The Book of Old Houses (5 page)

He dragged on the cigarette. “My grandmother used to clean 'em, cut the heads and tails off, put 'em in brown paper bags from the grocery store and bake 'em in the oven. Myself, I'd rather eat the paper bag.” The storekeeper stuck the cigarette butt into a coffee can half full of sand.

Dave smiled, finishing his doughnut, which was delicious, and crumpling his napkin. “Listen, I'm new here—” he began.

The storekeeper gave him a look, the substance of which was a polite but unmistakable
No shit, Sherlock.

“And I'm looking for somebody.” Down in the boat basin a guy tossed a black golf bag and a pair of shoes into an open boat and untied the vessel, then hopped in and motored away.

The storekeeper didn't comment.
Here we go,
thought Dave, remembering what Horace used to say about the famously taciturn Maine natives. But he decided to give it a try anyway.

“Fellow about my age, medium height, medium build . . .”

The storekeeper was giving him another flat
give me a break
look.
Oh, what the hell,
Dave thought.

“Merkle's his name. Bert Merkle.”

Because it wasn't as if Merkle wouldn't have figured out that Dave would be coming. Merkle had a gift for knowing what other people would do, especially if it might inconvenience him.

I'll inconvenience him,
Dave thought with another sudden burst of bleak rage. How much else had Merkle figured out, though?

That was the real question. That, and exactly how Dave was going to manage to get his gun back and shoot Bert Merkle with it. He regretted again having handed it over, even though his hot rush of emotion right now only validated the decision.

He'd never been good at feeling one way and acting another, he reminded himself. Besides, what if Merkle came sniffing and searching for the weapon before Dave could use it?

Finding it, maybe, too. Which Bert could, and there was no sense pretending otherwise.

The storekeeper frowned. “Merkle? That crackpot?”

Just then the bell over the shop door jingled summoningly and the aproned man went inside, returning moments later with two coffees.

“Don't know why anyone would want to go looking for that guy,” he went on as if the conversation hadn't been interrupted. He handed one of the coffees to Dave. “On the house. Welcome to Eastport.”

Dave sipped, expecting the equivalent of crank-case oil. “I had to throw him out of here, he kept bothering all the customers with his foolishness,” the storekeeper went on.

The coffee was good. “What kind of foolishness?”

“Objects,” the storekeeper answered. “Unidentified flying ones,” he added. His tone suggested that it was the flying part he found especially irksome.

“Guy swears he sees 'em. They land in his backyard, the little green men get out and talk to him. So
he
says.” The storekeeper turned to Dave. “Your friend's a few pecans short of a pie.”

“Uh-huh,” Dave agreed. Merkle always had liked the air of harmlessness created by his I'm-so-crazy act.

Extraterrestrials, though; that was a new wrinkle. “Did he,” Dave asked, “ever mention to you what the little green men say?”

The storekeeper looked scornful. In the boat basin, a spry-looking old gentleman in a navy peacoat was urging a small black dog to jump from a pier into a wooden dory.

“Nope,” said the storekeeper, lighting another smoke. “ ‘Take me to your leader,' I guess. What else?”

The dog jumped; the man followed. As the man settled himself and began to row, the dog sat in the bow, barking.

“Wears tinfoil hats,” the storekeeper went on sorrowfully of Merkle, as if reciting the bad habits of a troublesome relative. “Been around here twenty years, started out no more crazy than any of the rest of us.”

Something about the way the storekeeper said it made Dave think personality quirks were pretty common in Eastport, and that a live-and-let-live attitude might be fairly widespread, too, as a result.

And that Bert's recent behavior was stretching even this elastic standard. The storekeeper's next words seemed to confirm the idea. “I mean, a lot of folks here, they'll . . .”

The man thought a moment, considering how to put it, then went on. “Let's just say conformity's not an absolute requirement for bein' a well-respected member of this community, you just manage to take a shower, brush your teeth, an' put on some clean clothes oftener'n once in a blue moon, you get me? This guy, though. Takes his individuality seriously.” And when Dave tipped his head inquisitively:

“Gets up on his soapbox down here right across from the post office every Saturday morning,” the storekeeper said. “Shouting about how the aliens are going to get us.”

