The Dark House (4 page)

He could hear Sloane's voice, a low monotone, from the master bedroom as he moved back through the living room. It was a small house—the living area all flowed together, the kitchen, dining room, and sitting area all merging into one. No privacy, Rollins thought. At the big house in Brookline where he'd grown up, space was all there was. Everything and everyone seemed so far apart—shut away in that vast house behind thick, oak doors down long hallways that were hung with oils and silenced by thick Persian rugs. But here, the slightest sounds rang through the walls like gunfire.

“Harris?” It was Marj calling from the master bedroom. It took Rollins a moment to realize that she meant him. He turned and found her coming toward him. “I didn't know where you were.” She sounded frightened.

“I was showing her the Jacuzzi,” Sloane explained. Was there a note of guilt in his voice? “Worth the price of the house right there. Want to see?”

He guided Rollins back to the master bath. Water was pouring into the tub through a golden spigot, pooling with a froth of bubbles.

Rollins didn't like the look of it. “We should be going.” He headed back out of the bedroom and down the hall to the front door.

“You want to leave an address or phone number or something?” Sloane shouted after him.

“I don't think we're interested after all,” Rollins replied. “Thanks anyway.”

“Well, you have my card if you change your mind.” Sloane stood just inside the screen door, watching them. “People do, you know, all the time.”

 

Outside in his car, Rollins could feel Sloane's eyes on him from the threshold as he released the hand brake and switched on the ignition. It was like being X-rayed. He shouldn't have been able to feel anything, but he did. The whole left side of his head seemed to buzz where it was exposed to Sloane's gaze. He eased the car away from the curb.

“Find anything?” Marj asked.

Distracted, Rollins didn't quite take in what Marj was asking.

“I said, did you find out anything while I was in with el creepo?”

“No. Nothing.” He took a right, to double back onto 62. He still felt Sloane's gaze.

“You sure he wasn't the guy you followed?”

“Yes
.” Rollins nodded emphatically.

“Then why do you suppose he was so interested in you?”

Sometimes, Rollins felt things before his brain registered them: His palms suddenly felt oily, and there was a murky pulsing deep in his chest. “What makes you think he was?”

“Are you blind? You didn't notice the way he looked at you?”

“Of course not.” All his senses had been on high alert. But he had been distracted, first by Marj and then by Sloane's suddenly pulling up out of nowhere, his headlights blazing. If only he'd had a little warning, time to prepare.

“It was like he was trying to figure out if he knew you from somewhere,” Marj went on. “You
sure
you never seen him before?”

“Positive.”

“Then, when he had me alone with him by the Jacuzzi, he kept asking me stuff about you—like where you worked, where you lived. He kept it casual, but I could tell he really wanted to know. That's why I yelled. Freaked me fucking out.”

Sloane's face loomed up in Rollins' mind, big as a billboard. “You didn't tell him, did you?”

“I had to tell him
something
!”

“Why?”

“He'd think I was holding out on him. Rolo, it would have been strange. I kept it real general, don't worry. I said you were in mutual funds, and you lived, like, in town.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Look, maybe he was just trying to tell if you could afford the house.”

“Anybody could afford that house.”

“I couldn't.”

An offhand remark, Rollins was pretty sure. Marj hadn't meant anything by it. All the same, it shamed him. Clearly, his parents had been right about one thing: It was never wise to discuss money. He vowed to avoid the topic with Marj in the future.

 

The rest of the ride back to Boston passed uneasily for Rollins. He dropped Marj off at her apartment building. Despite her demurrals, he saw her to her front door and opened it for her.

“Thanks.” Her voice seemed to be almost all breath. “You don't suppose anything bad will happen, do you? I mean, we were just playing around, basically, right?”

Rollins assured her that nothing would come of it.

Marj smiled. “Well, good night then.” She extended a hand. Still smarting from the pushy way that Sloane had thrust out his hand, Rollins was determined to be more suave with Marj. But somehow he miscalculated and, rather than lock onto the meat of her hand, he ended up grasping mostly her fingers.

