The Dark House (6 page)

It was a pleasant evening, if a little moist, and Rollins took a seat high up in the stands to watch the Indians go through their warm-ups. A clear violation of the code: Customarily, Rollins remained hidden in his car throughout a pursuit. But as he had seen with Cindy, he was drawn to this great American idyll, one he'd scarcely experienced as a boy. He'd played only a little ball, never very well, of course. Richard was the athletic one in the family. Besides, it was good to get some air.

The Indians were taking on the Werner Ford Mustangs. The game itself was slow to get going, and then proved to be a sloppy affair with muffed grounders and errant pitching. Rollins' attention wandered to the distant trees, the various advertisements on the outfield wall, and finally to a youngish redhead in cut-offs and a tank top who was leaning against the side of the backstop. For a fleeting moment, Rollins thought it was Marj. Her fingers grasping the fence's wire mesh, the young woman's arms were up, giving Rollins a provocative glimpse of her underarms. She had a touch of Marj's brightness, her ability to liven things up.

After a couple of innings, she gave the Mustangs a last shout of encouragement and headed for the parking lot.

Rollins followed her.

Rollins' palms tingled, and his breath came faster than normal as he strolled along. He was conscious of being exposed on all sides, not just from a narrow angle or two as he would be in his car. He was aware of his skin, the visible parts and, also, the invisible parts that, with each step, were being rubbed and pressed by the insides of his clothes. But mostly he concentrated on the woman he was following. Each purrlike scuff of her sandals put every part of her in intriguing motion—her hair swinging across the back of her neck, her muscled calves flexing with each step, her thighs quivering inside her clingy cut-offs. He wasn't at all sure where this would lead, but he couldn't stop himself.
He'd crossed a line—into a place without lines.

She climbed into a Chrysler convertible with the top up and exited the parking lot quickly. Rollins had to hurry to his car (without being too obvious about it) and then zip after her to catch up. She went right onto 1A, and then U-ed back at the first rotary. Rollins stayed with her, several cars behind. Ten minutes passed as Rollins pursued the Chrysler, the driver's hair flowing behind like a windsock. His thoughts locked on to her, Rollins wondered if, like Marj, she also listened to hard rock and spent her evenings yakking on her cordless. This time, he left the recorder off.

He followed the Chrysler back to working-class Chelsea, where she wove through the grimy downtown. He felt a ripple of anxiety as, stopped at a light, he thought he caught her stealing an extra look in her rearview. He flipped down his visor to obscure himself. Then he had a jolt of fright a few blocks later when he saw her reach for a cell phone. Still he pursued. He charged in after her when, without signaling (so like Marj!), she made a sharp right turn into a narrow alley by a pizza parlor. He'd gone in about twenty yards when, with sudden terror, he saw the Chrysler jerk to a halt. The woman whipped around in her seat and pointed right at him, rage on her face. “He's right there!” she shouted.

Off to his right, Rollins saw a large bearded man come racing up a side alley at him. He was wielding a baseball bat. “Get the
fuck
away from my wife!” the man screamed. Rollins slammed the car into reverse and shot out of there, every nerve on fire.

What—what had gotten into him? What had he been thinking of? He thought he'd been so careful, so cunning. And for what? For nothing. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. He shouldn't have followed that poor woman. This exact situation was what his rules were for! He must have frightened her horribly—to see him following her like some stalker. And the risk to himself! That bearded man—the husband. He could have—Well, who knew exactly, but it might have been dreadful. He might have been hurt. Or the police might have been involved, or reporters. Just the thought of the shame, the embarrassment. The humiliation. And for what? What
had
he been
seeking? What if the bearded man had
not
charged at him—how far would he have pursued? What had he hoped to see? What might he have done?

His thoughts raced this way and that. But they always returned to the same place. To one idea, one feeling. He wanted to get closer. That was all.

R
ollins kept the tapes of his pursuits, filed by date and time, in their original clear-plastic cases on a long shelf over the wide, maple-framed bed in his bedroom. It seemed safest to have them there, where they would be close to him while he slept. Even though they did not concern him directly (
he
was not the subject of his pursuit, after all), they were still extremely personal, and revealing in their way.

