The Book of Old Houses (14 page)

Jason's flat expression didn't change. “I would if he asked. But he never has. Bert's never wanted a single thing from me. He doesn't need my help.”

“Oh, come on, Jason,” Ellie put in. “He asked you to keep those clippings for him, didn't he? Put them all up on that cork-board, there? That's help.”

The boy scowled, whether at the contradiction or something else I couldn't tell.

“So Bert didn't ask you to get something from Mr. Robotham, in Orono?” I persisted. “An old book, maybe? He didn't ask you to go down there and . . .”

Slow shake of the gleaming head. “Don't go to Orono. Go to Augusta. Drive my mom there every couple of weeks to her doctors' appointments.”

And to buy mass quantities of strawberry Slurpees, no doubt. He finished the second one; too bad they didn't deliver the stuff in tanker trucks.

“So we drive to the doctor's, I wait, we eat lunch and go to the mall,” he recited in a near monotone.

As he spoke he was playing the game once more, spattering the extremely realistic-appearing insides of red-eyed goblins all over the walls of a tunnel lit by torches.

“Then we come home,” he added. Goblins died en masse. Their tinny shrieks echoed from the computer's speakers. Only now he wasn't shooting them.

He'd switched weapons. He was clubbing them to death. The sound effects weren't pleasant; with a keyboard click he made the noises louder, then louder still.

“Jason,” I tried, raising my voice to be heard over the din. “If I ask your mother whether or not you were here on the night Mr.

Robotham was attacked, what will she say?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.” His rudeness was deliberate, I realized. There was more in that hairless head of his than he wanted to let on, I could tell by the books and the chessboard.

And from the look in his eyes. I mean, it's pretty obvious when nobody's home in there, usually. And Jason's mental rooms seemed fully furnished and inhabited to me; just not with anyone you'd want to meet on a dark street late at night.

“Come on, Jason, her chair's right by the front door. Are you trying to tell me she doesn't see you going in or out?”

Even Ann Talbert with her hysterical ambitions and her wild expectation that everyone else would just march to her drummer wasn't actually...well,
creepy
was the only word for Jason. Still, his ex-teacher Merrie Fargeorge must've seen something worthwhile in him. Hadn't Bob Arnold reported she'd spent time trying to help him?

See, I was trying to like him; I really was. After all, he was just a kid, and without knowing any details I could tell his home situation was unfortunate. So I was trying to cut him some slack.

But he didn't make it easy. “Correct,” he replied flatly. The question seemed to amuse him somehow, provoking a smirky,
I
know something you don't know
expression.

Frustrated, I went to the only window, needing relief from the dark, depressing atmosphere and the sweet reek of gloppy pink syrup.

Toward the back of the house was a rickety old wooden shed about the size of a one-car garage, built of gray, rotten wood and ancient, disintegrating wooden shingles with a few new boards peeking whitely through the gaps between the old ones.

Just enough to keep the whole structure from falling down entirely, I supposed. “Okay, I'll bite,” I said finally.

I turned to him again. “You say your mom wouldn't notice, I'll believe you. Hey, you know her better than I do. But like I said, I've got a son your age, too, and I would notice. So why wouldn't she?”

“She just wouldn't, that's all.”

He stared at the screen, his thumbs moving fast on the game controller. It was obvious he'd come to the end of his attention span as far as we were concerned.

The only reason he'd let us up here at all, I realized, was that it was the path of least resistance. Somebody knocks, you open the door. Wants to talk, you let them talk. Wait them out, sooner or later they'll go away.

I got a feeling that path was a very familiar one to Jason Riverton. And that someone, possibly Merkle, had taken advantage of it. But I still didn't know how. And something about Jason's manner still bugged me, like he had a secret he wasn't telling.

But finally after a few more insolent, one-syllable answers from the skinny teenager we left.

“ 'Bye, Jason.” No answer. In the living room his mother's fingers moved on whatever she was knitting, as relentlessly as her son's did on his game device.

