Bomber's Law (7 page)

“I'm not sure,” Dell'Appa said. “Lemme sleep on it, get back to you on it in the morning.”

“Well,” Brennan said, “on their way to the various schools, Laura and the kids apparently see this house where there obviously lives somebody as nutty as Laura. And that other nutbag'd already gone and draped the trees all over with the toilet paper, and it took them awhile, Laura and the kids, to figure out it's supposed to be, in the dark with some lights on it people're supposed to think it's Hallowe'en ghosts. In the trees, and they think: ‘Wow, what a real great …' ”

Brennan leaned forward fast in the seat and stared at the outside rearview mirror. Dell'Appa looked at his watch. It read 7:09. “Nope,” Brennan said, relaxing again, “that's not him. I thought it was him for a minute, comin' to catch the seven-fourteen. He's done that some times. But today isn't one of them, I guess.”

•  •  •

“
Yeah
,” Gayle said slowly, that night at the table, turning her knife back and forth beside her plate and frowning at it, drawing the word out as though it had been an extremely fine thread of some delicate fabric that would fray and then break if pulled too hard, “remember back before Roy was conceived, when we were still living in Brighton? And I was still doing my training research? Remember that patient I had? That mild mousey young woman from Everett who dressed like she was Miss Jane Marple in real life, and looked like her, too, even though she was fifty years younger, but then turned out to have that, well, rather unusual habit?”

“Sure,” he said, “the cockgazer-spinster. Male subway riders were complaining. She wanted what she didn't have. But, geez, Brennan? I doubt that it's that. The old bastard does have four kids.”

“Oh,” she said, “not penis-envy, no.
Money.
But it amounts to the same thing. His younger brother's success is something he doesn't have. But he can't be jealous of it, as he could—and most likely would—if someone else had it. No, no. To disapprove of Dougie's big money would disapprove of himself, if he did that. He'd be a jealous big brother. So instead he disapproves of Doug's pretty wife—and I'll bet, I would
bet
, his good wife's plain, and he ignores her—but he puts it in terms of her conduct. And now even his mother agrees.”

Dell'Appa didn't say anything for a few minutes. “
Yeah
,” he said, “yeah, that could be.”

“Now, Natty Bumpo,” Gayle said, slyly smiling, “wanna talk about how come he's so glad to see
you
back from your wilderness days? Since you claim you mean him no harm?”

“I didn't say that,” he said.

Late Monday afternoon Lieutenant Dennison had been careful in all respects. “No need for hastiness, Harry,” he had said to Dell'Appa. “No call for concern. Take your time. Proceed calmly. Be of the best possible cheer. People and things change so constantly, but so gradually, that when—heck, because—we're around them all the time, we don't even notice what's going on until the whole commotion's over. And then, when we start trying to figure out just when the whole rigamarole started, and what we've got on our hands now, we get slam-dunked again. Our watches're no good. The calendar's what's called for. And when we do get the main time-frame sorted out, well, we have to deal with the inner clock.

“See, while everything else was changing, so were we. We were changing too. You've been gone almost
a year. A whole year that Bob's spent adding to that file, Short Joey's file. While you were out of here, loose in the woods by yourself, as far as he's concerned—because you weren't where you could see him, watch him like a hawk, and he wasn't watching you, because he couldn't see you either—during that year he was changing. Just like the file that he was working on was changing. And like you were, too, yourself. Independently of one another. So was I.

“Well, there's no need to get all lathered up when that happens, let alone when it finally dawns on you that it happened. Take your time. Like I've had to. Like we all've had to, one reason or another. I've got a brand-new house.”

“What was the matter with your old house?” Dell'Appa had said. “The house in Canton, right? With the sunken living room, picture window, overlooking the golf course? One good strong lefty golfer with a nasty slice, you're getting fresh air up the ass? I thought you and Tory liked that house. Never understood quite why, but I did get that impression.”

