The Resurrection Man (17 page)

Sarah concentrated on her driving, keeping a sharp eye out for any vehicle that might contain a Dravidian or reasonable facsimile in a red jogging suit, but she didn’t see one. Davy was an experienced traveler, he sat back in his car seat and beguiled the time showing his llama the sights along the way, or catching a few winks so as to be fresh and rested for whatever adventures might be awaiting him at Aunt Mimi’s.

What awaited them all, of course, was food. Miriam hadn’t had time to do more than whip up a batch of prune muffins, a pot of corn chowder, and a magnificent garden salad to keep body and soul together in lieu of what she considered a decent meal. Dessert was a melon sorbet Miriam had made from scratch in her handy home ice-cream freezer, served with pizzelle fresh baked in a remarkably hi-tech reversible waffle iron she’d got for Mother’s Day.

“This is marvelous, Miriam,” Sarah commented. “And you’re an angel to take Davy for us. I only hope we haven’t got you into trouble.”

Miriam Bittersohn Rivkin was a handsome woman, or could be when she got dressed up. Sartorial elegance was not her top priority, however, her present outfit of a venerable denim wrap skirt and one of her husband’s old shirts was about as classy as she generally got around home. Her hair was naturally dark and wavy like Max’s, but now showing a fair amount of gray. Another woman of her age might have started touching it up, Miriam believed in taking life as it came. She finished nibbling the spear of endive she’d fished out of the salad bowl and wiped the dressing off her fingers with a cotton-print napkin.

“How, for instance?”

“We don’t really know,” said Sarah. “There’s this little man in a red jogging suit who keeps popping up. Charles saw him in an alley in the Back Bay, he passed us this morning as we were going into the Common Garage. Last night he climbed over our back fence and pounded on the basement door, then ran away. At least we think he was the one, Mariposa only saw the seat of his pants going back over the fence. You tell her, Max. Davy, why don’t you eat your chowder with a spoon the way daddy does, instead of picking out the kernels with your fingers?”

“Max ate with his fingers when he was Davy’s age,” said Miriam. “So did Mike, it’s probably hereditary. He’ll grow out of it. So what else with the man in the red suit, Max?”

Her brother explained, she nodded. “That’s interesting. But he hasn’t actually done anything, has he? I mean, you don’t seriously suppose he’d have gone running through the Protheroes’ yard if he’d been planning to come back and shove a spear into that old man? And you don’t really know whether he was the man in the rhubarb leaf, or that he stole Mrs. Percy’s painting. Maybe he was trying to keep somebody else from stealing it and they took his clothes to get back at him. Maybe”—Miriam was ever on the side of the underdog—“you should try to make friends with him.”

“How?” said Max. “Hold out a fortune cookie and whistle? Hey, Kätzele, not to break up the party, but I promised Brooks I’d be back by half past three. He’s got a date with a bird of paradise.”

“Well, he’d better not let Theonia know,” Sarah replied rather crossly. “All right, then, if we must. Oh, I’ll be so glad if we ever get to come home! Thanks for everything, Miriam. Whatever would we do without you?”

“I’ve often wondered,” said her sister-in-law. “See you tomorrow. Or the day after is fine with me. Come on, Davy, let’s fill your wading pool and give the llama a drink.”

“M
AX,” SAID SARAH, “WOULD
you mind if we swung by our house for just a minute?”

“Of course not.” Max’s glance was both tender and sober. “I feel like a louse for keeping you and Davy in town all summer.”

“Darling, don’t. Actually it’s been rather fun. Some of it, anyway. We’ve had no problems managing your therapy, as we would have had out here. It proves how right we were to hang on to the Boston house, having a place of our own to stay in has made all the difference. Brooks and Theonia have been marvelous, though I expect they’ll be well enough pleased to have the house to themselves when we move back here. It shouldn’t be long now, should it?”

“About another three weeks, the doctor thinks.”

“Then we’d better get on with finding someone to work full time in the office. I don’t intend for either of us to be shuffling back and forth any more than we can help. What a pity Mike didn’t decide on an art major.”

Max shook his head. “Mike’s a great kid, but he’ll make a far better engineer than he would a detective. You know, Sarah, crazy as it sounds, that oldest boy of your Cousin Lionel’s might not be such a bad assistant if he had the right training.”