On the TV screen, Bob Barker was reminding everyone to have their pets spayed and neutered. Something was strange about that, too, though, it seemed to me, and then I remembered.

It was the same thing he'd been saying when we came in.

“Mrs. Riverton?” I stepped into the room. With the shades pulled down and no lights turned on, it was cavelike but for the TV's garish glow.

“Yes, dear?” But her gaze didn't shift when I moved in front of her. And the show on the TV screen wasn't being broadcast.

It was recorded on a VCR tape. The same show, over and over. “Ellie and I are leaving now, Mrs. Riverton.”

“Fine, dear.” Like a statue, except for the fingers. A bad thought struck me. In the gloom I peered closely at her hands, pale in the screen's light.

Fingers moving. Knitting needles in the fingers. But no yarn on the needles. On the TV screen a hysterically happy woman flung her arms around a white-haired Bob Barker.

But Mrs. Riverton didn't see it. Her milky-blue eyes stared sightlessly at the screen. Something wrong with her, I realized.

I mean, besides the fact that she was blind.

“Whew,” Ellie breathed
when we got outside. “That was weird. But Jake—if he'd done it, wouldn't someone have seen him?”

Two minds with but a single thought, again: the idea that Jason's gratitude for Merkle's friendship might have led the boy to do something awful.

“So tall, the black clothes and shaved head,” Ellie went on.

So recognizable, she meant. “It was dark,” I pointed out. “He could have hunched down to look shorter, worn one of those ball caps on his head.”

Besides, Horace Robotham had already been dead awhile when he was found by a late-night dog-walker, sprawled across the sidewalk on the quiet Orono street where he'd lived.

Ahead, Merrie Fargeorge's picturesque saltwater farm lay on a long, gentle slope of sandy grassland overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay, at the very end of Dog Island.

“Are you sure this is such a good idea?” I asked Ellie as we headed toward it. Leaving the Rivertons' house I'd expected to be returning home.

But Ellie had other plans, and I had to admit that after the dim, depressing situation we'd just escaped I was glad not to be hurrying back indoors anywhere. Brisk salt air and a high, head-clearing blue sky were just what the doctor ordered after that experience.

“At least she has someone to drive her places,” said Ellie, meaning Mrs. Riverton. “And yes,” she added, “I'm sure.”

We walked on; at length Ellie mused, “If Bert Merkle somehow got Jason to commit—”

Murder.
Simple as that. “Yeah. If he did, the both of them are pretty much getting away with it,” I agreed. “They're each other's alibi, not that anyone's asked either of them for one.”

We walked fast, trying to shake off the atmosphere of the Rivertons' house. “On top of which,” I went on, “if Bert can just
finger
people and Jason will do his bidding—”

“Uh-huh. Then who's next? Bob Arnold for hassling Bert about his yard? A city-council member for directing Bob to do it?”

Or—me, for some reason that made sense only in his tinfoil-capped head? And why would Merkle be so interested in my old book, anyway?

Its oh-so-coincidental disappearance right around the time of Robotham's death apparently hadn't meant much to the cops. But to me it had begun seeming more and more like the motive for Robotham's murder.

Still, I reminded myself firmly, we didn't really know Jason Riverton
or
Bert Merkle had done anything wrong at all.

“I checked on him, too, by the way,” said Ellie. “DiMaio, that is. I got on the computer at home and Googled him nine ways from Sunday,” she told me.

Besides her many other good qualities, she was the suspicious type; gosh, I just loved that about her. “And?”

“And as far as I can tell, DiMaio's what he says he is. College professor. Small school in Providence, funny old buildings. From the pictures and course listings it seems pretty old-fashioned. Greek and Latin and so on. Scholarly. But it's for real. I called the number on the website and a person answered, said Professor DiMaio's on leave until the autumn session.”

She turned her face into the late-morning sunshine. Merrie Fargeorge's farm grew steadily nearer.

“Anyway, we might just as well get this over with,” she added, meaning an interview with the old educator. “Maybe a talk with you now will take the edge off her mood later. Make the party a little less awkward.”

