Four Past Midnight (51 page)

“The insurance people are due at noon,” Ted said.

“Well, that's more than an hour from now. Let's go to your place, Ted. I don't feel so hot myself. I'd like to sit down.”

“All right.” Ted spoke in a slightly nettled no-need-to-shout tone which also did Mort's heart good. And although he would have said at breakfast that morning that Ted Milner's place was the last one on earth he wanted to go, he accompanied them without protest.

They were all quiet on the ride across town to the split-level on the east side where Ted hung his hat. Mort didn't know what Amy and Ted were thinking about, although the house for Amy and whether or not they'd be on time to meet the wallahs from the insurance company for Ted would probably be a couple of good guesses, but he knew what he was thinking about. He was trying to decide if he was going crazy or not. Is it real, or is it Memorex?

He decided finally that Amy really
had
said that about her office next to the laundry room—it was not a false memory. Had she said it before 1982, when “John Shooter” claimed to have written a story called “Secret Window, Secret Garden”? He didn't know. No matter how earnestly he conned his confused and aching brain, what kept coming back was a single curt message: answer inconclusive. But if she had said it, no matter when, couldn't the title of Shooter's story still be simple coincidence? Maybe, but the coincidences were piling up, weren't they? He had decided the fire was, must be, a coincidence. But the memory which Amy's garden with its crop of dead flowers had prodded forth ... well, it was getting harder and harder to believe all of this wasn't tied together in some strange, possibly even supernatural fashion.

And in his own way, hadn't “Shooter” himself been just as confused? How did you get it? he had asked; his voice had been fierce with rage and puzzlement.
That's what I really want to know
.
How in hell did a big
-
money scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shitsplat town in Mississippi and

steal my goddam story
? At the time, Mort had thought either that it was another sign of the man's madness or that the guy was one hell of a good actor. Now, in Ted's car, it occurred to him for the first time that it was exactly the way he himself would have reacted, had the circumstances been reversed.

As, in a way, they had been. The one place where the two stories differed completely was in the matter of the title. They both fit, but now Mort found that he had a question to ask Shooter which was very similar to the one Shooter had already asked him:
How did you happen by that title
,
Mr
.
Shooter
?
That's what I really want to know
.
How did you happen to know that
,
twelve hundred miles away from your shitsplat town in Mississippi
,
the wife of a writer you claim you never heard of before this year had her own secret window
,
looking down on her own secret garden
?

Well, there was only one way to find out, of course. When Greg ran Shooter down, Mort would have to ask him.

Mort passed on the cup of coffee Ted offered and asked if he had a Coke or a Pepsi. Ted did, and after Mort had drunk it, his stomach settled. He had expected that just being here, here where Ted and Amy played house now that they no longer had to bother with the cheap little town-line motels, would make him angry and restless. It didn't. It was just a house, one where every room seemed to proclaim that the owner was a Swinging Young Bachelor Who Was Making It. Mort found that he could deal with that quite easily, although it made him feel a little nervous for Amy all over again. He thought of her little office with its clear, sane light and the soporific drone of the drier coming through the wall, her little office with its secret window, the only one in the whole place which looked down into the tight little angle of space formed by the house and the ell, and thought how much she had belonged there and how little she seemed to belong here. But that was something she would have to deal with herself, and he thought, after a few minutes in this other house which was not a dreaded den of iniquity at all but only a house, that he could live with that ... that he could even be content with it.

She asked him if he would be staying in Derry overnight. “Uh-uh. I'll be going back as soon as we finish with the insurance adjustors. If something else pops, they can get in touch with me ... or you can.”

He smiled at her. She smiled back and touched his hand briefly. Ted didn't like it. He frowned out the window and fingered his pipe.

They were on time for their meeting with the representatives of the insurance company, which undoubtedly relieved Ted Milner's mind. Mort was not particularly crazy about having Ted in attendance; it had never been Ted's house, after all, not even after the divorce. Still, it seemed to ease Amy's mind to have him there, and so Mort left it alone.

