The Book of Old Houses (12 page)

“Hey, no law against having friends,” the police chief said. “And that kid, you ask me, he could definitely use a few. Although I probably wouldn't put Merkle at the top of the list, I happened to be the one doin' the choosing. Poor woman,” Bob added, and then shut up on the subject.

“I see,” I said, even though I didn't. Bob knew a lot of things about a lot of people, naturally, and if he didn't want to reveal them, then there was no way I'd be able to make him.

And probably most of them weren't pertinent to my situation, anyway. “But now you'd like me to pick this kid's brains again on the topic of Merkle,” I said. “And the kid will cooperate with me in this because . . . ?”

A sputter of static came out of the squad's radio, followed by some garbled talk I couldn't decipher.

But Bob could. Grimacing, he fired up the vehicle's big engine, wincing as it pinged on account of not getting premium fuel. As the condition of his squad car showed, budgets around Eastport were tight even without Bert Merkle threatening any big-money-damages lawsuits.

“I'm not saying the boy will cooperate,” Bob replied. “Matter of fact I predict he won't. He's not exactly Mr. Personality, Jason isn't. But there's something more than meets the eye going on over there, and I sure wouldn't mind if somebody besides me went and—”

His radio sputtered again, more urgently this time. He threw the vehicle into reverse. A heavy
clunk!
came from under the hood; the car jerked back.

“Bring Ellie, too, she's good at that kind of thing, Jake. And you could talk to the kid's old schoolteacher, Merrie Fargeorge. She spent a lot of time with him, I hear.” Setting a blue rotating beacon on the dashboard, he roared off.

Leaving me standing alone in front of the Waco with about a dozen more questions.

None of which were going to get answered. Instead Bob hoped I'd be able to find things out and report back to him; in fact I got the strong feeling that without anybody quite saying so, we'd just made a deal: I talk to Jason, Bob talked to DiMaio.

Great, I thought. My big lead so far in a case of murder that (a) might not even exist and (b) that I didn't want anything to do with anyway was (c) a teenager who probably wasn't going to want to talk to me at all, followed by his teacher with whom I was already about as popular as a piece of chewing gum.

If the chewing gum happened to be stuck to her shoe, that is. For a minute it all made me wish I had Dave DiMaio's missing handgun, so cheap you could use it to blow a hole in someone, then toss it down a sewer and never miss it.

But I didn't have Dave's awful little gun anymore, did I?

Nope.

Somebody else did.

Chapter
8

W
hen I got home I headed immediately for the phone
again, intending to call Ellie so we could visit Jason Riverton together and get it over with. But as I reached for the handset I heard pitiful whimpering coming from upstairs, and when I got to the hall I saw a white thing on the stairway landing.

Halfway around the corner, wedged against the banister on one side and the wall on the other, it was a bathtub-shaped white thing with a pair of mournful brown eyes peering worriedly from the far side of it at me.

Dog eyes. “Okay, girl,” I said reassuringly, starting up the stairs. “Stay right there, now. I'm coming to get you, so don't you move an inch.”

Seeing me, Monday the Labrador retriever began wriggling and whining even more urgently. “Okay, baby,” I said, trying to calm her. “Okay, now.”

Because in her excitement she kept bumping against the tub, and if it let go and began sliding down the stairs, guess who it would mash? But as I neared the thing, I saw there was little chance of that.

While I'd been out, someone—my father, almost certainly—had dismantled the bathroom door. He'd also disconnected the plumbing, removed the faucet handles and the spout, and then levered that monstrous old bathtub up with three enormous iron crowbars, now lying in the bathtub.

Next, that same someone had placed four long pieces of iron pipe under the tub, to use as rollers. And finally, this genius of mechanical engineering had put a chain on the tub by running it up through the drain, then through the hole where the spout had been.

A
big
chain. Held taut by . . . I squinted past the tub to where the chain snaked into the bathroom, then out the window. Monday whined pitifully.

“Just hold on a second,” I told the anxious dog. Probably she'd slept through the noise of getting the tub out here, then woken to find herself imprisoned.

I'd seen my father's old pickup in the driveway on my way in here, and noticed the chain hooked to the towing ball on the rear bumper. But I'd paid no attention; he always had projects going on, and the less I knew about many of them the better. Besides, in my wildest dreams I'd never have imagined this.

Monday barked sharply, overcome by impatience and readying herself to leap. “No!” I said, putting my hand up in the
halt
gesture she'd learned as a pup.

Learned what it meant, that is; not necessarily to obey it. “Wait!” I said; see
not necessarily,
above.

If she jumped, she could break a leg or worse, because Monday was young at heart but on the outside she was an old dog, white-throated and brittle-boned.

