The Book of Old Houses (18 page)

Inside, her son, Jason, lay sprawled on the scarred, gritty floor of the upstairs hall where it seemed he'd gone down all at once like a tree falling. As he collapsed, he'd reached out for the newel post at the top of the stairs, breaking it off at its base.

“I guess his mom heard him fall?” I asked, stepping over to him.

I swallowed hard.

“Uh-huh.” Bob hitched up his belt, moved his shoulders under his blue uniform shirt, uncomfortable in the dim, stuffy confines of the small house.

Through the doorway to Jason's room I could see his computer's screen saver flickering, white stars endlessly wheeling on an ocean of solid black. Walking into the cramped space, I accidentally bumped against the desk; the screen snapped instantly to a word-processing document.

Two big capital letters had been typed on it: DD.

Bob looked over my shoulder. “Initials. Maybe Dungeons and Dragons? I know he was big on the computer games all the young guys seem to like.”

But I knew about computer games, too, because Sam had been a fan. “No. D and D is a role-playing game. Multiple players. Jason was into the kind called first-person shooters.”

The irony of that hadn't struck me before. But after hearing what Merrie Fargeorge had said about him and his father, now it did. Because Jason really knew what it was like to be a first-person shooter, didn't he?

Or at least some people thought so. “What's the difference?” Bob asked.

“Isolation,” I answered. At first Ellie had stayed outside with Mrs. Riverton, but now I heard her footsteps pass through the living room and go into the kitchen.

I scanned the musty chamber Jason had lived in. The science-fiction novels, reproductions of old weaponry, and empty cups in the stuffed-full wastebasket were no more enlightening than they'd been hours earlier.

But now there was a bottle of red wine, unopened, on the shelf among the weapons. And a new book stood on the shelf below that:
Poisons and Antidotes, A Practical Guide for Clinicians.

A medical text. My ex-husband had owned a copy. I pointed it out to Bob.

“That why you think poison?” A half-empty forty-ounce Slurpee cup still stood by the computer.

Bob sighed. “It helps. Book on poison, kid falls dead.”

He kept looking at Jason as if one of these times, he'd see something that would give him another chance to keep an eye on the youth, alive.

A better eye. “Besides, take a look at that cup. No, not the half-full one. The one in the trash, there.”

There were a half-dozen of them. I pointed. “This one?”

He nodded. “Don't touch it,” he added hastily as I reached for the big drink container. “Just look kind of sideways at it.”

I angled my head obediently. “Anyway, what were you saying about games?” he asked as I bent to peer closer.

The clear-plastic domed top had come off. A rainbow-hued iridescence overlaid with green, the color of a soap bubble, lay on the drops of liquid remaining in the cup. I'd seen that iridescence before, when I lived in the city and especially in winter here in Eastport, in places where cars got parked regularly.

“You need other people,” I said, “for a game of D and D. Jason played the kind of game where you're the only hero and you move through a maze, slaying dragons or zombies, or even other humans. And—perfect for Jason's personality—you do it alone.”

Which he had. Died alone, too, with his blind mother right downstairs having no idea what was going on. As I straightened, I wondered what would happen to Mrs. Riverton now.

“That's antifreeze in the cup,” I said.

Again, Bob nodded. When I asked where he thought it might have come from or if he thought the boy might've administered it to himself—don't, by the way; it's a lousy way to die—he shrugged.

“That's for the state guys to figure out,” he said. “So what
do
you think the letters mean?”

The screen saver had popped back up; this time we left it alone. I shook my head. “Could be a lot of things.”

The memory of Jason kept replaying itself in my mind: sullen speech, seemingly dull thoughts. More pronounced neurological symptoms such as delirium and hallucinations would've come later.

And after that, the heart and lungs would've failed. I knew because when Sam was a toddler, he tasted anything he got near. So in addition to clearing our apartment of poisons I'd read up on a laundry list of harmful substances, from arsenic to zeuterium.

So why had I missed the signs in Jason? Because his unlovely appearance and general air of being a sullen numbskull had prejudiced me. Instead of clear warnings, I'd thought his symptoms were a normal part of his personality.

I should've made something of the difference between his apparent dull-wittedness and all those books in his shelves. And the chess set.

But I hadn't. So now, I accused myself bitterly as I stared down at his body once more, who was the numbskull?

From downstairs came the sound of someone stepping on the kitchen garbage pail's lid-pedal, then letting it fall:
squeak-clink.
Next, Ellie's footsteps crossed the living room again and started up the stairs toward us.