Don Strick, the Consolidated Assurance Company agent with whom they had done business, conducted the meeting at his office, where they went after another brief tour of “the site.” At the office they met a man named Fred Evans, a Consolidated field investigator specializing in arson. The reason Evans hadn't been with Wickersham and Bradley that morning or at “the site” when Strick met them there at noon became obvious very quickly: he had spent most of the previous night poking through the ruins with a ten-cell flashlight and a Polaroid camera. He had gone back to his motel room, he said, to catch a few winks before meeting the Raineys.

Mort liked Evans very much. He seemed to really care about the loss he and Amy had suffered, while everyone else, including Mr. Teddy Makes Three, seemed to have only mouthed the traditional words of sympathy before going on to whatever they considered the business at hand (and in Ted Milner's case, Mort thought, the business at hand was getting him out of Derry and back to Tashmore Lake as soon as possible). Fred Evans did not refer to 92 Kansas Street as “the site.” He referred to it as “the house.”

His questions, while essentially the same as those asked by Wickersham and Bradley, were gentler, more detailed, and more probing. Although he'd had four hours' sleep at most, his eyes were bright, his speech quick and clear. After speaking with him for twenty minutes, Mort decided that he would deal with a company other than Consolidated Assurance if he ever decided to burn down a house for the insurance money. Or wait until this man retired.

When he had finished his questions, Evans smiled at them. “You've been very helpful, and I want to thank you again, both for your thoughtful answers and for your kind treatment of me. In a lot of cases, people's feathers get ruffled the second they hear the words ‘insurance investigator.' They're already upset, understandably so, and quite often they take the presence of an investigator on the scene as an accusation that they torched their own property.”

“Given the circumstances, I don't think we could have asked for better treatment,” Amy said, and Ted Milner nodded so violently that his head might have been on a string—one controlled by a puppeteer with a bad case of nerves.

“This next part is hard,” Evans said. He nodded to Strick, who opened a desk drawer and produced a clipboard with a computer printout on it. “When an investigator ascertains that a fire was as serious as this one clearly was, we have to show the clients a list of claimed insurable property. You look it over, then sign an affidavit swearing that the items listed still belong to you, and that they were still in the house when the fire occurred. You should put a check mark beside any item or items you've sold since your last insurance overhaul with Mr. Strick here, and any insured property which was not in the house at the time of the fire.” Evans put a fist to his lips and cleared his throat before going on. “I'm told that there has been a separation of residence recently, so that last bit may be particularly important.”

“We're divorced,” Mort said bluntly. “I'm living in our place on Tashmore Lake. We only used it during the summers, but it's got a furnace and is livable during the cold months. Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to moving the bulk of my things out of the house up here. I'd been putting it off.”

Don Strick nodded sympathetically. Ted crossed his legs, fiddled with his pipe, and generally gave the impression of a man who is trying not to look as deeply bored as he is.

“Do the best you can with the list,” Evans said. He took the clipboard from Strick and handed it across the desk to Amy. “This can be a bit unpleasant—it's a little like a treasure hunt in reverse.”

Ted had put his pipe down and was craning at the list, his boredom gone, at least for the time being; his eyes were as avid as those of any bystander gleeping the aftermath of a bad accident. Amy saw him looking and obligingly tipped the form his way. Mort, who was sitting on the other side of her, tipped it back the other way.

“Do you mind?” he asked Ted. He was angry, really angry, and they all heard it in his voice.

“Mort—” Amy said.

“I'm not going to make a big deal of this,” Mort said to her, “but this was
our
stuff, Amy.
Ours
.”

“I hardly think—” Ted began indignantly.

“No, he's perfectly right, Mr. Milner,” Fred Evans said with a mildness Mort felt might have been deceptive. “The law says you have no right to be looking at the listed items at all. We wink at something like that if nobody minds ... but I think Mr. Rainey does.”

