The Book of Old Houses (28 page)

Amazing how fast you can run out of conversational fodder while you're recuperating in a hospital. So I'd told Sam about the tree that once grew in front of the house and about a lot of other things, too; the girl who showed up naked in our apartment in New York City so long ago, for instance.

There was still one subject we hadn't discussed yet, but I wanted to talk with Wade about it once more before I raised that.

“Dave said somebody should dig, just to see,” Sam told me. “So I did.”

I raised my eyebrows at DiMaio. “Well,” he explained, “if the book didn't go into the wall from inside, then it had to be from the outside. And if the earth was soft enough . . .”

As it would have been, recently filled after the old tree's removal and the soil mixed with wood chips. “Bert could have waited until he knew who was buying the old place,” Dave added.

Waited, so my name would be in the book. And then he could simply have come over here one night very late, shortly before I moved in, and dug himself a hole. The old tree's roots might even have loosened a few foundation stones for him: presto, instant book depository.

DiMaio regarded the foil hat bemusedly. “And I guess while Bert had the hole open, he just couldn't resist signing his work.”

Out on my back porch, the three of us stood awkwardly for a moment. Then Dave spoke again. “Say so long to Ellie for me, too, will you, Jake?” He punched Sam lightly on the shoulder. “Take it easy, guy. And if that AA sponsor of yours craps out again, get another one.”

He descended the porch steps; I walked with him to his car. “I misjudged you,” I said.

He smiled. “Watch out for those first impressions.”

Uh-huh. “But you know, it still wasn't reason enough.”

Dave paused with his hand on the car door.

“For Merrie to do all those terrible things . . . ” I continued. “It was so out of character. Sure, if the book got declared real it would've been news, and she would've been part of it. Her fine old family name would've gotten a blot on it . . . but that would have ended, eventually. People would've forgotten.”

Dave got into his aging Saab sedan, started it, and rolled down the window.

“She even brought pastries to the boy's mother,” I went on, “at the same time as she brought the poison.”

Something flickered in his eyes. “No, she didn't. I brought the pastry.”

Surprising to the end, our Dave.

“I'd tried to visit Jason that day,” he told me. “Bert said I should talk to him, to see if he might be the right kind of student for our school.”

“And you believed Bert?”

“Whatever else he was, he was always interested in the place we'd both come from. I thought Horace would've wanted me to find out if . . . Well. There seemed no harm in trying.” He looked embarrassed. “I brought the pastry as a sort of . . . just something to show my good intentions, I suppose.”

“And was he? The right kind of student?”

“I don't know. He wouldn't see me. He wouldn't even answer his mother when she called upstairs to him. Or he couldn't.”

There was a brief silence while we thought about that. “But you're right, I can't fully explain what happened, either. I wish I could. Good-bye, Jake.”

From the street he waved but his expression was distant, as if he were already thinking about something else.

Driving away, he didn't look back.

As it turned
out I didn't accompany Sam that night. Sam's sponsor canceled so Sam skipped the coffee party and went to his meeting alone, while Wade and I took a ride around the island together.

“Hey,” he said as I slid into the truck's cab beside him. “How're you feeling?”

“Okay,” I said, although my neck hurt like hell. The doctors had given me some pain pills, but after the dose I'd had out at Merrie Fargeorge's I didn't want to feel drugged again anytime soon.

Wade smelled like lime shaving cream, laundry soap, and the Badger Balm he used to keep his hands from cracking in the cold air when he was out on the water.

“Good enough, anyway,” I said.

It was getting on for dark. We crossed County Road past the youth center and continued toward the old factory that extracted pearl essence from clam shells, for iridescent nail polish and so on.

“So did DiMaio want his little popgun back?” Wade asked.

I shook my head. “He didn't even mention it. I think maybe he was glad to be rid of it. Wade, did Sam really believe I might shoot myself with that thing?”

Because that was what had happened; my son had heard me shout out a threat about it, a thoughtless outburst that now I didn't even remember making.

And . . . he'd worried about it. Halfway down the road as it entered a grove of pine trees, Wade cut the engine. We drifted to a grassy verge overlooking the water.

“I'm not sure what Sam thought,” Wade said. It hit me then how precarious Sam's situation really was, how unsure he must feel about everything.

“And he opened the box how?” I'd thought keeping the key on a chain around my neck was safe enough. But apparently not.

“Jake, he's known about that loose brick for years,” Wade informed me gently. “The spare key, too. And the money.”

The ten thousand, which he'd never touched; not even when he was at his worst. And the guns. I had, I suddenly realized, been fortunate in a lot of departments.