Instead of driving home, he went through the first intersection, then curved back to watch her windows for a few minutes from a taxi stand. Things were starting to swim a little, and he just wanted to make sure that she was okay. That's all. He saw her speak on a cordless phone as she paced back and forth in front of what he guessed were the living room windows. He watched her gesture with those very same fingers, the ones that had touched him. He watched her run them through her hair.

I
t was past eleven when he returned to his own apartment building, a former row house on Hanover Street in Boston's North End. The neighborhood was home mostly to Italian-Americans, but also to an increasing number of well-heeled young professionals like himself, who were drawn to the cappuccino bars and not put off by the lingering mob associations of the place. At that hour, Rollins was surprised to find his landlady, Mrs. D'Alimonte, still up. “Oh, Mr. Rollins!” she cried, bustling out of her ground floor apartment with a plateful of cannoli. She was wearing a faded housedress, and her hair looked limp from the heat. “I baked them for you special.”

Rollins was in no mood for dessert, but he didn't want to be impolite. He selected one of the pastries and delicately bit into the end,
careful not to make a mess of the ricotta filling. “Delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You're out late tonight,” said Mrs. D'Alimonte, widening her round eyes. “A pretty girl, I hope.”

Rollins flushed, then realized she was just fishing for information. He headed upstairs, eager for the solitude of his apartment, his wide bed and soft pillow.

He had made it only a few steps up the stairs before Mrs. D'Alimonte called out to him again. “I'm glad you like the cannoli, Mr. Rollins.” She raised her voice a little. “Because I—well—I meant to tell you—this came for you the other day.” Rollins craned his head around. She was holding an envelope by one corner as if it were some sort of legal evidence. “And I—oh dear—somehow it ended up in my apartment under the newspapers and—”

Rollins returned a few steps down the stairs and took the envelope from her hand. As he did so, Mrs. D'Alimonte's jaw started to quiver. Rollins hadn't thought he could have such an effect on anyone, least of all his oversize landlady. He inspected the envelope.
Rollins
was handwritten in ballpoint on the front, nothing more; there was no stamp, postmark, or return address.

“Someone must have dropped it off for you,” Mrs. D'Alimonte said. “I—I found it on the floor just inside the front door.”

“When?”

“A week ago? Maybe ten days? I'm afraid I don't exactly remember.”

“Mrs. D'Alimonte, I have to ask: Do you usually examine my mail?”

“No, never, Mr. Rollins!”

But Rollins had made his point. He pocketed the envelope and continued back upstairs.

“Mr. Rollins, are you in some kind of trouble?”

Rollins stopped again. “Whatever makes you think that?”

“You seem—oh, nothing. Never mind. Good night, Mr. Rollins. I'm sorry about the letter. I should have given it to you sooner. I'm just a mixed-up old lady.”

Rollins waited until Mrs. D'Alimonte had retreated back into her apartment before he opened his door. He had installed several dead bolts, and it always took him a while to unlock everything. Inside, he punched in the code disconnecting his burglar alarm, then flipped on the lights and checked to see that all the shades were pulled.

Rollins lived in a one-bedroom apartment with dark wallpaper he'd selected to bring out the dusky hues of the oil landscapes on the walls. Restfully English in their gilt frames, they'd been acquired by a great-aunt for a song at Knoedler's nearly a century earlier. Another family heirloom stood by the window, next to the radiator. It was an early Victorian mahogany sideboard that had come down from his maternal grandfather. It was a little large for the space, but Rollins had always been fond of it. As a child, he had liked to hide in the lower cabinets, especially during his parents' dinner parties. That was how he'd learned his father considered him “withdrawn” and “enigmatic,” two words he'd had to look up. Now, the sideboard was decorated with a scissored angel from the younger of Richard's two children, an eight-year-old named Natalie; it had come two Christmases ago, but Rollins hadn't thrown it out. The angel stood, somewhat faded and curled up, beside some ceremonial silver and an extremely handsome, inlaid Parisian humidor. Since Rollins didn't smoke, the humidor had remained empty for years until, through a previous job, he got to know a private investigator by the name of Al Schecter. Actually, Schecter always called himself a “professional investigator” to downplay the lurid Hollywood associations of his career. Rollins hadn't talked to him in years, but he thought of him fondly every time he looked at the humidor. Schecter had given him a dozen cigars—illegal Cubans from his collection—to fill it. In tribute to Schecter, Rollins had never removed them.

