A Thief in the House of Memory (19 page)

Dec understood. One more little mystery cleared up. And now it was his turn.

“I think I know what happened to Dad's watch,” he said.

Birdie glanced sideways at him with a puzzled look on her face.

“His father's watch, I mean. The one he wore on D-Day.”

“I know
what
you're talking about, Dec. I just have no
idea why — of all the things you might have on your mind this morning — you're thinking about an old watch.”

Dec wasn't sure he could explain why the watch was important. He only knew that it was, somehow. It explained things that he had no other way of understanding. Who his mother was, who his father was.

“I think Lindy stole that watch and hid it inside Plato's head,” he said. “There's a little pocket there, I found it this morning. I think that's what Denny was after when he fell. She must have told him it was really valuable, or something.”

Birdie still looked a little anxious. “You've lost me.”

“It was her idea of a joke,” he said. “She liked to play jokes on Dad. He probably told her that his father's old watch was the most precious thing he owned. I can see him saying that. And so one day when she was really mad at him, she hid it — hid it where he'd never find it.” He paused, swallowed. “Just to hurt him.”

There, it was out. Dec rolled down the window and took a deep breath of country air. He rolled the windows back up.

“How do you know all that?”

“I don't. And no one will ever know. It's totally a guess.”

Birdie shook her head a few times. “I've got half a mind to phone up Clare Mahood and tell him your story. You know what that dipstick had the nerve to say at the inquest? He accused your father of killing Runyon in a jealous rage and making it look like an accident. Can you believe anything so nuts?”

“Boy,” said Dec. “Go figure.”

“I know,” said Birdie, laughing. “Talk about ridiculous.”

Silence descended on them, leaving them both lost in their own private thoughts. Dec's thinking was particularly tangled. Plato had turned out to be the key to everything. But not in the way Dec had suspected — or feared. He wished Sunny had never put the idea in his mind that Plato might have been on the hall table instead of in its usual spot. She had been wrong and had helped to set him down a treacherous path. He didn't want to think about it. Didn't want to talk any more, except that there was one thing he needed to say. One thing he needed to get out right away before he had any second thoughts, even though they were pulling up in front of the school.

“It would probably be a good idea if you told Dad about Lindy,” he said.

She pulled over to the curb and turned off the radio. “Honesty is always the best policy,” she said. But she said it the way a person might say having a molar pulled out with pliers is a good idea.

“Well, it'd save a lot of hassle, don't you think?”

She frowned. She had her perfect pencil-thin eyebrows on again, and she raised one of them expressively. “You think?”

“Yes,” said Dec, decisively, looking straight ahead. “Then Dad won't have to worry about getting an annulment.”

T
HERE WAS A LETTER
for Dec in the post-office box. For Deaglan, actually, which was the Irish spelling of his name. Vivien was full of surprises.

in this silence-challenged cafeteria
you sit alone in a room of your own.
are there pictures on the walls in there?
is that what you are frowning at
or why you smile, sometimes, a far away smile?
i want to knock on your door and say, mister
look at this
the sun is shining golden on that girl's barrettes
that man is painting his house apricot
the little boy in the sage green sweater has a brand new
trike
the world has ended — i know, i know, i know
but hey — there's another one!

T
HERE ARE TIDAL
pools and great green strands of kelp and driftwood dry as bone. So much driftwood, like giant pick-up sticks. His dreaming eye focuses in on the driftwood; it begins to tremble. An earthquake, he thinks, but then the logs start to drift up into the air, as if someone has filmed a truckload of logs being dumped off the cliff, and then reversed the film. He watches the logs dancing, and then realizes that he is their choreographer. In no time he has himself the skeleton of a wild and wonderful house suspended above the sea. He looks it over from every side with a dream-builder's eye, sees how it might work, how it fits together. He snaps off a whole roll of dream photos, which develop in the darkroom of sleep
.

Dec scanned the cliff in the magazine and copied it. He wondered how far it was from where his mother had lived. His mother had talked about California all the time. It was one of her dreams. He had forgotten that, but then she had so
many dreams. He had forgotten a lot, but it wasn't a careless kind of forgetting. When she left, he had gathered together everything of hers he could and shoved it down hard into a secret box, locked it and thrown away the key. And then he had found the key and opened up the box. There was more in there than he bargained for.

Sunny knocked on his bedroom door.

“It's not locked.”

She came in wearing powder blue shorts and a white T-shirt stained pink with popsicle juice. He showed her his drawings and explained how they worked. There were thin wooden poles and steel cables and floors suspended between them open on every side to the air.

She listened intently and scoured the drawings but with ever growing perplexity. Her hair was in braids and Dec could see the hearing aid in her right ear. The earaches had stopped, which was great, but he would miss the way she talked, as if half her words were capitalized. It had made everything she said seem so urgent.

“It's a funny house,” she said shaking her head,

“It's a pick-up-sticks house.”

Sunny laughed. “You're crazy.”

Dec smiled and nodded. It was kind of crazy. He might have to build a model to show how it worked. He could borrow some of his father's tools, but he would do the work up at his grandfather's workshop in the basement of the big
house. He would do this on his own, in his own way. That was the shape of the future.

“Are you going to live in that stick house?” Sunny asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Will you build me a house, Deckly?” she asked.

“You bet. What kind of a house do you want?”

She thought and thought. Then she smiled a very rascally smile. “I want a house that tastes like watermelon juice,” she said and burst out laughing.

D
EC SAT WITH
Ezra on the lawn outside the school. “Ran is totalled,” said Ezra. “You owe me three dollars and twenty-seven cents, which is what the insurance guy says it's worth.”

“I'll buy you lunch,” said Dec.

“Deal,” said Ezra. But neither of them moved. It was too beautiful to imagine going indoors. Ezra had decided to write his exams without studying at all, just for the fun of it. Dec had just aced history.

“How are things at Camelot?” said Ezra.

Dec shrugged. “Pretty wild,” he said. “Birdie's planting an awful lot of petunias and Dad's started to gear up for the Battle of Gettysburg.”

“The twentieth-century thing didn't take?”

Dec shook his head. “Too close for comfort, I guess.”

He was just about to ask Ezra more about the apartment he had found that weekend in Montreal, when he noticed Vivien across the quad. Ezra saw her, too.

“Hey, Viv,” he called.

She waved and started walking towards them, but was intercepted en route by the inseparable Melody Fong and Martin McNair. They looked pretty excited about something.

“Probably just proved mathematically why sunshine makes your socks fall down,” said Ezra.

“Does it?” asked Dec.

“Well, Martin's socks, anyway.”

Dec glanced at Martin's socks. But as interesting as they were, his eyes wandered back to Vivien. She wasn't wearing socks. She was wearing pink Birkenstocks and a flowing Indian cotton shift.

“Hey, look,” said Dec. “Vivien's got legs!”

She looked his way and waved again. It was one of those I'll-be-there-soon looks, a don't-go-away look.

He nodded. He wasn't going anywhere. Not for the moment. These days, time seemed a roomier place than he ever remembered it.

“Hmmm,” said Ezra. “Do I sense some chemistry happening here?”

“Chemistry's my worst subject,” said Dec, but he smiled.

Vivien arrived at last and plopped down beside them. “I found this totally cool book at the second-hand store,” she said. “The Esquire Handbook for Hosts.” She took it from her backpack and opened it. “There's this list at the back,
‘365 Excuses for a Party.' You want to know what we're celebrating today?”

“I already know,” said Dec, smiling. “The world has ended. But hey, there's another one!”