Shaking his head, he went on. “He's got all the gory details down pat, too, Bert does. How the worst ones're already here and they're going to come up out of the bay one fine day, all black and dripping.”

He turned to Dave. “With tentacles, like, growing out of their heads. And gills. And about how we're related to 'em, some of us, only we don't even know it.”

“That's pretty wild, all right,” Dave said, not letting his voice betray any emotion. He wondered what else Bert Merkle had decided to shout from the rooftops.

“Don't happen to know where he lives, do you?” he asked, as if the answer weren't very important to him.

Unfooled, the storekeeper shot Dave a sideways look. “Not a cop, are you? Or the tax man? 'Cause I'm no fan of Merkle but I'm also not in the habit of turning in my neighbors.”

He stuck his second cigarette butt into the sand. “Fellow wants to tell stories, his own business, way I see it.”

Dave finished his coffee. “No,” he replied easily, “I'm not either of those. I went to school with Bert. A friend of ours has died, one of our classmates, and I came to talk to Bert about it. That's all.”

“No kidding. Hey, sorry about that.” The bell rang again and the storekeeper went inside, then returned.

“School buddies, huh? Funny, I'd of thought Bert was a lot older'n you. Guess seein' little green men must age a person.”

Not green,
Dave thought.
Black. And dripping.
“Guess so,” he agreed, and listened carefully as the storekeeper told him how to find Bert Merkle's place.

“Not a house, really,” he said. “More like sort of a trailer that's been built-onto every which-a-way. Back from the street, a lot of old overgrown bushes all tangled up around it.”

Inside, Dave tried to pay but the storekeeper wouldn't hear of it. “Can't miss the yard, though,” he went on. “Junk right out to the lot-lines, sheet metal, cardboard, bottles and cans, scrap wood, you name it.”

A couple of kids ran in, bought sodas, and ran back out.
I was like them, once,
Dave thought, watching them go.

“I hear Merkle even got a summons from the code-enforcement guy, telling him to clean up that yard of his or else. Merkle went to the hearing, told them he's got to have all that stuff. Said it shields his energy, makes it hard for his enemies to find him,” the storekeeper said.

Dave thought Merkle had better get himself some more junk. “Guess it doesn't work on little men, though,” the storekeeper added. “Or for that matter on you.”

“Thanks,” Dave said. “And thanks again for the coffee.” The bell jingled as he exited.

Out on the sidewalk he decided to retrieve the Saab from Jacobia Tiptree before doing anything else. The longer the car sat, the more interesting he might become to her and that friend of hers, Ellie White.

And that he
didn't
want. That the two women were something other than run-of-the-mill Eastport housewives he'd figured out too late. Also the swift, decisive way in which his gun had been taken from him had felt a bit too much like confiscation for his comfort.

But the box opened with a key. And over the years Horace had taught Dave a few smatterings of the lock-picker's art. So he could get the weapon back one way or another.

He couldn't help wondering whether the women themselves would pose problems, however. He hoped not. They were both rather likable, he thought as he retraced his steps along Water Street.

He entered the water-company office with its windows full of healthy-looking potted plants; Horace always said the ability to grow good houseplants was a sign of a well-ordered soul. There he asked questions about Eastport people's families, houses, and ancestors, explaining his interest by saying he was an amateur historian.

He did the same at the soda fountain, Wadsworth's Hardware, and a pizza place in which the aroma of spiced tomato sauce hung tantalizingly. But his thoughts never strayed very far from the two women, Jacobia Tiptree and Ellie White.

Quite likable indeed, he decided, picturing again the lean, dark-haired one with the faint aura of violence hanging around her like an invisible cloud. Beside her the red-haired young mother with the amazing pale-green eyes and penetrating glance had resembled a colored illustration from some old children's book about fairies and sprites.

Remarkable, really, each in her own way. Horace would have liked them.

Dave hoped they would both turn out to be smart enough to mind their own business.

