Crooked House (3 page)

Thom glanced at it and shrugged
. “Yeah, well, Crook’s tastes weren’t for everybody, I guess. Come on.” At the top of the stairs, Thom pointed off to the left. “That way leads to the east wing. Most of the bedrooms are down there.”

“Fourteen
of them, you said?”

“That’s right.
” Robert gazed down a long hallway. There were windows along the left wall, but it was late afternoon, and the light that came through the windows was muted. A few tables and some decorative chairs at the far end of the hall were lost in the gloom of gathering shadows. There were fresh flowers in white porcelain vases on each of the tables, but those too had been robbed of their color by the fading afternoon sun.

“This is what I wanted to show you down here,” Thom said, and gestured for Robert to follow him into the west wing
. “Remember when we used to go watch the Yankees play?”

“How could I forget?
”

“
Well, check this out. This is your personal library.”

“My personal...”

Thom had stopped in front of a pair of large, heavy wooden doors. He put his hands on the twin wrought iron handles, smiled over his shoulder at Robert, and threw the doors open.

Robert stepped past him, his mouth hanging open.

“What do you think?” Thom said. “Not bad, huh?”

“Oh good lord,” Robert said.

The room was paneled on either side in olive wood. Three windows were placed along each wall, one set offering a view into the woods on the north side of the house, and the other, over the driveway where Thom’s car was parked. A massive oaken desk dominated the center of the room, and behind that, a curved bookshelf that stretched to the ceiling and ran nearly the length of the entire room.

Robert ran a fing
er along the shelf. He felt like a kid at Christmas. Before him was everything from the usual assortment of professional journals and popular novels to clothbound copies of Truman Capote and John Cheever and Don DeLillo and dozens more. He took down the copy of Capote’s The Grass Harp and flipped to the title page. “First edition,” he muttered, shaking his head. He flipped through a few more, his smiled widening. They were all first editions. “My God, this is like library porn.”

Thom laughed hard at that.

“Where did all these books come from? There’s some amazing stuff up here.”

“The English Department’s had control of this house for about a decade, and we’ve had several different professors living here
. A library builds up over the years.”

“I’ll say.”

“Go around the other side,” Thom said. “There’s a little alcove back there with a cot.”

Robert circled around behind the bookshelf, and sure enough, there was a narrow space between the shelve
s and the back wall of the room where a small, metal-framed Army cot shouldered up against the olive wood paneling. It looked like it hadn’t been slept in for a very long time. The sheets would have to be changed, he thought, before he’d lie down on that dusty thing.

He came around the other side, hooking a thumb over his shoulder back toward the cot
. “What’s that for?”

Thom shrugged
. “Beats me. I guess you’ll have a place to lie down if you’re working late.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Old, yellowed pictures from the early days of baseball hung on the walls. Robert went over to one and saw a young man in an old-fashioned baseball uniform, a wooden bat resting on his shoulders. He had dark, intelligent-looking eyes beneath a high forehead. He looked ready for business. The date, handwritten at the bottom right of the picture, read 1909.

There were lots of other baseball pictures down the length of the wall, most of them team pictures, but it was the picture of the young man that drew Robert in.

“Is this Crook?” he asked.

“Probably.”

“He was a pro baseball player?”

“Evidently.”

Robert gestured at the room around them. “I didn’t think pro ball players made this kind of money back then.”

“He was
a dentist and a bootlegger too.”

“He was a
bootlegger? Are you kidding?”

“Nope, Crook was a real crook
. I guess the house comes by the name honestly.”

“I guess so
.”

“I don’t know a lot about the house, but
apparently there’s a pretty nasty story behind it. About Crook anyway. If you want, we have a guy in the History Department named Tony Udoll who knows all about it. I can give you his e-mail, if you want it.”

“Yeah, sure
. I guess.”

Robert went back to the picture
. Below it, resting on a pair of brass brackets, was a wooden baseball bat. It looked like the same one in the picture. He picked it up, and it felt good in his hands, like it was made for him.

That’s the sweet spot
. Right there on the meat of the bat.

“Hey Robert, you okay?”

Robert turned to him. “Huh?” he said.

“Are you okay
? You kind of zoned out there for a bit.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, for about a minute. You sure you’re okay?”

Robert nodded
. But he did feel a little dizzy. He put the bat back.

“Okay
. So, what do you think? You want the house?”

Robert looked around the library again, at the books, the old baseball stuff, and it seemed too much, too good to be true, like there had to be a catch
. He hated that about himself, that he could be so suspicious in the face of such generosity, and that from such an old friend. But he didn’t deserve this, and he knew it.

“Robert?”

“Yeah,” Robert said. He forced a smile. “You bet, Thom. Count me in.”

December 15

The next day, after lunch, Thom Horner drove him to the airport and walked him as far as the TSA security gate.

“Well, this is it,” Thom said. He held out his hand. “This is as far as I can go.”

“I guess so.”

The two men shook hands.

“There’s some new
-hire paperwork to fill out, tax forms, benefits enrollment, that sort of stuff. If you want I can e-mail most of it to you so you can get a head start on it.”

