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now.”
    “He’ll grow into it,” Susan said serenely. “It’s a name with a noble heritage in your family, Doug.”
    “No Grellier has been named that for a hundred fifty years. Chip—”
    “Etienne,” Susan corrected him.
    “ Chip complained to me about it when he visited Chicago last summer.”
    While his wife and brother bickered, Jim walked through the house to see if he could find a stash of weed. Junior Schapen wasn’t smart enough to break into a house without leaving a trail of broken glass. But Chip was, and several times in the past year Jim had wondered about his son’s behavior. Chip had started having mood swings and outbursts of anger at odds with his usual disposition. When he’d asked Chip, point-blank, if he was doing drugs, his son had laughed at him, then left to go to the Storm Door with his baseball buddies.
    Chip and Curly were pretty tight; Curly might buy dope for Chip. Or maybe at school—when Jim had gone to high school, you could get a nickel bag openly on the premises. He thought the school had tightened up its drug monitoring, but maybe not. He’d have to talk again to Chip, which he didn’t relish.
    He went back to the kitchen, where Doug and Susan were still arguing, and dragged them off to start scrubbing. “Doug and I’ll do the walls and ceiling if you gals will take on the floors.”
    There were five big rooms on the ground floor, and then the front hallway, which itself was bigger than the Grelliers’ family room. By the time the women had worked their way into the hall, they were black with soot. Susan had a tangle of spiderwebs in her auburn curls.
    “This smell is never going away.” Mimi sat back on her heels in exhaustion.
    The front hall had taken the worst of the cat invasion: the two women had scrubbed urine stains, scooped feces. It was up to Susan to dispose of mouse and snake remains; Mimi had blanched at the sight of the mummified carcasses. She looked at the grand staircase, with its carved newel-posts and balustrade. It all needed to be cleaned, as did the carved double front doors; the etched-glass panels were black with dirt and webs.
    “They’ll have to strip all these floorboards and refinish them, unless they decide it’s too much trouble and tear the house down completely,” Mimi said, tossing her scrub brush aside and getting to her feet.
    “Don’t say that to Susan,” Doug called from the front parlor. “She’ll never forgive you for even suggesting it.”
    “It’s true, I do love this house,” Susan said. “I guess it seems silly to someone who doesn’t know or care about the history, but I like to think about a time when people were so committed to doing the right thing that they’d even risk their lives for it.”
    She climbed a ladder and began wiping off the red globes bracketing the tops of each of the four doorways that opened into the hall. Mimi, perched on the bottom landing of the staircase, asked if they were some kind of emergency light.
    “They’re fire extinguishers. Una Fremantle was terrified of fire after Quantrill burned down their first house. That little bead sticking out of the bottom holds sulfuric acid. The globe on top has baking soda in it. If a fire got hot enough, the glass would break. Baking soda would fall on the acid, so the room would fill with carbon dioxide and choke off the fire. At least, that was the theory. I don’t know that these globes would create enough CO 2 to do any good.”
    “We could burn some of these floorboards.” Doug came into the hallway. “That would get rid of the stench and test the bulb doohickeys at the same time.”
    Mimi, seeing her sister-in-law redden, got to her feet. “I vote for lunch. Nothing like hard work to make leftover turkey sound good.”
    After lunch, they went up to the second floor, using the back stairs off the kitchen, with its narrow risers enclosed inside narrow walls. A big patch of plaster had fallen from one wall, exposing the laths.
    Doug