“He said the spare key wasn't in very good shape after all those years. He's worried he damaged the lock.”

“He did,” I said. “I'll need a new box.” With, I'd already decided, a digital thumbprint-reader. And a retinal scanner.

Wade glanced at me. “What he said was that he didn't know how much of what he was worrying about was real, and how much was just that drying-out feeling he still gets.”

At my puzzled look he added, “His body getting accustomed to the no-booze thing. So he told me he figured he should err on the side of caution, is all.”

“Oh. All right. I guess I can understand that. But he left the Bisley and the .38. And the target gun, so I don't see . . .”

“Yeah. I asked him about that, too.” Cars were parked on the verge, engines off and parking lights on.

“Sam told me one thing he did know was that you wouldn't use a gun I'd given you or one you and I had used together,” he said.

Which made no sense whatsoever out in the real world. But in our little family, it did. I leaned against Wade.

“Good for him.” Across the water the last bit of pink faded from the sky.

“So how come Merrie sent the old book to Ann Talbert?”

Wade wanted to know. “That's the part I still don't get.”

High on the hillside a hundred yards from the parking area, a white-tailed deer emerged from the trees.

“As soon as Dave came to town, Merrie must've started getting scared. A stranger asking questions wouldn't have spooked an innocent person, but she wasn't an innocent; she'd already murdered Horace. So she did exactly what she'd advised me to do: she got proactive.”

“With Jason Riverton as a diversion,” Wade said.

“Correct. But at the same time, she also knew the old book linked her to Horace's death, and that if anyone learned she had it, she wouldn't be able to explain it.”

Behind the first deer another appeared, and another. The buck's antlers were a bone-colored crown in the dying light. Last came spotted fawns, gangly and feisty, kicking up their heels.

“But I guess she couldn't stand to just bury it somewhere,” I said.

Someone got out of one of the cars and threw a lot of apples and carrots into the grass; the deer watched patiently.

“In case somebody else might find it,” I continued. “Merrie must've believed Ann Talbert would take care of it
and
keep quiet about it, though, because Ann was nearly as obsessed with it as Merrie was, herself.”

A meteor streaked the sky, dripping sparks. A phosphorescent trail on the water mirrored it as the deer munched warily.

“She got rid of the book but kept the house key?”

“Well, she kept it in a big old jar with a few hundred other antique ones that she'd collected. So it didn't exactly stand out.”

“Huh. You wouldn't think Merrie Fargeorge could tip a young person like Ann off a railed dock, though,” Wade said.

“Not usually,” I agreed. “But Ann was a tiny little thing, and she was very drunk. And remember, Merrie had been digging around with a pick and shovel in that yard of hers, most of her life.”

So she'd been strong. “If we hadn't showed up at Ann's house so fast, she'd have gotten the book back herself that night. Or tried.” I recalled those big Block door locks Ann had.

A gawky fawn stuck its head into the illuminated circle of the cars' parking lights. It grabbed an apple from the few remaining ones and backed out again to savor its prize.

“It turns out that Merrie'd been visiting Mrs. Riverton for years. Mrs. Riverton said so, when Ellie went to tell her how Jason really got poisoned. Apparently she'd been going there just out of the goodness of her heart,” I added.

And that to me was still the most perplexing question of all: how a person like Merrie had gone so suddenly—so thoroughly
—bad.

“She'd been in the house once already that day when Ellie and I went. That's when she must've left the antifreeze jug in the cabinet, in place of the syrup.”

Wade started the truck. At County Road he turned right, past the convenience-store gas pumps, surreal in the outdoor lights.

“Later she went back. Put the syrup back under the sink and the jug in the trash, so it would look like Mrs. Riverton had made a tragic mistake. That's also when she left the wine bottle and the poison-remedy book.”

“Risky.” Wade turned into the elementary-school driveway, followed it all the way around to the rear where the ball field spread out, and parked.

“Not really. You can't see the alley behind the Rivertons' from the street. And she'd parked there so often in the past that probably no one would make anything of seeing her there again.”

It was cold-hearted, though. By that time, Jason might have already been unconscious.

We climbed the stony path leading away from the schoolyard. Above, fog moved in ribbony swirls.

“Besides, it was Merrie Fargeorge. Who'd suspect her? Poor Jason, though,” I added. “All he ever wanted was someone to like him.”

Wade put a hand out to help me. Between my aches and pains, bruises and stitches, and the lingering sense of having been run over by a fleet of eighteen-wheelers, that hill was no piece of cake.

“And all Merkle was after was the use of that shed? Staying in good with Jason . . . that just ensured the boy wouldn't decide maybe he wanted it for himself?” Wade asked.

