The Book of Old Houses (10 page)

The few vile oaths she remembered would never harm anyone, and the book she'd been said to possess didn't exist. But Dave and Horace had returned to Albuquerque afterward, and with Horace in the lead had walked straight out into the desert behind the motel, half a mile or so until Horace said they should stop.

A few round stones peeking up through the sand turned out to be the top of a cairn; under it lay old papers that Horace barely glanced at before burning them. He wouldn't even tell Dave what was on them, nor what the old woman had said about them.

Dave still remembered the care with which Horace had touched the match to those yellowed pages, the relief they'd both felt when each page was turned to ash and the ashes scattered.

And now it was Dave's turn. With a last glance for the tiny, repulsive trailer in which Bert Merkle hunkered, Dave headed back to his room for the night.

He'd never asked Horace if those hidden papers actually belonged to the old woman. By then, he'd known what Horace would answer:

That papers like the ones they'd destroyed didn't belong to anyone. People belonged to
them.

So when the time came he still intended to avenge his old friend's murder. But first he meant to locate Jacobia Tiptree's book and find out if, like the papers in the desert long ago, it might have the potential to join with other small, widely scattered fragments—

—a howl here, a smothered shriek there . . .

Enough darkness, finally, to swallow up all the light.

Chapter
7

I
woke way too early the next morning with thoughts of
Merrie Fargeorge's party rattling in my skull like skeletons trying to fight their way out of a closet.

Today. The party was today.

So even though it was an hour before dawn I slid out of bed, grabbed up some clothes, and slipped downstairs where I started the coffee, dressed hastily in the early-morning chill, then took the dogs out for a quick walk.

Eastport in the darkness before sunrise was damp and chilly, silent except for the pigeons muttering sleepily in the eaves of the old houses. As we came back around the block, the sky changed from black to gray. Trees and roofs appeared suddenly against it like a photograph developing.

A breeze sprang up. A blue jay called raucously. A car went by, its windshield still half-fogged and headlights on. The dogs climbed the porch steps sedately, signaling their intention to go back to bed.

Inside, Cat Dancing was still asleep, but she twitched her tail at me from her throne atop the refrigerator just to show me that even while snoozing she could make a snarky remark.

No Bella yet. While the dogs settled I filled a thermos and carried it with me up to the third floor, stepping carefully to avoid the squeaky tread
—finishing nails,
I thought;
hammer and white glue—
at the fifth step from the top.

In the workroom, mindful of Wade still sleeping below, I took my shoes off. I padded silently across the tarp-covered plank floor in my stocking feet. Paint flakes, sawdust, and wood splinters littered the tarp.

There was a time in my life when I'd have thought a room like this all to myself was heaven, another during which I'd have regarded that bare light bulb with horror; what, no chandelier?

I wouldn't have realized the meaning of stove-thimbles set into the chimneys: that in the iron-cold Maine winters the young women who worked here heated their rooms with tiny wood-burners, carefully parceling out their meager allowances of fuel and budgeting their candles.

Because to a shivering young servant girl in those days, a candle was like gold.

The windows brightened, looking out onto a scene like a watercolor painting: pale-blue sky with the light pouring upward into it, pearlescent bay with swirling current-lines hinting at the turbulence below, trees with their upper boughs sunny and trunks still heavily shadowed.

After a moment of luxuriating in it I turned away, knowing I shouldn't be here at all. With so much to do, if I started this minute I still wouldn't be ready for the party in time.

And of course if I weren't working on it I should at least be planning for it. But I so much didn't want to; Merrie Fargeorge's belief that she could scold me as if I were a young student had made me feel as fractious as one.

Rebellious, too; the idea of a teacher loved for strictness was one I'd always found more convincing in fiction than in fact.

So instead of getting out the dusty teacups to begin washing them, I crouched by the window sash laid on the milk crates, reopened the glazing-compound container, and dug a chunk the size of a Ping-Pong ball out of it with the putty knife.

I only had to insert fifteen more eight-by-eleven-inch pieces of glass, pin them with the sharp steel triangles called glazing pins, and smooth on the glazing compound without injuring the glass or—glazing pins being wicked sharp, as are glass windowpanes, whether broken or unbroken—myself.

