The Book of Old Houses (9 page)

Wade nodded in silent assent.

“A book of names, listing all the people who would live in this house,” I said. “How could it be anything but a trick of some kind?”

“Uh-huh. Speaking of tricks, why didn't you ask him about his?” Wade inquired.

The gun, he meant. But before I could answer he drew me down and wrapped his arms around me, smelling like toothpaste, fresh air, and harsh soap from his shower at the freighter terminal.

His breath when he spoke again was warm in my ear. “Jake?”

“I don't know,” I replied. “I guess because it's his. I don't like the way he went about it one bit, and I still intend to call him on that, once I've found out a little more about what's going on. But much as I wish it were, it's not up to me to decide who gets to have a gun at all.”

I went up on one elbow. “Did you see the fuss Prill made over him, though?”

In the end I'd had to shoo both dogs from underfoot. Even Cat Dancing, wonder of all wonders, had let DiMaio reach up to smooth two fingers between her ears without taking advantage of the tender wrist-flesh he exposed by doing so.

“And it's empty,” I added. “I unloaded it when I had it.”

This, however, didn't convince my husband. “You bring a gun, you're not going to bring extra ammunition?” he asked.

Of course I would.
Which didn't guarantee that Dave had, but the possibility meant maybe I'd better rethink this whole washing-my-hands-of-the-matter idea yet again.

Across the room, the curtains shone white in the moonlight. On August nights in Eastport it was warm enough to keep the bedroom windows wide open, cool enough to snuggle together under blankets.

Wade pulled me back down beside him, tucked ours in snugly around my shoulder, and wrapped the other side around himself.

“I didn't want him to know
I
knew he took it,” I persisted. “He might let on more about what he's up to, if he doesn't realize I think he's . . .”

He's what?
I wasn't sure. “Maybe he thinks Bert Merkle killed Robotham?” I fretted. “Maybe he's here to do something about that? And about . . . I don't know. Other things.”

“Other things?” Wade's lips grazed the side of my face, his whiskers prickling pleasantly on my neck. I let my eyes close.

“Mm-hmm. Like maybe even get the book back. Because you know, I didn't believe him when he said he didn't know where it . . . oh.”

I bit my lip hard. “Don't move,” Wade whispered.

So I didn't, nor make a sound, either, even when at last I turned joyfully into my husband's embrace.

An hour later
Wade slept peacefully. But I was awake again, standing by the window-opening in the ruined bathroom, wondering what in the world had possessed me to smash it apart.

Certainly there were times when fixing up an old house meant eliminating what had gone before. But this . . .

Gleams of streetlight peeked between the maple leaves whose faint rustling was the only sound. A skunk in no particular hurry made his bumbling way from one patch of shadow to the next.

Somebody's wind chimes tinkled. A bird chirped sleepily and fell silent. I turned to go back to bed. But then:

“So where were you?” It was Sam's voice, coming up from the back porch through the window opening.

“What do you mean?” Dave DiMaio asked.

Sam had been waiting for a chance to talk to DiMaio . Now I guessed they must have encountered each other somewhere—since coming home, Sam had become a regular late-night walker—and had ended up back here.

“Come on,” Sam said. “I'm just out of the hospital myself, so don't try to kid me. I know the look.”

I went on standing there; eavesdropping, but I couldn't help it.

They'd told me to let go, let Sam make his mistakes, fall if he had to. They'd told me I wasn't alone in it anymore, that there would be others ready to help him if he slipped. But when it's your kid who's in trouble, that's far easier said than done.

Small chuckle from DiMaio . “Silver Hill. Needed a tune-up.”

“Fancy,” Sam remarked.

Silver Hill was a private facility in Connecticut, very expensive and good. Sam had gone to an upstate New York place, cheaper.

The mother in me was glad somebody's son had the resources. But another side of me wondered who'd paid for Silver Hill. Not the pocketbook of an obscure English professor, surely. And insurance companies didn't choose luxury treatment facilities for their policyholders, if they paid for rehab at all.

“Did the job,” DiMaio answered. “I just picked a bad time for it. As if there's ever a good time.”

