The Book of Old Houses (22 page)

Or didn't do. In Sam's case, so far it was a potentially fatal illness and not his actual demise. Still: somebody you were and shouldn't have been, somebody you should've been and weren't.

Something. Let the experts say differently, but go ahead; try not feeling that way in your heart.

“If the cops have already as good as said Jason's death was an accident, I don't suppose they've gone through the house. Not the way we would,” I ventured.

Ellie shook her head.

“No one,” I went on, “has confronted Bert Merkle about all this, either. As far as we know.”

She fell into step beside me. “Nope.”

“About killing Jason to keep him from implicating Bert in Horace's murder, sending Ann into Horace's house for the book, killing
her
to keep her quiet about it
and
get the book back . . .”

It was just past noon and the sun, newly slanting in these last warm days of August, turned the island of Campobello across the water to a gleaming gold bar. Sailboats cavorted in the wind, and on the breakwater an ice-cream truck played the same innocent song over and over.

“Only I got to the book first, which he didn't plan on,” I said. “Listen, Ellie, what would you say to one more day? Would George go along with that, do you suppose?”

But both of us knew that if Ellie said she wanted to go to Mars, George would be out renting the rocket ship. “I was going to head home,” I said, “try getting some things done in what's left of the afternoon. But instead . . .”

Instead it was time for a little more breaking and entering.

Emphasis on the
entering
part.

Installed in a
cheap wooden hollow-core front door, a keyed doorknob lock keeps you from having to walk around thinking
Darn, I left my door wide open again.

But unlike the Block-manufactured behemoth Ann Talbert had installed, it doesn't do much else. The Rivertons' front door swung open; I dropped the tiny screwdriver back into my bag.

“What're we looking for?” Ellie whispered.

The front hall smelled musty. A path worn in the rug led to the living room, where the TV remote still perched on the arm of Mrs. Riverton's chair. Grime on the remote, dust on the screen; even though nobody else was in here with us the atmosphere in the house felt heavy with silent sorrow.

“I don't know,” I whispered back. Suspecting that someone had crept in and set up a poisoning death made even the ratty old sofa, crocheted afghan, and age-stained drapes seem ominous.

“But if no one's really checked around in here thoroughly, then maybe we should at least look at that computer again. Just in case Jason got e-mail from Merkle, for instance,” I said.

“You think he'd have written anything incriminating?”

Mrs. Riverton's ChapStick lay on the table by the chair, beside a half-finished cup of tea. In the kitchen a bundle of laundry stood by the washer; on the counter were a group of small orange plastic pharmacy bottles and a vial of eye drops.

“She didn't take her pills along with her?”

“I imagine they've given her new prescriptions,” Ellie said. “After what they think happened they wouldn't want her taking any of these.”

Right; in case strawberry syrup wasn't the only thing she'd gotten mixed up. From a tiny screened back porch the tumbledown shed at the rear of the small yard was visible, its swaybacked roofline looking ready to fall at the least excuse.

Behind the shed, a back alley ran along the rear of all the properties on this side of Water Street. The Rivertons' car was still pulled into the yard at an angle from the alley. A couple of well-worn ruts beside it showed where visitors parked.

I opened the cabinet under the sink. Nothing in there looked unusual now; no strawberry syrup, no antifreeze jug.

A phone hung on the kitchen wall. But there was no answering machine and no caller ID so I couldn't check on calls they might have gotten, and the wall calendar held a reminder for a doctor's appointment but nothing more.

Jason and his mother had lived quiet lives. No wonder he'd been open to whatever weird excitement—or even just the plain old variety—that a friendship with Bert Merkle might offer.

I peered into the breadbox, the silverware drawer, and the sugar bowl. Nothing. “Jake?” Ellie called from upstairs. “Um, you want to come look at this?”

I found her in Jason's room. It seemed even smaller and shabbier than it had with him in it. Black walls and woodwork that badly needed repainting, pine-board-and-milk-crate bookcase full of tattered paperbacks, and his desk . . .

All just the way we'd seen it last, even the wine bottle and the poison handbook. “Cops didn't think these were strange?” I asked.

Ellie sat, turned the computer on. “Bottle's unopened,” she pointed out. “And he had a lot of unusual books.”

“Uh-huh.” I still thought a poisoned kid with a book about poisons and their antidotes on his shelf was interesting. But if anything it bolstered a suicide theory, which they'd discarded.

“Password?” I asked.

Her fingers moved on the keyboard. “No. You can get right into his e-mail. I don't see much except spam, though.”

“Maybe he deleted things?” The room smelled like teenaged boy, which is only a pleasant smell when it's your own teenaged boy.