Oof, the party. At her words the full misery of the prospect crashed over me again.

Bad enough to have only the tiny quarter-bath downstairs for guests' use; an old tub lurking on the stairwell was guaranteed to scandalize an Eastport lady of Merrie's refinement, even aside from her annoyance about DiMaio. And the sight of her ancestral home place, as prettily composed and beautifully balanced as a Currier & Ives print, didn't make me feel any better:

House, barn, garden, shed, all laid out on the sunwashed, grassy slope like a model of eighteenth-century domestic economy. “How does she do it?” I wondered aloud.

Because it wasn't just lovely to look at; this was a working New England saltwater farm, with emphasis on the
working.
The raspberry bushes and asparagus bed bore bountifully, I saw as we entered the rail-fenced drive, and the sweet peas colorfully and muscularly climbing a trellis by her back door made mine look like runts.

Beehives clustered at one edge of the garden; beans thatched the curved-bamboo-pole tipis at the other. But most amazing of all was an excavation—a pit, really—that spread about twenty feet square in the soil beyond the garden plot.

Terraced in a series of steps, it was about eight feet deep, its walls horizontally ribboned with the layers of earth—black, brown, moss green, and the pale tan of the surface sand—that had been dug through to create it.

Merrie Fargeorge stood in the middle of it, leaning on her spade, wearing boots, coveralls, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Holding a trowel in one gloved hand and a small, soft-bristled brush in the other, she looked up at our approach.

“Hello, Merrie,” called Ellie. The ex-teacher put her tools down on a tarp as her little dog, a bright, bouncy mutt with a cocked ear and a black-ringed left eye, danced out to greet us.
Caspar,
the tag on his collar read.

“Hi, Caspar. How're you doing, buddy?” I said. At least the dog didn't bite.

“Good morning, ladies,” Merrie trilled, removing her spectacles to peer at us. Close up, the excavation looked even bigger. “To what do I owe the honor of your visit today?”

“Why, the pleasure of your company, Miss Fargeorge,” Ellie replied gallantly. “May I help you?” she added, reaching out a hand as the older woman got to the excavation's crumbly top step.

Miss Fargeorge twinkled at Ellie's flattery, but she didn't look the least bit fooled—I got the feeling that the last time she'd been fooled was about fifty years earlier—and she didn't want any assistance, either.

Instead, she took the final step up to ground level as easily as the half-dozen before. “Oh,” she said, her tone cooling noticeably as she caught clear sight of me. “Hello, Jacobia.”

Clearly I was still in the doghouse, and not a nice one like Caspar's with clean straw and a fresh bowl of water.

“Merrie,” I began placatingly, “I do think there's been a minor misunderstanding . . .”

Set out on the tarp at the bottom of the excavation were her other tools: a shovel, a small pickaxe, a large pickaxe, and a long, hollow, tubelike device with a stout wooden handle at one end and wickedly pointed serrations cut into the heavy steel at the other.

“It's a sampling tool,” she said, seeing my curiosity. “You push it into the earth by turning the handle, to capture a core sample.

Then you pull the tool out and the sample comes with it. From it you may learn whether it is worthwhile digging farther,” she added in a lecturing tone.

Her smile had ice in it, as if I'd neglected to hand in my homework and was now attempting to distract her from that criminal failure.

“And there's no misunderstanding,” she added. “None at all, minor or otherwise.”

Spryly striding away from us over the uneven ground, she started toward the house, the navy-blue ribbon on her straw hat streaming behind her and her dog at her heels.

“But come along, both of you,” she called back at us as she went. “Caspar needs his biscuit and it's time for my cup of tea.”

Step into my parlor,
I thought, feeling like the fly. But after a glance at Ellie, who'd already started along down the grassy path, I followed Merrie, too.

Chapter
10

W
ith Caspar frolicking behind, we let Merrie Fargeorge
lead us on a grassy path beaten down by many passages of her booted feet. Past a dusty, well-used-looking Honda Civic in the drive we proceeded to the screened porch where our hostess took her boots off, exchanging them for soft moosehide slippers. Caspar darted in ahead of us, skidded around a corner, and vanished, his cheerful yaps echoing.