Envelope in hand, Rollins settled into the large leather chair that stood by the bookcase stuffed with a few of his Latin texts from college, some business books, an Arnold genealogy volume (covering his mother's side of the family), and a complete leatherbound edition of James Fenimore Cooper that his grandmother had given him as a graduation present. He switched on the antique lamp that curved over the
chair, pulled on his reading glasses, and looked at the envelope. The
Rollins
was written with a definite scrawl, whether it was a mark of haste or slovenliness he couldn't guess. A cheap pen, anyway. A blob of ink had congealed at the top of the
R
and on the second
l
.

He took a breath, poked an index finger under the flap, and ripped the envelope open. There was a note inside, written on plain paper. It bore no name or letterhead, merely a number scrawled with the same blobby ballpoint:
9427503
. At first, Rollins assumed it was some sort of account number or possibly an entry code. But then he noted the seven digits and decided that it had to be a telephone number, even if it lacked the usual hyphen separating out the exchange. He glanced over at the telephone, the heavy, black, rotary type now considered old-fashioned, at his elbow. He considered dialing, but it was nearly midnight, no time to phone.

 

The note on the side table glowed slightly yellow in the tawny morning light that filtered through the window shades. Rollins was tempted to crumple it up and toss it into the wastebasket like other unsolicited correspondence. It was rude, after all, to be so inexplicable. The note seemed to demand something from him that he wasn't sure he wanted to give.

It brought back to mind all the strange events involving the dark house, events that were likewise inexplicable. Could those events and this obscure note be linked? On the face of it, two oddities in close succession seemed likely to be related. That's the conclusion that he'd come to last night, anyway, as he was struggling to go to sleep. But now, in the daylight, he wasn't so sure. If Mrs. D'Alimonte was to be believed, the note had arrived well before Rollins had gone to the dark house, before he'd ever thought of going to the dark house, before there ever
was
a dark house so far as he was concerned. And it was as pointless to contemplate a link between these two unrelated occurrences as…well, as it would be to project matrimony between him and Marj based on the previous evening's car ride. After all, that night's pursuit had been purely arbitrary, as always. Rollins had simply looked up from the
Herald
's gossip column in front of that newsstand in Somerville, spotted the Audi going by, and followed it.

He took the sheet of paper into the kitchen and propped it up against the salt and pepper shakers on the table and sat down before it, bringing his head low to study it. It was just a number. A number from nowhere. That was all. No watermarks, stray doodles—or any indentations left from other correspondence, which a cop show recollected from his childhood inspired him to check for.

For comparison, he retrieved the envelope from the telephone table and tipped it up against a candlestick. He looked from one document to the other. On both, the handwriting was light, almost spidery. Looking closer, he thought he detected a trace of femininity in the delicate loop of the first
9
. In Rollins' experience, men's handwriting tended toward jagged angularity, women's to a more supple roundness. The idea came to him in a spasm: Might Marj have written it? In a kind of brain-burst, he pictured her laboring over the paper, tongue protruding through tightened lips, ballpoint in hand.

He hurried to the telephone book to see if Brighton might be covered by the 942 exchange. But no: 942 was for Watertown, across the Charles River from Brighton. While he was at it, he checked Marj's home telephone. There was an M. Simmons at her address on Washington Street, but the phone was 367–9836. Another wild possibility struck him. Both the name Rollins and the number 9427503 were seven units long. Was 9427503 the numerical equivalent of his name on the telephone dial? Was someone playing an elaborate joke on him? He checked the telephone. No to that, too. Rollins and 9427503 did not overlap in the slightest; the telephone equivalent of Rollins was 7655467.

He was tempted to dial that number, just for curiosity's sake. But he returned to the kitchen and, leaving the two pieces of paper on their easels, he prepared his breakfast (toast with peach jam, orange juice, black coffee). He continued to stare at them from various angles around the little kitchen throughout his meal. When he had cleared away his dishes, he could postpone the inevitable no longer. He carried the note over to his telephone table, picked up the receiver, and dialed. He got two rings, then a click. Then the shrill whine of a fax/modem line shrieked into his ear, and he hurriedly replaced the receiver.