“I don't know if that particular cup was in the trash when I was here earlier,” I told Bob Arnold.

From the way other cups were piled on top of the offending one, and from the rate at which Jason had seemed to empty them, I guessed the fatal beverage might've been consumed first thing that morning.

But a guess was all it was. The book and wine bottle hadn't been present earlier, I was certain. As Ellie reached the top of the stairs I bumped the desk again, deliberately; the computer screen snapped from black starscape to black letters once more.

“Huh,” she said when she saw them. She shot a look at me.

Right; Dave DiMaio's initials. “There's something downstairs that you both might want to see,” she told us.

The kitchen was a 1940s-ish room with an old red-and-black splatter-patterned linoleum floor. Dingy white curtains hung sadly at the windows; a round-shouldered old Frigidaire wheezed in the corner.

No clutter, though. Everything in its place, as it would have to be for a blind woman to function in it. This time between the curtains I spotted what I figured must be their car, behind the old shed; it was an aging blue subcompact that looked, as my dad would've put it, as if it had been ridden hard and put away wet, too many times.

Ellie stepped on the trash can's pedal again. Atop the eggshells, coffee grounds, and a white,
M-
emblazoned bag from Mimi's bakery lay a yellow quart-sized plastic jug.

NoFrost,
the black-and-white label read. “Antifreeze,” Bob Arnold said flatly.

Ellie looked thoughtful. “Who found him, anyway?”

“What kind of killer puts the murder weapon in the household trash?” Bob mused aloud.

“I don't know. But you can buy this stuff anywhere around here. The IGA, the hardware store, or it could have been sitting in someone's garage since last winter,” I said.

Ellie let the garbage-pail lid fall shut as Bob spoke again. “I found him. His mom kept calling upstairs to him, didn't get an answer.” He shook his head regretfully. “Scared to go find out what'd happened, she said. Pushed 911 on the speed-dial 'cause that's what she and Jason had agreed she would do, anytime she had a problem.”

As we returned to the living room, two vehicles pulled in outside behind Bob's squad car: a blue Maine State Police sedan with a blue light bar on the roof and an oversized radio wand curved over the chassis, and the big white boxy Mobile Crime Lab van from Augusta. Ellie went out to speak with Mrs. Riverton in case she might be frightened by the strangers.

I stayed with Bob. “I wonder what Bert Merkle will have to say about this.”

He nodded grimly, readying himself to deal with the state guys, who would want to nitpick everything he'd done so far. “Ayuh. I wish now I'd pressed him harder on why he hung out with the kid. But you know, there was nothing illegal about it. And hell, the kid didn't have any other friends.”

We moved toward the front door, the initials on the computer screen still clear in my mind's eye. Had Jason realized too late what was happening? Had he tried to leave a clue? Or had someone else left the initials, along with the wine and the poison handbook?

If the latter, then they were part of a cruel joke that at the moment only I was getting. Because back in the bad old days—right after my mother's death and long before my life with Sam and my ex-husband in the big city—I'd been a country kid up in the remote hills where people made still moonshine.

Often they made it in car radiators liberated from wrecks at the local junkyard. The risk was, it's difficult to get all the antifreeze out of the radiator.

Fortunately, booze itself is an effective antidote to antifreeze poisoning, so fatalities were rare. “How long's it take?” Bob asked.

“What? Oh.” To die of ethylene glycol poisoning, he meant. Bob didn't know my childhood history; he just thought because my ex-husband had been a doctor I knew about medical things.

And in this instance I did. “It varies,” I said. “Depends on the size of the dose versus the size of your body. Enough of it, you can be comatose in a few hours.”

The stuff tasted sweet; you might not notice it in a soft drink, for example. Or a Slurpee.

“Early intervention, if you're young, healthy, and lucky, you've got a chance,” I said. “Otherwise, not.”

Bob nodded slowly, watching through the window as one of the state cops bent to the open passenger-side window of Bob's squad car, talking to Jason's mother. Introducing himself, I supposed; her hand moved to her lips in dismay.

“Well,” Bob said glumly, “time to face the music. Do the old second-guess two-step.”

As he went out, both state cops turned to him. I glanced at my watch; we weren't due to meet Dave at the Lime Tree for another half hour. So I went home, called him at the Motel East, and told him to show up in five minutes. Standing there in the phone alcove with the empty house shimmeringly silent around me, I didn't give him any time to argue or ask questions.

“Just be there,” I said. When the phone rang again as I hung up, I thought it was him calling back to argue about it.

