The Dark House (2 page)

“W
ell, you're getting a lot of work done, I see.”

Rollins swiveled around in his chair. It was Marj, the new girl in an adjacent cubicle. She had two earrings in each ear, auburn hair that Rollins was pretty sure was not her natural color, and, apparently, a hunger for attention. She was twenty-seven, he knew from her job application, and, to judge by the unadorned ring finger, single. And, for reasons he wasn't quite clear about, she seemed to have been trying, from the moment she arrived two months ago, to befriend him. At present, she was wearing a black skirt slit a couple of inches up the side, a tight green blouse and matching eyeliner, which, for a man like Rollins, was probably not the right way to go about it.

“You've been staring out the window for, like, the last half hour.” Marj leaned up against the edge of his desk and plucked a pencil out of the pencil holder to drum against his desktop. “What's the matter, out late last night?”

“Not terribly.” Every tap on the desktop pounded directly on Rollins' brain.

Marj chewed her lip. A fold of her skirt slanted across her pelvis. One of her high heels tipped sideways.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” Rollins asked finally.

Marj brightened. “Shoot.”

“When you come home at night, do you turn on the lights?”

Marj crossed her arms in front of her chest, a gesture seemingly designed to protect her from a man she may have wildly misjudged. “Usually.”

“I'm serious—do you?”

“Yeah, I turn on the lights.” Marj looked at him warily, her blondish eyebrows furled in horizontal
S'
s.

“Even if you're going straight to bed?”

“Sure.”

“Always?”

“Yeah, always,” she replied, her voice rising. “Or I might bump into something. I'm not a freaking bat.” She gave out a little crackle of a laugh, as if to discharge some accumulated voltage. “Why all the crazy questions?”

“Oh, just research. You've been most helpful.” He smiled. “Thanks.”

Marj remained where she was. “Research? What kind?”

“General.”

Normally, Rollins would have taken Marj's puzzled look as a perverse kind of compliment and let it go at that. He liked being secretive, even a little squirrelly, at times. But the possibility of having been watched last night had sobered him. He took a breath while he contemplated the matter. “Okay, I saw someone go into a house last night without turning on the lights. I was thinking about it just now. I thought it was odd.”

“That the sort of thing you think about?”

“Sometimes.”

There was a pause in the conversation as Marj pondered that. “Which house?”

 

Rollins told Marj the full story that afternoon over lunch at a soup-and-salad place named Georgio's. He hadn't meant to tell her—or anyone. He'd planned to file away the night's tape with all the others on the long row over his bed. A subject for future review, perhaps, but not active concern. Yet the sight of the dark house—as he'd come to think of it—had stayed with him. More than that, it seemed to grow in his memory, like a plant that had accidentally been released in a new, more favorable environment. What was, in fact, a stubby suburban ranch house had now taken on some of the characteristics of a towering Gothic. The whole business seemed somehow momentous, and he wasn't sure where to go with it. He spoke to his brother in Indianapolis on occasion, but never about anything like this. There were other, more distant, relatives around, like Aunt Eleanor and Uncle George out in the western suburbs, but they were hardly confidants. He'd had his crowd at Williams (fellow classics majors and black-and-white film buffs mostly), plus a few holdovers from prep school. But the gang had drifted to New York since college, and the truth was, he found himself a little short on genuine friends at present.

That decided it. She was right there, and, despite her quasi-punk appearance, she seemed genuinely curious. Plus, the fact that he barely knew the first thing about her (and, presumably, vice versa) made him think she might be a harmless recipient of his news. Some history was operating here: He'd once confided in a young woman on a train to New York City, revealing to her a few details of his driving life that he attributed to a nameless friend. The woman seemed mildly intrigued, especially once Rollins made it clear that his friend was not some scuzzy peeping tom, but rather a kind of cultural anthropologist. She said that Rollins' friend reminded her of a distant cousin in Washington state who used a radio scanner to monitor police reports. “Kind of an interesting guy, actually,” the woman said. Rollins had been so encouraged, he thought that he might try to get together with the woman for a drink in the city, but it turned out she was continuing on
to Philadelphia. He never did get her name. Still, he left the train whistling; it had been so wonderful to unburden himself.