That, and the fruity reek of strawberry Slurpees, which was an aroma I knew I'd never enjoy again. Ellie's fingers flew.

“Nope again. He had a software program on here that he could use to recover deleted things, including e-mail.”

We waited. A line appeared on the screen:
Number of Files Recovered = 0.

“How come you know so much about computers?” She'd looked up Dave DiMaio on the Internet, too, I recalled, which now that I thought about it was also more tech-savvy than I'd have expected of her. Ellie's life consisted of real things, not pixel-images.

Small laugh. “Lee's reading picture books already. Getting curious about chapter books.”

That is, with lots more words in them. “So any minute she'll be on the Internet, herself.”

She nodded. “To stay ahead of her I need to start now, or I'll be like those other parents who have no clue until the kid runs off with some pervert they met in a chat room.”

She hit
return.
Lines began scrolling down the screen; she hit
pause
and leaned back in Jason's chair. “Here's a log of the programs Jason's run recently.”

“Those Internet slimebags'll have no chance against you.”

“I hope.” The screen quit scrolling. “It's a short list,” she added. “E-mail, web surfing, music, and the one he used most, for games.” She pointed at the screen. “This Shock Jock module had to get loaded each time Jason started a new session of game-playing. By the look of it, he'd leave it running all day, then load it up again the next morning.”

“I get it. But help me out, here. Your skill in finding all this is very impressive but I still don't see—”

“It's what you don't see that's interesting,” she explained. “Something Merrie Fargeorge told you made me think of it—that Jason had never used a word-processing program in his life.”

Not even when Merrie had tried to pay him to do it. “What about the word-processing program itself? Does it show things that got created with it?”

Ellie typed. The screen filled with the two-letter message that had been there when we found his body:
DD.

More keystrokes. “Only one word-processing document. Created yesterday, two fifty-nine
P.M.
Could he still even have been conscious when this was written?” she wondered aloud.

“It hardly seems likely, does it? His mom called Bob Arnold about four.”

A sound from downstairs interrupted us. Not a loud sound or even a threatening one . . .

Maybe nothing at all. I strode to the hall and looked down. “Someone there?”

No answer. Halfway down the stairs I peered left and right, saw no one and heard nothing, then spotted the TV remote on the carpet where it had slipped from the chair's upholstered arm.

But no one was in the house. When I got back to Jason's room Ellie was shutting down the computer.

“So why'd a kid who never wrote a word in his life struggle out of a fatal coma to fire up his word processor?” I wondered aloud.

She shrugged, moving the computer mouse on a black mousepad whose gold-and-red script read
Shoggoth Lives.

And who, I wondered irritably, was Shoggoth? “And write,” I added, “a message that no one can figure out what it means?”

“Oh, I'm sure someone can,” said a voice from behind me, and I just about dropped dead of fright right there, first on account of anybody being behind us to say anything at all; I'd been sure the house was empty.

And second, because it was Bert Merkle. “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

Yeah, pretty lame. But it was all I could think of on such short notice. And besides, I
really
wanted to know the answer.

Dirty fingernails, scruffy thinning hair . . . to look any more like a Halloween scarecrow the man would have had to have straw sticking out of his cuffs, and as for those teeth—

“I could ask you the same,” he pointed out.

But even more than a scarecrow, what he really reminded me of was the fact that there was no other way out of this room.

“I happened to be passing, noticed the front door ajar,” he said, his fingertips pressed together so that his curved, unkempt nails resembled the spines on a Venus's-flytrap.

“So I decided to check,” he finished. But he was lying. We hadn't left the door ajar. He'd tried it and found it unlocked so he'd come in.

And found us already inside. His eyes were pale gray, like a couple of pickled onions. I totaled up the number of negative factors in this situation: evil guy, scene of a murder, no one knew we were here.

Et cetera. But then Ellie spoke up. “Mrs. Riverton asked me to make sure Jason's computer was shut down properly,” she lied smoothly.

“And,” she added, “to lock up when we left. Which we are doing.” She moved purposefully toward the Merkle-blocked door.

With an ironic leer, he stepped back to let her pass. I followed, holding my breath and tensed for sudden movement on his part.

None came. But on the stairway landing I halted.

“Coming?” I asked. Because from the way he was waiting for us to go, it was clear he didn't intend to.

But eventually he followed us grudgingly downstairs and out the front door, where he ambled away with no farewell while we walked in the opposite direction.

“I wonder what he wanted,” I said once he was out of earshot.

“Me, too.” Ellie turned abruptly. “But I'm not finished with that place,” she declared. “There's still that shed out back, and I want to know what's in it.”

