The Book of Old Houses (7 page)

“Nice mess o' mackerel,” she allowed. “Go cut the heads an' tails off, take the insides out, and wash 'em with the hose.”

Being in the same room with Sam had a tendency to make all women's faces soften, not to mention their hearts; he was his father's son.

“I don't know, Bella,” he said, dropping an arm around her. “If I do all that work, are you going to cook them?”

“ 'Course I will,” she promised stoutly. She was a sucker for his crooked grin. “Go on with you, now,” she added with a hint of tenderness, “you're spoiling my sauce.”

He let Bella shoo him good-humoredly out of the kitchen and when he was gone she spoke again. “ 'Course I'll cook 'em. Fresh mackerel makes excellent cat food.”

Cat Dancing purred loudly in response from her customary perch on top of the refrigerator. But then a
ka-klunk!
from upstairs must've reminded Bella of my father and a scowl creased her face.

Fortunately she wasn't looking directly at the sauce at the time; curdled crab is not so delicious. I turned back to Ellie. “So, what else about Bert Merkle?”

Intent on her saucepan once more, Bella made a rude noise. “No more sense than one o' them fish,” she commented, but whether she meant Merkle or my father, I couldn't tell.

“Skippy says Dave DiMaio told him that Bert and Dave went to school together,” Ellie reported. “Dave wanted to know where Bert lives, as if he intended to go visit his old friend.”

Suddenly my decision to hide the lockbox a lot better felt urgent. “If he really is a friend,” I remarked.

Ellie dabbed butter from her lip with a napkin. “You know, I think maybe we'd better keep an eye on him.”

Bella added salt, pepper, lemon juice, and grated cheese to the sauce she was creating, then took the two slices of homemade white bread she'd turned into breadcrumbs and stirred them with enough melted butter to moisten them.

“Oh, I don't know,” I objected. Between the demolished bathroom and a few other home-repair projects that I'd been neglecting lately—and, I reminded myself with a despairing pang, Merrie Fargeorge's party preparations—I didn't need anything else on my to-do list. Cat Dancing gazed down with cross-eyed interest at the container of crabmeat.

“Don't even dream about it,” Bella said without looking up at the cat.

“Dave will be coming to get his car soon,” I said. “Probably he'll be staying at the Motel East, or one of the bed-and-breakfasts.”

That was one good side effect of swinging a sledgehammer around your only bathroom; no overnight guests.

Ellie ate her last scone bit. “Good. Near enough for us to stay reasonably well-informed about his activities, but with no obvious close connection to either one of us.”

Right, because such an impertinently inquisitive person-from-away wouldn't quite bring out the tar and feathers, in Eastport.

Not quite. “He seems like a nice enough guy, though,” I added, not quite knowing why I was defending him; his recent bereavement, maybe.

“Except for the gun he brought with him,” Ellie replied.

Right. Except for that.

Bella stirred more cheese into the sauce. “I don't know why people can't let well enough alone,” she said, frowning into the pan.

For a minute I thought she meant DiMaio, but then I looked up and saw my father standing forlornly in the kitchen doorway. “Going home for lunch,” he said finally.

No response from Bella. Ordinarily by now they'd have been eating their grilled-cheese sandwiches companionably.

“Do not,” my father reminded me severely, “try moving that bathtub.”

I was about as likely to run out and try shifting the Rock of Gibraltar a few inches to the left.

“You have plenty of other more manageable projects to finish around this place,” he added.

For instance, in my workroom on the third floor a very old attic window awaited me: rotten, paint-peeled, and with most of its antique, wavery-glass panes ready to fall out.

That is, the ones that hadn't done so already. I'd begun repairs, but completion on the window was urgently needed; in winter the wind muscled frigidly in through it, making a mockery of any plan I might have for house-heating efficiency.

Although actually the whole house made a mockery of that. And since it was now late August, I calculated that winter would be here in approximately twenty minutes.

“Right,” I told my father as he went out, thinking,
Scraper, chisel, belt sander, paint.