“Jesse? Are you out of your mind? Anyway, Jesse’s not even in college yet and I can’t imagine which one would take him. Unless there’s a school that offers courses in vandalism and pillage.”

“I don’t know. I’ve talked to the kid a few times at those get-togethers your Aunt Appie puts on. He’s sharp, he’s got imagination, and he’s resourceful, to put it mildly.”

“Oh yes, Jesse’s full of resources. So are his brothers. So were the Visigoths, I believe. I don’t know though, Max, you could be right. Remember that time a mob of reporters tried to invade us from the beach and Lionel’s boys held them off with a barrage of fish heads? I remember feeling quite proud of them, though not for long. I suppose you could sound Jesse out a bit if you feel up to it. Just be sure to handcuff him to his chair first so that he won’t be able to pick your pockets.”

“Aren’t you being a trifle harsh?”

“Not at all, it’s just that I’ve known those four brats of Lionel’s a good deal longer than you have. They’re all chips off the old block, unfortunately. Their father’s as bad as they are, though Lionel’s a lot sharper at not letting his right hand notice what his left hand’s up to. Go ahead if you want to, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Hell, I can outmaneuver a kid his age.”

“Jesse’s no kid, unless perhaps he’s a reincarnation of Billy the Kid, which wouldn’t surprise me a bit. We might ask that friend of Theonia’s who does past-life readings to check his pedigree. By the way, do you have your key to the house with you? It’s just occurred to me that I’ve left mine in my other handbag.”

“It’s okay, don’t forget I was a Boy Scout once. Hey, how about that? We appear to have a welcoming committee.”

A scowling youth in the shortest of cutoffs and the holiest of T-shirts was straddling the drive directly in front of them. “Can’t you read the sign?” he was yelling. “This is private property.”

Sarah stuck her head out the car window. “Thanks for telling us, Jesse. Whatever are you doing here?”

Without being invited, Jesse opened the back door and climbed in.

“Guarding the premises. What’d you do, Aunt Sarah, rack up the other car? Hi, Max, you still got that bum leg? How come they didn’t amputate?”

“How come you weren’t exposed on a barren hillside at birth?” Sarah retorted. “What do you mean, you’re guarding the premises? Has something happened?”

“Ah, some jerks had a picnic here yesterday. They strewed Chinese food all over the place.”

“Chinese food?”

“Well, those boxes they put the take-out in. And broken chopsticks and a couple of fortune cookies. One of them said ‘Your luck has run out’ and the other said ‘Prepare for worse to come.’ That was kind of gross, I thought. So Mike told me to keep people off.”

“Mike knows you’re here?”

“Well, sure.” Jesse was all virtue. “I had to ask permission to camp, didn’t I? I told him I was your cousin, sort of, and you always let me and my family stay here.”

“Since when?”

“Well, grandma does, and we all did, that time when the boat house burned down. I had to go someplace, Vare kicked me out.”

“What for?”

“Oh, you know Vare.” Lionel and his wife had drilled their children to call them by their first names. Sarah saw this as a way of ducking parental responsibility, which in their case it probably was. “She got mad because I wouldn’t go on a slumber party with this dumb kid who’s got the hots for me.”

“What? Do you mean your mother actually—” Sarah had been aware that such things happened nowadays, but it hadn’t dawned on her that they might be occurring among the junior Kellings. “This dumb kid—ah, male or female?”

“Oh, female. Vare’s sickeningly conventional in some ways, you know. Anorexic and stupid. Skinny I could have handled, stupid I couldn’t. I mean, I can understand where Vare gets off about conforming to the mores of my peer group and all that garbage, but I don’t see why I should have to sacrifice the precious pearl of my virginity just to oblige a screwed-up skeleton who can’t even look at a pizza without barfing.”

Jesse’s face had turned the color of a boiled lobster. For the first time in their stormy acquaintance, Sarah saw the boy embarrassed to the point of tears. “I—hell, I suppose this sounds crazy, but I just don’t want to do it unless it’s with somebody I at least kind of like. And any girl I think I might like never likes me. So here I am, still a virgin at sixteen. Maladjusted, Vare says, maybe she’s right for once. I suppose I can’t blame my mother for not wanting a nut case around the house setting a bad example to my younger siblings, but a guy’s got to march to his own drummer, is how I look at it.”