“Little devil,” Merrie remarked. “Can you believe that he's terrified of thunderstorms? Otherwise, he's utterly fearless.”

Inside, the house was cool and clean, as neat and airy as a well-kept museum. As full of relics, too; glass cases displayed clay pipes, antique marbles, fine-featured dolls' heads, tools, and dozens of other items that Merrie had dug from her excavation site, which for decades had been the family trash heap.

She explained this as we admired the artifacts and she made tea in her kitchen, where the slow ticking of an antique banjo clock emphasized the otherwise silent orderliness of the place.

Bella would've loved it, but around so much delicate and probably valuable stuff, I felt like the bull in the china shop.

And not a very popular bull, either; Merrie's coolness to me continued as she bustled about the kitchen.

Trying to ignore it—why had Ellie thought this would be a good idea, anyway? I examined the calendar posted on the front of the refrigerator. From it, I gathered why the car in the driveway looked so heavily used:

Merrie Fargeorge was not just a retired schoolteacher with a historical hobby. She was a recognized expert on downeast history and practical archeology, with meetings, talks, and seminars scheduled at historical societies all over the state, at least three days a week and often more.

Also, she was a gourmet cook. Perusing the calendar I suddenly became aware of the delicious fragrance wafting from the stove. Meat and onions, pungent spices, garlic and bay leaf . . .

“Beef bourguignon,” Merrie said, seeing me sniffing with appreciation. Soon the citrusy scent of Constant Comment tea joined the other delightful aromas.

“It's a pet peeve of mine,” she continued briskly, “these portions-for-one frozen foods. Hideous stuff, all of it. Singles, and especially seniors, should enjoy life too, don't you feel?”

From the notes on the shopping list posted by the back door tomorrow's dinner would be coq au vin, the next night's garlic shrimp in champagne sauce; enjoyable indeed.

“Now,” she said, not waiting for a reply as she guided us into the sitting room. Here cooking aromas were replaced by light perfumes of lavender, cedar, and lemon oil, floating together in the still air of the pristine room.

“What can I do for you two this morning?” she asked, placing thin china cups of steaming liquid before us and setting out a plate of raspberry shortbreads.

From Mimi's, I guessed; apparently the new bakery was taking Eastport by storm. Merrie eyed us wisely from behind her spectacles.

“When people come to see me, it's often because they have some kind of historical question,” she prompted.

“And generally, Merrie knows the answer,” said Ellie, taking her cue.

Aha, I thought; so this was the part where I redeemed myself by listening with appreciation. And I could get behind that, as Sam would've put it. I sat back and sipped my tea, then tried one of the fruited shortbreads, which was excellent, while the banjo clock ticked distantly and Ellie spoke.

According to her, the Fargeorge farm had been in Merrie's family since 1789 when Simon Fargeorge arrived. Soon he became a well-to-do farmer and victualer, supplying meat and vegetables to the ships, military and commercial, that came into the harbor, and to the soldiers at Fort Sullivan.

Since then, generations of Fargeorges had grown up here; most had gone away. But not Merrie; as the last local descendant of one of Eastport's most revered founding citizens, she had her own float in the parade each Fourth of July, a front pew in the Congregational church was dedicated to her family by a bronze plaque—she sat in the pew each Sunday—and when the ladies of Eastport decided to fete someone, Merrie was the obvious choice.

With, this time, unfortunate results for me. Not that I was about to interrupt Ellie's history lesson by mentioning this; the party was supposed to be a surprise. So for once I kept my lip zipped.

That is, until we got to the real point of our visit. “It's about Jason Riverton,” Ellie told Merrie.

The tea had begun cooling. “We realize this may sound like a strange question. But we want to know if you think he's capable of committing murder.”

The Rivertons had a car, though I hadn't seen it, and Jason could've made it to Orono and back in four hours, plus maybe an hour for evil doings. And I believed him now about his mother not noticing his absence.

