The Book of Old Houses (13 page)

But this ridiculous new Biblical-pedigree claim—or was it a mama-gree?—seemed to me to be a dead giveaway that her mental status was getting iffy. The tiny spit droplets that flew out of her mouth whenever she pronounced a
p
only emphasized this.

“You know where it is,” she grated out accusingly. “You sent it to the man in Orono when I
asked
you not to. That Hobgoblin or whatever his name is.”

She hadn't asked; she'd
ordered
me not to send the old book away. I'd thought at the time that she was nervy but harmless and done it anyway, never giving her objections much thought.

“Robotham,” I corrected her.

When my father first found the book, I'd been excited and had unwisely told a few people here in Eastport about it; that's how Ann had learned of it. And she'd been an intolerable pain in the tail about it ever since.

“Whatever,” she sneered. “Just don't think you're fooling anybody with that story about him losing it, or letting it get stolen, or whatever.”

Another breath; fascinating, I thought. From the lengths of her usually disagreeable monologues, until now I'd thought she must take in oxygen via hidden gills.

“Probably,” she added snidely, “that
boyfriend
of his killed him.”

Years in the money business had taught me not to take other people's idiocies personally. But at her words, a hot little flame of outrage sprang up in my heart.

I hadn't known Horace. But neither had Ann. Luckily, Ellie stepped in.

“Time to go,” she said, advancing on Ann in a purposeful way that made Ann's tiny shape back toward the door even as her big red mouth kept moving.

“Want . . . me
. . . mine,
” she spluttered urgently, as Ellie went on mercilessly invading her personal space. “I have a
right . . .
because
I'm . . .
”

“Good-bye,” Ellie said sweetly, and didn't quite give Ann a shove when they reached the hallway.

“. . . an
artist
!” Ann wailed as Ellie forced her out the door, then followed her onto the porch. I heard their voices out there, Ann's outraged and Ellie's determined, before Ellie came in again. She slammed the door and sagged against it.

“You never told me she was so
insistent,
” she managed, and after a moment I had to smile too, not at Ann but at Ellie, whose delicate exterior concealed, apparently, a Sherman tank.

“Thanks.” I sank into a chair. Outside the kitchen window, late-summer sweet peas twined elegantly against the chain-link of the dog run.

“This time I thought I'd never get rid of her,” I said. “But was it you who kept . . . ?”

Calling,
I meant to finish. But instead Bella's voice rose from the front hall, shrill with alarm. “Missus?”

She'd come in the front door to avoid Ann Talbert at the rear, I gathered; good move. “Jake,” I corrected automatically, as I always did.

She ignored this as she always did. “Missus, there's a—”

“Tub on the stairs,” I said. “I know, Bella. My father put it there. He's got it chained very securely, though, and I'm sure he'll be back soon to lower it down.”
If he can get it unstuck,
I added silently. That had to be the plan.

“If the dogs want in, just let them in. And if they go upstairs don't worry about it,” I called out to Bella.

If white-faced old Monday could handle the tub then surely Prill would be able to. “Just yell at them to come down and if they don't,” I added, “I'll deal with it when I come home.”

Probably Bella hadn't been out getting dynamite, I realized.

Probably she already had some.

And with any luck she'd have detonated all of it by the time I got back.

“Let's get out of here,” I told Ellie a little desperately.

The pastries could wait.

Jason Riverton lived
on Water Street halfway to Dog Island, which was not really an island but a long, grassy peninsula overlooking a sand beach and the Old Sow whirlpool, at the north end of town.

Here the houses alternated between sweeping, well-maintained Victorians and smaller white Capes or bungalows with odd-sized windows and unwieldy-looking dormers, fronted by patches of grass.

“Ann Talbert was in Orono the night Horace Robotham was killed,” Ellie said as we walked toward the Riverton house.

Out on the water, the tide was running and the whirlpool in it swirled furiously, its paisley-shaped outer curls and dark, treacherous-looking blue sinkholes whitecapped.

