by Daniel Hecht
"Oh? What exactly did she say about her plans?" Royce asked, preoccupied with the coffee.
"Just that. We'll get the place into safe shape, then give her an estimate for different levels of restoration, let her decide then what she wants to do."
Royce stroked his chin, appeared to consider this for a moment. "Because I'd really need you to start work here right away. I'm leaving, as I told you, and when I return in several weeks I'd like to have the job done. I plan to hold one of those significant social events to announce my return to the old Big Apple, and I'd like the place to be perfect."
"It's already perfect."
"The point being that whoever takes the job must be prepared to start work immediately." The water in the teapot increased its rumble and the steam began to whistle feebly in intermittent pulses. Royce stood up and waited at the stove.
"Then that leaves me out. I've already got a commitment for this time period."
Royce's eyes flashed at him, irritated. "What are you making working for my mother? Fifteen dollars an hour? Twenty? I said I'd pay top dollar. In New York City, that means two or three times what she's paying you." The water came to a full boil, blowing a cone of steam and a steady shriek from the spout. Royce ignored it. "I'd like you to do the work, Paul."
"I said I can't."
"You drive a hard bargain, don't you?" Royce forced a smile. "I hadn't figured you for the type. Okay, eighty dollars an hour. But only if you start work immediately."
It was a staggering sum, as much as teachers in Vermont made in a day. Paul shook his head, the whistle shrilling in his eardrums. "I can't. I've made another agreement. Would you mind taking the teapot off? It's giving me a headache."
Royce didn't move. "You're more than willing to ingratiate yourself with my mother—why not with me, at four times the pay? Don't give me this crap about the professional ethics of the handyman."
Paul stood up, slapped at the stove knob. The whistle subsided. He wanted to leave the apartment, get away from Royce. There was something twisted in Royce, something awful just below the civilized surface. Suddenly being near him had become unbearably oppressive.
"Fuck! One," Paul said, "I'm not ingratiating myself with anyone. I'm helping out my aunt, and I'm getting paid for my professional services. Two: This place doesn't need anything. It's fine. What's your angle?"
"I'm so glad I get to witness a few of the famous obscenities. Sit down, Paulie. Why are we arguing?" Royce had regained control over himself. His voice was smooth again, but his hands shook as he poured the water into the coffeemaker and inserted the plunger. "Look. I agree, the place isn't in bad shape. But—and don't take this the wrong way—here in Manhattan, when your work requires you make an impression, standards are high. 'Not bad' isn't good enough. See, the whole system works on faith, Paulie. Faith in a company, faith in a product, faith in the value of a currency. The stock market stays up because the gamblers have enough faith to buy in, not sell out. Pdght? Money is no different from any other religion, it works on reverence, awe, and blind goddamned faith. Now, I regularly move money around, big sums of it, more than my own liquidity at any given point. That means I use other people's money, and that means I need them to have faith. Say I'm having people over, courting an investment of millions of dollars—I have to look sound. Absolutely sound."
Royce slowly depressed the plunger. "I need top-quality work and I want someone I can trust in here when I'm away. Who better than you? Surely you can understand that."
Paul felt himself wavering. Royce was pointing out that there were cultural differences between them. Maybe the standards of Royce's income bracket weren't something he really understood.
Paul walked out of the room. "I'll think about it, okay, Royce? Best I can do. If you need a decision right away, there are hundreds of contractors in New York. If you want somebody you can trust, look for one that's licensed and insured. You've got a Yellow Pages."
"I can see I've underestimated you. Let's make it a hundred dollars an hour, first month paid in advance," Royce called after him. "Say fifteen thousand. Provided you start within the next few days."
"Thanks for lunch," Paul growled over his shoulder. "You're a big spender. I'm impressed no end." The anger seemed to well up out of nowhere, and his abdomen ticced in spasms. He found his scarf and gloves and punched the elevator call button.
Royce followed him into the hall. "You think I'm fucked up?" he said, speaking softly now. "Then go ahead, work for Vivien. You don't know what fucked up means. Fair warning, cousin."
The elevator door opened, and Paul stepped inside. As the doors drew closed, Royce stood broad-shouldered and agitated at the end of the hall, looking after him and still fumbling with the coffee plunger, which seemed to have lodged, the shaft bent, halfway down the cylinder. Paul's revulsion gave way to the sense that he'd overreacted, and a feeling for Royce less like anger than, unexpectedly, pity.
Driving back along the crowded Saw Mill River Parkway, Paul tried to smooth out his emotions. After seeing Royce, he'd driven down to Chinatown, where he bought gifts for Janet and Mark. Fighting the heavy city traffic had exhausted him. And now the MG's motor was stuttering, reawakening his concern about its reliability. His stomach felt sour, as if he'd eaten something rancid, although the food had been first-rate.
His thoughts drifted back to the preceding days, and abruptly he caught the thought that had teased him that first day as he hefted the broken finial at the lodge. He sat up out of the slump he'd fallen into behind the wheel.