But it wasn't. “Jacobia?” It was Merrie Fargeorge and she sounded upset. “Jacobia, I just heard about Jason Riverton.”

Of course she had. Eastport's jungle drums probably started beating two minutes after Bob's squad pulled up in front of the Riverton house.

“Yes,” I began, “I'm afraid it's—”

“Is it true about his computer screen?” she interrupted. “The initials?”

I hesitated. “How did you know that, Merrie?”

She didn't miss a beat. “Ellie called just now to see if I could go over and help Mrs. Riverton, and of course I will. I'll bring her here to stay with me, if she wants, for as long as she needs to.” She rushed on. “Ellie wanted to know if
I
knew anyone
Jason
knew who . . . oh, my, that's a complicated sentence, isn't it?”

But I understood what she meant.

“. . . with the initials
DD,
because that's what was on his computer. Written with a word-processing program, Ellie said?”

Well, that answered that. “Yes, Merrie, we wondered if maybe he wrote it and that it might—”

“No,” she interrupted again, sharply. “He didn't.”

“Beg pardon?” Cat Dancing yawned and twitched her tail from atop the refrigerator. In the parlor the dogs got up, turned in circles, and settled.

“Jacobia,” Merrie said impatiently, “I don't know what went on over at that house today, but I can tell you that Jason didn't write any initials using any word-processing program.”

“How can you be so sure?”

A huff of annoyance escaped her. “Well! If you knew him, you would be certain, too. I've tried for years to teach that boy to do anything more than play those awful shooting games. Jason was my student at the high school, you know, before I retired. And I've kept in touch since.”

“But, Merrie, he might've . . .”

Learned on his own,
I thought. Or Bert Merkle might've taught him.

“Might've, schmight've,” she snapped. “I offered that young man a hundred dollars to learn word processing just well enough to bring the program up on the screen and type a few words. That was all I asked, and I told him scout's honor I'd hand the money to him immediately, cash on the barrelhead.”

“And?”

“And he couldn't. Apparently he simply couldn't. And if he'd learned between then and now, don't you think he'd have come to me, to collect the reward? I'm telling you, Jacobia, whoever wrote those initials on his computer, it wasn't Jason.”

Fascinating, I thought. The bottle, the book . . . and this.

“He couldn't,” Merrie said. “He couldn't, and he didn't.”

Chapter
13

W
ait a minute,” Dave DiMaio said indignantly. “You
don't think I had anything to do with—”

He was in the bar when I got back to the Lime Tree. It was busier than before, ice cubes clinking and voices mingling in relaxed, end-of-the-day conversation.

I wasn't relaxed, and wasted no time ordering a drink, either. I just sat down and let him have it.

“You show up here, you're carrying a gun, you know where I put it, and then it goes missing. You've got a grudge against Merkle, and now Bert's young buddy, Jason Riverton, is dead. But not of a gunshot wound, which strikes me as a nice way to aim suspicion at someone else—”

He looked confused as I added more details: the antifreeze, the computer with Dave's initials on the screen. “Jason had a car. He idolized Merkle. He might have done what Merkle asked—drive to Orono, try to get my old book back from Horace. Maybe Merkle offered to pay him, or maybe Jason just did it out of some weird idea of friendship.”

Or twisted hero worship. “Maybe things went wrong and Jason got mad, lost his temper. Or maybe that was the whole plan all along. Or maybe,” I finished hotly, “you just think it was. But now you want revenge.”

At the word
revenge,
he winced. “Look,” he said, “I met the kid. Earlier today, in fact—Merkle told me about him, said he thought the kid might be right for our school.”

Skepticism was a mild term for what my face expressed, in the mirror behind the bar.

“But how would I get antifreeze into his drink?” Dave demanded. “And if I did that somehow, why would I write my own initials on his computer?”

“I don't know.” The bartender waved the Beefeater bottle at me and I nodded. “I don't know any of that.”

When my drink arrived I took a sip. “But I do know you're angry, and you've been bird-dogging Bert Merkle, I'll bet, too, haven't you?”

That last part was just a guess. A guilty flush said my wild dart had found a sensitive target. It didn't explain how DiMaio could've connected Jason to Horace's death.

But that didn't mean it hadn't happened. He signaled for a refill on his own drink, a lemon soda.

No alcohol; I recalled the conversation I'd eavesdropped on the night before. “It doesn't bother you being in here?” I asked.

“What, a bar?” He smiled ruefully at his fresh glass. “No. Drinking with others has never been my particular difficulty.”

As opposed, I guessed he meant, to drinking alone. “So what put you back in rehab?”