Back at my
house I stomped up the porch steps, let the dogs out, then waited for them to dash back in again before slamming the screen door so hard behind us all that it nearly fell off its hinges.

Nobody home, I thought; Bella must've gone to the store.

“God
bless
it!” I shouted into the empty house. “I swear if
one more thing
happens around here that
I do not want to happen,
I'm going to get one of those damn guns out of the cellar and
shoot
myself with it!”

But someone
was
home; my son, Sam, popped his head out of the parlor. Tall and handsome with dark, curly hair, long eyelashes, and a lantern jaw, he was living here at least temporarily after returning from the alcohol-treatment place.

“Mom?” he said, scanning my face anxiously.

“Oh, hush up,” I told him, annoyed. “Can't a person blow off a little steam without a witness around, making shocked faces?”

Which I suppose was not a particularly kind thing to say to a recuperating person, and especially not one who was working as hard at it as Sam was. But oh, I was so cheesed off, and mostly at myself.

Angrily I strode down the hall and upstairs to see if just possibly the whole bathroom fiasco had merely been what my son would've called a Fig Newton of my imagination.

But no such luck. The room was all just the way I'd left it, which is to say I had about as much chance of repairing it by tomorrow as an ice cube had, stuck on one of the tines of Satan's pitchfork. On the other hand, I reminded myself grimly, even the worst home-repair massacre in Eastport was a day at the beach compared to the kind of foolishness I used to endure on a regular basis.

Because back in the old days, before I bought a big antique house on an island in Maine and began pouring pretty much every single drop of my blood into it, not to mention any dollars that weren't firmly nailed down, I lived with my then-husband and son in Manhattan, where I was a freelance money-manager to . . .

Well, let's not get too specific about it. But among my clients were the absolute cream of New York mobster society, guys whose funds were so dirty that when they brought me cash I sent the manila envelopes stuffed full of greenbacks through a nearby commercial laundry's steam-cleaning apparatus before opening them.

After that I found ways of investing the cash that would not set off alarm bells down at the Federal Building, where photos of many of my clients—labeled with nicknames like Bloody Eddie, Fast Al, and Tommy “Eyeballs” McGown—were prominently posted.

And at home things were even more interesting. We lived on the Upper East Side in a building so exclusive that it should've had an alligator-filled moat. My neighbors wore diamonds as big as gumdrops to the meetings of their charity organizations, while their husbands got whisked off each morning in limos to jobs that apparently involved guarding the safety of the Free World, or at any rate of all the advertising accounts in it.

Their nannies dressed better than I did. Meanwhile in my own apartment we were apparently holding a contest to see who could break me first:

1. My husband, Victor, the eminent brain surgeon, whose eye for the ladies around the hospital where he worked was so legendary that they'd started calling him the Sperminator, or

2. My not-yet-teenaged son, who while still in eighth grade was already addicted to so many substances that once when we were picking a friend up at LaGuardia, his physical presence ruined a major drug bust by distracting every contraband-sniffing dog in the terminal. Luckily Sam didn't actually have anything illegal on him; it was just that his whole system was so saturated.

One night not long after that memorable incident, I came home from a hard day of transforming half a million dollars in mob money into certificates of deposit so clean that even a forensic accountant wouldn't be able to find anything wrong with them.

Which was the whole point. Dirty money leaves a slime trail. But I'd eliminated it, and earned a hefty commission for myself.

So I poured a glass of wine to celebrate, which was when I noticed that two of the good wineglasses were already missing from the sideboard. One was in the sink, and the other, I learned when I turned from discovering the first, was in the hand of an extremely pretty young woman who did not have much clothing on.

None, actually. She stood in the kitchen doorway between the eight-burner professional gas range and the Sub-Zero refrigerator with built-in icemaker and water dispenser.

On the shelves to one side of her stood the world's priciest Cuisinart, a top-of-the-line juicer, a breadmaker so elaborate you could set it to toast the stuff and spread peanut butter on it for you, a blender I'd bought for making strawberry daiquiris and never used because by that point diluting the liquor just seemed silly, and eight very lovely little shrimp-shaped chartreuse sushi plates with matching sauce bowls that I never used, either.