“You're damned
tooting
Mr. Rainey does,” Mort said. His hands were tightly clenched in his lap; he could feel his fingernails biting smile-shapes into the soft meat of his palms.

Amy switched her look of unhappy appeal from Mort to Ted. Mort expected Ted to huff and puff and try to blow somebody's house down, but Ted did not. Mort supposed it was a measure of his own hostile feeling toward the man that he'd made such an assumption; he didn't know Ted very well (although he did know he looked a bit like Alfalfa when you woke him up suddenly in a no-tell motel), but he knew Amy. If Ted had been a blowhard, she would have left him already.

Smiling a little, speaking to her and ignoring Mort and the others completely, Ted said: “Would it help matters if I took a walk around the block?”

Mort tried to restrain himself and couldn't quite do it. “Why not make it two?” he asked Ted with bogus amiability.

Amy shot him a narrow, dark stare, then looked back at Ted. “Would you? This might be a little easier ...”

“Sure,” he said. He kissed her high on her cheekbone, and Mort had another dolorous revelation: the man cared for her. He might not always care for her, but right now he did. Mort realized he had come halfway to thinking Amy was just a toy that had captivated Ted for a little while, a toy of which he would tire soon enough. But that didn't jibe with what he knew of Amy, either. She had better instincts about people than that ... and more respect for herself.

Ted got up and left. Amy looked at Mort reproachfully. “Are you satisfied?”

“I suppose,” he said. “Look, Amy—I probably didn't handle that as well as I could have, but my motives are honorable enough. We shared a lot over the years. I guess this is the last thing, and I think it belongs between the two of us. Okay?”

Strick looked uncomfortable. Fred Evans did not; he looked from Mort to Amy and then back to Mort again with the bright interest of a man watching a really good tennis match.

“Okay,” Amy said in a low voice. He touched her hand lightly, and she gave him a smile. It was strained, but better than no smile at all, he reckoned.

He pulled his chair closer to hers and they bent over the list, heads close together, like kids studying for a test. It didn't take Mort long to understand why Evans had warned them. He thought he had grasped the size of the loss. He had been wrong.

Looking at the columns of cold computer type, Mort thought he could not have been more dismayed if someone had taken everything in the house at 92 Kansas Street and strewn it along the block for the whole world to stare at. He couldn't believe all the things he had forgotten, all the things that were gone.

Seven major appliances. Four TVs, one with a videotape editing hook-up. The Spode china, and the authentic Early American furniture which Amy had bought a piece at a time. The value of the antique armoire which had stood in their bedroom was listed at $14,000. They had not been serious art-collectors, but they had been appreciators, and they had lost twelve pieces of original art. Their value was listed at $22,000, but Mort didn't care about the dollar value; he was thinking about the N. C. Wyeth line-drawing of two boys putting to sea in a small boat. It was raining in the picture; the boys were wearing slickers and galoshes and big grins. Mort had loved that picture, and now it was gone. The Waterford glassware. The sports equipment stored in the garage—skis, ten-speed bikes, and the Old Town canoe. Amy's three furs were listed. He saw her make tiny check marks beside the beaver and the mink—still in storage, apparently—but she passed the short fox jacket without checking it off. It had been hanging in the closet, warm and stylish outerwear for fall, when the fire happened. He remembered giving her that coat for her birthday six or seven years ago. Gone now. His Celestron telescope. Gone. The big puzzle quilt Amy's mother had given them when they were married. Amy's mother was dead and the quilt was now so much ash in the wind.

The worst, at least for Mort, was halfway down the second column, and again it wasn't the dollar value that hurt. 124 BOTS. WINE, the item read. VALUE $4,900. Wine was something they had both liked. They weren't rabid about it, but they had built the little wine room in the cellar together, stocked it together, and had drunk the occasional bottle together.