The Book of Old Houses (20 page)

“We should just make folks state their business before we ever even let 'em onto the island,” declared Bella.

Now Liane Myers stole uneasy peeks at my dour housekeeper.

I'd told Liane where my house was the night before and instructed her to be here by eight at the latest, or I'd add her to the list of topics I intended to discuss with Bob Arnold.

And apparently she hadn't wanted that. “I'm glad to know you don't mean to cause me problems,” I told the young blonde woman. “Although I don't quite see how you could.”

Translation: Don't get too full of yourself, missy. Because the idea that some pretty young twit in a sports car could come around here and upset my applecart was—well, maybe when I was still married to my ex-husband, she could have.

But not anymore. “But I'm confused about why you
are
here,” I added. “None of us has even met your father, and—”

She turned her pale-blue gaze on me. Today she wore a white linen blouse, tan woven-silk pants, and a cashmere cardigan. On her feet were a pair of patent-leather slides with grosgrain bows on them. In other words, she looked like a million bucks, as she had the night before.

Just a different million bucks. “I'm not the only one you're confused about,” she said. “Other people might think my dad was a great guy. But to me, he was a first-class jerk.”

Her eyes narrowed with remembered pain. “I wrote to him as a kid. He never answered one of my letters. I finally gave up.”

She straightened her shoulders. “But that's old news. The point now is he had a will and I'm not in it. But
he
is. That schemer, Dave DiMaio.”

“Really,” Bella commented, looking over from the sink.

Suddenly Liane seemed to realize who Bella was and what she was doing here. Spurred by this brainstorm, she shot my housekeeper one of those snotty little
Why am I talking in front of the help?
looks, about as subtle as a punch in the nose.

Bella deflected it with a casual twitch, as if she'd found something unpleasant on her sleeve. Then she summed up Liane's difficulty neatly:

“So your father had money but he didn't leave a penny of it to you. He left it to—”

“That little DiMaio geek,” Liane agreed venomously, turning back to me.

“As for my dad's
partner
”
—
she put a mean twist on the word—“he's already
got
money. That Lang Cabell person. A couple of old aunts of his, that he ran off to as soon as my dad died?”

Liane sniffed enviously. “I did a little research on them. They're dripping with it, and at their age what else do they have to spend it on but him? Meanwhile,” she added, “
I
haven't got a dime. My
husband—
”

No wedding ring. She saw me looking. “He passed away. After a long, courageous battle with gambling and skirt-chasing.”

She smoothed her hair back. “So when I found out what Dad's will says, I decided to make sure DiMaio knows he's not getting anything. To start with, I went to visit that so-called college of his, and do you know what
that
place is like?”

“No,” I said, “why don't you tell me?” Because even annoying people can be informative, and she was proving it in spades.

“Well,” she replied, gratified at my interest. “It's just a bunch of old brownstone dormitories plus weird wooden houses, so narrow they all look like they're only one-room wide. All kind of leaning together. Or
at
you. It's creepy!”

“Do tell,” I murmured as Bella left the room.

“And the students. Pale and skinny. Wispy beards and hollow eyes. All carrying ratty old books around like they were in love with them,” Liane added scornfully.

She got up. “Anyway, I asked around there and finally found someone in the grungy old office that he shares. He'd left a map on his desk, with Eastport circled on it. So I came here, too.”

“You're contesting Horace's will, then? With a lawsuit?”

“I sure am,” she declared as if daring me to do something about it. “Unless DiMaio gives up
his
claim.”

Which depending on how much money we were talking about, Dave actually might. As I knew very well from my days as money-manager to the rich and filthy, fighting it out in court over the terms of a will was expensive, and prevailing was anything but a given. You could lose plenty, trying to win.

But Liane Myers must've known that, too. In fact, I got the impression she was counting on it.

“He wouldn't listen last night,” she said. “But he's going to. Because I'm going to make him.”

She walked around the kitchen as if inspecting it, then peered through the phone alcove into the dining room.

“This is another funny old place,” she said dismissively. “Though I guess it could be fixed up. Some wall-to-wall carpet and . . . track lighting, maybe? You know,
modernize
it.”

And after that comment of course I didn't haul her by her hair out the back door.

“How'd you know DiMaio would be at Ann's house last night?” I asked.

Liane hadn't been nearby when Ann was talking in the restaurant. She didn't seem to know about the old book at all, in fact.

Or at any rate she hadn't mentioned it. But she was the type who might try to make it part of her father's estate, too, if she learned of it and suspected it had any value. That had been most of the reason I wanted to talk with her, in case she represented some last little book-related loose end I needed to yank into a square knot.

Because let's face it, now that I had my property back, the rest of it was really none of my business.

“I didn't know,” she said. “I had been waiting around to get a minute with him. I'd decided to talk to him and figured I might as well just get it over with. Finally he went out on the dock with the rest of you and I thought it was my chance. But then the woman fell and he jumped in.”

To try to save Ann.

Or make it look as if he were trying.

“After that of course the cops had to talk to him,” Liane continued. “That took a while, and then he had to go dry out, get dry clothes on, and so forth. So I waited around outside his motel and when he came out again, I followed him.”

So far, so believable. Except: “You knew he
would
come out again because . . . ?”

She gave me a look. “After what he'd been through, d'you think you'd be able to just lie down on a bed and turn on the TV, read a magazine or whatever? I sure couldn't.”

At the back door she paused. “My father could ignore me when he was alive,” she said. “I couldn't do much about that. But I'm his only blood relative, so now I've got the upper hand. And I'm going to shake it.”

She stalked away toward the Miata; not scared; not stupid. And apparently well-motivated. Where had Liane Myers been on the night of her father's death? I wondered.

As if I'd spoken aloud, she stopped at the car door. “A million,” she said.

