I got Ellie out of that room in under a minute.
I don’t remember the stairs. I remember standing in the doorway of her bedroom with my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth, and I remember that she was fine — sprawled sideways, one arm off the mattress, breathing that deep unbothered breath that children have and adults spend their whole lives trying to get back. I carried her into our room and put her in the middle of the bed and sat on the floor with my back against the door until it got light.
Dan woke up at six and found me there.
To his enormous credit, he did not say I was being ridiculous. He listened to the whole thing — the cough, the direction it moved, all of it — and when I was finished he was quiet for a while and then he said, “Okay. I’ll get a ladder.”
That is the sentence I think about when people ask me why I stayed married to an optimist.
He borrowed a twenty-eight-foot extension ladder from a man at work and brought it home strapped to the roof of the car at four in the afternoon. Ellie was at my mother’s. I remember that detail with a kind of physical relief every time it comes back to me: Ellie was at my mother’s.
The gable vent is about six feet above the gutter line on the north end of the house. Dan went up with a headlamp, a screwdriver and his phone, and I stood at the bottom of the ladder holding it with both hands and feeling absurd.
It took him a while to get the panel off. The screws were newer than the panel was — that was the first thing he said, called down to me flatly, like a man reading a label. These screws aren’t original. Someone had taken that vent off and put it back at some point, and not very long ago.
Then he got it open, and he put his head and shoulders through, and he did not say anything at all.
Ten seconds. Fifteen. I said his name twice.
When he came back down the ladder he came down fast and wrong, skipping rungs, and when he got to the bottom his hands were shaking so badly that he could not get his phone into his pocket, and he kept trying, and I had to take it off him.
“There’s a bed up there,” he said.
What Dan saw, and what the police photographed nine hours later, was this.
The roof space ran the full length of the house — low, maybe four feet at the ridge, dropping to nothing at the eaves. Someone had laid a path of loose boards along the joists from the gable end to a point roughly above our kitchen, so that you could move without putting a foot through a ceiling. That was the creaking. It was never the house. It was boards on joists, taking weight.
At the far end, where the roof was highest, there was a nest.
That is the word Dan used and I have never found a better one. A folded camping mat. Two sleeping bags, one inside the other. A pillow with a case on it. A five-gallon bucket with a lid, and a second bucket of clean water, and a milk crate turned on its end as a table. On the crate: a phone charger, a paperback with the cover torn off, a hairbrush, and a tin that had once held biscuits.
And food. Not much, and not fresh, but ours. A box of the cereal bars I buy for Ellie’s lunches. Two of the little pouches of applesauce. A sleeve of crackers from the pantry that I had genuinely believed I was losing my mind about, because I had bought crackers twice in three weeks and both times they were gone before anyone had eaten any.
Everything was tidy. That is the part that people never expect when I tell it. Everything was tidy. The sleeping bags were rolled. The rubbish was bagged. Ray the exterminator had told us there was no mess, and he was right, and he was right because whoever was up there had been cleaning up after themselves for weeks.
The police came at half past six and were, at first, gently sceptical in a way that made me want to scream. Two officers, one of whom asked me three separate times whether the previous owners might have left “camping equipment” in the roof.
Then the older one went up the ladder, and came down, and got on his radio, and the tone of the entire evening changed.
They brought lights. They brought two more units. They put Dan and me in the kitchen and told us to stay there, and we sat at our own table in our own house listening to men walk around above our heads, which after twenty-two nights of listening to one set of feet up there was almost funny.
At about nine they came down and told us the roof space was empty.
Nobody was in it. There was no sign of forced entry anywhere on the property. The gable vent had been unscrewed from the outside, which meant a ladder, which meant either someone had one or someone had access to one — and the officer who said this to me said it carefully, watching my face, because at that point they had started to wonder about us.
Then he asked whether we had a garage.
We did. Detached, at the end of the drive, full of boxes we had not unpacked. And leaning along the back wall of it, where it had been since the day we moved in, under a tarpaulin we had never lifted, was a twenty-foot aluminium ladder that did not belong to us.