A wry note of resignation crept into his voice. I stood processing the information that Dave DiMaio was a recovering substance abuser, too, sober again only a few weeks.

“Your friend died while you were gone?” Sam asked.

“Yup.” A world of grief and guilt hung in the syllable.
Horace
and I were old-book-hunters together.

“Listen, do you know anything about a fellow who lives in Eastport, name of Bert Merkle? You don't,” DiMaio added, “have to tell anyone I asked.”

Sam's reply was inaudible, but the alarm bells ringing in my head weren't. Suddenly Dave's curiosity about old Eastport houses and families made more sense. So did his attempts up and down Water Street to make people think that was the reason for his visit.

Except in the Moose Island General Store, that is. Once Dave had the answers from there that he was looking for, he'd floated his cover story everywhere else, hoping it was the one that would get remembered instead of the real one.

And then he'd invaded my cellar. The sudden impulse to march downstairs and confront DiMaio seized me. I could demand to know just exactly what he thought he was doing here in Eastport.

And why. But for one thing it would've meant admitting I'd been listening in on Sam's private conversation, which I didn't want to do. Issues of trust were the tiniest bit tricky between us, at the moment.

Besides, I was beginning to believe even more strongly that any fact I knew—and that DiMaio didn't know I possessed—might come in handy sooner or later.

And there seemed to be precious few of them so I decided for the moment to hang on to the ones I had. On the porch a lawn chair creaked as someone got up.

“G'night,” Sam said. The screen door squeaked as he came in; footsteps descended the porch steps. I moved closer to the window, trying to catch a glimpse of DiMaio .

At first he was an indistinct shape in the gloom. But as he reached the street and stepped into the glow of the streetlight, he raised a hand in farewell, not looking back.

Not to Sam, who'd already come inside, the back door closing and locking sturdily with a recognizable
clunk-click.

But to me, as if Dave DiMaio had known all along that I was standing there listening.

Dave DiMaio walked
away down Key Street into the silence of an Eastport night. The dinner had been excellent, the company pleasant, and the walk afterward refreshing.

Sam Tiptree, especially, seemed decent. Dave hoped the kid made it through the early post-rehab stage, which Dave knew could be bumpy. He wished he'd had some advice to offer, not the least because the kid's mother seemed worried about him; she must not know, he thought, how that porch roof amplified the sound of footsteps overhead.

But Horace was always the one with good advice. Had been the one. Dave walked on. Overhead, bright celestial objects formed a glimmering net anchored here and there by the moon, the planets, and some of the larger stars.

On Water Street he spied a large feral cat loping along atop the granite riprap by the fishing pier, then another and another. That wasn't unusual; wild cats often infested seaside districts on account of all the rats.

But seeing them reminded Dave of a story Horace had told once, about a Maine island town many miles from the mainland and long before the time of air travel or instant communication.

The town had experienced a single freakishly high tide just before the onset of winter, Horace had said. Next came a blizzard and after that three months of fierce Atlantic storms, and by the time anyone got out from the mainland to check on the inhabitants of the island they found all were dead of what turned out to be bubonic plague.

All the rats were dead, too; thousands of them, more than could be explained. But no cats, though they found food bowls labeled Fluffy or Muffy, cat food in the household pantries, all the trappings of feline-keeping.

Just—no cats. And as far as Dave knew no one had ever been able to explain that, either.

Brushing aside a mental picture of cats fleeing en masse into the sea, he reached the Motel East.

He climbed the open stairs to the second floor, unlocked the door. Switching on the light inside, he paused out of habit in case he got some sense that anyone else had been in here in his absence.

But it seemed no one had been. Crossing the room he pulled the heavy curtains aside, opened the sliding-glass door a crack. Salt air gushed through. But walking away from the window he felt the curtain billowing behind him, and that made him feel uneasy, so he returned to the window and closed it, then took his shoes off and lay down on the bed.

He liked motel rooms, their bland imprintlessness and the light, unencumbered feeling that came from not owning anything in them. Sometimes when he was in one, he turned on the television and watched the late-night shows, a pastime he never indulged at school, where he didn't even own a set.