“What?” The pale morning sun turned her hair to gleaming platinum.

“My dad's estate. Well, more like a million and a half,” she amended. “Give or take a few hundred thousand.”

Well-motivated, indeed.

Anything worth doing
was worth researching thoroughly first, Horace had always said. But the morning after Ann Talbert drowned off the end of the Lime Tree's dock, Dave DiMaio wasn't researching anything.

He'd lost his tie pin and he was hunting for it.

He'd been all over his motel room, and retraced his steps downtown. He'd missed it just as he was cleaning up to go out to dinner the night before, but he'd been too upset to think of it again until at last he'd returned to his room for the night.

He wanted it; Horace had given it to him. And even though he knew he was being childish about it, learning that Horace had a daughter Dave knew nothing of made the thing seem even more important to him.

As if once he'd found it other things might go back to the way they'd been, too. Mulling this, he drove out Water Street toward Dog Island, intending to start his search there.

A car zoomed up alongside him before he arrived, though, and with an imperious horn-honk, Liane Myers veered her own car hard, forcing Dave's old Saab nearly up onto the sidewalk.

She skidded to a halt and got out, stalking to his window. “You killed my father,” she said.

He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

Her resemblance to Horace was more striking in daylight: pale hair, cleft chin, those eyes, which behind all the hurt and the makeup were so very like Horace's.

At the sight of them, sudden memory assaulted Dave, of the day he'd first met Professor Horace Robotham in his spare, elegant office on the first floor of the old Strange Literature building. Generously donated by the Strange family, of course, Horace would always tell parents and prospective students as he herded them on obligatory campus tours.

Usually prospective students got the joke. Usually—though on occasion one could surprise you—the parents didn't.

“Get out of that car,” Horace's daughter ordered now.

Dave did, unsure why he was obeying. Something in the voice, so like his old friend's . . .

Behind her, the bay was pale blue with dark swirls in it. Gulls rose in clouds from the surface of the water and settled again. “You're not getting away with it,” she said.

Getting away with what? Did she think he'd been part of a plot to get Horace to ignore her? But where was the sense in that?

Perhaps if the choices were to be made now, Dave thought, Horace would've done things differently. Still, he must have had reasons.

“He must have thought you'd be okay,” Dave ventured.

But that turned out to be the wrong thing to say. “Sure. He was real concerned,” she replied, her tone sarcastic.

“I guess now you'll try telling me you don't know anything about his will, either,” she added.

Indignation seized him; did she think this was about money? “Of course I don't,” he retorted. “And even if I did . . .”

Then it occurred to him what she must mean. “No. He wouldn't do that. Lang gets it, surely. They'd been together for . . .”

Well, practically forever. As long as Dave had known Horace, anyway.

“He left it all to you,” she said flatly. Challengingly.

He couldn't believe it. But then suddenly he did, and for the barest instant allowed himself to think what it could mean.

In winter he wouldn't have to move all his work over to the library where it was warm. And the Saab needed . . . well. He could buy a new one, couldn't he?

She spoke again, angrily. “And I'm not okay. I'm living on credit cards . . . I'll be waitressing in a diner pretty soon, for god's sake.”

All at once, a feeling of calm came over him. It was as if instead of an angry woman he was inspecting an old manuscript, an ancient map, or a bit of yellowing parchment. Her deep tan looked recent, artificial. But in the bright outdoor light he could just make out a faint, white ring around her wedding finger.

“You got divorced?” he guessed. Her lips tightened to a thin line. “Or—no, he died, didn't he? That's it.”

He watched her face; it said yes. “Your husband died and . . . his family tossed you out? You've run through whatever he left you—”

She didn't deny any of it.

“—and your own family, your mother and her people, maybe, they won't give you any more, either,” Dave finished. “Is that just about the size of it?”

Because maybe she thought he was a harmless little sap whom she could bulldoze right over. Between her take-no-crap attitude and her startling brand of blonde-bombshell beauty, she had a lot of weaponry at her disposal.

But he was getting his wind back now, after the news she'd dropped on him. And he'd never been a sap.

“Then you found out your father died. You knew or hoped he had money, and now you're here. To get it.”

“So what?” She looked defiant. “It's mine. I deserve it. After what I've been through . . .”

Another thought struck him. “Where have you been living?” he asked, interrupting her diatribe: absent fathers; cold, neglectful husbands; the cruel, cruel world.

“What d'you care?”

He gazed past her at the water and the little boats on it. A massive freighter sat on the horizon, its bulk reminding Dave of a large animal nosing its way in among smaller ones.

“I just wondered,” he said.

Horace's old-book-and-manuscript business wasn't a money tree. Mostly he'd handled first editions, historical signatures, and hand-colored illustrations, reasonably profitable but in no way windfall-creating. But that merely created a context within which Horace's real work could hide in plain sight.

“I suppose you must've been interested in him,” Dave added. “Wanted to meet him. Maybe you even thought of calling or just showing up, but didn't know if you should.”

He doubted this girl even had a clue to what Horace had been all about. But if she had somehow learned that her father was wealthy—

Without warning another memory assaulted him, of a wizened old woman with eyes like coals in a New Mexican desert outpost so remote, he and Horace had needed burros to traverse the last dozen desolate miles. In her adobe dwelling, amidst shrines to the Blessed Virgin and to San Fausto with all the arrows sticking out of him, they'd found an ancient book written in Spanish, wrapped in bright-red coarsely woven cloth and surrounded by its own regiment of burning candles.

Among other things, the relic was supposed to cure boils, a notion Dave had dismissed until he developed his own, on the ride back. Corn tortillas cooking on a smoky fire . . . Horace had sat on his haunches and conversed with the old woman in her own dialect, a mixture of Spanish and old-native Nahuatl.