The very first pursuit had occurred a few weeks before he'd arrived at Johnson—almost five years earlier, on November 18, 1995, at 6:17
P.M
., as it said in black felt-tip pen on the spine of the left-most cassette box. He'd come off a career in journalism, or something of a career (it lasted only a few years and ended badly); he'd been accustomed to taking elaborate notes and often used a tape recorder. That first one
wasn't much, just a kind of private journalism, a way of keeping his hand in. He'd spotted an interesting-looking car, a '63 Renault, as it happened, two cars up on the expressway, and he'd gotten curious about its owner. That proved to be an elderly retiree who lived alone in a small beachfront cottage in Harwichport, out on the Cape. After that, he tailed a magenta Ford Fairlane, drawn to the unusual color. It was driven by a frizzy-haired student who parked it in a tow zone in the Back Bay, removed a pair of stereo speakers from the trunk, and disappeared into a brownstone that belonged to Emerson College.

In those early days, when he was still caught up in the drama of each chase, Rollins had recorded practically everything, not just the objective details of a pursuit. He imagined elaborate romantic histories for his subjects (often replete with scandalous divorces and abandoned children), described the weather in adjective-laden detail, critiqued the architecture, reviewed the cars (particularly savagely where low-end Japanese imports were concerned)…. Now, he was embarrassed that he could ever have gone on so.

But he was younger then, and a bit of a romantic. Listening to these early tapes again, he sometimes sensed in them a tone of—what? explanation?—as though he'd imagined, even in the act of speaking, that he might share them someday with someone else. Here and there, he also picked up a note of unhappiness and longing that he hadn't meant to express, hadn't even been aware of at the time, and it startled him to hear himself sound so low. He'd always thought he'd come across as reasonably happy. He attributed those occasional bleats of dissatisfaction to an uneasy adjustment to the solitary life back in his early thirties, when it became clear that dating was not his game.

It struck him now how young he'd seemed and how much he'd matured in those five years. He'd straightened his life out a great deal since. He had a job, a good job, as well as what was surely one of the most exciting hobbies imaginable. Objectively, things may not have changed a great deal, but he had adjusted to them so much better. When he listened to the recent tapes, he figured he sounded all right. (Then again, it had taken a few years for the sadness of those early tapes to become apparent, as if his deepest feelings were recorded on a
film that took a long time to develop. He tried not to dwell too much on that distressing possibility.) In any case, he figured he'd probably never find anyone to listen to the tapes, so he'd gradually cut back on the verbiage, which was the safer course anyway. Now the verbal record was purely an aide-mémoire, a few basic details to kindle his recollection. In most cases, he confined himself to the make and model of car, time of sighting, route, destination, the subject, and any activities witnessed.

Those early tapes, even when stacked three boxes high (ten tapes to a box), covered almost four feet of shelf. He'd switched to the much handier microcassettes after six months—on July 7, 1996, at 9:17
P.M
.—and they continued, six to a slim case, another two feet, leaving only about a foot more for future recordings.

It was a hot night, and Rollins (who didn't believe in air-conditioning) was stretched out on his bed in his white boxer shorts, his head back on pillows, trying to get his mind off the sight of the redhead's husband coming at him. Because of the heat, he thought he might enjoy a winter recording, and, choosing pretty much at random, he'd selected the box from December 19, 1995, one of the early ones. Rollins removed the thick Sony tape player from the bedside cabinet and placed it beside him on the pillow. He slipped the tape into the slot and lay back with his eyes closed.

“Tuesday, December nineteenth, nineteen ninety-five. Eight-fourteen
P.M
.,” the tape began. “I'm on Boylston Street in the Back Bay between—what have we got here?—all right, yes, I see where I am now, between Berkeley and Clarendon.” The sound of his own voice was hypnotic. “The man I'm following is in a tan Mercedes S600. Married, I bet. But it wouldn't surprise me if he had somebody on the side. Seems like the type. A little too handsome, if you ask me. Too sure of himself. Too smooth. He left the Prudential garage seven minutes ago.” On the tape, the Merc's driver double-parked and hurried inside a Bath 'n' Bed shop. “Probably a last-minute Christmas-gift pickup for the wife he's forgotten all about.”

