Mr. X (75 page)

“Now two sets of pictures are missing? Yours and Stewart’s?”

“Awfully strange coincidence, isn’t it?”

“So strange that you thought I must have had something to do with it. And then didn’t tell you. Which makes it sound like, instead of trying to annoy Stewart, I was concealing something from you.”

She was right: it did sound like that. I remembered what Rachel Milton had said to me about the Hatch photographs, but Laurie’s talent for perception had already pushed this conversation past anything intended by my thoughtless question. “Whoa,” I said. “Too far, too fast. Around you, I have to watch what I say.”

“Who drove you to the V.A. Hospital?”

“I know,” I said.

A car rolled into the driveway and stopped in front of the garage.

Laurie kissed my cheek. “Remember who your friends are.”

*  *  *

Cobbie burst in and squealed with pleasure. “Ned, Ned, I have a
trick
!”

Posy smiled at me, put down the stroller, and set two shopping bags on the counter. “After the movie, I bought some books and a couple of the CDs Ned recommended.”

“I have a
trick
!” Cobbie’s eyes were dancing. He smelled like popcorn.

“Let me know how much you paid, and I’ll add it to your check.” Laurie hugged Cobbie. “Hello, squirt. Did you like the movie?”

“Uh-huh. And I—”

“You want to show us a trick.”

“Uh-huh.” He paused for dramatic effect and sang an odd series of notes. Then he went limp with laughter.

“It’s beyond me,” Posy said. “He’s been singing it over and over, and it cracks him up every time.”

Cobbie began singing the peculiar melody again, and this time he found it so funny he could not get to the end.

“Do it all the way through,” I said.

Cobbie stationed himself before me, looked directly into my eyes, and sang the entire sequence of notes.

I thought I knew why it sounded so odd. “Um, backwards something singing you are, Cobbie?” It took me longer to work out the order of the six words than Cobbie had taken to reverse eight bars of melody.

“Huh?” Laurie said.

Chortling, Cobbie trotted to the piano and plunked out the notes.

“Now play it the right way,” I said.

He hit the same notes in the opposite order and grinned at Posy.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s from the movie.”

“Wholewide Worl,” Cobbie said.

“That settles it,” I said to Laurie. “He’s going to be Spike Jones when he grows up.”

“Is Ned staying for dinner?” Cobbie asked.

“Is he?” Laurie asked me.

“As long as Cobbie and I can listen to one of those new CDs,” I said, thinking that after dinner, I would go back to Buxton Place to see what Earl Sawyer had hidden in a drawer. Earl Sawyer was a troubling man. He cherished the notion that
H. P. Lovecraft’s stories described a literal reality, and he had nearly fainted when I had touched the first edition with the owner’s inscription on the flyleaf. I tried to remember the name: Fleckner? Flecker? Fletcher. W. Wilson Fletcher, of the Fortress Military Academy in Owlsburg, Pennsylvania.

For about half an hour, Cobbie sat entranced through most of Haydn’s
Theresienmesse
, occasionally turning to see if I had heard some particular sonic miracle. Now and then, he said “Huh” to himself. During the “Credo” movement, he looked at me with an expression of puzzled delight. “That’s called a fugue,” I said. He turned back to the music and muttered, “Foog.” When the movement came to an end, he announced that it was time for cartoons and sped into the room on the other side of the fireplace.

In the kitchen, Laurie and Posy were gliding back and forth between the counter and the stove. Posy asked if I had seen the books she bought for Cobbie, and I went back into the living room. Posy had found short biographies, written for children, of Beethoven and Mozart. The last book in the bag was
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft’s Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre
.

I brought it into the kitchen and said, “You didn’t get this for Cobbie, did you?”

“Oh, sure,” Posy said. “Laurie and I were talking about the book you brought over the other day. Somebody Rinehart? Lovecraft’s name came up, and I was curious. A guy in my neurobiology seminar is a big Lovecraft fan. I’ve never read anything by him, so I thought I’d take a look. One instance is chance, two are design.”

“Huh,” I said, and realized that I sounded like Cobbie.

“You’re not allowed to ogle the staff,” Laurie said. She handed me the wine bottle. “We’ll be ready in about twenty minutes.”

I poured out the last of the wine, went to the sofa, and began reading “The Dunwich Horror.”

