The Dark House (5 page)

Rollins always arrived well before nine o'clock, to give himself time to get settled before the numbers started to fly when the domestic equity markets opened at nine-thirty. This morning, he passed through the glass double doors at 8:47. Happy not to be waylaid by Harmony, the gabby receptionist, he embarked on the twenty-three steps that led him to his small office with its one window, a prized emblem of his seniority. Marj's workstation was about ten feet past his own, off to the right, and concealed behind a gray baffle. Rollins would catch sight of her only if she was standing, which she evidently wasn't doing now. He was burning to ask her about the note, but he was not prepared to go and actually peer in her doorway to see if she was there. That would be a public declaration of interest in Marj that he wasn't prepared to make. She was little more than a temp, after all, one with double earrings in each ear, like some Hottentot.

He veered off toward his desk, sat down, and scanned the windows of the office building across the way. But his eyes did not linger there. He felt edgy, restless. He flipped on his computer and tapped his foot on the carpeting until the machine booted up. He checked for e-mail messages, but found none. He felt a moment of relief that at least one avenue to his awareness remained uninvaded. Then disappointment set in. Marj might have sent him something. He could imagine it: clumsy but affectionate, signed—who knows?—“me.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. Maybe she hadn't arrived yet. Unlike himself, her daily schedule was more variable. Some days, she rushed in well after the market had opened, a bit of tardiness that was nearly unforgivable at Johnson. Other days, she arrived even before he did. Was she here?

Rollins stood up and quickly scanned across the baffle tops. No sign of her.

He grabbed a mug off the slender shelf above his desk and headed down the corridor toward the kitchen nook. He slowed as he passed Marj's desk. He glimpsed a bright summer outfit. Marj was leaning back in her chair as she talked to Jenette Manglen, the matronly senior executive from sectors. Rollins' and Marj's eyes met for only a moment. Marj's fingers flicked a slight greeting. Before Manglen could spot him loitering there, Rollins accelerated again.

He lingered in the kitchen area, sampling the doughnuts. He bit into three of them, found them all unappetizing, and dropped them in the trash. He checked his watch, then slowly made his way back to his office, coffee in hand. This time, Marj was alone. She looked up toward him expectantly, but, right then, Rollins could not bring himself to speak to her. What would he say? It was enough to know, simply, that she was there. He continued on back to his desk, where he sipped his coffee, his door open beside him.

“You could at least wave.” It was Marj, close by. He sensed the brightness of her dress.

Rollins pretended to be absorbed in his computer screen.

From the way the air moved, he could feel her lean down to him. “Hello?”

He turned around to face her. He noticed the thin, wobbly line of yellow eyeliner on her eyelid, the youthful softness of her cheeks and chin.

She leaned back against his desktop, her pelvis nearly at his eye level. “What, not talking to me?”

In his youth, Rollins had been prone to migraines that whipped up out of nothing, forcing him to lie under cold compresses in bed with the shades drawn for days, and he lived in fear that they would someday return. They tended to come out of a feeling of being overwhelmed, as if he were caught in a net from which he could never clear himself, no matter how much he flailed and flailed. Certain colors could do it, some smells, even a noise if it was the right pitch. But some emotions would do it most of all. Now, despite his eagerness to be here with
Marj, Rollins felt his temples pounding in a way that was not auspicious. He needed silence, solitude. Rollins got up from his chair and stepped past her, inadvertently catching his fingertip on her skirt as he brushed by. “Excuse me. I'm sorry.” He headed briskly down the corridor. Rollins could sense heads turning toward him as he rushed by, but he was past caring. As he passed the kitchen nook, he hurriedly set his coffee mug down in the sink. Behind him, he could see Marj pursuing him.

This was not good. He hurried on down to the end of the corridor, past the boss's glassed-in office, took a right, and dashed to the men's room, sure that he would be safe there among the porcelain urinals. He pushed open the heavy door and rushed headlong to the sink, desperate to plunge his head under ice-cold water. But just as he was reaching for the spigot, the door opened again behind him, and he heard a pair of heels click on the tiled floor.