“Or spill the beans about what Merkle was doing in it, I suppose. He knew Jason was so desperate for a friend, he'd never betray one. So he behaved like a friend . . . sort of.”

“Christ,” Wade said softly.

“Yeah. Sad, huh? On the other hand, Merkle did save Ellie and me.”

Where Bert had found the goodness for it, I couldn't imagine, or the impulse to try to help Jason Riverton, either. But he had; maybe that school of Dave's had done him some good, in spite of himself.

“Yes.” Wade's hand tightened on mine. “Yes, he did.”

From the top of the hill, the night view stretched from Deer Island past Campobello and the Lubec Narrows, all the way around to Shackford Head and Carryingplace Cove. With the lights far and near glistening wetly it resembled a fairy-tale setting, but the fog that had sat motionless to our south all day long gobbled it steadily now that it was dark.

Finally we drove home. “Ellie's keeping Merrie's dog,” I said. “She thinks sending him to a shelter is just too hard-hearted.”

Caspar had been sleeping on her lap the last time I'd talked to her, with Lee stroking his ears, and George planned on training the animal to ride shotgun with him in his truck.

“Look,” Wade said as we pulled into our driveway, and I followed his wave up to the third floor where for the first time in years domestic light glowed warmly.

“Let's go in,” I urged, lonesome suddenly for my own kitchen, the battered tea kettle with its bright summoning whistle, my own chair. And . . . maybe even a bath.

“A hot toddy?” Wade suggested.

“Yes,” I agreed, hurrying alongside him as, with our arms clasped around each other, we went into the big old house together and closed the door firmly behind us.

Chapter
19

D
riving out Route 190, Dave DiMaio saw the banner
hung at the entrance to the Seaview Campground:
Bonfire Tonite!

He drove in past the putting green and the cottages under the pines, among dozens of travel campers each with its awning, lawn chairs, and barbecue grill. The road wound on past a small general store, downhill to the water.

A long grassy area sloped to the dock where boats were tied up. Dave walked out slowly to the end of the dock, then returned to the Saab and drove all the way to where the road dead-ended at a metal gate.

He sat in the car, looking across the water to where the last light faded. When it grew completely dark and the bonfire's first flames glowed behind the hill, he returned to where a few campers had already gathered, one with a guitar.

“Nice night,” said the guitar-playing fellow.

“Yes,” Dave agreed as he began tearing parchment pages out of the old book. He had the idea that the fellow sitting across the flames from him knew what he was burning.

But that must be only his own imagination, and besides, it didn't matter. Neither did the absence of any hard proof that the book was precisely the kind of thing Horace Robotham had spent his life eradicating, not a forgery at all.

Merkle's secret workshop and his history of creating shams, even ones good enough to convince professional collectors, had persuaded Dave briefly that this volume, too, was merely another fake among many. What could be more reasonable?

But on the other side of the ledger were five deaths, and the transformation of a harmless old woman into a killer. For Dave it was evidence enough, as it would have been for Horace, who might not have waited even this long before setting the thing alight.

Smoke curled from the parchment pages and vanished until only the binding remained. Dave fed that in, too, pushing it with a stick to be sure every bit reached the fire's heart; at last the final fragment vanished with a sizzling pop.

The guitar guy nodded ponderously. While Dave worked he'd been strumming the instrument quietly. Now he played a sprightly ending-ditty:
shave and a haircut, two bits!

“All finished?” he asked.

Dave rose stiffly from his haunches and breathed in the gathering fog, letting it quench the hot, painful places in his heart. “Finished,” he said.

Back in the Saab he eyed his reflection in the darkened windshield and realized that it was true.

On the car's backseat lay the long, ruggedly slender tool that the Fargeorge woman had used for coring out samples from her backyard archeological dig. The tool was useful, not only for getting things out of the earth, but also for putting them in.

Small things made of tinfoil, for instance. So there was no sense leaving the device where people might get ideas from it.

Doubts, questions; no need, anymore, for any of those. His journey, begun alone in anger and sorrow, had come to its end. It was as if his old friend were with him, in firelight and in the sense of a task completed.

Thinking this, Dave aimed the Saab back toward Providence, to his own funny old college, his bachelor rooms tucked up under the eaves of the ancient residence hall, his students and books.

Someday he might be to one of his pupils what Horace had been to him. His heart moved hopefully at the notion. But now in the darkness of a late-summer Maine evening thick with mist and the shrilling of crickets, there was no hurry.

So that when he came to the small white wooden sign by the side of the road, this time he didn't bother taking the short-cut but instead drove straight on into the unmarked night.