In Summertime Saga

The house was empty and I was standing at the hat-rack looking at a key I'd been ignoring for eighteen days.

Brass. Small. Hanging from a hook on the side of the rack, next to a scarf and a baseball cap that had probably been Frank's. I'd picked it up on Day 1, turned it over in my hand, and put it back because I wasn't ready. I'd thought about it again on the day I heard Debbie crying through her bedroom door and realized the mortgage and the murder and the Russians were all connected and I'd skipped the instructions. I'd looked at it a dozen times since. Always put it back.

Debbie was at Diane's for the morning. Jenny was doing something with Jane at the mall. The house was quiet. The kind of quiet it only had when nobody was in it.

I took the key.

The stool was in the garage where it had always been, behind the mower and the rusted toolbox. I carried it upstairs. The attic access was a panel in the hallway ceiling between my room and the bathroom, the one door in this house I'd never opened. I positioned the stool underneath, climbed up, put the key in the lock, and turned.

The panel swung down. A folding ladder slid out with a groan of old hinges. Dust came down with it, a thin cloud that caught the hallway light and floated.

I climbed up.

The attic was hot. No ventilation, no windows, just the underside of the roof and the heat that had been collecting there since June started. It smelled like old wood and cardboard, stale and sweet underneath, like dried flowers or a closet that hadn't been opened in years. I had to crouch. The ceiling was low enough that standing up meant hitting the rafters.

Boxes. Old furniture with sheets over it. A lamp without a shade. A stack of framed photos leaning against a wall that I didn't look at because I wasn't here for photos. A fishing rod in a canvas case, the kind you take on a boat. A globe that was faded and sitting at an angle on a broken stand. A cheerleading uniform in a clear garment bag, red and white, Jenny's name stitched on the front in cursive.

And a wooden box.

It was on a shelf at the back, between two stacks of books and a shoebox full of what looked like old tax returns. Plain wood, maybe twelve inches by eight, with a simple clasp. No lock on it. Just a clasp you flipped up with your thumb.

I knew what was in this box because I'd read the wiki entry between loading screens in my past life. "Frank's keepsake box. Contains: photograph, key, and lockbox code." I'd clicked through the in-game version without reading the dialogue because the attic was a required step between me and the next sex scene and the plot was the part I was mashing through.

I flipped the clasp.

Inside, lined with faded red velvet: three items.

A photograph. Frank and a man I recognized from the game but had never seen in person. Mayor Rump. They were standing together in front of a building I didn't recognize, both in suits, shaking hands, smiling. Campaign photo, maybe, or a donor event. Frank looked younger in this picture than in the fishing photo downstairs. His smile looked real. Rump's didn't. Rump's smile never looked real even when it was, wide and practiced, a billboard grin on a human face.

A key. Smaller than the attic key. Brass again, but newer. For a bank deposit box.

A scrap of paper with a number written on it in handwriting I didn't recognize. Probably Frank's. 11082.

I held the photo. Frank was dead. Murdered. Hanged by a Russian enforcer named Dimitri in a warehouse somewhere in Summerville. The debt was fake. Frank had stolen money from the Bratva because he'd discovered what they were doing with it through his job at the bank. He'd hidden the stolen cash in a boat called The Dink, or something close to that. The money was in the boat and the boat was at a treehouse and the treehouse was in the forest and these were facts I'd absorbed from a walkthrough: step by step, without understanding why.

The key opened lockbox 11082 at Saga Financial. The lockbox had evidence that pointed at Rump. Rump was connected to the Russians. The Russians had killed Frank. The evidence would eventually bring Rump down and the Russians with him. That was the shape of it.

The specifics were fog. I knew the endpoint: Rump gets arrested. The mayor goes down. But between "open the lockbox" and "mayor in handcuffs" was a chain of events I'd followed a guide for without reading the text. I'd clicked through Harold at the police station. Some scene at the Rump mansion involving a recording. A bank heist I didn't understand and a warehouse raid where Tony got shot and Debbie and Jenny got kidnapped. I'd mashed the fight sequence because the combat minigame was annoying.

I put the photo back in the box. Kept the key. Pulled out my phone and typed 11082 into the notes app. Closed the box. Put it back on the shelf.

I crouched there in the hot dusty attic with a dead man's key in my pocket and thought about what I knew and what I didn't.

I knew the what. Frank was murdered. The evidence existed. The mayor was guilty. The Russians were the enforcement arm. The money was hidden. I knew WHERE things were: lockbox at the bank, cash in the boat, evidence in the mayor's office. I knew WHO mattered: Harold the cop, Tony the protector, Liu at the bank, Nadya the Russian daughter who switched sides.

I didn't know the HOW. The sequence. The triggers. Which piece of evidence went where, who needed to see it, what had to happen before what. The game had a specific order and I'd followed it by clicking where the guide said to click without ever understanding why step four came before step seven.

A spider was building a web between two rafters above my head. It had gotten about a third of the way through and the silk caught the light from the open hatch below.

I'd played Summertime Saga for the tits. That was the truth of it. I'd downloaded it on a Tuesday night because the thumbnails had women with absurd proportions and I'd clicked through six hours of content in two sittings and I'd cared about exactly one dimension of the game. The sex scenes. I'd mashed through dialogue. Followed a walkthrough step by step without reading why. Alt-tabbed during plot cutscenes. Treated the murder mystery, the political corruption, the Russian mafia, the community web of relationships and consequences the same way I'd treated every story in my life: as the obstacle between me and the next woman who took her clothes off.

Now I was inside the game and the murder mystery was the thing keeping this household alive and I didn't know how to solve it because I'd never cared enough to learn.

I climbed down the ladder. Folded it back up. Closed the panel. Put the stool back in the garage.

The hallway upstairs smelled like Debbie's shampoo. The bathroom door was open and the shower glass was clear and the handprint was gone. This morning hadn't happened, or it had happened and the house had absorbed it and moved on.

I went to my room. Sat on the bed. The key was in my pocket and the code was in my phone and the photo was in the box and the box was in the attic and the answers were somewhere between Saga Financial and the mayor's mansion and I was going to have to figure out the walkthrough for real this time because there was no guide and no alt-tab and the woman downstairs who made my eggs had bruises coming that I couldn't prevent if I didn't put the chain together.

Step one: the bank. Lockbox 11082. See what's inside.

After that I was guessing.