“Rolo, you all right?” It was Marj, coming closer.

At first, Rollins didn't answer. He ducked down silently to check the toilet stalls, which, mercifully, were empty. “You shouldn't be in here,” he said quietly. He soaked a paper towel with cold water and dabbed his forehead.

Marj stepped closer and took the towel from him. “Bend down.” She spoke softly.

Rollins grasped the edges of the sink with his hands, bowed his head, and closed his eyes. He felt her hands push into his hair as she pressed the cool towel down on his temples, first one, then the other. Some water trickled down toward his eyes, like backward tears.

 

Warm water slurping in his ear, and suds threatening his eyes, and her hands on him, Neely's hands, digging into his scalp, pushing and pushing, from behind him, as she bent over his back. “Keep your eyes shut,” she'd say. “Squeeze 'em.” And his snuffling as he said okay.

 

He closed his eyes tight, his head filled with the soothing sensation that came from Marj's fingertips. He was eager for it, but uncertain, too. He
was too aware of Marj's body, pressing against his side; with Neely, he'd sensed only her hands.

“Headache?”

“A migraine. I could feel it coming. I'm sorry. I should have said.”

Marj continued to massage his temples. Rollins was terribly afraid someone might come in. “You sleep all right last night?” she asked.

“Not particularly.”

“Me neither. I kept thinking about that weird house, and that real estate guy.”

Rollins let his head sag, trying to let the soothing coolness from her fingertips work into his brain. A long time passed in silence as her fingers went around and around on his temples. For a while, her gentle strokes achieved wonders. It seemed that her caresses were actually reaching into his consciousness. But finally, the sheer proximity of this near-stranger, delightful as she was, unnerved him. He thought about how awkward it would look if someone came in and found them there, his head bent low before her, his left ear so close to her breast. He stepped away from the sink. “Thanks.” He pulled out some paper towels to dry his hands and the sides of his face. When he looked up, he was surprised she was still there, considering that he had delivered her cue to leave. But there was no denying it—she was definitely attractive just now, her hair rumpled, her lips parted as she looked at him.

“I found this when I arrived home last night,” he said after a moment. He reached into his jacket pocket and handed her the envelope.

Marj wiped her hands on her skirt and took it from him.

Rollins watched her open up the envelope and slide out the paper. “You didn't leave it for me by any chance, did you?”

“This?” Marj read off the digits, then checked on the back. “God, no. What's 9427503—the winning lotto?”

“I figured it was a phone number.”

“You try it?”

Rollins nodded gently, not wanting to bring on a headache. “It's a fax line.”

Marj brought her hand to her mouth. “Oh, God—you got that, that screech? No wonder you have a headache.”

“You sure you didn't leave it?”

“Rolo, I don't even know where you live.”

That nickname seemed to have established an intimacy that Rollins wasn't quite ready for.

“Yesterday, you told Sloane I lived in town,” he said evenly.

“Will you get off this, please? In town—that's just an expression, okay?” She looked at the note again. “It's not even my handwriting. I don't do script—not like that anyway. Look—”

She reached into Rollins' jacket for a pen and wrote his name out in her own handwriting below the other
Rollins.
When she was finished, it was strange to see his name there twice, as if two different people—both of them strangers, really—were calling out to him.

“See?” Marj asked. “What would I send you a bunch of numbers for, anyway? If I wanted to write you something, I'd use words.”

“I guess I wasn't thinking.”

“So who did send it?”

“That's what I don't know.”

“We'll have to try the fax line, then.” Marj snapped up the paper and headed for the door.

“Wait a second—you can't just—”

But Marj didn't stop. Conscious of his incipient migraine, Rollins tried not to jostle his head too much as he hurried to catch up to her outside in the corridor. “You can't just send her anything.”

Marj turned around toward him, puzzlement on her face. “Her?”

Somewhat sheepishly, Rollins told her his theory of female penmanship, afraid Marj might find it sexist. Women could be touchy about such things.