“She was?” I asked, surprised. “You mean you've already checked? When? And why?”

Ellie looked nonchalant. “I started wondering about her right after it happened. Horace's death, I mean. Because,” she explained, “I knew Ann really, really wanted the book.”

“And you thought—?”

“Well, no,” Ellie admitted. “I can't say my thinking rose to the level of an actual suspicion. Because you know, at that point nobody was even talking about that kind of a murder. Not even us.”

We crossed Clark Street, passing between more small houses on our left and the old abandoned gas plant on our right, its tall brick chimney looking as if a stiff breeze would topple it.

But it had looked that way for years. “Only, when somebody wants something,” Ellie continued, “and then the person who has it gets his head bonked, I just always wonder . . .”

Yeah. Other people's first words were usually “Mama” or “Dada.” I'm pretty sure Ellie's was “Whodunnit.”

“So why was she there?” I asked. “Do you know that, too?”

Ellie nodded matter-of-factly. “Writers'-group meeting. On the U. Maine campus, every other week.”

“And you discovered all this by . . .”

“Asking her. Just now, when I pushed her out your back door. Like I say, I'd been wondering. So, once I got her out on the porch, I asked.”

And ye shall receive,
I thought; good old Ellie. “As in, ‘Where were you on the night of . . .' ”

“Exactly like that,” Ellie agreed. “
That
stopped her in her tracks,” she added, clearly enjoying the memory. Ellie hadn't had very much use for Ann Talbert even before Ann became the Writer from Hell.

“She was so shocked, she just kind of coughed up the answer before she thought much about it,” Ellie reported.

“So you think she could have killed Robotham, then stolen the book? In which case her demands for it now would be . . .”

“Camouflage,” Ellie supplied. “And no, I still don't, really. Ann isn't
that
nuts.”

She paused thoughtfully. “Or I don't
think
she is. But if all we want is to muddy the waters a little for Dave DiMaio, she makes a good start.”

I glanced at her. “Muddy the waters?”

“Make him believe somebody other than Merkle might've killed Robotham,” she explained cheerfully. “Because other than the book—which by the way he doesn't really seem to be looking for, so maybe he thinks Merkle has that, too? Anyway, why else would he be here?”

“Huh. Good plan,” I said. Clearly we were thinking alike; if Dave did believe Bert Merkle had killed his friend, and Dave was here in town to get revenge, producing one or more other suspects for him might slow him down. “So
that's
why you . . .”

“Called this morning? Yep. To get us onto the same page in case we weren't.”

Which of course we had been; sometimes I thought Ellie and I had been separated at birth. “Saving you from Ann Talbert
—and
finding out where she was that night—those were just nifty side effects.” She grinned winningly at me. “But my question is, what're we doing
here
?”

We were approaching the Rivertons' house.

“Bob Arnold suggested it.” A tall, asphalt-shingle-sided dwelling on a tiny lot, it had a ramshackle shed out back and a pair of warped two-by-fours laid loosely atop stacked concrete blocks serving as the front step. Empty flower boxes at dull windows whose curtains looked sadly unlaundered, a broken hinge on the rusty mailbox, and a patchy, dandelion-studded lawn badly needing a mower all suggested that a caring hand had been absent from it for quite a while.

“Bob thinks Jason Riverton might have something useful to say about Merkle,” I added. “But he also wants our sense of what kind of weird stuff, if any, is going on in the Riverton house.”

We started up the front walk, cracked and pierced through by clumps of yellow-blooming chamomile. “Seems Merkle's made a pal of Jason, and Bob can't figure out why. And in return,” I added, “Bob might have some information about DiMaio for us, too.”

We climbed the concrete-block step. “Sam doing okay?” Ellie asked.

“Yeah. So far, so fine.” But she understood as clearly as I did that if at any moment Sam stopped being that way, Bob might find out about it first.

