Skull Session (4 page)

Paul cleared his mind with one last echoing blast on the sax. The depressed mood of earlier had passed. The air was fresh, the evening sky beautiful. This was the good life.
You can't say you haven't been lucky in
other respects,
Line had said.

Plus there was the phone call from Kay. With any luck, he'd be making money soon. Highwood—maybe the proposition was the beginning of the turnaround. Maybe he'd paid enough dues and it was time to collect.

4

T
HE CAR DOOR CHUNKED and a moment later Lia burst into the kitchen, carrying an armload of books and a bag of groceries, which Paul took from her. "Wow," she said. "What a day. Ugh. I am
very
glad to be home." She kissed Paul fiercely.

"A hard day?"

"No more than usual—typical departmental squabbles, scheduling conflicts, conferences. I'm beat. I'm very, very glad to see you." She threw her books on the kitchen table and embraced him fully, her head fitting under his chin, the outdoors smell in her hair. Paul rubbed her back and felt the compressed strength of her.

"I've got pasta water on. And I got an interesting call today."

"Well, you'll have to tell me over dinner. I'm going to take a nap," she said decisively. "Half an hour."

"Fine." Paul smiled, went back to working on the garlic.

"You were running in the fields," she said from the doorway, startling him. "And you didn't wear orange. Paul, it's hunting season!"

"Yeah. It was great. How did you know?"

"Burrs in my skirt." She lifted the fabric to show him a cluster of small triangular tags. "J wasn't out in the autumn fields wearing this skirt—they must have stuck to me when I hugged you just now. And the orange windbreaker is still hanging by the collar loop, the way I hang it. You'd have hung it by the hood." She pointed to the row of hooks near the door.

"How would anyone guess you're a police detective's daughter?"

"I wish you wouldn't do it."

"Hey, I thought you were the big apostle of controlled risk."

This didn't strike her as amusing. "That's not risky, it's just stupid."

He laughed. "I brought my saxophone. Nobody was going to shoot me, unless they thought I was a moose."

"If that's what moose sound like." Lia put her hand to his cheek. "You are hopeless, you know that?" She looked up at him, a heart-shaped face framed in tangled red-blond hair, cheeks banded with fatigue. Paul saw suddenly that she loved and in some way trusted the quirky, sentimentalizing muddle he lived in as much as he loved and trusted her clarity, focus, decisiveness.

Then she was heading toward the stairs again, picking at the burrs, her skirt lifted to reveal her strong calves. /
am absolutely a goner,
Paul told himself joyfully.
I am gonzo about this woman.

Over dinner, Paul told her about the call from Kay, filling in some background. "Highwood is the house of my aunt Vivien, down in Westchester County, fifty or sixty miles from Manhattan. When I was a kid we used to spend a lot of time up there. On top of a hill, wild old woods all around—a beautiful spot. Back then, Vivien lived there with her ancient mother, Freda, and her son, Royce, who's a few years older than me."

"I don't think you've ever mentioned Vivien." Lia wrapped her spaghetti expertly on her fork and when it slipped sucked her noodles anyway. "Your mother's sister?"

"Half sister. They weren't really in touch with each other until later in their lives. My mother's what, seventy, so Vivien would be in her early sixties. Their father divorced my mother's mother soon after her birth, and married Vivien's mother, so they grew up in separate households. More than separate—estranged. When my grandmother remarried, she didn't want to have anything to do with her ex's new family."

*' Understandable.''

"But then Vivien and her husband, Erik, moved to the Lewisboro area when my parents were there, bought Highwood, and they all got pretty close." He explained: Highwood had been built as a hunting lodge by some wealthy nineteenth-century industrialist, and stood alone on the top of a ridge in heavy forest. Inside, much of the decor was left over from the original owners—boar, bear, and elk heads on the walls, antique guns and decorative swords, Hudson River School paintings that portrayed mist-obscured, dense woods like those around High-wood. Vivien's own tastes were no less exotic. She had traveled all over the world with her husband, bringing back chairs made of antelope horns, antique chests from Milan, paint-daubed shields and spears from some African tribe. Some of her things had come from no farther away than Fifth Avenue, but those were fascinating too. And expensive. The uninhabited house would be a gold mine to anyone missing a few scruples.