At school, he was content with faded drapes and shabby furniture inherited from some previous inhabitant. He took most meals in Commons; an amazing luxury, he'd thought when he'd first arrived there as a student, and his opinion hadn't changed.

In those days he'd never even been in a motel. But then he began traveling with Horace, first as a porter, later secretary and transcriptionist; Horace's notes were so hen-scratchingly cryptic that they had to be copied within hours of his writing them or he might forget what they meant.

Horace had asked Dave once if he minded the menial nature of the work. Horace always mapped out their objectives and plans for achieving them, never Dave.

But Dave had replied honestly that he preferred it. Putting his hand to a simple task, especially a dumb, repetitive one like carrying bags or copying notes, felt to Dave like what little he understood of the act of praying.

Thinking this he got up from the bed, slipped his feet back into his shoes, and pulled on his jacket. Outside, he walked away from the downtown area, then turned downhill toward a tidal inlet that was filled in now, but must once have been bridged. Old foundations jutting from the earth above the current street level told him that the bridge had been replaced with a road set on truckloads of hauled-in earth. The bay was as black as onyx and the tide had turned, water rushing in with a trickling sound.

The air smelled of fish and roses, creosote and salt. Ice-cold salt; the water here even in summer was only about fifty-five degrees, he'd read in one of the motel's flyers. Dave wondered how long it would take a body to decompose in the frigid water.

Too long, probably. Striding briskly, he started uphill again until he was looking south over a 180-degree view of night sky, starlit water, and small islands humped like dark animals.

Nothing moved. Dave resumed walking and soon saw the trash-strewn yard and a tiny trailer hunkered at its rear amid heaps of junk. Flattened cans, old wooden pallets, a satellite dish with odd metal projections soldered clumsily to it . . .

Merkle's place, he thought, as darkly chaotic as the man himself. A dim yellowish light burned behind ancient venetian blinds in the tiny window.

Walk away.
Horace's voice spoke calmly inside Dave's head.
Just turn your back, the other cheek, a new leaf.

Get out of here.

While you still can.

Only Merkle hadn't let Horace Robotham turn
his
back, had he? Instead he'd gotten wind somehow of an old book, realized what it might be, and learned that Horace had it.

And then he'd murdered Horace, making it look as if a mugging had gone wrong, and then—

Then Merkle had stolen the book. It was the kind of thing Merkle had always collected.

Grimoires, mostly; books of spells, many of which he'd tried using. Or so rumor had it; back in their college days, terrible aromas and odd sounds had emanated from Merkle's rooms late at night, rooms to which he'd admitted no one.

Spellbooks weren't all Merkle wanted, though. Most were filled with nonsense. Once in a blue moon one might contain some scrap of usable lore; even then, the trick was not so much in following as in deciphering it. But the Tiptree woman's book was different.

If genuine, the thing was not an instruction manual. This book didn't purport to provide tools—the recipes, spells, or god forbid, incantations—of what naive devotees called the magickal arts. Instead it held a list that, if authentic, could only have been compiled
by means of
magic.

In other words, it was proof. And for that, Merkle would have murdered a hundred Horaces, or a thousand.

The rank smell of kerosene burning in a badly vented stove stank up the neighborhood around Merkle's grim little dwelling. Horace had always said you needed to take plenty of time, not only for planning, but so that you felt confident, when your plan went into action.

Or in case your plan changed, as Dave's was already doing. He'd come to avenge his friend, but so much talk about the old book had reminded him of what Horace would've wanted, in-stead: The book itself. Dave imagined it lurking somewhere, a patch of darkness swallowing up the light.

Not so bad on its own, maybe. But when you put one patch of darkness with another, and then another . . .

Standing there, unwilling to leave what he already thought of as the scene of the crime, Dave let his mind drift back yet again to the adobe hut in New Mexico. It had turned out to house only a wizened, half-blind old woman, brewing up useless potions over a smoke-hole mesquite fire and muttering obscenities in Spanish.