And I
didn't
believe he'd refuse Bert Merkle a favor, maybe a violent favor. But I still wondered if the venerable Miss Fargeorge would blacken the name of a former pupil, even if he deserved it.

So it surprised me that she didn't even ask why we wanted to know such a thing. And her answer surprised me more.

“Jason was the most unrewarding student I ever taught,” she announced, putting her teacup down. “And with a good deal less excuse than most. I think his poor mother was at least half the reason why I stayed involved, even after he graduated.”

She frowned, remembering. “Although they didn't always seem unfortunate, any of them. Before his father was killed in a hunting accident and his mother became ill, the family appeared solid.”

I glanced at Ellie. We really didn't have much time; back at my house there were ever so many chores still to be completed in preparation for this afternoon. But:

Patience,
my friend's answering glance instructed. So I nibbled the last shortbread and tried to obey.

“Although,” Merrie added, “I suppose we never really do know what goes on behind closed doors, do we?” She sipped tea. “And at any rate that changed later, their . . . normalcy.”

I looked questioningly at her. “The accident, of course,” she explained, although as before, the word
accident
got an odd little twist as it came out of her mouth.

“Jason was only ten,” she went on with her story. “He and his father were out in the woods, in October I think it was, with a pair of rifles.”

Her lips tightened briefly. “Deer hunting,” she added. “They will take the boys young, around here. Mostly I suppose it works out all right.”

“But that time it didn't,” I guessed, and she nodded slowly at me. For an instant the atmosphere in the Riverton house closed around me again, dim and strange with a layer of sour, sorrowful dampness overlaying everything.

It had felt like the kind of hidden, unpleasant place where if you wanted to, you could grow your own mushrooms. But now I wondered if what I'd sensed instead was a crop of bad memories.

“No,” Merrie answered, “it didn't go well at all.”

She considered a moment. Maybe she was wondering how much of her old student's privacy she was betraying, then decided to go on nevertheless.

“They found Jason crying, covered in blood and holding one of the guns, alone on one of the old logging roads. He'd been out there all night, that's why they sent a search party.”

“So they'd gone missing,” I began; she stopped me with a look.

“Indeed. But the search party knew the general area they'd been in. And when the searchers followed a hiking trail into the woods, they found the father.

“Richard Riverton,” Merrie said grimly. “Well-known. Not,” she added judiciously, “well-liked.”

She looked back and forth at the two of us. “In fact his death, or rather the manner of it,” she refined her comment carefully, “was one of the very few things that ever got hushed up effectively around here.”

Which at first I found hard to believe, even with downeast-history expert Miss Merrie Fargeorge testifying to it. In Eastport if you get a hangnail at nine-fifteen, people start waving pairs of fingernail clippers at you by nine-thirty at the latest.

“People liked Margot Riverton, you see,” Merrie said, seeming to understand my skepticism. “And her health was so shaky, even then . . . no one quite knew what might happen to her if word got out that her son might've murdered his father.”

The words hung starkly. “I never heard anything like that,” murmured Ellie after a brief, shocked silence.

Merrie glanced coolly at her. “No, dear, of course not. They made a pact, all the men from that day, that they wouldn't talk.

Not about what happened, and not about the end of the story.”

The clock in the kitchen chimed the hour; a fresh bout of impatience seized me. But I had to hear the end of the story.

“One of them was my student,” said Merrie. “Arlo Bonnet. Arlo was a soft-hearted fellow, always had been. And it bothered him, you see, what had happened. He
needed
to tell someone.”

“If the father was dead and the boy had a gun, what ‘rest of it' was there?” I asked. “And what did Jason say had happened?”

“Accident,” Merrie replied tersely. “That's all Jason told them. But Arlo told me when they went down the logging road searching, they saw the boy before he heard them.”

“And that was because?” I pressed.

“Crying too hard, Arlo said, to notice anything.”

Merrie paused, recalling it. “Arlo told me,” she said, “that it looked to them all as if Jason was trying to get the gun barrel into his own mouth, to reach down and pull the trigger.”