"I take it they were well off?"

"Loaded. Erik Hoffrnann's father had made a pile in the Philippines, around the turn of the century." Paul paused, the recollection coming back to him. The hidden repositories of memory: He'd forgotten he knew any of this. "And Erik inherited it all. Major bucks."

He served himself some salad, ground a bit of pepper over it. "We'd all go up there, my parents and Vivien and Freda would talk, cook, drink, and we kids would run around the house and the woods. A fabulous place. It wasn't really designed to be a residence—mainly it was intended to host large hunting parties and wild-game banquets. The main room is the size of this whole house, with a balcony around three sides of it, a fireplace I could park the MG in."

"So, what—your aunt wants you to fix up the place now? What's the matter with it?"

"Last spring she moved to San Francisco. Since she's been gone, the house has apparently been vandalized, and she needs someone to spruce it back up."

"Paul, this sounds great! You're perfect for the job!" She ripped a piece from the loaf of French bread and swabbed her plate with it. "It sure wouldn't hurt to have some money coming in, would it?"

"No, it would not exactly hurt," Paul agreed.

But for all the enthusiasm he felt for the memories of Highwood, there was something unpleasant in the recollections. Out of Lia's sight, under the table, one hand or the other had been ticcing constantly, the uneasiness telegraphing itself to his muscles without conscious intent.

Paul punched his mother's number and visualized the old black dial phone ringing on the desk in her apartment. He couldn't hope that she hadn't been drinking, only that she hadn't been drinking heavily. She had taken Ben's death hard, entering a protracted mourning accompanied by fairly serious and tenacious alcoholism. Twenty-nine years later, neither the drinking nor the mourning had ended.

Now she was seventy, a plump woman of medium height, her hair mostly gray, lines of bitterness and disappointment in her face. Only rarely, in the right light, could you catch a glimpse of the insouciant, funny, gregarious journalist and young mother that the old photos showed.

"Paulie," she said. "Well. To what do I owe the honor?" A stock reproach. The exaggerated precision of her speech suggested this was one of her heavier nights.

"Profuse apologies and a spirit of repentance, okay, Ma? How're

things in Philly?"

"Things in Philly have a distinctly autumnal cast. It's November. What month is it there?"

"We've finally got the cold weather. It was global warming until Friday."

"I take it you're calling about Vivien—Kay told me she'd called.

What did you two cook up?"

"I haven't talked to Vivien yet. Kay said maybe I should talk to you first—I mean, I hardly know Vivien, and now I'm supposed to call her up. Kay said she's squirrely. I can't remember."

Aster laughed. " 'Squirrely'? Vivien's not squirrely, she's nuts. Cracked. Always has been. Runs in the family."

"How so?"

"A woman would have to be cracked to live alone in that house all those years." She sounded irritated at his obtuseness. "Living up on that hill. Every time there was a storm, some tree branch would fall and bring down the power lines. Then in winter—plowing three quarters of a mile uphill. Ask Dempsey how many times he went up there to fix pipes that had frozen because the lines went down and the furnaces quit."

"We used to have a great time up there," Paul reminded her.

"Sure we did. It's a nice spot. It's a gorgeous house." She seemed about to qualify her comments but appeared to run out of criticisms. She paused, and through the receiver Paul heard the clink of ice in a glass.

"So Ma—how much are you drinking nowadays?"

"As much as I like."

"I thought you said you were going to cut back. I thought the doctor advised you."

"I have cut back. But I make an exception in November."

"I just want you to take care of yourself," he told her.

"This is how I take care of myself."

They were both quiet for a moment. "Anyway," Paul began again, "Kay is worried Vivien will be difficult to work with."