And glazing compound, lots and lots of glazing compound for putting in each and every one of the five-by-eight-inch panes of glass that needed replacing. Just thinking about it made me want to go shove a bathtub out a window, but if I didn't get those panes in soon I might just as well pump heating oil out through it instead.

Paintbrush, glazing pins . . .
and some extra glass panes, I decided, since even after all the glazing I'd done since moving in here, I still had about a one-in-six breakage rate.

“Now, about the party,” Ellie said.

“Listen, Ellie,” I said hastily. “Maybe I was a little too optimistic about my hostess abilities when I offered to . . .”

Cake, punch, napkins, glasses.
Real ones, mind you, not the plastic variety, and a pox on paper plates. We'd need a big tea maker, and a coffee urn, and with all that crystal and china on the table I guessed we'd better transfer the cream and sugar into something besides old Tupperware containers.

And the good teacups, wrapped in yellowing newspaper, were in a box in the hall closet. Bella stirred curry powder into the sauce, whereupon a sweet, complex perfume wafted from it, like something being concocted in an expensive restaurant.

“You'll be fine,” Ellie reassured me. “I'll just run down to the IGA and get you some spray starch, so it'll be easier for you to iron the linen napkins.”

“But . . . but . . .” I sounded like an old outboard engine.

“Jake.” She eyed me amusedly. “Come on, now, it'll be fine. You've done this before and it worked out very well, so what's the problem?”

Right, I had: ten years earlier, when Eastport ladies were still generously taking pity on me on account of my just-got-here status. So they'd forgiven me my many faux pas including the very large picture of Elvis Presley painted on black velvet that I'd fastened up at the last minute to cover the big hole in the dining-room wall.

But this time would be different. No hole in the dining-room wall, for one thing. And no allowances made, for another.

This time, in the are-you-or-aren't-you-a-real-Eastport-lady department, it was put up or shut up.

“I've got to go. Lee's fast asleep. But George is with her,” Ellie added. “So that won't last.”

George Valentine was Ellie's husband and a fine, responsible babysitter, but he did have one bad habit: he adored that child so much that anytime she fell asleep, he woke her up again so he could play with her. As a result Lee had learned to take power naps lasting about fifteen minutes, after which she hung on her crib rail and howled.

“Good luck,” I said as Ellie departed; when he was small Sam had done the same thing for a while and I'd been puzzled—though I must admit, pleased—when the habit ended suddenly. Later I found out that my then-husband had begun dosing him with tincture of opium, to quiet him.

Ellie stuck her head back in. “Listen—don't forget what I said about DiMaio. The gun means that guy's up to something, I'm sure of it.”

Oh, great.
“Wait here,” I told Bella when Ellie had gone. “I mean it, don't move an inch.”

Because if I didn't say it, in the mood she was in she might decide to push that old bathtub out the window herself, and after that it could be bombs away with all the rest of the upstairs furniture.

Leaving her in the kitchen I descended once more the set of narrow, curving steps that led to the cellar, remembering to duck as I passed under some low-hanging pipes and step fast to the left to avoid falling into the square hole where the wood-burning furnace used to be.

The ancient coal chute gaped darkly at me—with only a few additions my cellar could be a museum dedicated to the history of home heating—as did the doorway to the old meat room. In the far corner, past the paint cans, ladders, power sprayer, varnish tins, primer buckets, tarps, and all the other equipment so necessary to the painting of even a single wall in a very old house, there was a loose brick.

I knew, because I'd loosened it with a hammer and chisel. I'd wanted a secure hiding place, somewhere to put things so even the cleverest thief wouldn't find them.

Ten thousand dollars in twenties and tens, for instance; emergency money. Plus the extra key to the lockbox; I took the box down from the shelf where I'd put it when Dave was here, then crossed to the opposite corner of the cellar and pulled the brick out.

The cash was still in there; key, too. I shoved the money to the back to make room. The original tiny brass key to the lockbox hung as always on a gold chain around my neck, along with a gold heart charm that Wade had given me.