“To kill himself.” Ellie said it softly. “A ten-year-old boy. Out of . . . fear? Or grief?”

Merrie looked disapproving, as if someone had failed to work up to grade level. “Guilt,” she corrected sharply. “I'm certain of it. Arlo said it was obvious, from what else they found. Only Jason couldn't do it. Couldn't reach the trigger, because his arms were too short.”

Maybe so, but the story still didn't make sense to me. And neither did the way Merrie was telling it, as if there were no question at all that Jason Riverton had murdered his own father.

“I don't understand,” I said. “Without witnesses, how can anyone be sure it wasn't an accident? He'd still feel guilt about it, and if he was frightened enough—”

“Think about it,” Merrie interrupted.

Another silence. I spoke first. “Maybe,” I said, “the father was shot in the back? Or even . . . the back of the head?”

In other words, way too high. Accidental hunting deaths are almost always body shots, I'd learned after spending nearly a decade's worth of hunting seasons in Maine. That's because the chest on an adult male human being is just about shoulder-high on your average white-tailed deer.

Which is what the accidental shooter usually thinks he's shooting.

The old schoolteacher nodded slowly again, her look grave. “They couldn't be certain. But the medical examiner said he believed it was the back of Mr. Riverton's head, yes.”

The medical uncertainty, I thought, was interesting in a nightmarish sort of way. But Ellie picked up on a different angle of the story.

“But that's outrageous,” she said. “People've known it all this time
. . . you've
known what happened? How. . . how could you?”

Keep the secret, she meant. Obstruct justice, cover up a murder, let a kid loose who ought to have been in detention, or worse. But Merrie Fargeorge had an answer for that, too.

“Nobody
knows
what happened,” she said coldly. “All we knew for sure was that if Jason was prosecuted and found guilty, Margot would be alone. And we knew her well enough to know she wouldn't be able to take it.”

She got up to clear the cups and biscuit plates. “What was done, was done. Mr. Riverton was gone. He couldn't be brought back. And whatever the reason was, we knew it wouldn't happen again. Or,” she added, “we thought we did.”

“Why was that?” I got up, too, following her and Ellie back to the kitchen with its placidly ticking clock and smells of good cooking. Merrie pulled an apron on and began rinsing the cups at the sink.

“Well, isn't it obvious?” Her back was to me as she replied. “A boy only has one father. And what that father did to provoke a ten-year-old boy to murder, we didn't know.”

She turned, wiping her hands on a linen towel monogrammed in red. “Margot often had bruises. A cut lip, a black eye . . . she
said
it was because her sight was failing.”

The dog, Caspar, pranced to the door, wagging to be let out. Merrie complied, looking past the animal to the excavation site where we'd interrupted her.

“We were so sure nothing like Jason's ‘accident' would ever happen again,” she said. “But now . . .”

The towel's red monogrammed
F
seemed to drip from her hands as she turned back to Ellie and me.

“Maybe we were wrong,” she finished, hanging the towel on its hook.

“Okay, so I
guess now we know the reason for Jason's guilty look,” I said as Ellie and I walked back down Water Street toward my house.

“Uh-huh,” she said distractedly. From the expression on her face I could see she was considering what Merrie Fargeorge had said.

And not liking something about it. “
And
I think we know why Merrie doesn't like Dave DiMaio going around Eastport asking questions,” I went on. “She and some of her contemporaries covered up Jason's dad's possible murder. She doesn't want Dave stirring all that stuff up again.”

“Maybe,” Ellie replied. “Maybe that's it. But it doesn't quite make sense as far as DiMaio's actual interests go, does it? Because you know, he wasn't asking people about the
recent
past.”

We climbed Adams Street toward the high school, past wood-framed houses whose tiny fenced yards were wedged into crevices in the granite hill; halfway up I turned to look out over the blue water below. Loaded with sightseers wielding cameras and binoculars, the Deer Island ferry was chugging back from Canada into the cove; near the landing two uniformed U.S. Customs officers got ready to check the passengers' IDs.