The Book of Old Houses (3 page)

“I'm Dave DiMaio,” he said, and at my blank look he went on, “I was a friend of Horace Robotham.”

“Oh. Oh, my.” I descended the porch steps and took the hand he offered.

“I'm so sorry for your loss,” I said. The obituary had been in the
Bangor Daily News.

He smiled warmly. In his forties, I guessed, but with the lean build some very fortunate men keep throughout their lives. “Thanks. Horace and I corresponded about you before he . . .”

Horace Robotham had been a Maine-based rare-book expert and I'd sent him a volume my father had unearthed in the cellar of my house. But I hadn't heard much back from him except a few brief notes to say he was working on it, and then he'd died suddenly, murdered by someone who had apparently attacked him while he was out on his evening walk.

A random mugging, the police called it. That had been three weeks earlier.

“I'm very sorry about your friend,” I repeated. “Won't you come in? You must have had a long drive.”

Not that I knew where he'd come from but getting to Eastport at all—a town of about two thousand on Moose Island in downeast Maine, three hours from Bangor and light-years, it often seemed, from anywhere else—nearly always involved serious travel times.

Dave DiMaio followed me inside to the big old high-ceilinged kitchen with its tall bare windows, pine wainscoting, and hardwood floor. “This is beautiful,” he said.

“Thanks,” I replied. His gaze took in the built-in pine cabinets, linoleum-topped counters, woodstove-equipped fireplace hearth, and the antique soapstone sink, all bathed in the watery sunlight pouring in through the windows' rippled panes.

From her usual perch atop the refrigerator our cross-eyed Siamese cat, Cat Dancing, opened one piercing blue eye while twitching her tail in irritation, then went to sleep again.

“Sit down, won't you?” I invited.
And tell me why you've come,
I wanted to add.

But the poor man looked exhausted so I gave him a glass of lemonade and set a paper plate of oatmeal lace cookies in front of him instead.

“Oh,” he breathed when he'd drunk down half the lemonade in a swig. “Oh, that hits the spot.”

He was trying his first cookie when the dogs pelted in, Monday the black Labrador wagging ecstactically at the sight of company, Prill the red Doberman hanging back, her amber eyes alert.

“It's okay, Prill,” I said a little nervously.

Prill was a rescue dog with some terrible history that I was better off not knowing. Fine with the family and with anyone else to whom she'd been introduced, she still thought s-t-r-a-n-g-e-r spelled trouble.

Dave DiMaio got up. “Hello, girl,” he said conversationally to the dog, crouching before her.

Prill's ears flattened. “Really,” I told Dave, trying to keep calm in the face of imminent disaster, “you shouldn't . . .”

“Hello,” he repeated to the unhappy dog, who dropped into a crouch of her own and crept forward, lip curled ominously.

But when she got near enough, DiMaio reached out fearlessly and ruffled her ears, as casually as if she didn't weigh over a hundred pounds and possess nearly as many teeth. I just stared as under his caress her suspicions melted.

Then she rolled onto her side, her stubby tail tattooing the floor. “Dogs seem to like me,” DiMaio explained with a shrug.

Prill yawned happily and let out a whimper of joy.

“Yes, so I see,” I said. “This one should've liked you with a little barbeque sauce and maybe a side of fries. How did you
do
that?”

The big red dog got to her feet and wandered unconcernedly away into the dining room where I heard her drop into her doggy bed with a soft thump. Monday followed.

“I don't know. Good vibes?” DiMaio smiled briefly as he straightened. “But listen, I'm sorry to barge in here. I've obviously interrupted you in a project.”

Bathroom wreckage, I realized with embarrassment, remained in my hair, and although I'd washed my hands before putting out the refreshments, the rest of me looked fit for digging ditches.

Meanwhile Bella was still upstairs, dropping big chunks of sink into, apparently, a metal bucket:
clunk! clank! thunk!

“I have been a little busy,” I admitted, all at once keenly aware of my costume: tattered jeans, a paint-smeared shirt, loafers with most of the stitching torn out.

