and cussing, and knocking boards over.
Daphne had folded his jacket and tucked it under her left arm, and now she walked up to the shed door and reached out with her right hand, took hold of the brown padlock, and pulled. The whole rusted hasp and lock came away from the wood in one stiff piece.
A few moments later her father appeared from around the far corner, red faced and sweating. His white shirt was streaked with dust and cobwebs.
"Well, she's not back there," he said, brushing dead leaves out of his hair. "I don't think she's been out here in months. Years. Let's get out of here."
Daphne held out the rusted hasp and padlock for him to see, then dropped it and brushed her fingers on her pink blouse.
"I didn't tear the wood," she said. "The screws were just sitting in the holes."
"Good lord, Daph," said her father, "nobody's going to mind."
"I know, but I mean the thing was just hung there, in the holes-somebody else pulled it out, and then hung it backup." She wrinkled her nose. "And I smell gasoline."
"You do not."
"Honest, I do." They both knew her sense of smell was better than his.
"You just want to look in there for gold."
But he sighed and tugged on the purple glass doorknob, and the door creaked open, sliding easily over the dead grass.
"Probably she keeps whisky out here," Daphne said, a little nervously. "Sneaks out at night to drink it." Her father said her uncle Bennett kept a bottle of whisky in his garage, and that's why he kept all his business files out there.
"She doesn't drink whisky," her father said absently, crouching to peer inside. "I wish we had a flashlight — somebody's pulled up half the floor." He leaned back and exhaled. "And I smell gasoline too."
Daphne bent down and looked past her father's elbow into the dimness. A roughly four-foot-square cement slab was leaned up against the shelves on the left-side wall, and seemed to be responsible for that wall's outward tilt; and a square patch of bare black dirt at the foot of the slab seemed to indicate where it had been pried up. The rest of the floor was pale bricks.
The floor was clear except for a scattering of cigarette butts and a pair of tire-soled sandals lying on the bricks.
The gasoline reek was strong enough to mask whatever moldy smells the place might ordinarily have; and Daphne could see a red-and-yellow metal gasoline can on a wooden shelf against the back wall.
Her father ducked inside and took hold of the handle on top of the can and lifted it. She could hear swishing inside the can as he stepped past her, and it seemed to be heavy as he carried it outside. She noticed that there was no cap on it. No wonder the place reeks, she thought.
There was a nearly opaque window in the back wall, and Daphne stepped in across the bricks and stood on tiptoe to twist the latch on its frame; the latch snapped off, but when she pushed on the window the entire thing fell outside, frame and all, thumping in the thick weeds. Dry summer air puffed in through the ragged square hole, fluttering her brown bangs. She inhaled it gratefully.
"I've got ventilation," she called over her shoulder. "And some light too."
A television sat on a metal cart to the left of the door, with a VCR on top of it. The VCR was flashing 12:00, though it must be past one by now.
"The time's wrong," she said to her father, pointing at the VCR as he ducked his head to step inside again.
"What?"
"On her VCR. Weird to have electricity out here."
"Oh! It's always had electrical outlets. God knows why. This is the first time I've seen anything plugged in, out here. Lucky there was no spark." He glanced past her and smiled. "I'm glad you got that window open."
Daphne thought he was relieved to learn that her "time's wrong" remark had been about the VCR. But before she could think of a way to ask him about it, he had stepped to the shelf and picked up a green metal box that had been hidden behind the gasoline can.
"What's that?" she asked.
"An ammunition box. I don't think she's ever had a gun, though." He swung the lid up, then tipped it sideways so Daphne could see that it was full of old yellowed papers. He righted it and began flipping through them.
Daphne glanced at the nearly upright cement slab — and then looked at it more closely. It was lumpy with damp mud, but somebody had cleaned four patches of it — two handprints and two shoe prints, clearly pressed into the cement when it had still been wet. And behind the undisturbed clumps of mud she could see looping grooves in the face of the block; somebody had scrawled something in it too.
She put her father's jacket on the shelf beside the ammunition box and then stepped down onto the patch of sunken dirt next to the block. She pressed her open right hand into the right-hand print in the block — and then quickly pulled her hand away. The cement there was as smooth and warm as flesh, and damp.
With the side of her shoe, she scuffed mud off the bottom of the slab, and then stepped back. Jan 12 — 1928, she read. The writing seemed to have been done with a stick.
"Bunch of old letters," her father said behind her. "New Jersey postmarks, 1933, '39, '55 .. ."
"To her?"
Daphne pried off some more mud with her fingers. There was a long, smooth groove next to the shoe prints, as if a rod too had been pressed into the wet cement. She noticed that the shoe prints were awfully long and narrow, and set at a duck-foot angle.
"Lisa Marrity, yup," said her father.
Above the rod indentation was a crude caricature of a man with a bowler hat and a Hitler mustache.
"The letters are all in German," her father said. She could hear him rifling through the stack. "Well, no, some in English. Ugh, they're sticky, the envelopes! Was she licking them?"
Daphne could puzzle out the words at the top of the block, since the grooves of the writing were neatly filled in with black mud. To Sid — Best of Luck. And the last clump of dirt fell off all at once when she tugged at it. Exposed now was the carefully incised name, Charlie Chaplin.
Daphne looked over her shoulder at her father, who was holding the metal box and peering into it. "Hey," she said.