“That’d be great
. Thanks.” The line moved, creating a gap in front of Robert. Others waiting behind Robert moved forward. Robert adjusted his grip on his carry-on and said, “Thom, look, I can’t tell you how much this means to me. The job, the house, working with you again – I feel like I’m on top of the world.”

Thom beamed
. “It’s good to have you back in the fold, Robert.” He pointed to the agent waiting to take his boarding pass and ID. “You need to get going. Say hi to Sarah for me, okay?”

“I will.”

“Oh, and tell her I haven’t forgotten how good she was at taking care of the office back before you stole her away. If you guys need a little extra help with the bills or whatever, you tell her to call me. I may have some work for her.”

“Really
? You’d do that?”

“Of course I would
. Tell her to call me, okay?”

Robert nodded
. “Yeah, I will.”

“Good
. Now get going. I’ll see you on the eighteenth.”

They shook hands again and Robert made his way through security and onto his plane
. He’d brought some notes along for the courses he was going to be teaching in the spring, and he’d had every intention of going through them on his flight, but he found it impossible to concentrate. He just felt so good. For the first time in a very long time it looked like he might actually be able to finally get ahead. He stared out the window most of the way home, thinking how nice it was going to be to get out from under all his bills. He was so tired of feeling trapped, like he was treading water. For so long he’d felt frustrated, helpless, angry. But those days were about to be gone, and he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.

His high spirits carried him all the way home
. The drive from Jacksonville to Gainesville was gray and rainy, but not even the weather and the slow crawl through traffic could sour his mood.

It took a trip to the mailbox to do that.

His was located in a bank of other mailboxes down at the end of his block. There was a thick stack of bills inside. He hadn’t checked it in about a week, and he could tell from the soft but insistent shades of pink and yellow on some of them that they contained late notices.

Without bothering to look through them he went back to his car and dropped down heavily behind the wheel
. He hadn’t even noticed the change, but his good mood was gone now. And he was sweating. His mouth tasted awful, metallic and gross. His anger was rising too, heat spreading across the skin of his face as he dropped the car in gear and drove the rest of the way home.

He turned off the car but didn’t
bother to get out. Not right away. He wasn’t ready for that yet. Coming back here to this little brown and white track home, tenth down in a seemingly endless row of identical crappy track houses, with its peeling paint and weedy yard and splintery front steps and Angela’s bike on the front walk, the mail in his lap, he felt so damned defeated. And he hated that. He shouldn’t have to feel this way. He loved Sarah. He loved Angela. They were his world, his center, his pride and joy. And yet there were times, like now, when all he wanted to do was back his car out of the drive, head toward the Gulf of Mexico, and drive right off the end of the pier.

He closed his eyes and tried to let the anger melt away.

Come on, buddy, pull it together.

Crook House, he thought
. Crook House, Crook House, Crook House. Over and over, like a mantra. How nice that’ll be.

*

Sarah was at the kitchen table, helping Angela with her homework.

She glanced over her shoulder when he walked through the door and her expression brightened.

“Daddy!” Angela yelled. She climbed out of her chair and ran for him, wrapping him up in a hug that somehow, for a moment at least, made everything right in his world. He could stay like this all day.

“Hi
, Baby,” he said. “What are you guys doing?”

“Fractions
. Hey Daddy, you smell.”

He laughed
. “I’ve been cooped up in a plane all day, Baby.”

“Are we going to San Antonio, Daddy?”

Robert mussed her thick brown hair, so like her mother’s. “You bet we are. Wait till you see the place where we’re gonna live. It’s a mansion.”

“Cool
. Daddy, we’re gonna have hamburgers tonight to celebrate.”

He glanced from Angela to
Sarah. Sarah gestured toward the kitchen. On the counter next to the sink was a large mound of hamburger sweating under cellophane, tomatoes, a jar of pickles, a head of lettuce, a box of Franzia Chardonnay next to a pile of potatoes and the deep fryer for Sarah’s famous homemade French fries.

“Wow, now that is a celebration.”

Sarah walked toward them. “All right,” she said, patting Angela on the shoulder. “Go back and finish your homework. Let me say hi to Daddy.”

“Okay.”

With a flip of her hair and a little skip, Angela went back to the table, leaving Robert alone with Sarah.

For the first time, he noticed something dark in her expression.

“Everything all right?”

She nodded, then leaned in to hug him.

“It’s good to have you home.”

“Good to be home.
” He put his hands on her shoulders and held her out at arm’s length. “Thom Horner really came through for us. You should see this place he got for us. Sarah, I think, by this time next year, we could be pretty close to where we need to be. We might even be able to finally start saving some money toward Angela’s college.”

She smiled, but to Ro
bert it looked forced.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

Sarah wrinkled her nose at him without losing her smile. “She’s right. You do smell. Why don’t you go take a shower? I’ll tell you about it when you get out.”

“A shower sounds good
.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You wanna join me?”

“I’m helping your daughter with her homework, you pervert.”

“All right,” he said.

“I do need to talk to you about something when you’re done though.”