But then I managed a smile of my own as something about this guy—the set of his jaw, or the odd, brooding darkness that lurked behind the friendliness in his eyes—suggested he'd seen worse.

Much worse. “Have you by any chance brought me back the book your friend had?” I asked.

After reading in the paper about Horace Robotham's death I'd tried writing to the address I had for him, hoping someone might be clearing up the rare-book dealer's affairs. But I'd gotten no answer. I'd just about decided I might have to drive to Orono, Maine, where he'd lived and had an old-book business, to try locating my volume.

DiMaio shook his head. “No. I'm sorry to say I don't know where your book is. Horace's partner, Lang Cabell, looked for it. But it wasn't there. I just talked to Lang last night,” he added. “I'd been . . . away.”

The light dawned suddenly: my old book, a sudden death, and now this stranger, arriving without warning. . . .

“So that's why you're here,” I said. “You want it, too. You've just found out he died, and that the book is gone. And you think maybe someone—”

“No, no,” he interrupted, putting his hands up in a warding-off gesture. “Nothing like that. Really, I don't know there's any connection at all between . . .”

Protesting too much. And at my skeptical look he gave in. “All right. It's your book, after all. I guess you've got a right to a few answers. The few I have.”

He let his hands fall to his sides. “Long story, though. Do you want to take a walk with me while I tell it?”

What popped into my mind immediately was a walk-and-talk, the kind of stroll people take to discuss something confidential when they suspect their current location might be bugged. Back in the big city where I worked as a money manager to the rich and dreadful, many of my clients were so paranoid about eavesdropping that the only place I ever saw them was out on the street.

But DiMaio's explanation was less paranoid. “I started out before daybreak this morning from Providence, Rhode Island,” he told me. “I teach at a small college you've never heard of, special topics in late-nineteenth-century American literature.”

“Really,” I said evenly. Heard about a death just last night and hopped into his car bright and early; fascinating.

“Anyway,” he added, “I've been on the road for hours, and I want some exercise if I can get it.”

He wanted more than that, I felt certain. But by now I was curious, and it
was
a beautiful day. Pausing only to brush a few larger shards of pedestal sink out of my hair, I grabbed the dogs' collars from their hook in the hall, which brought them running.

“You're on,” I told Dave DiMaio. “I'll give you the fifty-cent Eastport tour and while we're out, you can also explain to me why my old book's so important to you,” I said, bending to leash the animals.

Still assuming that the book was the only thing behind his visit. But when we got outside, DiMaio paused. “Um, listen,” he began, with an uncertain glance back at his car.

“What?” I asked, peering up at the window through which the entire bathroom would soon be exiting. Once that was finished, we were in for approximately the same amount of construction that it took to complete the Brooklyn Bridge.

And bathroom work wasn't the only thing I had on my plate this fine August morning. The quarrel between Bella and my dad had sounded serious, and her remarks weren't reassuring.

A rift between those two could throw all of our reasonably tranquil domestic arrangements into a cocked hat, so I supposed I would have to do something about it.

Also my just-past-teenaged son, Sam, had recently returned from alcohol rehab. And while I'd realized at last that it wasn't my job to keep him sober, I still couldn't help trying.

There was something else, too, that I ought to remember but couldn't, I thought distractedly. I knew one thing, though: I had no intention of getting involved with murder.

If that was even what it was; if Horace Robotham's death wasn't just a mugging gone tragically wrong, as the police seemed to believe.

“Well,” Dave began, “I just wondered if in your house—”

“Yes?” The dogs yanked mercilessly, Prill west and Monday east.

“In your house,” Dave DiMaio said seriously to me, “would there by any chance be a good place to hide a gun?”

Half an hour
after he pulled into my driveway we'd stashed Dave DiMaio's horrid little firearm in the cellar lockbox where I kept my own collection of weaponry.

The best of the bunch was the Bisley six-shot revolver my husband, Wade Sorenson, had given me before we got married. With its long, blued steel barrel, checkered walnut grip, and general air of being able to stop anything including a charging rhinoceros, the Italian reproduction of the gun that won the West was my favorite, even aside from the sentimental attachment I felt for it.

