Chapter 3
When they reached the second floor, Alice dashed down to her room and came back, clicking a handful of short, bent tipped metal rods between her fingers. "Lock picks!"
To reach the attic, they climbed a set of stairs so steep they were more ladder-like than stair-like, except for the hairpin turn within the narrow shaft that the architect had grudgingly allowed for the stairs. Elizabeth would have felt safer on a ladder and crept up cautiously, one step at a time. Alice scampered up like a squirrel, while Dirk followed more slowly but with less caution than Elizabeth. Bob would have lingered in the hall below and doubtless drifted off to his room to avoid the entire costume quest, but Penrose gave him a subtle shove in the small of his back that got his feet onto the first step and he came the rest of the way up on his own.
The attic was cold and had an attic smell of dust, old birds' nests, and stale air. Above them shadows fluttered in the rafters. A ghostly human shape stood in one corner. Elizabeth started at the sight of it, but then saw it was only a dress form draped in a forgotten, half-made robe, glowing palely in the moonlight that fell through the dormer windows and did nothing to brighten the room.
Alice pulled chains to switch on antique, teardrop-shaped light bulbs that shed little more light than a candle. "I love this attic. It's like people moved into this house and never moved out. Some of this stuff dates back to the Civil War and before."
"Why didn't they take their stuff when they moved out?"
"Maybe they never left." Dirk let out an eerie laugh and in his normal voice said, "We haven't found any skeletons yet."
Eyebrows raised, Elizabeth gave Penrose a questioning glance.
He told her, "No, you're not going to find any bodies. Not up here anyway."
She did not find this comforting.
Dirk flipped open trunks and scanned their contents as if he were looking for something specific. He lifted a beaded, drop-waisted gown out of one trunk and examined it under the light.
"Are you going to be a flapper?" asked Alice.
"I didn't think you were into dresses," said Bob.
"It's Halloween. Even straight men wear dresses on Halloween," Dirk pointed out. He held the gown up to Bob. "Your shoulders are too wide."
Bob stepped back and changed the subject. "Are you twins going as a matched set? Like Betty and Veronica? Or Ginger and Mary Ann?"
"That's perfect," Dirk hooted. "You'd have to be Mary Ann, Alice, or else it won't be a costume." He folded the gown and replaced it in the trunk. In another trunk, he found a bias cut satin evening gown and held it up to himself. "I think I should be Ginger. What do you think?"
"You don't have the hips," said Alice.
"Those I can add. Bob can be Gilligan."
"Seventies sitcoms are so passé Alice complained.
"Sixties," said Penrose from over by the dress form where he sat on a moldering brassbound chest.
"Sixties," said Elizabeth.
"Since when are you the TV trivia queen?" said Alice.
"Forget Gilligan," said Bob, "They should be Velma and Daphne!"
"And you can be Shaggy?" grinned Dirk.
"No, Scooby-Doo."
Alice opened a wardrobe which proved to contain men's clothing. She reached in and pulled out a deep purple zoot suit. "How about this, Bob?" She picked her way through the trunks, boxes, and odd bits of furniture to where he was edging his way back towards the stairs.
"She'll never get him to wear that," said Penrose. "If you all insist upon a theme for your costumes, get her to open this trunk. With what's in here you can all be Dumas's musketeers." He indicated the chest on which he sat.
"Have you looked in these trunks over here?" Elizabeth worked her way over towards Penrose.
Alice said, "No, we haven't gotten into half of what's up here. We tend to mess around where the light is better." Leaving off harassing Bob with the zoot suit, she followed her sister and stubbed her toe. Dropping the suit, she hopped around clutching her foot. "Ah shit!"
Elizabeth fiddled with the huge, clunky lock on the brass bound chest. The keyhole was so large her finger fit inside. She jiggled the pins with her fingertip, but it stubbornly remained locked.
Alice sat down on an odd little stool with a U-shaped seat to nurse her toe and complain for a while before getting up and limping over to her sister. "This kind of lock is really easy, but you can't quite pick it with your finger. Here, let me." She pulled her picks from her pocket and was soon rewarded with a satisfying click. The lock slipped from its hasp.
"Where did you learn how to pick locks? Do you have a secret life of crime that you never told me about?" Elizabeth asked.
"One of the guys I dated in college learned how to pick locks from a guide he found on the Internet. I learned from him when we went exploring the tunnels that connect some of the old buildings at school." She opened the lid of the trunk and squinted into the darkness. A mysterious animal shape turned out to be a plumed hat with its broad brim pinned up. Alice immediately placed it on her head and reached in for more goodies. Her next foray into the trunk was rewarded with a pair of thigh-high leather boots with the tops folded down. She hastily yanked off her own shoes and pulled on the boots. She cried, "This is awesome! I am wearing these to work tomorrow."
Alice literally dove into the trunk. All that Elizabeth could see were the boots waving around. She imagined the bottom of the trunk opening into a dumbwaiter shaft and her sister falling four stories down to the bottom of the house. No such luck.
Alice bounced up again with an armload of doublets, hose, and puffy pants. Dirk left his trove of 1930's garb and even Bob came to look. The men dragged the trunk out of its corner and under one of the light bulbs.
When Bob saw what Alice had in her arms he said, "No. No way am I wearing tights."
"You have to, this jerkin won't look right over jeans," she said, tossing him the jerkin and holding up a pair of pants whose legs ended in little skirts trimmed with lace and ribbons. "What are these? Medieval bellbottoms?"
"Mine," said Dirk.
"Those are petticoat breeches," Elizabeth said.
Alice and Elizabeth proceeded to turn out the contents of the chest and before long they were all in varying degrees of seventeenth century garb. Dirk was a cavalier with petticoat breeches and a long curly wig. Bob put on a doublet, but calmly played the immovable object to Alice's irresistible force and did not don the hose she brandished in his face.
Getting the garments on correctly was another story. The fastenings, a tangled mass of laces, were complicated and Penrose gave Elizabeth the instructions on the proper ordering of the layers and which garments went together, which she fed to the others.
Alice got annoyed when Penrose, via Elizabeth, insisted that she could not wear a set of petticoat breeches with her high boots. "How would you know?"
Elizabeth looked to Penrose but he was no help, as usual. "When I did my junior year in the UK, I went to the Museum of Fashion a bunch of times."
"Really? Cool. Do know what this is?" Dirk held up a stiff, heavily embroidered triangle of fabric.
"It's a stomacher," she said without any prompting from Penrose. She actually had gone to the Museum of Fashion once. She pulled a lady's blue silk robe from the pile of garments tossed aside by Alice in her haste to find things to go with her boots, and shrugged it on. "See how it doesn't meet in the front? The stomacher covers the corset and petticoats show through the gap in the front of the skirt."
Alice helped her find the other garments, a shift, petticoats, and stays, to complete the outfit and Penrose tucked a few other necessary items into Elizabeth's armload without the others seeing. With costumes selected for everyone, they bundled the clothes together and closed up the trunks. They avoided the difficulty of making the dangerous climb with their hands full by the expedient measure of simply throwing everything to the hallway floor below (narrowly missing Rififi, who stopped to wrestle with the laces before running off) and then climbing down after.