“And you were right,” Dennison had said. “We liked it very much. But we don't live in it any more. Because we changed. Or we got changed. Against our will. Amounts to the same thing, I guess, although I'd bet if it was your idea, you'd like it a lot better. Lemme give you directions to the Dennison ancestral home we now occupy in Westport.

“You've got to bear with me now,” he had said. “This's no exaggeration. Don't get the idea that anything I'm telling you maybe ought to be discounted by at least a dime, most likely a quarter, even fifty-percent, maybe, off the sticker-price. I know how it's going to sound to you by the time I get through: as though somewhere along the line I must've gradually begun to take leave of my wits. You may've been pretty sure we were on the same planet when we started out, but you'll be absolutely certain when I'm finished that somehow I went into a time-warp you didn't happen to notice, and we've come out in different spheres. The only reason you can still see me and hear me is because I did manage to insert myself into a geosynchronous orbit. But I will sound like I'm no longer on earth. Because that's the way it sounds to everybody—it's the way it sounded to me when it'd first happened, or I first began to realize it'd happened, and I tried telling it to myself—just to see how it would sound.

“ ‘Well, no, it's not actually our house. Well, it is our house,
now
anyway, but that wasn't what it was supposed to be. It's really just the way it sort of worked out. See, this house, where it is and all, this, well, it wasn't our idea. It was never our idea to buy it is what I mean. Which, as a matter of fact, we didn't, although we're certainly buying it now and we're going to be, and not only for the foreseeable future either; also for the unforeseeable one beyond that. Buying it, that is. For nine more years. At least. Heck, we didn't even want to move into it, but we more or less had to, and now the reason we moved in, the lady we moved in to be with, well, she isn't around anymore.

“Here or anyplace else, really; we had her cremated and scattered her ashes on the wind, room-service, you could call it, for the Buzzards of the Bay, if there're any still alive. Because that was what she wanted, and one way or the other, whatever Virginia wanted was what you always ended up doing. It shifted, of course, the wind did, while we were right in the midst of doing it, sprinkling Virginia, I mean, so some of her got blown back into our faces—ashes-sprinkling and -scattering. They're like peeing, I guess: never sprinkle to windward; always sprinkle to leeward. Otherwise you'll get a good faceful of the dearly departed. ‘Departing,' I guess I should say, ‘dearly departing,' and none too gracefully, either. Damned gritty customer, Virginia was, not only when she was alive and but then also after,
especially
after, we'd had her crispy-crittered. She did have that streak of cussedness, she did. She probably
wanted
sprinkling her to be a big pain in the ass, too. Just like she'd always been herself, at least when she had a choice. But it doesn't matter. Not now, anyway. What matters now, when what we'd naturally like to do is move out of the goddamned ark we didn't want to move into in the first place, is: we can't. We might as well be in chains.'

“Now you have to agree with me,” Dennison had said, “the whole story's plainly preposterous. Completely true, in every respect, of course, but still: sounds completely preposterous. Prisoners. Of our very own house. Which of course it actually isn't, never was and never will be, because it's not a house we ever wanted. For a house to be
your house
, in the actual meaning of the term, it has to be, right from the very beginning, a house that
you
really want. And this one that we've got, we never did. At all. But we're stuck with the damned thing, just the same.”

“Cannon said it looks like a horror-movie set,” Dell'Appa had said. “He told me one day when he had to do something in Pittsfield and stopped by for a beer with me in Northampton on his way back here. He said you and Tory'd had him and Jackie to dinner and it'd been a hell of a bad night, thunder and lightning, all that shit, and he said when he first saw that house: ‘I thought I must've taken a wrong turn along the way, and I was at the Bates Motel.' He said Jackie said to him: ‘ “Well, okay, but just dinner. That's all I'm stayin' for. Brian may claim this's Tory's mother's house, but I have seen the movie there, and I'm takin' no showers in
that
joint.' ”

Dennison had laughed. “Well,” he had said, “I wouldn't argue with him. I don't agree with him, but I wouldn't argue with him. To me it looks more like a big Mediterranean-seaside villa designed by somebody, some architect, who knew exactly what the classic design of that genre called for, and understood that his client had a very precise picture of the finished structure in his head, exactly corresponding to the classic design. So the designer, quite prudently, followed it devoutly, and no doubt his client was delighted. And the architect certainly was not.