The tape went on: “A couple of boys just went past. Five and seven is my guess, nicely dressed, matching parkas, holding tight to their
mother. I'll bet a dollar they're headed to F.A.O. Schwarz.” Listening to his earlier self, Rollins tensed, just as his earlier self probably had. At roughly the age of the older boy, he'd gone with his brother Richard to see the Santa Claus at F.A.O Schwarz one December. The boys were taken by the handyman, Gabe, who sometimes doubled as chauffeur in his Buick Skylark, its wide interior fragrant with pipe tobacco. After Stephanie died, their parents usually offloaded such tasks, giving young Rollins the impression they couldn't bear the sight of him anymore. So Gabe drove them to the toy store that day. Of course, when Christmas came, none of the gifts that Rollins had discussed so carefully with Santa—a rare German edition of a prewar BMW was particularly longed for—appeared under the tree.

“Only six days until Christmas,” said Rollins' voice on the tape. “Look at everyone, all weighed down with packages, trudging through the goddamn slush. Nobody looks too joyful, if you ask me.”

As the words brought the scenes to mind—the parked cars buried in snowbanks, the Christmas lights twinkling in ice-glazed trees (it had been a particularly harsh winter, he remembered), Rollins had the unusual sensation that he was getting inside his own head, and the even stranger feeling that his own head was all there was. In the background, he could hear cars splattering by. He could picture the ashen faces of the package-laden shoppers, the leaden skies overhead. He had the overwhelming impression of soot-smudged snow, of concrete-colored skies, of dull tasks being repeated endlessly. It was distressing, suddenly, to think that there might have been an actual world out there that was in fact quite different—cheerier, mostly—from the one that he detailed to his Sony. To Rollins' disturbed surprise, the voice cried out: “Is gray the only color of this Christmas season? Shouldn't I be seeing a little more red or green or white out here? Is it really this gray?” Rollins clicked off the machine, nearly quaking with amazement that his younger self had come to the same realization—and he hadn't remembered it. He sat up and looked again at the cases over his bed, wondering what other disturbed perceptions were locked away in them.

The telephone rang. Rollins glanced at the bedside clock: It was well after eight, too late for telemarketers. With a jolt, he remembered
the possible fax number. Was its owner now calling him? Rollins didn't always answer his phone; if he was tired, he sometimes counted it a victory to hear the caller give up after six or seven rings. But he switched off the recorder, hurried to the sitting room, and plucked the receiver from its cradle. “Yes?”

“Rolo, that you?”

It was Marj. Her telephone voice was more full-throated than he had imagined. It seemed to thrust her toward him, mouth first.

“How did you get my number?” he asked cautiously. It wasn't listed.

“From Harmony.” The Johnson receptionist. “She's got all the home numbers. Look, I'm out by the house. I think you should come.”

“What house?”

“The house house. You know. The—dark house.”

“You went
back
?”

“Just—oh, come on, would you please?” Marj sounded like she might burst into tears. “It's on fire, Rollins! There are all these fire engines and shit everywhere.”

Rollins went silent, imagining the blaze, the streams of water arcing from fat hoses.

“Hurry, okay?”

“I'll be there as soon as I can.” Rollins restored the receiver to its cradle. He returned to his bed and, with some reluctance, unplugged the recorder and returned the tape to its place on the shelf overhead. It offered some serenity, this scene he had recorded so many years ago and tucked away in a plastic case like all the others, all of them completely over and done with. But then he thought of the house engulfed in flames and Marj there watching, the fire flickering in her eyes, the heat on her skin.

 

Mrs. D'Alimonte must have been hovering by her door, because she charged into the hall as soon as Rollins put his foot on the staircase. “Oh, Mr. Rollins,” she cried out breathlessly, “is that you?”