And that I intended to be next, yet another excellent reason for staying in Bob's good graces.

Ellie knocked. Moments later we were let into the house by Jason Riverton's mother. She was a small, stoop-shouldered woman with a watery gaze that wandered over our faces without quite focusing on either of us.

After that, it took maybe another ten seconds or so to turn Mrs. Riverton's darling boy into a real, honest-to-gosh murder suspect.

Chapter
9

I
'll be here if you need anything,” Mrs. Riverton said as
heavy footsteps thudded down the stairs toward us.

Turning away she went back to the dim front parlor and the rocking chair in front of the big TV. When we knocked she'd been watching
The Price Is Right.

On the TV tray was a paper plate with the remains of a prune pastry on it. A paper napkin with an elaborate red
M
printed on it lay by the plate; it seemed Ellie wasn't the only local fan of Mimi's new bakery.

Seating herself, Mrs. Riverton resumed her knitting; I couldn't see what was on the needles. In the narrow front hall, her son looked from Ellie to me and back again.

Jason Riverton was six feet tall and a hundred and thirty-five pounds or so, with intensely hostile dark-brown eyes and a sour expression. A wispy moustache struggled on his soft, damp-looking upper lip. His head was shaved. A gold stud pierced his right nostril. “Yeah?” he demanded.

He wore baggy jeans with a pair of black suspenders and an old black T-shirt with a screen-print of a zombie being pierced by a lightning bolt on it, and maybe it was just the effect of the nose piercing, but I got the strong impression that for some reason he'd forgotten how not to breathe through his mouth.

“Jason, if you don't mind, we've got ourselves a problem and we hoped you could help us out by answering a couple of questions for us,” Ellie said after she'd introduced us both.

He shrugged carelessly in reply, then turned and tramped back up the narrow stairs; we followed. Each step was covered with a grit-choked brown rubber mat worn nearly to shreds, and the paint on the walls wasn't much lighter.

Where there still was any paint at all. Over the years the comings and goings of a teenaged boy had gouged the flimsy wallboard and hatchmarked the shaky, paint-peeling banister bolted to it.

Just at first glance I could see a dozen other things I'd have fixed immediately, too: a missing light-switch cover, a flap of loose carpet at the top of the stairs, a doorknob dangling at half-mast from a closet door, and a diagonal crack in the hallway plaster that unless I missed my guess meant the whole foundation was sinking. . . .

But none of it prepared me for the inside of Jason's room, which
had
been recently painted: flat black.

Black—walls, floor, ceiling . . . And then there were the clippings. Newspaper clippings, all recent and all on one subject: the death of Horace Robotham. Ellie and I glanced at each other as Jason sank into a chair in front of a computer.

The
Bangor Daily News
had run more than Horace Robotham's obituary, of course. His death had been big news for a few days in a place where serious crime was so rare, and it had been a subject with a lot of angles.

Neighborhood safety, tips on how not to become a victim, effective policing, comments from local residents, town-gown relationships—as Ellie had reminded me, Orono was home to the University of Maine's flagship campus—Jason had them all, snipped neatly out of the paper and pinned to a corkboard on the black wall behind his desk.

A cold, prickly feeling came over me, gazing at them. Why hadn't it occurred to me earlier that looking for more murder suspects also meant possibly finding one right here?

But it hadn't, until now. Without a word, Jason resumed the computer game he'd been playing: blasting wraiths, zombies, and skeletons to gory bits whenever they sprang up in the software-generated dungeon he was navigating with a handheld device.

“So, Jason,” I began, perhaps a bit too heartily. “I've got a son only a few years older than you are, went to Shead High. What class are you in?”

A strawberry Slurpee with a stained straw sticking out of it stood on his desk, which was made out of a hollow-core door and two filing cabinets. Unblinking, he drank automatically from the cup, reaching out with a spiderishly thin, pale hand to grasp it as unseeingly as one of the monsters in his computer game might.