This for a single glass piece does not sound very difficult, and it wasn't: one pane, zip-zip, zop-zop. Fifteen of them is a chore, though. Finally I sat back on my heels and opened the thermos, to assess what I'd done so far. But as soon as I wasn't actively working on the window, other thoughts flooded in.

Bella, my father, Sam, the old bathtub, the party, and Dave DiMaio all began capering in my head once more, the latter most troublingly. Dave and his dratted missing gun and what was I going to do about them?

Because I could still say it was none of my business.
But that's never stopped you before,
a little voice in my head remarked snidely.

On top of which, now that I'd come up with a theory about just which act he might be thinking of committing with his gun and specifically upon whom, his having the thing at all seemed a lot more worrisome to me.

By now it was full day outside, gulls sailing serenely past the windows and cars moving down in the street. A faucet went on and then off suddenly in the kitchen, triggering a bout of water-hammering that shook every pipe in the house.

Pipe wrench,
I thought, shaking the glazing pins from their small cardboard carton into my palm. Then I laid in another old windowpane and began pushing the pins' sharp points in with the putty knife, pinning the pane down snugly.

If he hurts someone, and you could've stopped him . . .

Now came the hardest part: the actual glazing. I'd watched experts do this so fast you could hardly see their hands move, but my way was a little different. After warming and softening another ball of glazing compound, I laid a thickish strand of it along a pane's edge. Next, I drew the knife's angled blade firmly all the way around the pane, pressing the compound in tight and smoothing its top surface, trying not to stop or even slow down around inside corners and maintaining even knife-pressure.

Which no matter how many times I did it was always either (a) mind-bogglingly easy or (b) like patting yourself on the head while chewing gum, walking a tightrope, and whistling “Dixie” all at the same time.

This time it was (b); you have to press
hard
on the putty knife, and my second try was a mess, too, because if you press too hard, the glass breaks. But by the third attempt I began achieving something like the swift, satisfying efficiency that is implied by the phrase
zip, zop.

Light poured convincingly through the windows as I snapped the top back onto the compound's container, wiped the knife, and dropped the leftover pins into their box. When I finally straightened, I still didn't know what to do about a lot of things. But as for DiMaio, his weapon, and my suspicion that his presence here was related to a murder
and
to the old book we'd found in my cellar . . .

Making my way downstairs to the smell of fresh coffee and the
clickety-click
of dog toenails as they danced around the door urging Wade to let them out again—

“G'morning,” my husband said, planting a kiss on my neck.

“G'morning, yourself,” I replied, planting one back.

—as for
that
situation, I now had a plan.

“Something for you
in the dining room,” said Wade. “Found a present for you, forgot to tell you about it last night.”

“For me? Well, aren't you a wonderful man.”

He was, too, if recent memory served. Sipping my hot coffee I went in where he pointed and found a small box. In it, reposing on a bed of cotton batting, was a new pair of pliers.

A
soft-jawed
pair of pliers. “Wade, these are great,” I told him, returning to the kitchen to wrap my arms around him.

“Glad you like 'em.” He was already dressed, ready to leave: white cobblecloth long-underwear shirt, navy hooded sweatshirt, heavy khaki pants, and a pair of Carhartt boots. He was going out this morning to fix a bell buoy in the channel, and with the breeze still rising it was going to be cold out there on the water.

“See, with these pliers,” I told Bella, “you can fix—oh, let's say a faucet, without putting a lot of ugly marks on it. Because of the plastic instead of metal, you see, in the gripping parts.”

“Good,” said Bella. “You can start with that one.” She pointed at the kitchen sink. “Water company flushed the mains, put so much grit in the system that the faucet screen's clogged up,” she added.

So I did, and with the new pliers I made quick work of it. Off with the metal collar at the end of the faucet spout, then a fast finger poke to get the wire screen out of the collar, taking care not to lose the washer and putting it in right-side-up again when I'd finished.

Presto, on with the collar again and the job was done; good old Wade, he really knew what a girl wanted. And a good thing, too, since without plenty of water in the kitchen I shuddered to think what the rest of the day would be like.