Rollins continued down the stairs, his head down.

“Mr. Rollins?” she repeated.

“Mrs. D'Alimonte,” he said frostily. Nothing more.

“The most wonderful news. I'm finally renting the other apartment on your floor.” It had been vacant for months. “To a single mother with a lovely little girl. I don't usually take children, as you know, but she was just so adorable. And now I'm so excited!” She brought her hands together like a preteen. “A little girl, Mr. Rollins, isn't that wonderful? And the mother, I think you'll find her very attractive. I do hope you'll look out for them, Mr. Rollins.”

“Yes, absolutely.” Rollins gave her a big smile that he hoped would not seem too artificial.

“Going out again tonight?” Mrs. D'Alimonte asked. The way she stood there, her back against her apartment door, Rollins thought suddenly that the old woman was not just trying to marry him off to some new renter, but had designs on him herself.

“I have to see someone.”

“Oh, really?” Mrs. D's eyes seemed to bore in on him.

“Good night, Mrs. D'Alimonte.” Rollins closed the door behind him.

 

As he proceeded to his garage, he sensed something and turned: There was a man on the far side of the street moving away from him. Rollins felt sure that he had not been in motion before, that he had been standing, facing Rollins' apartment building until he came out. The man was reasonably well-dressed for this part of town. Once he'd turned, Rollins could make out only a skeletal quality to his features. A gaunt man. Rollins crossed the street and hurried after him, but the man hooked a left at the next block. When Rollins hurried to the corner, he had disappeared. Rollins glanced in a window or two of the cafes and restaurants down the street, but, seeing nothing of him, thought better of it. He didn't want the gaunt man—if it was
the
gaunt man—to think that he was looking for him. It was better to feign detachment, unconcern. Rollins returned the way he had come, glancing back only once to see if he was being followed. At his garage, he avoided the elevator and climbed the stairs to the third floor. Then, his eyes darting about the shadows, he rushed to his Nissan in slot 37. He sped out of the parking garage, tires squealing.

As he passed along the narrow North End streets, across the Charles, and then headed north—
again
—on Interstate 93, he paid far less attention to the cars up ahead than to the ones behind. He thought about the back of his head, how it would look from behind. He didn't see a dark Audi. Might the gaunt man—if, again, it had been the gaunt man he'd seen—have changed cars? Rollins tried to examine the drivers as he cruised along. But, searching by mirror in the fading light, he could barely see into the interior of adjoining cars. Possibly, the gaunt man had enlisted an associate to follow him.

The thought shot through him: The gaunt man might be in league with Sloane! Panicky, Rollins checked around for the realtor's hulking Land Cruiser and was relieved to see no sign of it.

The Nissan hummed smoothly along in the middle lane, but Rollins had the sensation he disliked most in life—of being intruded upon, of being physically disturbed. What's more, he was filled with foreboding that his private pursuit was now about to go public. By now, the TV news vans would have swarmed the tree-lined Elmhurst street by number 29. Blow-dried reporters would be addressing TV cameras before the house's smoldering embers for their eleven o'clock report.

Yet as he drove east on 62, he heard no sirens, and, as he scanned the moonlit horizon, he could see no smoke rising over the trees and the smattering of colonial houses that dotted the narrow highway. As he wound through sleepy North Reading and turned in on Elmhurst, he saw no sign of a fire at all. Number 29 still stood, the faux medieval door intact, the metal siding gleaming dully just as before. The only difference was that a
FOR SALE
sign from Sloane Realty now adorned the front yard.

He was still gazing in astonishment at 29 from across the street when he heard a rap on the passenger-side window. He snapped his head around. It was Marj. She gestured for him to roll down the window, which he did. But, annoyed, he didn't pop the door lock, just straightened up on his side of the car, his arms folded across his chest. From there, he could see her thin hand, with its silver bracelets, several rings, and bright yellow fingernails, slither over the glass to pluck the lock button. She climbed in beside him, then quietly pulled the door shut behind her.