I figured I'd let him catch his breath, make him think I'd quit pushing him so hard. Then maybe he'd let drop some careless detail I could pounce on.

“Relapse is just a symptom of the disease,” he said. “You get a flare-up, you deal with it and go on. Case closed.”

Glancing over at the doorway I spotted the blonde woman I'd seen driving the red Miata earlier, now in a white cocktail dress and with her pale hair pulled into a topknot.

She saw me, too, and something in her eyes made me think she recognized me. It crossed my mind to wonder whether perhaps Bert Merkle wasn't the only one getting followed; that maybe I was. But her look at me had more of curiosity than malice in it, and a moment later she was gone.

“I picked a bad time to fall off the wagon, though,” Dave went on ruefully. “Horace died the same night I went into the hospital.”

A sports car started up outside. “I already knew Bert Merkle lived in Eastport,” he continued. “We went to school together, back when Horace was teaching where I am now. I figured out what kind of guy Bert Merkle was pretty quick—so did everyone at the school—and I've kept tabs on him over the years.” He frowned at his glass. “I'd warned Horace to watch out for Bert. I said he might try some sort of maneuver to get his hands on your book.”

“Come on, it's been a while since you two were students. Why worry about what Bert's doing now? And why would he want my book, anyway?”

Not that he'd have been the only one with a yen for it. Eastport's most ambitious unpublished author, Ann Talbert, seemed pretty crazy to get her mitts wrapped around the thing also, I recalled. But at least she had a reason, however unrealistic it might seem to me.

“All right,” Dave said reluctantly. “I'll tell you. But you're not going to believe a lot of it.”

“I'll be the judge of that,” I said. And then as if summoned by my thought Ann herself walked in, wearing skinny black jeans, a white silk shirt, and a good leather jacket. On her feet were a pair of high black-leather boots with toes so sharp you could've skewered a shish kebab on them. She'd exchanged her hoop earrings for bright tube-shaped danglers the size of bass-fishing lures, and her red lipstick for orange; otherwise, with that head of black hair gelled into daggerish spikes and eye makeup so exotic that it probably glowed in the dark, it was the same old Ann.

The words
I want
were practically tattooed on her forehead. She at least had manners enough to take a table by herself rather than intrude right away, but I knew by the way her eyes narrowed when she spotted me that I was getting a delayed sentence, not a pardon.

“Go on,” I told Dave, “and don't dawdle, please.” The rest of our group would be here soon, too.

He nodded. “I've already told you Horace and I used to go on book-hunting trips together. I'd just gotten out of college, and he was . . .”

“Never mind that. Cut to the chase.” More people were coming in, gathering at the tables and ordering drinks.

“
Dangerous
old books,” Dave said flatly. “Books like that, even fragments of them, are in high demand in certain circles. They contain information that people believe they might use. Or misuse, more to the point.”

“You think that's why Bert wants it? The book's collectible, so it's valuable?”

DiMaio shook his head. “Bert's not a collector. I've known him a long time, and I doubt he's changed much from the kind of fellow he was when we were in school.”

“Why, then?” Tapping her foot impatiently, Ann Talbert sat drinking a wine cooler and waiting for her chance at me. The triumphant gleam in her eye didn't bode well.

“Merkle wants your book for the simplest of all reasons,” Dave said. “He wants to use it himself.”

Oh, please. A mental picture of Merkle dressed in wizard's garb, a pointy hat and a shiny robe with stars on it, maybe, rose in my mind.

“But that doesn't make sense,” I objected. “It's just a list of names.”

Written in blood,
said an unpleasant voice in my head.
Names no one could possibly have known, back when the list was compiled.

But someone had. “Right,” said DiMaio . “But think about it; an object that can't exist. Yet it does. How could such a thing be created?”

He eyed me levelly, waiting for my answer as if he were back at his school once more and I were his student.

“Well,” I replied slowly. “Not that I believe in any such thing myself, mind you . . .”

Oh, no?
sniped the voice in my head. “. . . but
if
it isn't just a clever, complicated hoax . . . then I suppose it would have to be done by . . . magic?”

I wanted him to laugh at this idea, but I knew he wouldn't. And he didn't.

“Magic,” he repeated. “And given that the ink in the book is exactly what you guessed it must be . . .”

Human blood.
“. . . I'd say it must be black magic. Wouldn't you?

“So now imagine you're Merkle, who's spent his life trying not to cleanse the earth of evil stuff, but to gather it to himself and use it.”

“Oh, please,” I began, but his gesture stopped me.