 

It would have been about a ten-minute walk from his North End apartment to Johnson Investments in Boston's financial district, but Rollins always drove. That took fifteen minutes, what with the lights, the tangle of one-way streets, and the parking. With the windows rolled up and the visor down, he felt safely insulated from the world as he glided along. Irritable this morning, with so much on his mind, he applied the horn liberally to scatter the pedestrians in his path.

He settled the car into its space four levels down from the street, then boarded the elevator to the lobby floor, its gleaming Tuscan marble and polished brass a testament to the firm's prosperity, if not to that of its employees. For himself, he liked being part of such a big, gleaming success; it took off some of the family pressure to accomplish something personally. He enjoyed the smart click of his heels against the marble, the expansive echo, the surge of other well-dressed employees hurrying along to keep up with the demands of the global markets. He crossed the hall and, passing up two elevators that looked a bit too full for comfort, rode in silence to the fourteenth floor in the company of Kent McMillan, the twenty-nine-year-old stock picker whose Emerging Sector Fund had of late defied gravity. For three flights, Rollins watched him in the shiny reflection of the elevator doors. Then he spoke. “Mind if I ask you a question?”

McMillan's eyes turned to his.

“Do people ever send you things out of the blue? People you don't know, I mean.”

“Fan mail?” McMillan flicked some lint off a lapel. “Sure. Goes with the territory.”

“I meant something more along the line of…anonymous notes.”

Clearly, McMillan didn't grasp what Rollins meant. “I get pictures sometimes. Women send 'em to me. You'd be surprised. Some of 'em—whew.” He rolled his eyes.

“They send them to you at home?”

“God, no. I'm not listed. The office. Why—someone been bugging you?”

“No, no.” Rollins coughed up a little laugh that he hoped would
sound dismissive. “Nothing serious. I just received something a little unusual—handwritten, no name—and I thought you might—”

McMillan interrupted: “If it gets weird, you can always call security. They're tigers.”

The elevator reached Rollins' floor, and he stepped out. “Well, thanks.”

“Sorry it happened,” McMillan called out behind him.

McMillan had ten more flights to go, but Rollins got off on fourteen to join the other drones in operations, or ops, which amounted to the custodial department of the growing Johnson empire. If Rollins were ever blinded, he could find his way here by smell, or the absence thereof, for it was the one part of the entire building that bore no scent whatsoever. The other departments, to Rollins' refined nostrils, nearly reeked of greed and fear, the dueling emotions of high finance. But ops was safe from all that. All the drones did was run the numbers on the numbers—determining the profits and losses of the big egos upstairs. By most standards, it was dull work. It involved no travel, few telephone conversations even, just the steady click of computer keys and an occasional amble down the hall for a cup of decaf or a Diet Coke.

But ops was Rollins' domain, his lair, and it comforted him to see the place this morning, just as always: the blue-gray carpeting that covered not just the floor but three feet of the walls as well; the chalky, acoustic-tiled ceiling; the shiny faces, unmarked by strain. The sounds evoked an electronic rain forest: the driplike patter of the computer keyboards; the murmur of subdued, unenthusiastic voices; the warbling sort of ring that the phones gave off. Rollins had been here five years, a tenure twice the duration of the next-longest inmate, the irrepressible Sally James in overseas. But unlike the others, Rollins had no plans to leave.

One of the attractive points of the job for Rollins had always been the narrowness of its emotional range. He didn't go to many parties, but when he did he usually accompanied the inevitable description of his job with a brief, wry lecture on the value of monotony. To him, the work represented security, reliability, steadiness—qualities that were
important for reasons he had never fully explored and did not intend to. He let the big egos grapple with the vagaries of the investment trade, whether interest rates would rise or fall, where the unemployment rate would be six months out, whether the bond market would be spooked by an inauspicious military buildup in some piddling third-world country. Rollins merely put the day's figures in a row and added them up. Well, there was more to it than that, but who really wanted to go into it? Leave it at this: Some days the sum was positive, some days negative, and he didn't particularly care either way.