“But it's . . .”
A ruin,
I would've finished. A falling-down ruin that probably wasn't even safe to—

Ellie wasn't listening. “You wanted a day, we're doing one more day,” she said. “So let's just do this.” She halted before the dilapidated old structure on the Riverton property. “That way, we can at least say we've tried everything we could.”

Yeah, including maybe having a roof fall down on our heads,
I thought as I surveyed the place uncertainly.

The shed had no visible windows, just nailed-up sheets of plywood where they used to be. Rotting sills and a rotted-plank door gray with age, plus a loose doorknob that practically fell off in her hand, were also among its charms.

“Ellie, come on, it's a wreck. What do you think we're going to find in—”

Ignoring me, she pulled the sagging door open.

“Oh,” I said, nonplussed. Because hidden behind the rotting old door was a brand-new one; a steel door with two brass-bright, nearly-new locks—not Blocks, but extremely solid-looking—one tumbler-style and one deadbolt.

Seeing them she turned expectantly to me. “Oh, no,” I said, putting my hands up in a warding-off gesture. “Just because I did the flimsy one, that doesn't mean I can . . .”

Shoving a screwdriver into the first lock had been easy. But on the other hand, no one put locks like these on unimportant things, did they?

“All right, all right,” I gave in. “You know, someday your confidence in me is going to be sadly . . .”

“Good morning.” I spun around; Dave DiMaio stood there.

“Don't you have anything useful to do but follow me and Ellie?” I began impatiently. But then I stopped, because he hadn't been following me, of course. Or Ellie, either.

He'd been following Merkle.

“Sturdy,” he commented. He eyed the locks.

Correct; like the Grand Canyon's a biggish ditch. “I suppose you want to get in there,” he said.

“Yes,” I told him. “That was the general plan. But unless you brought dynamite, a bulldozer, or the keys, that's not—”

“Step aside.” He removed something from his pocket: a ring of tiny hooks, strips, and other small metal implements.

Moments later the door swung open, which to me meant that DiMaio didn't merely have professional lock-picking tools; he was also good at using them. The Blocks at Ann Talbert's wouldn't have tumbled for him, but . . .

Flipping a light switch just inside the door, he crossed the threshold . . . and stopped.

“My god,” he said.

Chapter
16

I
'd expected a ruined inside to match the battered outside
of the Rivertons' shed. But instead we found a science lab.

Or something like it. “Oh, my goodness,” Ellie breathed.

“Yeah,” I agreed inadequately.

“Well,” Dave DiMaio murmured. “This answers one question.”

I gazed around. The shed's interior had been rebuilt; not professionally but adequately. The recently leveled floor held up new support beams; same with the ceiling.

It wasn't a bit pretty—unfinished Sheetrock never is—but it was functional. I got a mental picture of Jason Riverton and Bert Merkle working together out here.

Or Merkle alone. Maybe Jason's contribution was just letting Merkle do it and keeping quiet about it. Or—suddenly I recalled the small income that Ellie had said Mrs. Riverton had, from renting out some little place since forever.

This was that little place. “What's all this stuff for?” Ellie wondered aloud.

But I was already beginning to guess that, too. Along one wall was a laboratory bench with a long black-slate work surface punctuated by a brushed-steel double sink, a Bunsen burner, and an electric hot plate. At right angles to the lab bench stood a drawing table with a lamp clipped to it.

The lamp had magnifying lenses that you could rotate to peer onto the lighted surface. Slowly, DiMaio entered the work area.

“I wish Horace could see this. He'd have loved it.”

But I'd had just about enough of good old Horace, mostly on account of his being dead and therefore no help to us.

“Dave, d'you by any chance want to tell me what this means? Because otherwise I think I'm just going to call the cops and—”

“Don't do that. And don't
touch
that!” Dave added sharply to Ellie as she reached for something on the workbench.

Her hand jerked back. “You don't know what's been on that bench,” he explained. “Some of the chemicals used in this kind of operation can be poisonous, even radioactive.”

“Dave. Exactly what kind of operation are we talking about?” I asked.

Sheets of old parchment, yellowing and flaking. Spools of what looked like thread, equally old-appearing. Tiny pots of gold paint, a wickedly sharp-looking curved needle, quill pens with nibs newly cut, an embossing tool, a big iron kettle, which by the smell in here had been used for tanning leather . . .

“It's a bookbinding shop,” said Dave. “A very special one. Bert Merkle's, I can only suppose, where he fakes old books.”

Some pieces of leather had sections cut from them; book-shaped sections. The parchment sheets had been similarly used. Dots of gold splotched the work surface under one of the lights; a clipboard with lined sheets of paper on it seemed to chart the progress of various projects.