I pulled the chain over my head and put the key into the lock. It turned oddly, which was my first hint that something was wrong, with a soft, not-quite-stuck feeling, as if a pin or some other slim object had bent the lock's innards.

“Missus?” Bella called down the cellar stairs.

“Just a minute,” I called back. “I'll be right . . .”

On the far side of the cellar, the door to the steps leading up and out to the backyard stood ajar as it often did in summer, admitting a long thin triangle of light.

Next, through one of the broken cellar windows—and yes, I did know that I ought to replace these immediately if not sooner—I heard a car start up in my driveway.

The car backed into the street, its sound briefly louder and then diminishing. As it faded, I peered dumbly into the lockbox again, still unable to believe my eyes.

Chapter
5

B
ella, speak,” I commanded twenty minutes later. But she
wouldn't.

We were up on the third floor, in the big unfinished room with the tall, south-facing windows. Once upon a time, when the house was new and the family in it had so many servants that they hardly knew where to put them all, maids and scullery girls slept up here in narrow beds with only candles to say their prayers by.

Later came stoves, gaslights, and finally the massive old cast-iron radiators. Over the years I'd stripped off the stained wallpaper, patterned in grapevines that must have been green and fresh-looking all those decades ago.

I'd patched up the plaster and put a coat of white primer on it, too, so that now the room was like an artist's studio, airy and full of light. It made an excellent place to repair windows.

“Come on, Bella,” I urged. “I can see you're unhappy. But how can I help if you won't say what's wrong? Did my father hurt your feelings?”

For all her exterior toughness, Bella's insides were about as resilient as your average marshmallow. “Don't need help,” she uttered stubbornly, but her lower lip was trembling.

“Please,” I said, opening the plastic container of glazing compound, “tell me what happened.”

Before me, supported by four milk crates on a plastic tarp, lay a tall, rectangular exterior window. I'd already scraped and sanded it, filled the holes with plastic wood, and sanded that. So I just needed to put the glass back in and apply paint.

“Old fool,” Bella said, meaning my father.

She sat on an extra milk crate while I dug glazing compound out of the container with a putty knife. The stuff was soft and claylike, pale gray with the faint, pleasant scent of turpentine; the smell increased the artist's-studio feeling.

“He wants to get married,” Bella announced.

I paused in the act of rolling the glazing compound between my hands to warm and soften it. “You're kidding!”

Not very tactful, maybe. But she understood. That the two of them were good friends was one thing.

Marriage, though. My mother's ghost seemed to shift uneasily up there where it floated, always a little sorrowful, at the back of my mind.

“Nope. I'm not kidding, and he wasn't, either.” Bella looked around as if she'd never seen the third floor before.

“I've always liked it up here,” she remarked, as if having confided in me she now wanted to get away from the subject, fast.

“The light,” she said, “is clearer. And all the other little rooms up here could be made over real pretty, too.”

The chambers adjoining the main room, once home to the small army of girls who in their early teens were already expert at slops-carrying, potato-peeling, and ash-sweeping, offered plenty of space for a bathroom, bedroom, and galley kitchen, plus a small study. I'd often thought that if I ever ran really short of money I would fix it all up and rent it out.

“I'm still not sure I understand,” I told Bella. “My father proposed? To you?”

“Yup.” Her lips tightened at the memory while her work-roughened fingers twisted the corner of her apron.

“What's he want with me, anyway?” she asked plaintively. “Sure, I know how to work hard, and I'm a halfway decent cook, I guess.”

“Uh-huh.” Whenever we sat down to eat one of Bella's meals, angels gathered and began singing over the dining-room table. But she'd been married once already and it hadn't been a success. In fact, when her then-husband turned suddenly from a live one into a dead one, she'd been the prime suspect.

Ellie and I had gotten her out of that debacle, but since then the expression radiating from every plain, unyielding molecule of her face was a mixture of harsh skepticism and grim determination, only occasionally leavened with a pinch of simple affection.