“No, hear me out, Jake. Short of a spellbook that tells how to do it, what else would you want more than an object created by it?” His eyes held mine. “Drenched in the power you covet,
and
whose very existence proves that the power must be real?”

“Oh,” I breathed, convinced—for a moment—that everything he'd said was true. No doubt he really was an excellent teacher.

But then I remembered the missing gun, Jason Riverton's poisoned body, and Horace Robotham's crushed skull, none of which had a single damned thing to do with magic.

They had to do with murder. “All right, you had me going there,” I told him. “But your explanation fails to cover a few important details.”

Dave looked impatient. “Look, I realize it sounds crazy. But I didn't take my gun back. I didn't kill the Riverton boy.”

Sure, like he'd have admitted it to me. He went on, “I think there's a good chance Merkle took the book from Horace, with the boy's help or not. I think Bert has it, and he mustn't be allowed to—”

“Wrong,” Ann Talbert interrupted. Apparently she'd gotten tired of waiting. “So, Jacobia,” she went on, “I hear Jason Riverton's computer had initials typed on the screen. DD,” she added to DiMaio, as if daring him to comment.

She was slurring her words a little; that wine cooler, or whatever it was, clearly wasn't her first drink of the evening.

“Good news travels fast,” I replied. “Trust you to be tactful and sensitive about the whole thing, though.”

Right then if I could have lifted Ann bodily and dumped her over the dock rail outside, I would have. But she didn't care.

“As for the book, I don't know who you were talking about but whoever it is, he doesn't have it. I do,” she said.

She smirked, having dropped what she knew was a news bomb. “And,” she declared with a wriggle of glee, “I intend to keep it.”

• • •

Upstairs from the
bar, the Lime Tree dining room was all pale polished wood, white tablecloths, and tall windows running along the water side of the building. Our table sported a lavish bunch of greenish-white hydrangeas as its centerpiece.

By the time we were all seated my complexion was probably pretty green, too, and Dave's was worse. “But . . .” he'd spluttered at Ann's announcement minutes earlier, then blurted:
“How?”

“Someone mailed the book to me,” she'd said. “Anonymously. Someone who must've known
I
deserve it,
I
appreciate it,
I—
”

“Ai-yi-yi,” Ellie murmured to me now at the table; I'd told her about Ann's surprising claim, on our way upstairs.

With us were Bella, Wade, George Valentine, and my father, seated beside Bella Diamond despite her best efforts to shoo him away. At least they weren't openly squabbling; I guessed he must've postponed the ring-presenting project.

And Dave DiMaio was with us, of course, sitting on my left.

Sam had been invited, too, but said that until further notice, he wouldn't be coming to any places that served liquor.

“What's Ann mean,
make use of it
?” Ellie asked, still in a whisper.

Apparently in an effort to raise her annoyance quotient right up to the shriek level, Ann had taken a table near ours. So on top of everything else I got to watch soup getting spooned into her face.

“I don't know,” I said. “She went through her usual spiel, all about how she's an
artist
so she has special
feelings
that we all need to
respect.
Only this time, she's loaded.”

Ann started on a chef's salad; we had barely put our orders in. I gathered the waitstaff liked her as well as I did, and wanted to get rid of her quickly.

“I'll give her a feeling,” I added grimly. “When I told her it belonged to me and she should return it, she practically stuck her tongue out at me.”

“Hey. You okay?” Wade looked handsome in good gray slacks, pale-blue broadcloth shirt, and a blazer.

“Now that you're here, I am. Want to beat somebody up for me?”

“Anytime. Twice on Sundays.” His mouth formed a quick kiss in my direction; then the waitress returned, and soon we were all eating and chatting cheerfully enough, under the circumstances.

But as the plates were being cleared I began noticing other faces, people leaving their tables and moving out onto the deck to await the fireworks. Bob Arnold was here with the pair of state cops I'd seen earlier; apparently their opinion of his first-on-scene work hadn't been as negative as he expected.

Ann Talbert still lurked nearby, too; any nearer and she could've reached out to take food off my plate. I sort of wished she would, so I could slap her hand away. And I spotted Merrie Fargeorge with two women whom I recognized as Eastport Historical Society members.

“Don't look now,” Ellie said quietly. “Table for one, near the kitchen door.”

“Criminy.” Bert Merkle hunched protectively over his food as if fearing someone might steal it, casting dark glances between forkfuls of bloody prime rib. Catching my eye, he grinned, raised a glass to his grease-stained lips, then resumed devouring rare beef.