"Oh, she'll be difficult. I wouldn't do it, Paulie. Wouldn't give her the satisfaction of having a Skoglund working for her. But I know you won't listen to me. So I guess whether it's more of a headache than it's worth depends on what the job is and what you get out of it."

"Right now a regular paycheck would be worth quite a bit to me."

"Just make sure you charge her an arm and both legs—she can afford it," Aster growled. "Vivien. We used to ask her: Why live alone up there? She never set foot in the woods. But she'd rather be miserable up there for decades than ever give up the place. Oh, hell," she said dejectedly. There was something in her tone, something in her relationship with her half sister, that Paul couldn't place.

"We don't have to talk about it now—"

"Just keep it businesslike, Paulie. Keep your medical history and Mark's and your divorce to yourself. And for Christ's sake, don't go talking about
me.
She'll give you the interested gaze, the insightful questions, a little flattery—but all the time she's
collecting.
Keeping files on you."

"What I don't understand is what happened between you two. When I was a kid, you were pretty close. What changed?"

She exhaled slowly. "That's family for you. Skeletons in the closet— you might as well get used to it, let 'em lie. You may find yourself with your own skeletons one day, and then you'll understand."

Paul found Lia upstairs, reading in bed, Kellerman's
Radical Pedagogy
propped open on a pillow across her legs. She glanced up and made room for him next to her. "Not a good call, I take it," she said.

"How can you tell?"

"You come through the door with your chin first when she's made it difficult for you. You stump as you walk—like a chastened but defiant kid."

"It's just when she's been drinking. She lets herself go in November because that's the month my father died. She's not . . .
graceful
when she's drunk."

Lia pulled him and he toppled backward, head on her pillowed stomach. She stroked his head, waiting for him to spill.

"It's the classic psychology of the suicide survivor," Paul went on.

" Tt's my fault. I failed him.' We all feel it a little. But Aster really seems to blame herself."

"Have you ever asked her about it? Why Ben did it?"

"Sure—she looks stricken, then changes the subject. Or tells me something like, T wish I knew, Paulie. Then maybe I could live with myself.' "

"But it's no
one s fault
but Ben's. Ultimately, we're all responsible for ourselves."

"Of course." Paul allowed himself a little tic, snapping himself in the temple with one finger. "I don't really have a problem with it. I just sometimes worry about my mother. You know."

"What did she say about the project?"

"Wildly enthusiastic and supportive. No—basically she said that Vivien will be a pain in the ass and I shouldn't do it. Also that she's got lots of bucks and that I could make out pretty well."

She yanked his head around so she could bore her gaze, that diamond drill, into his eyes. "Paul, your luck is changing. Don't you get it? Things are going to go well for you. For us." She bent to kiss him. "Let's go down there and look it over. You could use a job for a while. Get the bill collectors off your back." She kissed him again. "Go call your aunt." "Right Okay." He heaved himself off the bed and slumped out of the room.

"Hello, Paulie!" Vivien said. "Well. Your sister said I might expect your call." Her voice was clear, each word spoken with clipped precision. "I've hardly spoken to you since you were a little boy."

"No—it's probably been thirty years since we've seen each other, Vivien."

"Tell me, Paulie Skoglund, how are you?
Who
are you? Catch me up. Of course, I've heard bits and pieces from Kay."

He hesitated, remembering Aster's warning. "Well, there isn't that much to tell. I was a self-employed carpenter and furniture maker for twelve years. Three years ago I went back to school for a master's in education. Married, divorced. Now I'm with a woman I met at Dartmouth."

"Education! Well—a noble calling. And your health is good? You're happy?"

"Yes, I'm very happy."

"I take it you've recovered from those neurological problems you had when you were a boy?"

"The early stuff went away. The Tourette's is still with me. But I've learned to live with it. Not a major problem."

"That's good. I remember how hard Ben used to work with you. He was such a devoted father. And now you're a father yourself. I understand you have a son—is he a good boy? Healthy? None of those troubles you had?"