Reluctantly, she complied while I surveyed the situation further. From the looks of it, my father had rolled the tub to the stairway, gotten it over to the landing, and hitched it to the chain so the tub wouldn't get away from him.

But then it got stuck—very solidly stuck, it seemed to me—as it was going around the corner.

No wonder he'd made himself scarce. And as if that weren't bad enough, Monday began howling her deeply felt objections to her predicament just as somebody rapped sharply on the back door downstairs, and then the phone rang.

“Bella,” I called out, climbing into the tub.

No answer from the kitchen or from anywhere else, and no one answered the phone. Maybe she was out buying dynamite to blast the crusted bits of last night's crab casserole out of the oven.

The Dawtons weren't anywhere in evidence, either. Daisy and Jericho had probably finished their prep work, and wouldn't be back until later this afternoon when the party actually began.

The tub shifted slightly under my weight. The chain it was hitched to made a creaking sound, tightening further. I put my hands on the tub's sides, steadying it and trying to stay in the middle.

Perched there, I couldn't have felt any more precarious if I'd been floating in the bay, bobbing along behind the
Sylvina.
Meanwhile the knock on the back door grew more insistent. The telephone quit ringing, then immediately started up again.

“All
right
!” I shouted in exasperation, “I'm . . . oops, sorry, girl,” I finished as the dog cringed away from me.

Gingerly, I climbed out of the tub again and reached for her. I could just barely manage to touch her if I stretched to where I nearly dislocated my shoulder.

My fingertips grazed her fur. “Come on, now, girlie, let's get you past this. . . . Damn it, Monday, come back here.”

But she still wasn't having any, and as she scrambled away I understood why. She'd been fine until she realized I was trying to get her into the tub. Which of course led to the idea that what I really intended was to give her a—horrors!
—bath.

Now from the sound of it she was hiding in the guest room, snuffling and panting and trying to shove her seventy-five-pound body into the very tiny amount of space under the bed.

So I climbed back into the tub once more—biting my tongue as I did so, since we really didn't need two of us howling in frustration around here—and then out of it again, this time by grabbing the chain fixed to it and hauling until I was upright.

Staggering into the bedroom I grabbed the elderly dog by her really very unwilling hindquarters. Backpedaling madly, she resisted every step of the trip back to the stairwell, toenails scritching as her toes scrabbled anxiously on the hardwood.

And then just as I was about to force her, she hopped nimbly into the tub and out of it again, and scampered downstairs.

“Oh,” I said softly, heart in my throat. But she made it to the bottom all right and vanished around the corner; I was the one who turned out not to be so nimble.

With the phone still ringing and stopping again every thirty seconds or so, I clambered yet once more into the ghastly old porcelain object—once you get them out into the light of day, believe me, they're
lots
worse than you realized—got one leg over the rim and then the other, and made my way down after the dog.

But by then she was nowhere to be found and the knocking on the back door had become hammering, while the phone's intermittent ringing was like the alarm bell in an old firehouse, shrilly insistent.

“I'm coming, I'm coming, just a—Oh, for heaven's sakes, what do you
want
?” I yelled, yanking open the back door.

And then I nearly slammed it again because on the other side stood Ann Talbert, a frustrated local writer and as far as I'd ever been able to tell also the pushiest person on the planet.

“I want to talk to you,” she announced, marching past me and in the process letting both dogs out.

They drilled for this secretly, I was convinced as the two of them blasted by, practically spinning Ann around in their wake. They got up in the dead of night, the big black dog and the big red one together, to practice their doggy escapes.

Fortunately at the foot of the porch steps Monday and Prill turned and made a beeline for the fenced-in part of the yard instead of the street. I hurried after them to shut the gate so they couldn't stray farther, and they settled happily to a session of burying things that shouldn't be buried (the leafy portions of a half-dozen Martha Washington geraniums) and digging up things that shouldn't be dug up (the geranium-plant roots).

Prill also looked around hopefully for an opportunity to chew things she shouldn't, which in her case included most of the human race. From the strength and height of the chain-link fence I'd installed around the dog run, you'd think I raised Tasmanian devils.

And now that they were out, of course I had to refresh the buckets of dog water, haul up the canvas shade because it was getting on for the middle of the morning, and find a bunch of dog toys to toss into the dog run with them, as part of my ongoing but ultimately doomed attempt to salvage at least one of those Martha Washingtons.

So that by the time I finished caring for the animals, I was hot, cross, sweaty, dirty, and out of sorts. Also it had not at all escaped my attention that by this afternoon, I would have to be clean, decently dressed, and (ideally) calm enough to greet guests.

None of which I was now. Unbelievably, it was still only nine-thirty in the morning and already I felt as if I'd been working hard all day at pulling the pins on hand grenades.