“Says he wants more
togetherness,
” she scoffed. “But can you imagine? The two of us fallin' all over each other, tryin' to keep out of each other's way in that tiny house of mine. Or,” she added with a shudder,
“his.”

Both their small cottages together would've fit easily in my house. And there would be room for a couple of tennis courts, besides.

“Well,” I said, “if you don't want to, you don't have to.”

But another problem worried me even more than Bella's marriage plans or the absence of them. Pondering it, I pressed a thin band of glazing compound onto the wooden ledge of the sash opening where a pane of glass would sit, then removed the excess with the putty knife.

“Hmph,” said Bella. “Maybe. But your father is a persistent old fool.”

Dropping a pane into its place and pressing firmly to settle it on the glazing compound, for a moment I imagined Dave DiMaio as one of those mild-mannered superheroes with x-ray eyes.

But that was silly. Life in my old house was indeed like a comic book, sometimes, but in it the main character was always dangling precariously from a ladder, upending a paint bucket, or smacking her thumb so painfully hard with a hammer that imaginary tweety-birds flew chirping around her head.

In short, around here when people could see through walls it was because I'd knocked holes into them. So on that late-summer morning in Eastport, Maine, when everything still seemed okay—except for the demolished bathroom, of course, and Bella, and Sam, who was not yet drinking again, and the party for Merrie Fargeorge with its terrifying requirements of crystal and china and the bar set so high in the hostessing-skills department that just thinking about it threatened to give me a nosebleed—in the midst of it all, I really knew only one thing. The gun I'd taken from DiMaio . . .

Cheap and greasy-feeling; loaded, too. I'd checked, before putting it where I knew no one could find it.

So what had happened was ridiculous.

Impossible, really. Like seeing through walls.

The Bisley and the .38 Special were still in the lockbox. The target gun, also.

But Dave DiMaio's awful little weapon was gone.

• • •

Driving the Saab
away from the Tiptree house, Dave felt a twinge of guilt. But not for long; the fury that had threatened to overwhelm him upon hearing of Horace's murder now seized him again.

Bert Merkle was here in Eastport; well, Dave had known that. So he would find Bert. And then . . . the matter would come to an end.

He drove downhill a few blocks to the Motel East, a brown two-story building on a bluff overlooking the ancient wreckage of a huge wharf.

Rotted stumps of old wooden pilings stuck out of the water like broken teeth, but in their place in his mind's eye rose the steam packet's cavernous terminal building, carts piled high with baggage outside amid the bustle and excitement of an imminent voyage to Boston or beyond.

He pulled into the motel parking lot and entered the office, whose desk was crammed with literature about tourist attractions: Reversing Falls, the Tides Institute, sails for whale-watching and fishing. The woman behind the desk smiled pleasantly as she handed him the room key, and wished him an enjoyable stay.

Enjoyable,
he repeated to himself as he collected his bag from the Saab's backseat.

Maybe not, he thought as he opened the door to a large, bright room with two king-sized beds, a tidy kitchenette, and a million-dollar view of the bay.

Satisfying, though. He put his bag down on one of the big beds.

Yes. Definitely that.

“Jacobia!” said a
female voice very sharply, inches from my ear. Hearing it, I wished intensely that I'd gone straight home instead of stopping at the IGA.

Or that I'd simply stayed outdoors. As soon as she dropped Lee off at her play date, Ellie had returned to my house, meaning to dive at once into heavy-duty party preparations. But when she saw my state of mind she'd taken me on an expedition, instead.

Moose Island still held wild areas where in summer brambly treasure-troves of blackberries grew, hidden by old apple trees and thickets of beach roses. In a secret one that only Ellie knew, we filled the quart-sized baskets her husband, George, wove out of ash strips as a hobby during the winter.

“The gun was Dave's, he wanted it back, and he took it,” she said of my empty-lockbox discovery, having lured me out with the promise of berry cobbler for dessert.

