The Wolf Gift (34 page)

“You don’t know where he comes from, do you?” asked Reuben.

“Well, he travels all over, to hear him tell it. I think he said last night that he’d been in Mumbai. I know one time he said he’d just come back from Cairo. I don’t know that he has a permanent home. He always got his mail at the old house, as far as I know. Wait a minute, I think he got a letter here today, as a matter of fact. Postman said he had no authority to be delivering his mail up there any longer. Left it here in case he comes back.”

“Maybe I could give him the letter,” said Reuben. “I’m from the Nideck house.”

“Yes, I know that you are,” said the man.

Reuben introduced himself and apologized for not having done so before.

“That’s all right,” said the man. “Everybody knows who you are. We’re glad there’s a new family in the old house. Glad to see you.”

The man went out into the Inn’s dining room and came back with the letter. “My wife opened it before she saw what it was. Then she saw it was for Tom Marrok. So I’m sorry about that. You can tell him we’re to blame for that.”

“Thank you,” said Reuben. He had never stolen a piece of federally protected mail before, and he felt his cheeks color.

“If he comes in, I’ll tell him you’re up at the house and you’ve got the letter.”

“That would be fine,” said Reuben.

Galton waved from the bar and lifted his beer stein as Reuben and Laura went out the door.

They drove back to the house.

“You can’t believe anything Marrok told you,” said Laura, “not about ‘the other’ or his intentions. It was lies.”

Reuben stared straight ahead. He had but one thought in his head and that was that Marrok had been in the house yesterday before they even arrived.

As soon as they were safe inside the great room again, he opened the letter. He was certain this had been the property of the dead creature, so what was the point of scrupling about it now?

The letter was in that strange spidery script that he’d seen only once before—in Felix’s diary upstairs.

There were three pages to the letter, and not a single word was discernible to him, of course. But there was what might be a signature.

“Come with me,” he said and led Laura up the stairs to Felix’s small studio. He snapped on the overhead light.

“It’s gone,” he said. “Felix’s diary. It was right there on that desk.”

He began to search the desk. But he knew it was useless. Whoever had taken the tablets from all over the house had taken the diaries of Felix Nideck too.

He looked at Laura. “He’s alive,” he said. “I know he is. He’s alive, and he wrote to this man, Marrok, telling him to come back here, to—.”

“You don’t know what he told him,” Laura said reasonably. “You don’t really know that this letter is from Felix. You only know these people share a language, a script.”

“No. I know. He’s alive. He’s always been alive. Something stopped him from coming back here and claiming his identity and his property. Maybe he wanted to disappear. Maybe he couldn’t pretend to be his age any longer, because he simply wasn’t aging. And he had to disappear. Though I can’t believe he would have done such a painful thing to Marchent or her parents—as to simply disappear.”

He was still for a moment, surveying the familiar clutter of the little room. The blackboards, the bulletin boards—all appeared unchanged. There was the same faded chalk writing, the same yellowed newspaper clippings with their map tacks. The same photographs everywhere of the smiling Felix and the smiling Sergei and the other mysterious men.

“I have to reach him some way, I have to talk with him, beg him to understand what happened to me, that I didn’t know what this was, that I—.”

“What is it?”

He let out a long exasperated sigh. “It’s the restlessness,” he said. “It’s the restlessness that comes when I can’t change, when I don’t hear the voices calling me. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to walk. But we can’t remain here; we can’t remain like sitting ducks, just waiting for him to strike.”

He paced the floor, surveying the shelves again. There had probably been other diaries, tucked in the shelves here, but the shelves had never been full, and he couldn’t know. Was it Marrok who had entered the house and taken these things? Or was it Felix himself?

The door stood open to the adjacent bedroom—the northwest-corner bedroom where he and Marchent had made love. That sense of the man came over him again, the keeper of these rooms, the man who’d chosen that great ornate black four-poster bed, all carved with tiny intricate figures, who had placed the black diorite figure of a cat near the lamp, who had left, what, a book of poems by Keats there on that little inlaid table by the chair.

He picked up the book. A faded burgundy ribbon marked a page. “Ode on Melancholy.” And on the page there was written a black check mark in ink by the first stanza, and a long line beside it, and scribbles in that fleecy writing—the Felix writing—that looked like a drawing of the sea.

“Here, here is what he marked a long time ago.” He gave it to Laura.

She took it to the lamp and gently read it aloud:

The agony of this, wanting so much to talk to him, to appeal to him.
I did what was natural to me, I did it because I didn’t know what else to do
. But was this true?

An overwhelming desire for the power came over him. The restlessness was driving him mad.

The wind tossed the rain against the black windows. Beyond, he heard the waves pounding the shore.

Laura looked so patient, so quietly respecting, so silent. She stood by the lamp with the Keats in her hands. She looked at the cover, and then back to him.

“Come,” she said. “I have to check something. Perhaps I made a mistake.”

She led the way down the hall into the master bedroom.

The little paperback book
How I Believe
was still lying on the table where she’d left it early that morning.

She opened it now and turned the brittle pages carefully.

“Yes, this is it. I wasn’t mistaken. Look at the inscription.”

“Yes, well, Margon gave it to Felix at some point, yes,” said Reuben. He didn’t quite understand.

“Look at the date.”

He read it aloud, “ ‘Rome ’04.’ Oh, my God. He disappeared in 1992. And this, this … this means he is alive and … he’s been in this house. He’s been here since he disappeared.”

