On Being Nancy Drew as I've Always Dreamed

Back to my strongpoint this week -- destruction.

Most of the time, when you're gutting a house, you don't know that much about the people who used to live there. You might have a name and some details as to where they are now, but you don't know the names and ages of all of the occupants, or if their house was once the gathering point for holidays, or if the home had been newly constructed or a family legacy. You don't know if it was a happy home or a hellhole.

So you play detective, at least in your head, as you work. Or, at least, I do.

We were working at a house in Gentilly today, one of many now-empty homes on a once-busy street. It hadn't been occupied since before the storm. The homeowner had left a note asking us volunteers to try to preserve any molding or door frames that could be reused it in the rebuilding, but the house was way beyond that. About five feet of water had sat in here for weeks, and then the building had sat for more than a year. The only things the family could gain from the gutting was the recovery of some family treasures, and even those turned out to be few and far between.

But I needed a goal and decided it was to figure out the family. The game was afoot, as Sherlock said.

(But first, an aside into my love of Nancy Drew. When I was little, I wanted to be Nancy Drew. I wanted my dad to be a lawyer named Carson and my maid/surrogate mom to be Hannah Gruen and although I found my boyfriend Ned a little dull (even as a elementary schooler, I thought I could do better), I liked my friends George and Bess, but George more because Bess was a bit of a baby (even as an elementary schooler, I blamed that on the fact that she was blond). My mother will tell you I tried to solve mysteries in our house even when there were none. I tried to fingerprint family members with flour, ink, and tape even though I had no idea 1) how to do it, 2) how to read it if I could, 3) how to lift prints off of other objects. My mother will also tell you about "The Case of the Missing Cookies," in which 5 or 6-year-old me tried to determine which family member had absconded with most of a plate of Christmas desserts. Was it Mom? Dad? Gram? Pop? Could Pepe, our toy poodle, or Big Buy, our Great Dane, have been part of the crumb conspiracy? (Clearly, my sister had not been born, or she would have naturally become Suspect #1 even if she couldn't swallow solids.) My mother will say I went to everyone in the house, trying to get fingerprints and questioning them and making a mess and carrying on while wearing a baseball cap and squinting as if through a magnifying glass although I had none ---- and in the end, the culprit was me. I think she's insane and that this is one of her revisionist memories altered for comic effect at my expense, but I do remember the family-wide fingerprinting attempts.) (Or, to put a positive spin on my possible guilt/cover up, I'm like Kaiser Soze before my time.)

The house had four beds: One in what was clearly the master (adult) bedroom, two twins in one room and another full with a canopy in another. A few photos remained: a smiling couple, looking very 1980s; a teenage boy in a Sean John shirt; a boy of about 4; two teenage girls with their faces pressed together. Among the few legible documents I found was a reminder postcard from a dentist.

The master bedroom, where I found some of the pictures, had an ornate, wooden headboard that fell apart as we pulled it out. It was a bed built for two, but other things in the room made me think it was a female-only dwelling: The small closet seemed to only contain women's clothes and TONS of women's shoes. The dresser, which also fell apart in our hands, had lots of lace, no boxers. Lots of make-up and creams and perfumes. A single woman had occupied that bedroom, I concluded. (Of course, I could be wrong. Come to our house in Philly and you might conclude the same as I have the entire third floor closet and some of Jordo's undergarments are just as delicately made and ornate as mi--- never mind.)

One bedroom was movie set teeny-bopper, but teeny bopper from Summer 2005. (Actually, it may have been more 2000. Backstreet Boys, N'Sync AND Britney, still on the walls?) But there was also a "Class of 2005" poster on one wall and a few paintings that looked more elementary school than high school. There were high school yearbooks and cheerleading costume complete with poms, but also a stuffed Elmo and a big collection of stuffed animals, including a teddy bear head. Girls' clothes in the drawers, including one white bra with green mold that had totally over-sculpted cups that would turn an A-cup into Carmen Electra. So daughters, I concluded. Two of them. One in her late teens, done with high school. The other about 11. The stuffed animals belonged to her, remnants of her childhood. The teenybopper posters did, too: After all, she was the little sister and would adopt the likes of her older sister, at least at first, meaning she may still have been clinging to the Boy Band glory days while her sister had moved on. (Did I not turn my sister into the world's youngest Duran Duran fan? Child thought she was actually going to marry Simon LeBon and she was 7.)

The final bedroom had the two twins. The walls were bare except for one alphabet poster. In one corner, we found a bunch of sports trophies and a plaque from a car show at the Superdome. There was a box of those monster cards -- Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon or whatever it is the kids play with today. (I used to play Pokemon with a kid I knew all the time but I could never understand the cards so I'd try to hide that fact with a dramatic presentation each hand. I always lost.) There were boys clothes, lots of little shoes. Brothers, I decided. One teen, based on the photo I'd found in the other room. The other elementary school aged.

So my final deductions: One parent (female), four children - two girls, two boys. When the storm hit, the oldest had just gotten out of the high school, the youngest was just learning to read.

Of course, I'll never really know who lived there. Or where they are now. Unlike the Nancy Drew books, things don't always tie up neatly in the end here. I just hope they were happy.