The story began with an evocation of a sinister area in northern Massachusetts. Cramped between looming hills, the town of Dunwich exuded decay. Generations of inbreeding had warped its native population into degeneracy. The story moved into particulars with the introduction of Lavinia Whateley, cursed by ugliness and albinism, who at thirty-five had given birth to goatish, dark-skinned Wilbur. The child began walking at seven months
and learned to speak before his first birthday. Well in advance of his teens, he developed thick lips, yellow skin, wire-brush hair, and the ability to throw dogs into savage fits.

In the way a particle of food sticks between the teeth, an otherwise unnoticed detail seemed to have lodged in my mind, and I leafed back and found this sentence:
“The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer’s common-law wife, Mamie Bishop.”

I flipped through a couple of pages and saw,
“Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men.”

Goose pimples rose on my arms. Once was chance, twice was design. The Buxton Place houses had been bought under names taken from Lovecraft characters, and their caretaker went by the name of another. Earl Sawyer adored Edward Rinehart because he was Edward Rinehart.

“Laurie,” I said before I knew what I was going to do, “I think I left something upstairs yesterday.”

“What?” she called.

“I’ll be right back.” As though driven by a malign compulsion, I double-jumped the stairs and went into Laurie’s bedroom. While a part of me stood by in horror, I pulled open her dresser drawers and searched through her clothing. I went to her closet and compounded my crime.

Laurie’s voice came from the bottom of the staircase. “What are you looking for, Ned?”

“A pair of sunglasses. I just realized they’re gone.”

“I don’t think they’re here. Dinner in five minutes.”

I looked under her bed and into her bedside table. I searched the bathroom. When I came out into the hallway, I glanced at Cobbie’s door and moved to Posy’s. I considered taking a look inside, rejected the idea, and turned toward the stairs. Posy Fairbrother was regarding me from the end of the hallway.

“Thank you for not going into my room,” she said. “Am I to gather you thought I might have taken your sunglasses?”

“No, Posy, please,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out where the blasted things could be.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear sunglasses,” she said. “Anyhow, we’re ready to eat.”

I got through dinner by steering the conversation toward cartoons, a subject on which Cobbie had a great many observations, and Haydn’s
Theresienmesse
, to which I had listened just often enough to fake an expertise. Posy sent me suspicious glances, and Cobbie, for whom dinner with the grown-ups was a special treat, threw in a couple of four-year-old aperçus. (“That music was like very, very, very good food,” and “It’s nice when a bunch of singers don’t make the notes
smeary
.”) Both women seemed put out with me, and my apologies for fussing over a lost pair of sunglasses and having to leave after dinner did nothing to warm the atmosphere. A puzzled Laurie walked me to the door. I said that I expected to be busy all the next day, but would call if I could. Cobbie rocketed out of the kitchen, and I gathered him up and kissed his cheek. He reared back and said, emphasizing every word, “I—want—to—hear—another—FOOG!”

107

I parked a block south of Brennan’s and hurried into narrow Buxton Place. Twilight had begun to sink into real darkness, and moonlight glinted from the windows in the old stables. As I had expected, the doors and windows of the cottages refused to budge. I kicked at cobbles until one dislodged. I wrapped it in my jacket, carried it back to number 2, and stepped up to the window.

A hand closed on my shoulder. I thought my heart would explode.

An inch from my ear, Robert’s voice, my voice, said, “Have you lost your mind?”

I wanted to club him with the stone.

“You can’t still be angry. I did you a favor.”

“You ran out on me.”

“Didn’t you disappear a second after I did?”

“Did I?”

He chuckled. “Brother dear, the more you can discover in yourself, the better off we’ll be tomorrow.”

“Where have you been?”

“Speaking of favors,” he said. “Blueberry Lane.”

His smirk was unbearable. “Someone had to repair the damage. I apologized for my moodiness. I hadn’t even thanked Laurie and Posy for their lovely dinner, and I hoped they would understand that my mother’s funeral was having a terrible effect on my manners. I found the sunglasses in the car, sorry for letting them become the focus of my anxieties. Blah blah blah. There are things about human beings I don’t understand, I know, but your fondness for that little boy really baffles me. I had to keep peeling him off my leg. If you don’t watch out, you’re going to spoil that child.”

“You followed me?”

“No. I had the pleasure of an early supper at Le Madrigal. Julian flirted with me so sweetly that I’m joining him for a drink around one-thirty this morning. The boy is all aquiver.”

“You’re going to have sex with Julian?”

“I don’t make pointless distinctions. Now that the ladies of Blueberry Lane have been pacified, tell me why we’re breaking into this hovel.”

“After we get inside,” I said.

Robert filtered through the front door of number 2. As always, it looked like a special effect in a movie. The door swung open, and I dropped the cobblestone and walked in.