From the number of points he'd put into the flashing score panel on the screen, it seemed he was a pretty good shot. But not much of a conversationalist.

“Just graduated high school,” he uttered finally. “Got into a construction job. Got hurt. Got on disability.”

And now here he was, only a couple of months later, having said good-bye to the stresses and strains of the workaday world. Efficient young fellow, our Jason.

“I'm sorry about that,” I replied. “Too bad, hitting such lousy luck right off the bat.” Although his injury, whatever it was, didn't hinder him from manipulating the game controller or reaching the Slurpee cup.

No pastry crumbs, I noticed without surprise. Mimi's creations were meant for grown-up taste buds, and what I'd seen so far of Jason suggested that he was more your basic Little Debbie type of snack consumer.

The rest of the room's decor consisted of a black bedspread on a black-sheeted, wooden-framed bed, militarily neat. Stacked milk crates identical to the ones I used in my workroom held his clothes, mostly jeans and T-shirts like the ones he was wearing.

Plank-and-concrete-block bookshelves lined the opposite wall, the shelves crammed with paperbacks some of whose titles were familiar; Sam had read all the Conan the Barbarian books. Lovecraft, Bloch, and James Branch Cabell—that last name jumped familiarly out at me—were heavily represented, also.

Down at one corner of the lowest shelf a half-dozen titles that didn't seem to belong with the rest were shoved together like out-casts: a high-school grammar text, old hardcover copies of
The
Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick,
and a few more from the you-really-should-read-it department of English literature.

I'd have bet any money Jason hadn't. Someone else had put those books there, trying I supposed to be a good influence on a young man's reading habits. I wondered who it had been; Bert Merkle, maybe?

But second only to the newspaper clippings he'd pinned up, it was the weapons collection ranged out along the top of the longest bookshelf that fascinated me the most: brass knuckles, spiked leather wristlets, a wooden truncheon with a black-leather strap looped through a hole in its stout handle . . .

Jason apparently shopped in the hand-to-hand-combat aisle, and not only for the modern stuff. “Where's the mace?” I asked, without thinking.

His slender thumbs paused momentarily in their battering of the computer-game controller.

“What?” His gaze stayed locked on the screen as the score rose up and the creatures fell down, writhing and screaming. But I thought he looked annoyed. Maybe I'd pointed out something he hadn't noticed before.

“Come on, Jason, that's quite a nice collection of medieval weaponry you've got there.”

Hey, I watch as much public television as anyone. And there had been a special on war in the Middle Ages a few weeks earlier.

I'd clicked past, then gone back to see the program because it reminded me so much of my first marriage. The correct term for a crossbow, I'd learned, was
arbalest.

“So?” Jason asked sullenly.

“So it seems funny to me that you've got all those others but no mace,” I persisted. “Makes me wonder. How come you're missing such an important one?”

Jason's weapons were reproductions, surely, but still it was a decent-looking collection. He'd even made little labels for each weapon, which to me meant he didn't spend all his time in front of the computer.

Just most of it. Meanwhile according to the program I'd seen, a mace was a heavy metal ball, toothed or smooth, fixed to a thick handle similar to the way an axe-head tops an axe.

“Bert warned me.” Jason avoided my question in a voice so flat it could've been machine-generated. “He said somebody'd be around hassling me sooner or later.”

A mace would've been a good tool for bashing in the skull of Horace Robotham. The dent it made could've looked as if it were put there by a rock.

“Why?” asked Ellie. “Why would Bert warn you about that?”

Jason finished his Slurpee. “Ma!” he bellowed, ignoring her question, too.

“Coming, dear,” Jason's mother called quaveringly.

Soon she appeared carrying a full cup of sweet refreshment, holding it out the way you might put a bit of meat through the bars of a lion's cage. She didn't look straight at him, either, any more than she had at us when we came in.

He grabbed the cup, didn't say thanks. Smiling eerily, eyes fixed on nothing, Jason's very odd mother didn't quite press her hands together and bow as she backed from the room.