With the Bisley was a small, gray .38 Police Special, the carrying of which I tried hard to avoid, since if I did it meant I was in way more trouble than I could handle. High among its virtues, though, was the fact that the Police Special was concealable, a big plus in any situation whose successful outcome depends at least in part on your looking like a dumb-bunny.

An appearance, by the way, that I am able to achieve with no difficulty whatsoever. But back to the lockbox and my third gun, a .22 Beretta Model 87 target pistol with an extended barrel.

Dave looked uneasy. “You struck me more as the anti-gun type,” he said as I examined the target gun, then locked the box again after putting his weapon into it.

“Mm. Watch out for first impressions,” I replied.

The gun he'd handed me was a .22 revolver. It was a cheap, evil-looking piece of junk perfect for dropping down a sewer grate after you'd used it in a convenience-store robbery, but not for much else.

“My husband repairs high-quality firearms when he's not out being a harbor pilot, and he's a good shot,” I told DiMaio.

Which was putting it mildly. Wade guided freighters into our harbor, through the wild tides, vicious currents, and treacherous granite outcroppings with which our local waters were plentifully furnished. Also, he could stand flat-footed and shoot the eye out of a gnat.

“He taught me to shoot,” I added, “and I discovered I liked it.”

Back then I'd thought guns were for guys with broken washing machines on their porches and mean dogs tied in their yards. But to get closer to Wade I'd have fixed all the washing machines and made friends with every one of those dogs, and after quite a while of his slow, patient instruction I found out that shooting was fun.

Plus, a couple of hours on the target range can make nearly any problem look manageable, since if worse comes to worst you can always just blast the daylights out of it.

I wasn't hands-on familiar with Dave's gun but unloading a revolver is no big brainteaser and I'd accomplished it without embarrassing myself, swinging the cylinder out and dumping its contents into my pocket. I'd have gone on to tell Dave that the Beretta 87 would've been a lot better choice for him than the ghastly little item he carried. For one thing, the Beretta's extended barrel made sighting easier for a beginner. But he'd already lost interest.

“This cellar's amazing,” he murmured, gazing at the hand-adzed beams, worn granite foundation, and the arched brickwork in the doorways to the small side-rooms where in the old days they hung meat.

Not to mention bushels of potatoes, rows of quart jars full of fruit, jams, relishes, and pickled eggs, boxes of salt pork and dried fish, sacks of pebble-hard peas, beans, and corn kernels . . . “Cellars got a lot of serious use in the 1800s,” I replied. “In those days, they weren't just catch-alls.”

Like this one now: bottles, cans, newspapers for recycling, Sam's snow skis and his snowmobile-riding gear, cans of paint and plastic buckets of plaster-patching compound . . . overall, the place looked like a hurricane had washed a lot of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam into my basement.

But the big iron hooks remained bolted to the walls and ceiling beams; tufts of deer hide, grayish with age and nailed to doorframes, still testified to the success of long-ago hunting trips.

“That's where the book came out of the wall.” I pointed to the corner behind the furnace where a forgotten water main had burst, flooding the place. The hole it had created was now filled with new concrete blocks and mortar, courtesy of my father.

Dave peered at the spot. “Nice repair. So the book was in the wall? Or in the soil on the other side of it?”

“Unclear. My dad took out the stones to get at the pipe, saw a wooden box that the book turned out to be in, and grabbed it before the water got at it. But as for how far in it was . . .”

Dave nodded with slow thoughtfulness. “And the foundation was built when? Eighteen twenty-three?”

So he and Horace Robotham had discussed more than the book's mere existence. Either that, or DiMaio had done some old-house research on his own. Again, I wondered what he was really doing here.

“Yes. The foundation's original. So we think the box went in when the granite did,” I answered.

“Huh. That would make the book itself nearly two centuries old,” he mused. “Interesting.”

No kidding, especially since my own name was written in it, along with those of every other previous owner of the house since it was built, all 185 years' worth of us. And how had
that
happened?