“Apparently so, at least at some point in the last eight years, yes.”

“I looked right at this and I didn’t see it.”

“I did too,” she said. “And then it hit me. And how many other things do you think have been brought here or taken from here over the years without anyone noticing? I think he’s been here. I think he left this book here. If Marrok could get into this house secretly, if he could
hide himself in this house, then Felix might have often done the same thing.”

Reuben paced in silence, trying to make sense of it, trying to know what, if anything, he could do.

She sat down at the table. She was paging through the little paperback.

“Are there notes?”

“Little check marks, underlining, squiggles,” she answered. “Same light strokes as in the Keats. Even check marks and underlining have the stamp of a personal hand. I think he is very much alive, and you can’t know who or what he is, or what he might do or want.”

“But you know what Marrok said, what he accused me of.”

“Reuben, the guardian was in a jealous rage,” she said. “You’d had his precious Marchent. He wanted to make you pay. He thought he’d left you to die. Very likely he didn’t attack by accident at all. He couldn’t finish you off, no, but he thought the Chrism would likely do that. He didn’t call 911 to save you. He called on account of Marchent, so her body wouldn’t lie there alone and neglected until Galton or somebody else found it.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Reuben, you are so gifted. Don’t you know jealous rage when you see it? The monster’s words were steeped in envy. All that about how he would never have chosen you, never given you a second glance, about how it was your fault that he turned his back on Marchent. That was envy from start to finish.”

“I understand.”

“You can’t know anything about this man, Felix, from what the monster said. Look at it squarely. If Felix did write this letter, if he’s alive now as this letter seems to indicate, he’s allowed you to inherit this house. He hasn’t sought to interfere by hook or by crook. Now why would he do that? And why would he send that unpleasant little creature, that strange little beast, to see to it that the owner of the house was killed, and the house lost to the probate courts again?”

“Because he’s taken the only things he wanted?” Reuben offered. “The diary and the tablets? He took them right after Marchent died?”

She shook her head. “I don’t believe it. There is so much more here, parchment scrolls, ancient codices, they’re everywhere. So many odds and ends that Felix collected. Why, who knows what’s really in the attics,
or in other places in this house? There are trunks up there you haven’t opened, boxes of papers. There are secret rooms in this house.”

“Secret rooms?”

“Reuben, there have to be secret rooms. Look, come into the hall.”

They stood at the place where the southern hall met the western hall.

“You have a rectangle of hallways here—the west, the south, the east, the north.”

“Yes, but we’ve been in all the rooms that open off them, more or less. On the outside you have the bedrooms, and on the inside, you have linen closets and extra bathrooms. Where are the secret rooms?”

“Reuben, you are scientifically challenged. Look.” She crossed the hall, and opened the first of the linen closets. “This room is scarcely ten feet deep. It’s the same all the way around the inside of the rectangle.”

“Right.”

“Well, what’s in the middle?” she asked.

“My God, you’re right. That has to be a huge square space in the middle.”

“Well, I searched this afternoon when you were with Jim. I went into every closet, bathroom, stairwell, and nowhere did I find a door opening to the middle of the house.”

“So you think there are things here, hidden in some secret rooms, things he may still want?”

“Come. Let’s try something else.”

She led the way into the bedroom that had become her office. She’d moved a small desk from the wall to the windows, and her laptop was open there.

“What’s the actual address of this house?”

He had to think. It was 40 Nideck Road. He’d memorized the zip when he’d been ordering equipment for the office online.

At once she typed this into the search window with the words “satellite map.”

As soon as an aerial view of the coast and the forest appeared, she zoomed in on the house itself. She clicked on the house until the image got larger and then larger. There was a great square glass roof, plainly visible, surrounded and concealed by the gables that faced the four points of the compass on each side.

“Look at that,” she said.

“My God, I didn’t know anybody could do that!” he said. “It’s not just a room, it’s a huge space. And the gables completely hide the glass roof from view. Can you zoom in tighter? I want to see the details of the roof.”

“It’s not going any tighter,” she said. “But I see what you see. Some kind of trapdoor or something on that roof.”

“I’ve got to go upstairs, I have to check out the attics. There has to be some way to get in there.”

“We’ve been all through them,” she said. “I didn’t see any doors. But there’s no telling how many times over the years that Felix or Marrok may have come here and gone into that secret part of the house through this trapdoor or some other secret entrance we have yet to find.”

“That explains it,” said Reuben. “Marrok was inside the house the night Marchent died. They couldn’t find any evidence of anyone. But he was in that middle room or rooms.”

“Look, maybe there’s just more of the same in that space, you know? More shelves, bookcases, whatever.”

He nodded.

“But you don’t know,” she said. “And as long as you don’t know, there’s hope that you have something to bargain with here. I mean Felix may want what’s in that space; he may want his entire house. And he won’t get it back simply by killing you. It will go on the market again, go to strangers. And what’s he going to do then?”

“Well, he can keep sneaking in as he’s done in the past.”

“No, he can’t. As long as the house belonged to his niece he could keep sneaking in. As long as it belonged to you, perhaps. But if the house goes to an absolute stranger, somebody who wants to turn it into a hotel or, worse yet, demolish it, well, he stands to lose everything here.”

“I see your point—.”

“We can’t put together a complete picture,” she said. “This letter just reached here. Maybe he doesn’t know himself what he wants to do yet. But I doubt seriously that the man these people have been describing ever sent that sinister Marrok to put an end to our lives.”

“Oh, I hope and pray you’re right.”