And when I got inside the phone was still ringing. “Ann, I'm afraid this is not a good time for me to—”

She'd been waiting for me in the hall but now she strode on into the kitchen ahead of me, yanked out a chair, and plopped herself down in it while I grabbed the phone. With any luck it would be the Department of Homeland Security, I thought, telling me to evacuate.

“Jake—” Ellie began.

“Oh, thank goodness,” I said. “Can you come over here?”

I glanced back into the kitchen where Ann sat fuming at the table, tapping her long red nails on the tablecloth and shooting evil looks in my direction from under her mop of short, spiky-cut black hair.

“On my way,” Ellie replied briskly, hearing the quaver in my voice that meant I was about to commit mayhem, and hung up.

“Thanks,” I said into the dead phone. It made me feel much better, knowing she would soon arrive.

But returning to the kitchen I still found myself wishing that I had a whip to go with the chairs out there, because Ann was only five feet tall and maybe ninety pounds drenched, but she was well known to be a tiger when she wanted something and boy, did she ever.

“The book,” she declared as soon as I got within verbal clawing range. “I want that old book, Jacobia.”

I want a million dollars and your absence, not necessarily in that order,
I thought, then realized suddenly who must've been pestering Horace Robotham with letters.

“Ann,” I said patiently. It would've been just like her. “Ann, I've told you before several times, I don't have the book. As you know, I sent it away to an expert.”

She huffed out an impatient breath. In addition to the jet-black hair, she wore huge hoop earrings, bright red lipstick, and an all-black outfit: boots, pants, short-sleeved cotton sweater.

“Yes, I do know, Jacobia,” she retorted in tones of strained patience. “But the
expert
you sent it to is
dead.
”

She made it sound as if this were my fault. “So now you can get it back and let
me
look at it.” She spoke as if instructing a three-year- old.

“Which you
should
have done in the
first
place,” she added as Ellie came in carrying a white bag with a red
M
printed on it, that looked as if it might contain pastries. Setting the bag on the counter she got a load of what Ann was saying and rolled her eyes.

“Experts,” Ann scoffed haughtily. The hoop earrings were so heavy, they made the corners of her eyes slant down.

“What do
they
know?” she went on theatrically. “Dusty little academics have no
idea.
But I have been writing for
years
so I'm
extremely
well-versed in the Market for Literature Today.”

She said it as if it were the title of a college course but I happened to know that she'd gotten it out of a magazine whose entire reason for existing was as follows:
f u cn rd ths u cn b a riter & mk bg $!

“Based on that book,
which
you are going to supply to me at your earliest convenience—you do realize that, don't you, Jacobia? As I am the only one who can truly appreciate and utilize it—”

Utilize,
I thought. If I'd had the book right now, I'd have utilized it as an assault weapon.

“—I intend to craft a modern masterpiece the whole world will clamor to read,” she intoned loftily.

Craft.
In Ann's favorite magazine, people were encouraged to craft things, not merely write them. “In translation,” I said.

“What?” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously at me. Apparently an eighth of an inch of black eyeliner was required not only to match her outfit, but also to complete the writerly look.

“Well, most of the world doesn't read English,” I said, “so for them all to clamor to read it, it would have to be in—”

“Oh, pooh.” She waved away my comment, her red nails slicing dangerously through the air. I tried to imagine her typing with those things, couldn't.

“That's what agents are for,” she said disdainfully. “And editors. My job is to write the thing, to express myself. Not to worry about the piddly details.”

Fixing her gaze on some unseen distant horizon, she put a little trill into
express myself,
rolling the
r
as if the phrase were Spanish.

I'd seen a few samples of Ann's writing, and as far as I could tell she thought spelling and punctuation were piddly details. Oh, and paragraphing, too. And maybe the parts in all capital letters were supposed to be dialogue.

She got up, putting her hands on her black-jeans-clad hips and fixing me in what I'm sure she believed was a gimlet gaze. “I want that book. I just know it's filled with colorful material.”

Right, if you liked the color of blood. Also, the only thing in that old book was a list; I'd told her that before, too, but I got the strong sense she didn't believe it.

“And from it,” she went on, “I'll craft an erotic paranormal historical-fiction novel with grippingly suspenseful romantic overtones and cutting-edge science-fiction subplots, told from the point of view of Mary Magdalene.”

She took a breath while I stared at her.

“
Who
as you may know was an important Biblical figure, and
who
I happen to be related to on my mother's side, and
who—
”

She sounded like an owl. Also it occurred to me for the first time in our acquaintance that she didn't sound quite sane. Until now she'd just been annoying, although with Ann it was a mega, economy-size annoyingness.