Marj looked at the letter again. “Maybe. We'll have to find out, won't we?” She led him back to the fax machine and pulled out a blank sheet of paper. “Here. Write something.”

“But if I send a note, it will have this fax number on it. Whoever-it-is will know where I work.”

“They already know where you live.”

Rollins rubbed his temples, feeling the hot skin slide around on either side of his head.

“Besides, you were willing to call from your home phone. That's traceable. Ever heard of caller ID?”

“Yes, but—” It hadn't occurred to him that such a modern innovation might apply to his own calls from such an antique phone. It distressed him to think how visible he was—he who had always prided himself on his ability to stay hidden. It seemed that he was scattering calling cards wherever he went. “Oh, never mind.”

“Go on. Write something. It probably won't go through anyway. It's probably just a computer modem.”

Rollins leaned over the table on which the fax machine sat. After a bit of thought, he wrote:
Who are you and what do you want?
He showed the line to Marj.

“Perfect.” She gave him an admiring look, then took the sheet and fed it into the fax machine, punched in the number on the telepad, and pressed the green
START
button. There was a dial tone, then the chirp of the numbers going through, and then the scream of the machine at the other end of the line. Finally a click, and the paper started to slide slowly through.

“Looks like it's working,” Marj said.

Both of them watched the paper disappear into the machine and reemerge into the collecting tray beneath. Marj scooped it up from there and handed it to Rollins, who dropped it into the wastebasket. “I guess it was a fax number,” he said.

All Rollins could think was that he had sent a message off into the void. But he didn't have a chance to ponder this for long. The fax machine soon gave out another click, then it started to rumble, and slowly a piece of paper rose from the machine's hind end. Rollins swept the fax off the receiving tray. It was his own message sent back to him. But this time, each
you
was underlined, so that the sentence now read:
Who are you and what do you want?

“Well, looks like it was a wrong number after all,” Rollins said, relieved.

Marj looked astonished. “Are you kidding me? Somebody's on to
you, Rolo. Who are you, what do you want—it's what
I'd
want to know.”

“Come on. It's just some clod who's irritated to get a fax from a stranger.”

“Well, let's find out.” Marj snatched the message from Rollins and grabbed the pen that was still in his hand. She added her own note to the bottom of the fax:
What's that supposed to mean?

Rollins watched as she slid it into the fax machine, pressed
REDIAL
, then
START
. The fax worked its way through the machine's digestive tract.

For several minutes, they both hovered expectantly over the fax machine. But no message came back.

“See?” Rollins said. “It's nothing.” He returned to his desk, glad finally to be right about something.

 

It was hot and steamy when Rollins left the Johnson building in his Nissan—eighty-six degrees according to the electronic sign on the U.S. Trust building on Congress Street. To get his mind off this nonsense with the fax number, he latched on to the first car he saw whose license plate ended in 86. He was desperate to lose himself in a pursuit again. On the road, he was nothing and nobody, just a pair of eyes and a pair of lips to record what he saw. He longed to empty himself out again.

The vehicle with the 86 proved to be a maroon Ford Windstar. He'd caught sight of the minivan turning right off Commonwealth Avenue onto Arlington Street, by the Public Garden with its roses and fruit trees, and he dutifully made note of this fact into the tape recorder. “Seems to be a fan of the governor's,” Rollins added, referring to the sticker on the rear bumper. He followed the minivan into the Callahan Tunnel and up Route 1A by Logan Airport to a parking lot beside a litter-strewn baseball field, where three uniformed young ballplayers piled out. “Little Leaguers, looks like,” Rollins whispered into the tape recorder as he glided by. “Three of them and a dad.” His own father's sporting interests had always been confined to an occasional round of golf at the country club. Rollins parked farther
down the lot, then stepped out of his car. The kids played for
JOE'S DONUTS INDIANS
, as it said in block type across the front of their uniforms, the
O
's enlarged to look like doughnuts. Rollins watched the driver lead his charges to the diamond. He waited a bit, then followed behind.