But it was close. “Because people just want to get us in trouble,” he declared when she'd gone out. “Me and Bert.”

He mowed down an onslaught of red-eyed, slavering demons, got a
Congratulations!
screen that asked if he wanted to record his high score, and declined the offer with a keystroke.

“But me, mostly,” he finished.

By now I'd had just about enough of Mr. Supernatural Space Slaughterer, or whoever this kid thought he was. His sullen attitude was tiring in the extreme, and I thought the clippings and weapons were doing a plenty good job of getting him in trouble without any help from me.

None of it was evidence. But I still found myself wondering where Jason Riverton had been on the night of Horace's death. As if reading my thought, he turned slowly.

“I was at Bert's that night,” he said, following my gaze to the corkboard. “He gave me all these clippings. He doesn't have room for them at his place. He didn't like that guy.”

“Is that so?” I replied, thinking,
How convenient. They are each other's alibi.
And whose idea was that?

Not Jason's, I was willing to wager. He sucked up a third of the Slurpee his mom had brought him, leaned back in his chair, and belched.

“Did Bert Merkle say why he didn't like Horace Robotham?” I asked.

Jason shook his shaven head. “Just said if anyone ever started thinking the guy was murdered, Bert'd be the one they thought did it. And I'd get asked questions, too, because Bert and I are friends.”

And because Jason was no Hulk Hogan but he was tall enough to hit a fellow over the head with a rock. Or with a mace. The whole point of one of those weapons was that you didn't need to be a muscleman to make a blow with one of them fatal.

“Why?” Ellie asked. “I mean, Bert's a whole lot older than you. I wouldn't think the two of you had very much in common at all. So why are you such good friends with him?”

And what does Bert want with you?
I added silently. It would have been Bob Arnold's question, too, when he'd questioned Jason. But Bob had been looking for only one specific variety of slime-toad behavior.

And I already had a feeling we'd need to dredge the whole scummy pond, to come up with Merkle's motivation for this strange friendship. Jason shrugged, picked up his cup again.

As more of the sweet drink glugged down the boy's gullet, it suddenly struck me that like the first one it was a real Slurpee, a forty-ouncer in the trademark gigantic plastic cup with a domed top. And the nearest 7-Eleven store, home of the authentic beverage, was a three-hour drive from here, in Augusta.

I knew because it was one of the things Sam complained about when we'd moved to Eastport, the absence of the equivalent of a pantryful of junk food on every corner. Jason's mom must've stocked up on them, maybe even kept a freezer full for him.

“Jason?” Ellie prodded him. “I asked why you and Bert are friends.”

Again he shrugged in reply—at least his shoulders got regular workouts, I thought meanly, but gosh, his sullenness was exasperating—then angled his head at the bookshelves.

A chessboard was set up on one of them, with a book of chess problems lying open alongside it. “Bert gives me books to read. Plays chess, too.”

I nodded at Ellie; that much at least sounded right. Even my dad had played the game fairly regularly with Merkle for a while. He'd given it up only when Merkle started trying to pick his brain on the topic of high explosives.

“Bert talks to me like I'm smart. He treats me like a human being. Which is more,” Jason added with a further touch of hostility, “than most people do.”

He eyed me. “And before you get started, there's no weird crap going on. That's what that cop wanted to know. But Bert's no Chester the Molester, so don't get all panicky about that.”

I nodded again. “Right. That's what Bob Arnold told me, too.”

But that only deepened the question of why Bert Merkle was interested in the youth, who seemed a deeply unrewarding sort of pal for a past-middle-age man.

Or for anyone, really. But maybe I was being too hard on him. Several major-league baseball caps that hung on hooks on the back of his bedroom door said he had at least one fresh-air interest.

Or maybe he just needed something to keep the sun off that shaved head. “Okay,” I said, “you and Bert talk about books and you play chess. But if he ever needed help, you'd help him, right?”