There were a lot of lined sheets on the clipboard. The earlier ones had gone yellowish and curling with age, the newer ones were fresh.

“He's been doing it,” Dave said, “for years.”

Back at home
I found Bella in the yard beating carpets with a tennis racket.

Bam!
A cloud of dust flew up. “Bella?” I asked hesitantly.

She lowered the tennis racket. But from the look on her face I decided getting too close might be a fool's move.

“What?” she demanded warily. “But before you tell me, let me just tell
you
that it better
not
be no message from your father.”

Bam!
More dust. “I've had my last talk with
him
until he gives up his damn-fool notions. I ain't a-marryin' and I ain't a-movin', and that's—”

Bam! “—final,”
she said.

She wore an old cotton housedress with the sleeves rolled up over her ropy arms. Over it she had on a carpenter's apron with generous front pockets. From one, the spray can of compressed air she used for getting dust out of small crevices peeped.

“He can't come live in my house,” she said as she resumed beating the rug, “ 'cause there ain't enough room. We'd be at each other's throats.”

My father's rough edges among her carefully arranged things; I thought again that it would be like a porcupine trying to get comfy.

“And his ain't no better. Worse, 'cause not only is it small, but let's face it, the man's sixteen years old at heart.”

He liked Bella's style and he kept to her rules when he was in my house, but at his own his idea of cleaning was to sweep the dust into a corner so he wouldn't trip over it.

Bam!
“And we ain't buyin' bigger. Even together, what we'd raise sellin' our two places wouldn't make the down payment. And don't even think of us takin' a loan for it, neither.”

I had been thinking of it, actually, as I walked home from the Riverton place. It made a nice change from thinking about my old book, now unmistakably exposed as a fake.

Suspecting it had been one thing. But having it shown to me—the how, where, even the what-with, as in those parchment bits and vials of fake-old ink—was a whole other bowl of chowder.

Chowdah,
as Bella would have put it.

“Not from you, nor anybody else,” she went on. “I got this far in life without bein' beholden, and I aim to do the rest the same way.”

“All right, Bella,” I said. “I understand.”

She glanced at me, surprised and I thought disappointed that I wasn't arguing with her. But I already knew arguing with Bella was about as smart as stepping within range of that tennis racket.

“Fine,” I told her, then went into the house and straight to the phone. Because maybe everything else was falling to bits, but I clung desperately to the notion that I could still fix one thing.

And on that topic I'd just gotten an idea. “That's right, George, I want you to come over here right away,” I said when I got Ellie's husband on the line.

“And bring along anyone you know who's good, reliable, and not already working on some other job,” I added.

Through the window I watched Bella viciously attack another rug; any more and my backyard would need a pollution-control device.

“Yes, as soon as possible,” I said. “It's a big project, I know, but I will pay the men good wages and overtime, and if you bring along enough of them . . . yes. Yes, I know, George.”

Then I listened while he told me that I would need, if not a blueprint, at least a detailed sketch of what I required.

But I disagreed. “George, I'm going to delegate all that to you. The pipes and the wiring are all accessible, and they'll dictate where everything else will be, so you just use your judgment.”

There ensued a short silence while he digested the unusual notion of me delegating any such thing. Looking hard at the idea might've made it indigestible to me, too; for instance, George was currently responsible for the faucet handles in the old shower looking like the controls on a nuclear reactor.

He'd bought them cheap from a discount plumbing-supply place and installed them without showing them to me first. But after the shower debacle we'd had a chat about esthetic choices, and I didn't have time to supervise this.

“I need it done, I need it done right, and most of all I need it done soon,” I told him. “So can you?”

Whereupon he allowed as though he probably could.

“And, George?” I added, taking a deep breath.

But he seemed to read my thought. “While we're there,” he ventured, “we could take care of that other little matter.” He cleared his throat. “Few days, it could be done. Because you know,” he added kindly, “it's brand-new construction.”

He waited, then went on: “What that means is, it won't take near the kind of ingenuity and cleverness you use for fixing the old parts of the house.”

Which was the nicest way he could possibly have communicated the fact that, while I was fairly competent at old-house repairs, rebuilding a bathroom in one of them wasn't just another bowl of chowder, it was a whole vat of the stuff.

“Fine, George,” I said gratefully. “You do that, too, then, along with my dad. I've got a list of materials, part numbers for the fixtures and tile, the paint colors, and so on. Will that be enough?”

Of my involvement, I meant, and he said it would; we agreed he would start immediately and hire whomever else he needed.