He’d been right. Something was bothering her. “You wanna talk now? My shower can wait.”

“No, just go do that
. I’ll be in when you’re done.”

He went into the bedroom and tossed the mail onto the bed
. He unpacked and undressed without really thinking about what he was doing. Even the anger he’d felt out in the driveway was gone now. He kept thinking of Sarah. He’d seen that troubled look on her face before, when he told her about the whole business in Matt Landis’ office and how he was now unemployed. It had felt like an indictment then. Seeing it now, it filled him with an unfocused sense of dread.

Robert climbed into the shower and let the water run over him, his thoughts turning again to Crook House
. That upstairs study was going to be glorious. All those books. All that baseball stuff. Here in this house he did everything on a laptop at the kitchen table, or on the living room floor when Angela had a project or some big homework assignment. But he would have his own wing of the house to work in now. He’d grown up in the little town of Marion, Indiana, and in his youth there’d been a dense strip of forestland along the edge of town the kids all called the Devil’s Den. As a boy, he’d spent most of his summers wandering that forest, dreaming he was Luke Skywalker, Yoda on his back, training him in the ways of The Force. A secret thrill had shot through him every time he got ready to enter the Den, and, for the first time in twenty years, he was feeling that thrill again. Only this time, it would be the library at Crook House that he’d be exploring. He envisioned himself pacing in front of the bookshelf, exploring it, reading until he passed out on the cot along the back wall. Or getting drunk on red wine and passing out on the cot. Or on that big oaken desk. Hell, he could run around in his underwear shouting like a loon, playing Nirvana records so loudly his eardrums would bleed. It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter, because for the first time since leaving the Devil’s Den, he’d have his own private retreat, his own little slice of heaven.

His hair was full of lather when he heard his name
.

He stopped, listened, heard it again.

God damn it, he thought. They always did this to him. He couldn’t even take a shower without being bothered.

“I’m in the shower,” he called out.

He listened, his fingers still in his hair, but heard nothing else.

Robert ducked his head under the water and rinsed the shampoo out quickly
. Knowing Sarah, she was probably just outside the bathroom door, unwilling to give him even a moment’s peace.

“I’m coming,” he said.

He shut off the water and was about to step out when he heard the sound of someone sobbing from the bedroom.

“
Sarah?”

There was no answer, but the sobbing went on.

He dried off quickly, threw the towel around his slowly spreading, milk white belly, and opened the door to the bedroom.

But there was no one there, just Angela’s stuffed raccoon staring at him from the bed
. She must have slept there with Sarah last night, he thought.

“
Sarah?” he called again.

The bedroom door opened and
Sarah came in. She was wearing black warm up pants and a vanilla top that fit snuggly to the swells of her breasts. She’d pulled her wavy brown hair back into a ponytail that showed the delicate line of her neck. He felt something stirring in his groin as he traced her curves. When they’d first met, back when she was the secretary in the English Office at Columbia, she’d admitted to him that she’d moonlighted as a waitress in a men’s club for a short time. He’d asked her if she’d ever danced, and at first she’d told him no, though later admitted that she had, for a short time, done a little dancing. Just to pay the bills. She still had the body of a dancer, though, and there were times, like now, as he stood there in nothing but a towel, that he was keenly aware of that fact. He’d been serious about asking her to join him in the shower. Being away from her for two days, he missed her, and he was feeling more than a little horny.

But the expression on her face quickly dispelled any thoughts along that line
. There was an almost haunted look in her eyes.

“I heard you crying,” he said.

“Huh?”

She went to the mule chest they shared and took out a pair of underwear for him
. He got dressed, then watched her as she sat down on the bed. There was a letter of some sort in her hand.

S
he’s definitely scared about something, he thought.

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.

“I got a call from the school today.”

His pulse quickened
. “Which school?”

“Angela’s
. Jay Carroll tried to check Angela out of class today.”

“He did
what
?”

Jay Carroll was the guy she’d been dating before Robert
. He was Angela’s birth father, and, in Robert’s opinion, a sorry excuse for a man. He’d only met the guy a few times – Jay had been drunk each time – but that was enough. The guy was some kind of actor, commercials mainly, and Robert had been completely disgusted by his arrogance. He’d pretty much dropped off the planet for a bunch of years, never once calling to check on Sarah or even sending her a birthday card. But his mother apparently lived in Ocala, and Jay came back to be with her about a year ago. A few times since then they’d gotten drunken calls in the middle of the night, and now and then they saw a red Ford pickup across the street, the guy behind the tinted glass a vague beer-drinking silhouette. It’d been creepy, but never anything the cops were willing to call a crime.

Sarah
was shaking her head. “They wouldn’t let him take her, and they called me right away.”

“I don’t understand
. Why would he do that? What makes him think he has the right?”

“He told the ladies in the office he wanted to take her to McDonald’s.”

“Oh man.”

Robert
sat down on the bed next to her. He wasn’t Angela’s birth father, that was true enough, but he was sure as hell her dad. Robert felt that link between them clear down to his bones. If that bastard ever so much as touched her.

He looked down at his lap, where his fists were turning white at the knuckles.