I shove the door and go in. I’ve been here before. Every inch of this place holds a table, or chair, or dresser, or picture frame, or statue, or trinket. The smell of dust and must mixes with lemon and varnish.
“May I help you?”
May she? May anybody?
God? I ask in my heart. May you help me? Is it a question? A plea? An antique prayer?
I shake my head, then walk to a wooden banister and climb the stairs to the loft. It’s been transformed from a choir loft to period rooms. Dresses from the 1920s hang on a rack in front of the open room. Inside, there are helmets and uniforms from every war. Did their original owners kill people? Did they have sisters at home who would have died for them? Who believed they were heroes, no matter what they’d done?
I sit on an army trunk tucked in front of a Japanese silkscreen room divider that splits the space in half, the West and the Orient. A bayonet hangs on the wall to the left, rifles and pistols in a glass case against the opposite wall.
I want out. Out of my own century and into this one, the past. I don’t want the present, and I don’t want the future. “I can’t do this.” I say it out loud, even though there’s nobody to hear except God and me. I can’t prove Jeremy didn’t kill Coach Johnson. All I’ve done is wreck his chances for being found insane.
Rita was helping Jeremy more than I was.