He didn't tell Marj everything. He glossed over the fact that he'd made a hobby of following people back to their homes for the last several years. He focused on the part that was too large for him to take in alone, namely the monstrous peculiarity of the gaunt man entering a dark house and never turning on the lights.

Marj listened to his tale intently, without interrupting.

“So what do you make of it?” Rollins asked finally.

“I'm amazed you did that.”

Rollins colored. He was in deeper than he'd thought. “Haven't you ever wondered about people? What they…do?”

Marj looked at him. “You've done this before, haven't you?”

Rollins reached for his water glass and took a long, cool drink.

“Well, you
are
a devil!” Marj's eyes flashed. “And here I thought you were some boring Republican like all the other creeps in the office. God, what a relief.”

Rollins set the glass down. He was startled by that glimmer in her eyes. Did it convey interest, or—he didn't quite know how to think about this—a kind of ferocity? It was like a car with its brights up, coming straight at him in his lane. As far as he could remember, no one had ever lingered on his face quite so shamelessly. He'd had a girlfriend or two, years back, but nothing that went anywhere. But these eyes of Marj's, they were like twin suns. He tried to match her gaze, but after a few moments he had to return his attention to his water glass.

Still, he did hope that, despite his shyness, she might find him reasonably attractive. At thirty-seven, he was still fairly young. He dressed well, all his clothes—like the blazer, rep tie, and summer-weight flannels ensemble he was wearing right now—were selected with care at the Exeter Shop, where he was on a first-name basis with the owner, a charming Trinidadian. He hadn't gone gray, or bald, or fat, like some of his Williams classmates. If anything, the years had given his face a sleek angularity that he thought might possibly be considered handsome in the manner of certain thirties' film stars he admired. As he followed Marj in his peripheral vision, her gaze felt tender, like her hands
(or so he assumed) now slowly bringing a bottle of Sprite to her lips. A good sign, surely.

Their lunches arrived, and Rollins took refuge in his salad, while Marj turned to her gazpacho. He ate in silence, concentrating on each bite: the satisfying crunch of the lettuce, the little explosions of the tomatoes on his tongue, the tang of the dressing.

“You should go back, you know,” Marj said finally.

Rollins dabbed at the corner of his mouth with his napkin. “You think?”

“Or perhaps I should go,” Marj added.

It was remarkable how a new bit of information about a person could transform all that had come before. Suddenly, he didn't mind her extra earrings and dyed hair. “By yourself?”

“He's never seen
me
.”

“Absolutely not. It wouldn't be safe. Who knows, the fellow might have a gun.”

“Then maybe we should go together. You can protect me from this ‘fellow.'” The corner of her mouth quivered as if she were trying to suppress a smile.

This was trouble. Rollins didn't have many guiding principles for his nightly pursuits, but one of them was the Garbo rule. He had to be alone. That had always been inviolable. Solitude allowed him to focus his energies on the object of his pursuit. The sole attachment had to be to the stranger in the car.

Marj finished off the Sprite and set the bottle down. “I'm not doing anything tonight, you know.”

 

Marj lived in an apartment building on Washington Street just down the hill from the sprawling Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in the Brighton section of Boston. As arranged, Rollins double-parked out front at exactly seven-thirty and honked three times. Marj threw open a window three flights up. “Be right there!” she shouted, waving. Her hair was wet and she was wearing only a bath towel. Rollins had seen such things before, countless times. He had seen more. But it's different when you know the person. There's an extra connection, a line of
unspoken communication, that makes the sight all the more revealing. He put the car in neutral, pulled the hand brake, and switched on the emergency blinkers.

Fifteen minutes later, he heard a rap on the passenger-side glass. He leaned over to pop the lock. From that vantage, peering up at her through the side window, he could see an inch or two of the downy flesh under her loose cotton T-shirt.