“Rude, sneaky, and technically illegal.” All of which, her tone said clearly, confirmed her original opinion of him.

“But look at it this way, Jake. Now that he has it, he has no reason to come back. I mean,” she added, “since it seems you've decided to wash your hands of him.”

Her look said she still thought I might be sorry about that later, but she didn't push it. “As for the party, you're being silly. The ladies like you. They'll be delighted by anything you do,” she reassured me again.

Right, the way all audiences are delighted by banana-peel pratfalls and grins dripping whipped-cream pie. My inability to entertain properly in Eastport—ladies! teacups! face powder!—was exceeded only by my growing terror of trying and failing at it.

But there were still those berries and that cobbler, so after we filled the baskets, Ellie had returned home and I'd come here to the IGA to get butter, flour, and Maine's superior answer to traditional baking powder: Bakewell Cream.

And it was while I was standing in the produce aisle trying to decide whether or not also to buy a particularly good-looking avocado—Bella loved them, and I thought it might help cheer her up—that I learned just how tricky and difficult a problem Dave DiMaio might actually turn out to be, gun or no gun.

“Jacobia,” Merrie Fargeorge repeated briskly. “Look alive!”

I dropped the avocado. Crouching quickly, Merrie popped nimbly up again and gave it to me.

“Standing there woolgathering,” she tut-tutted.

People glanced at us, hiding smiles; they'd been students of Merrie's, most of them. Under her gaze I felt like a schoolchild, too, being scolded in front of the class.

And I didn't like it; still, you had to hand it to her. For a person of her age and build—late sixties, round as a cookie jar, wearing a white shirt and denim jumper over white stockings and blue leather clogs—the woman was astonishingly fast and flexible.

“Jacobia,” the retired educator went on to admonish me, “you have to do something about him.”

“Who?” I asked, trying to take refuge in the thought of all the other things I should probably pick up while I was here, and that I wouldn't remember until I got home. Or I could just start living on pastries from the new bakery downtown—Mimi's, it was called—and dwelling under a rock.

That way maybe Merrie wouldn't be able to find me. “Your new guest, that's who,” she replied tartly.

Her hair was pure white, thick and springing from her head in a natural wave like wire coils erupting out of a box; any minute she was going to demand that I conjugate a verb.

“But he's not,” I protested, looking around hopelessly as she went on frowning in clear disapproval at me.

Because that was the thing about Merrie, and the real reason I was so worried about her party. Her friends liked me, as Ellie had said. But Merrie didn't, and I couldn't make her; I didn't amuse her, and there was nothing she wanted or needed from me.

Or from anyone, actually. Because in Eastport, Merrie Fargeorge was the real deal, the owner of the most valuable thing a person around here could possibly have: two centuries of Eastport ancestry, traceable all the way back to a fellow who arrived here with an axe, a mule, and a dream sometime way back in the late 1700s. And that, in downeast Maine, was the very definition of royalty.

“His car was in your driveway,” she pointed out. “Everyone saw it.”

The morning after the first night my then-not-yet-husband Wade Sorenson's pickup truck spent in my driveway, four different neighbors happened to stop by for a visit, eager for details and their feelings a little wounded, I could tell, when I refused to share.

“Oh,” I said now. “But, Merrie, he was only—”

“Never mind.” She brushed off my objection crisply. “He's all over town prying. Nose a mile long, that one has, and he's sticking it everywhere. Heavens, I would think a friend of yours would have better manners.”

Obviously she didn't think so. “But Merrie, he's
not a—
”

Her ice-blue eyes flashed annoyance as she ignored my attempt at a comment. For one thing, of course, I hadn't raised my hand.

“How old's your house? Who lived in it before you? Where'd the folks who built it come from? And what did they do?” Merrie went on with an affronted sniff.

“People don't care to put their whole family history out on display for some stranger with no local connections, you know, Jacobia,” she said.

But DiMaio was asking them to do so and it was obviously my fault. Meanwhile, suddenly I understood the real reason why I'd said I'd host the party at all.