Finally, we hung up. I stood there a moment with my hand on the phone, thinking about Jason Riverton, his unlucky mother, and the fact—sure as shootin', as my father would've put it—that she hadn't accidentally killed him.

And then I went out to catch a murderer, damn it.

• • •

It was the
girl's soft, bitten-looking lower lip and its tearful quiver, so deliberately calculating, that finished Dave finally.

“I want you to tell me about my father,” she said. “I want you to tell me
now.
”

She stood blocking his way on the main trail in Shackford Head State Park, a wild, forested area on the island just east of town. He'd come here to clear his head.

So much for that idea. Liane must have followed, scampered up the trail to accost him where they would be alone.

He walked straight at her. When it appeared they were about to collide, she faltered, then fell into step beside him.

“Well?” Liane demanded. “Are you going to tell me about him or not?”

After a small meadow and a wooden boardwalk over a swamp, the trail led uphill between old spruces, maples and pin oaks, and venerable white pines. Blue water peeped through breaks in the trees.

“I'm thinking about it,” he replied.

She huffed out an impatient breath. She wore jeans, a tan cotton sweater, and a pair of calf-high laced leather boots that were too delicate for the trail. Once when she stumbled he caught her arm. He released it only when she had steadied herself.

“I'm his daughter, aren't I?” she demanded as the trail took a sudden left turn, diminished to a rock-strewn path for the last few uphill yards.

“Yes.” He repressed a smile. Not much doubt of that. She was more like Horace each time he saw her, and the brazen insincerity of her expression when she'd made her demand only increased the resemblance.

Because at heart, Horace had been a man who always got the goods, hadn't he? Whatever it took; that his daughter should be the same didn't surprise Dave a bit.

They climbed to a high, rocky outcropping. A stone bench perched on it, overlooking a nearly 360-degree view of water and islands. Gray lichen crept over the granite where it elbowed up through the thin soil.

They sat. “So why the change of heart?” he asked.

Silence. “First you wanted money,” he pressed. “Now you want information. What changed?”

She gnawed her lip. “I want both. Is that so hard for you to figure out? You're still not going to see a dime of my father's money.”

He shrugged. “Then neither are you.”

Because he'd been thinking about it, and he understood, at last, why Horace had arranged his will the way he had.

She glanced at him rebelliously. “The shape you're in,” Dave explained, “if I let you take it your dad would rise up and haunt me for the rest of my life.”

Horace must've known Lang Cabell wouldn't fight for the money. And he must have hoped Dave would. “A lot of cash right now would ruin you,” he told the girl. “You wouldn't know how to handle it.”

Another exasperated sniff. “So you say.” But faced with his implacably delivered statement—he wasn't an experienced teacher for nothing, Dave reflected—she seemed to give up the subject.

For now. A fog bank lay motionless to the south behind the skeletal-looking bridge joining the Maine coast to Campobello Island. In a little while she spoke again.

“That's where Benedict Arnold went,” she said, surprising Dave. “With his wife. But she didn't like it there, it wasn't fancy enough for her.” She glanced at him, caught the look on his face. “What? You don't think I'm smart enough to know a thing like that?”

“No. I can tell that you're smart. I just wondered where you learned it, is all.”

She turned back to the glittering water. “I read a tourist pamphlet,” she said flatly. “So, do you still think I killed him for his money? My dad?”

This time he did smile. He couldn't help it; for all her attempted toughness, she was so young. “No. I've changed my mind about that.”

“Why not? I thought you were all convinced I'm some kind of awful gold digger.”

“Mmm. I was. But I've been trying to imagine you hitting him with a rock, or something. And I can't. Because the idea is completely ridiculous.”

For a moment she looked unsure whether she should take this as an insult or a compliment. Then she nodded. “Good. You've figured out what really did happen to him, then?”

“I thought I had. But there's been a new development. I'll have to think some more about it.”

“Oh,” she replied. She sounded disappointed.

He waited, but she didn't say anything more, and after a few minutes she got up and began walking back down the path away from him. He followed, watching the flimsy boots waver dangerously.

“Wait. I thought you wanted to know about Horace.”

She hesitated. “I still don't understand, though,” he added when she'd let him catch up. “Won't your mother tell you?”

She was weeping. He shoved a clean handkerchief at her.

“She can't. She died a couple of months ago. That's how I found out my dad had died, too.”

She snatched the handkerchief, dabbed her streaming eyes. “I've been staying in her house till it gets sold,” she explained. “And a letter came for her from my dad's lawyer. Horace must not've known that she was . . . anyway, I opened it.”

“I see.” They walked on.

“She always thought that stuff my dad was into was stupid. Whatever it was,” she added, stopping again.