“Here,” said Bella when I returned from putting the new tool in the toolbox. But she wasn't talking to me; instead she thrust a trayful of freshly washed glasses into the hands of a large, very serious-looking lady I'd never seen before.

The lady wore black, thick-soled orthopedic shoes, old-fashioned beige nylon stockings rolled down to midcalf, and a housedress with a border cross-stitched in purple thread on the skirt. She was somewhere between fifty and seventy.

“Hello,” I said, and she gave me an affronted look as if to ask me what I thought I was doing here, then took the tray on into the dining room.

“Hired 'er,” Bella said before I could ask. “For the party. Daisy Dawton. Her boy, too. He don't talk much, Jericho doesn't. But between 'em they don't have two dimes to rub together nor a pot to—Oh, hello, Jericho.” She broke off abruptly as yet another complete stranger strolled in as if he owned the place.

Daisy Dawton's boy turned out to be a smallish fellow with a mop of pale-yellow hair, plus a huge coffee urn under one arm and a half-dozen folding chairs under the other.

“There,” instructed Bella, pointing to where his mother had gone, and he hustled in that direction before I could get much more of a look at him.

“And they're both hard workers,” Bella added when he was out of earshot again.

She didn't ask me if it was all right that she'd hired them, since (a) she knew perfectly well that it was; she had free rein around here in domestic matters, and (b) what choice did I have? The party was in—oh, dear god—only a few more hours.

From three to five this very afternoon, to be exact, and the closer it got the more I thought I'd rather have dental surgery. Still, Bella seemed to have everything under control—

Well, everything but the lemon bars, gingersnaps, brownies, dream bars, deviled eggs, shrimp puffs, and pepper crackers with curried eggplant dip, all of which Ellie and the other ex-Merrie-students of Eastport had promised to provide, plus sherbet and ginger ale for the punch.

Next, not quite staggering under its weight, Jericho Dawton muscled the biggest glass punch bowl I'd ever seen in through my back door, angled it expertly as he made his way down the hall in order to avoid smashing it into a radiator, then set it down as gently as if it were a bomb at the center of the dining-room table.

From my earlier glimpse at his straight, pale hair, boyish build, and the knobby wrists jutting from his too-short sleeves, I'd made him out to be about twelve. Only when he turned did I realize from his stubbled jaw that Daisy's “boy” was at least thirty-five, and possibly forty.

And that Daisy was watching carefully for my reaction to her son's presence. “All right, then,” I said, turning away.

Because in Daisy Dawton's look I'd spied the kind of downeast pride that will cut its own nose off to spite its face, and poverty be damned. And anyway I didn't want to mess up my housekeeper's first try at subcontracting, which was such a good idea I wished I'd thought of it, myself.

In the kitchen, Bella got out cake plates, tossed linen napkins into the washing machine, and polished silver teaspoons so fast that in her hands they were little more than a brilliant blur.

“Let me handle this,” she said when I tried helping. Daisy trudged heavily in and went out again, struggling with the coffee urn.

“Here, Ma,” said Jericho, taking it from her. “Ain't it what you brought me for, heavy things like that?”

Whereupon Daisy grumbled something ungrateful, but in reply her son turned upon her a look of such melting sweetness that I knew these two were going to work out just fine. Bella, I thought as they went on companionably helping one another, could probably use extra hands for the heavy cleaning when springtime rolled around again, too.

And with so many people working on it, even the party might turn out all right. That is, if I could manage Merrie Fargeorge's disagreeable presence.

Before I dealt with her, though, there was yet another small matter to be handled, and like most unpleasant confrontations I knew the sooner I got it over with, the better.

Carrying my cup to the phone alcove, I dialed the Motel East and asked for Dave DiMaio. He answered on the first ring, sounding as if he, too, had been up for hours.

“Listen, Dave, you know that little gun I hid away for you in the lockbox in my cellar?”

Because if he meant to use it and then claim he didn't have it—implying that someone
else
must've taken it and done a bad deed with it—well, let's just say that as my first serious act of the new day I intended to pound a stake through the heart of that little notion
toot sweet,
as Sam would've put it.