Marj jumped in with a rush of perfume. “Hey.” She had a Walkman draped around her neck like a necklace, and artfully torn jeans. A rhythmic scratchiness leaked out from the headset. Everything about her seemed strange, but it was the immediacy of her being there, right there in his car, that got to him most of all. The Nissan hadn't seen many passengers. He tried to assure himself that it wasn't so unusual for a single man in the city to be so private about his car, but deep down he had his doubts. A few months back, he'd driven his brother Richard out for Thai food in Central Square when he'd come through on a business trip from Indiana. And he'd had a woman in the Nissan last fall. That was adventurous. A Cindy someone, whom he'd met at the Laundromat around the corner from his apartment. They'd gone to a Red Sox game for a few innings before Cindy started to complain about the noise and spilt beer. Actually, Rollins had started to enjoy himself, the marvelous expanse of green that was spread out before him, the leisurely pace of the game. He'd held open the possibility of dinner, but Cindy insisted on being driven straight home.

“You okay?” Marj tipped her head to look at him at an angle, as if trying for a new perspective. “We don't have to do this, you know. If it's too weird.”

“It'll be fine.” Rollins switched on the ignition. “Really.” He moved the car out into traffic and headed across town.

“Sorry to be so slow. I got a phone call.”

“No problem. It's still a little light out.” He pointedly didn't ask who called. Out of habit, he scanned the license plates on the nearby cars, checking for vanities.

“Say—look at you.”

As usual for his night work, Rollins had dressed down considerably. He wore his driving clothes—loose chinos, an old pair of sneakers, and a sweatshirt his mother had once sent him in a failed attempt to get him to exercise.

“I wanted to be comfortable,” Rollins explained.

Marj looked at him again. “You're not married, are you?”

“Me? No.” He nearly laughed at the thought.

“I didn't think so,” Marj said. “But my mom thought I should ask.” She paused a second, looking out at the other cars on the road. “Since you're older.”

“You asked your mother about me?”

“I'm from the Midwest. Well, originally. Morton, Illinois, the heart of the heartland.” She practically sang it out, as if it were a jingle from an advertisement. “Just east of Peoria. Got it? White frame house, picket fence, the whole bit. I split about ten years ago, but my mom still likes to check in. Don't worry, I just told her we were going out for a drive. That's something people do in Morton.”

“I'm from Brookline,” Rollins said. “I've spent about my whole life around here.” Marj seemed to incline toward him a little, but Rollins stopped short. It didn't seem like enough of a life to merit a conversation: dancing school; woodworking classes at the Brookline Community Center (his one experience with what his mother termed “mixing”); the “pre-prep” Grant School, with its faint smell of sawdust; puberty at Middlesex; then going west to Williams, his one big adventure. Why go into it? And as for the other life—the one he really lived—God, where to begin?

They were up on the turnpike now, passing the big screen over the famous left-field wall at Fenway Park. He passed through the dim tunnel, done in grimy bathroom tiles, under the plastic-looking Prudential tower to the expressway—reasonably clear at this hour—and across the nameless bridge at the mouth of the ruffled Charles to 93.

For a while, Marj rode quietly, too, and Rollins let the silence enfold the two of them. In his car, he was used to silence, but it had an unaccustomed edge to it now, with Marj there. Usually, as he embarked on a pursuit, the silence tokened concentration, focus; now there was a
pervasive sense of expectation that Rollins found unsettling, but that he didn't know how to dispel.

Once they were up on 93 heading north, Marj shifted in her seat. “So—any family?”

This was one of Rollins' least favorite topics. For simplicity's sake, he decided to leave out any reference to the illustrious, so-called greater family: that vast herd of overenthusiastic near-strangers who gathered for the annual fall family clambake at his grandmother's big place by the sea in Gloucester. Ditto the first cousins, whom he knew fairly well, but who were an impenetrable thicket all their own. Several moments passed—until Rollins realized that, despite all the thoughts that had coursed through his head, he hadn't actually said anything, and, further, that Marj was waiting for him speak. Finally, he explained about his younger brother, Richard, in Indianapolis. “He's married with two children, the V.P. of the Coca-Cola bottling plant there. I guess he's the big success in the family.” He tried to keep a sound of complaint out of his voice.