“Oh, as a professional he most likely felt a certain sense of satisfaction; it's the pro's job, once he takes it on, to carry out the client's wishes, not his own, and there couldn't've been any question but that he'd done that, in spades. Because there's no mistaking what it is, or what it was meant to be: a three-story, mauve stucco villa, with claret trim around the windows and doors, and a maroon terra-cotta-tiled mansard roof—which is, not so incidentally, a hellishly-expensive bauble to maintain and repair, all those little hooks and wires holding everything in place like the guts of a Swiss chronometer, until the weather inevitably does to the whole arrangement exactly what New England weather would do to a Swiss watch if you left the guts of it exposed outdoors for a year or so. The first one or two hooks and wires let go so the whole thing starts to slide off and go crashing down piecemeal into the shrubbery.

“It's perfect, you see,” Dennison said. “It just isn't perfect for here. What it would be absolutely perfect for would be a choice site on the lower slope of a Côte d'Azur corniche with southeastern exposure to the ocean. An exact copy, in other words, of the mansion-house where the designer's client had spent his halcyon, wealthy
boyhood, the eldest child and only son of an international merchant who'd made himself princely-rich by means of his shrewdness in the selection of rugs, woven in the Land of the Peacock Throne. Rugs that he purchased by the bale, cheap, for resale in units, at retail-expensive, to people with far more cash'n brains back home in America.

“No, the trouble with the house wasn't then and isn't now with
what
it is; the trouble's all with
where
it is. Adriatic, Mediterranean: either one of those would've been the ideal place for it. Wouldn't've mattered in the slightest. But smack-dab in the middle of a Bristol County, Massachusetts meadow—slightly rolling, very pretty, very pleasant, very Fairfield Porter, or maybe Fairfield County—especially in springtime when the wildflowers're in bloom—well, even though it's in Westport and you can smell—and sense—Buzzards Bay to the south, it's a good mile and a half from the harbor. So much for any hope of seeing open water. Which's fatal, for a house like this one. It
has
to overlook the water. No option. Mandatory. You can't have a house as tight-assholed as this on any site where the surroundings—the terrain and vegetation, no matter how spacious and open they might look to some Bronx tenement refugee, someone who'd grown up in a city—'re going to give even the slightest hint that something may be closing in on you. But that didn't matter. That fact didn't matter and neither did the architect's opinion, which I can state with assurance even though I never met the chap and don't even know who he was. The architect knew, one this good would've known this, had to've known this, that if you build a house like that, in a place like that, where you cannot see the ocean from a minimum of one major window in every important room, every room where anyone's going to spend any amount of time, and then you go and live in it long enough, sooner or later you will find that you've begun to lose your mind. But that's the location that our architect's customer owned, and the one he'd picked, and where he wanted his dream house to be built, which carried a certain amount of weight in the decision: he was, after all, the fellow who was going to be paying for the fucking thing. The first time it got paid for, at least. So it didn't matter to him that everyone who lived in it after he got through with it would begin to lose their marbles fairly soon after they moved in.”

“Communications with the spirit world, all that sort of thing?” Dell'Appa had said.

“Well, sure,” Dennison had said, “but in the old lady's case, that was nothing especially new. She'd started having regular conversations with dead people right after Tory's father died. Only well-known dead people, though. Virginia was very picky. About everything.”

“Well, that's not uncommon,” Dell'Appa had said. “Lots of widows that my mother knows, friends of hers that've lost their husbands, they have those kinds of conversations. She brought it up one night when Gayle and I were over for dinner, my father was griping about some trivial thing or other—she'd left the porch-light on all night or something, and he was saying he'd have to give some more thought to getting a divorce if it happened again, part of their standard routine—and she said she supposed he'd gotten so he liked nagging her so much he'd come back and do it after he was dead. Like his old friend Mike was doing to Rose now. And my father didn't like that at all.”