“Buck up, Jess,” said Max. “Some day your princess will come. Did you happen to bring any clothes with you?”

“Clothes?”

“You know. Shorts, pants, a jacket, maybe even shoes?”

“Oh, those. I’ve got Reeboks and Levi’s and a sweater. And my sleeping bag. It starts getting cold nights at this time of year. Not that I’m soft, you understand. I just don’t want to get sick and be a burden on Mike and Carrie.”

“That’s thoughtful of you, Jesse.” For Max’s sake, Sarah tried her level best to sound as though she believed him. “What are you living on? Do you have money for groceries?”

“No, Vare wouldn’t give me any.”

“Then is Mike feeding you?”

“No! I don’t need anybody. I can feed myself. I dig clams and pick berries and stuff. Mike and Carrie did ask me up for pizza a couple of nights, though,” the outcast admitted.

“How long have you been here?”

“What day’s today?”

“Wednesday.”

“Only Wednesday? Then it’s five days. I thought it was longer. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.”

“You haven’t been using the house, then?”

“Oh no. Just those two times, and then we ate out on the deck. They don’t let anybody into the house, only the woman who comes to clean and Mr. Lomax. They have their own keys because Mike and Carrie are off working all day. I hang out in the lean-to. Remember the one Lionel and we kids built that time?”

Sarah remembered all too well. “But it’s falling down.”

“Not any more. I’ve got it fixed good as new. Want to see?”

“We’re a little pressed for time just now.” Sarah glanced at Max and got a nod. “Would you care to ride back to Boston with us, and spend the night on Tulip Street for a change? You can’t live on clams indefinitely, I think we’d better arrange for you and Lionel to have a talk.”

“You can’t, they’ve all gone off on the boat.”

“When are they coming back?”

“When they get seasick, I guess.”

“Is your grandmother with them?”

“Of course. You don’t think they’d risk leaving the golden goose without her bodyguard?”

This was disrespectful of Jesse, but Sarah knew it was accurate. Apollonia Kelling had inherited a great deal of money from her late husband and even more from a deceased friend. The latter and larger legacy had, to Lionel’s temporary dismay, turned out to have been left for Appie’s lifetime only. Should she fail to spend it all during however many years she had left, the rest would be passed on to the local yacht club.

Lionel was therefore working hard to keep his dear old gray-haired mummy alive and productive for as long as possible. With touching solicitude he shuttled her back and forth in a series of expensive cars from her big old house in Cambridge to her sumptuous new ski lodge in Vermont or her sleek new yacht, selected and captained by her doting only son and manned by her almost as doting daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

Lionel was a passionate sailor, and a good one. They wouldn’t be back until he tired of the sea or Vare kicked up a monumental fuss. Sarah could see the handwriting on the wall, but what could she say?

“Then you’d better come with us anyway. Put on your Levi’s and we’ll borrow one of Mike’s shirts for you to wear.”

“Can we stop at the garage and tell him where I’m going?”

Ira Rivkin owned Ireson Town’s garage and filling station. Mike had been working for his father weekends and summers ever since he was old enough; this probably would be his last year, since he was finishing up his master’s degree. Jesse had no doubt begged him not to tell Sarah and Max that he was camping on their property and Mike had, as any warmhearted but conscientious young fellow would do, agreed to keep mum as long as Jesse behaved himself.

Perhaps Vare had done the right thing in shoving her firstborn out to fend for himself however insane her reason. Away from his hellhound brothers and his weird parents, strapped for cash and not daring to burgle the source of his occasional pizzas, the boy might have been using some of that empty time to do a bit of constructive thinking for a change. Max could even be right about Jesse, he’d turned a few other unlikely characters into reliable members of his far-flung network.

Sarah knew one thing in Jesse’s favor, the boy was remarkably fast on his feet. Should the occasion arise, he could probably outrun the little man in the red sweat suit. Thus trying to console herself she led the way into the house that she’d been missing so much.

Alien groceries in the kitchen were the first blow to her sensibilities: bizarre cereals in hideous boxes, canned soups, an empty take-out fried-chicken box left on the counter, soft drinks in the fridge, things she and Max wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole. Mike and Carrie were no doubt trying to keep the house in good order, but their ideas of neatness were not Sarah’s. She couldn’t suppress a feeling of having been invaded, even though she was truly grateful to the lovers for looking after the place.