It had to do with some reading he'd done while tracking down an idea about Mark. Specifically, it was a reference in a book he'd read called The Violent Personality, by a Dr. Emmett Childers. Mark was not habitually violen. But his seizures, if that's what they were, often ended in fits of violence, and Paul had begun looking for known neurological origins for violent behavior. He'd found a few ideas that might bear upon Mark's condition—and had also stumbled upon a footnote in Dr. Childers' book that could conceivably explain the damage at High-wood.
The note dealt briefly with reports of hyperkinesia and hyperdyna-mism. The medical term hyperkinesia was commonly used in connection with various psychopathologies from bipolar disorders to schizophrenia to drug responses and was often associated with hyperactivity in children. Hyperkinesic individuals moved their bodies and limbs excessively, at high speed, often inappropriately and with minimal control.
Rarer was a related condition, hyperdynamism—spontaneous displays of unusual or "superhuman" strength. Childers claimed that although hyperdynamism was not unknown in medical literature, it was very rare, and most reports were no doubt gready exaggerated. The footnote had concluded with the mild suggestion that the phenomenon warranted further research.
Paul had barely glanced at the footnote, reading fast and screening for information relevant to Mark. But now it came back to him. He'd have to find the reference again. It was a terrifying thought, but hyperdy- namism was one explanation for the finial that had been forcibly broken off while remaining unmarked by any impact. "Hit it with a couch," Lia had joked. Or, if you're strong enough, Paul thought, with the palm of your hand.
33
PAUL TOOK ONE OF THE green wingback chairs and sipped cognac from a bottle of Remy-Martin that Lia had found, miraculously intact and unopened, in the cupboard. Lia sat across from him. The lantern hissed fiercely on the table, throwing a harsh white light that cut sharp shadows in the room. Frowning, he told Lia about Royce's interest in the state of Highwood and his urgent desire to hire Paul to do something that didn't need doing for ridiculously high pay.
"A bribe—I love it. Did you confront him on it?" Lia took the bottle from him, swigged, returned it.
"Yeah. He gave me a concise overview of our cultural differences. Told me that different standards pertain among the very wealthy."
"Well, it's not totally implausible, is it?" Paul sighed wearily, rolling the liquid in the bottle. "No," he admitted.
"Did
you ask him if he was our midnight caller?"
"As a matter of fact, I did. 'Why, no, cousin. Didn't speak to your mother until just this morning. Didn't know you would be there.'"
"Because Janet called, and it wasn't her—I asked. She'd gotten your message from this morning."
"Is Mark okay?"
"She didn't mention anything, so I assume there wasn't any emergency. Just her usual chilly self. She said you could try her again tonight. And then Vivien called. 'Is this Lia?' she asked. T wondered if Paulie would rope you into helping him.' We only talked for a minute."
"Well, I suppose that's a relief."
"Yes. But before you let your shoulders down, I should tell you that a funny thing happened with Dempsey." Lia scowled. "I was in and out of the library, sorting a box, back and forth, right? So one time I poke my head in, and there's Dempsey scrabbling through the papers, picking up a page, reading it quickly, picking up another. As if he were looking for something specific. He didn't see me."
"Oh, Christ," Paul said.
"Maybe he's worried Vivien has something unpleasant on him, along with the rest of the dirt in her files."
"I don't believe there's any scandal in Dempsey's past. He's always been very aboveboard about his beliefs and actions."
"What, then?"
Paul's neck torqued uncontrollably, whipping his head around. "I have no idea. I'll just have to ask him about it tonight."
Responding to his agitation, Lia went to stand behind him and began massaging his neck. Her strong fingers probed the muscles there, intuitively finding the knots of tension at the base of his skull, loosening them. Paul shut his eyes and gave himself to the sensation.
In the silence he became aware of the big disordered darkness of the main hall, pressing against the closed door of the smoking room. He debated telling her about what he was feeling. But what could he say? Strange resonances in his memory. A big, dark, webbed, shadowed thing—
"Can I ask you something?" he said at last. "Now that you've spent a day here, don't you ever get a . . . weird feeling about it? Like something's wrong here—something very fucked up?"
"Of course. The people who did this have very screwed-up priorities. But that goes without saying. I take it you mean something else."
Paul leaned into her fingers. "I have these memories—being up here, going into the woods, then something else. Something that frightened me."
"Like what?"
How could he describe it? Lia was skeptical of the idea of memory repression, the recovered-memory fad that had resulted in so many recollections of satanic ritual abuse. The allegations of bloodletting rituals, cannibalism, incest, and murder were simply too fantastic to believe.
He gestured with his hands, trying to describe the sense of it. "It's as if I remember the feeling, or the texture of it, but past a certain point no visual images come to mind. Just this disturbing, unsettling, scary . . . turbulence, this feeling like . . . " He gestured again and then stopped, startled. He was making a tumbling motion with his two hands, the exact movement Mark had made when trying to describe the sensation of his seizures.
"Wow," he said.
"What now?"
Paul took her hands and held them, leaning his head back against her breasts. "Nothing," he said. "I've just got a lot to think about."
Again, it was a relief to sit in the warmth and order of the Corrigans' beautiful house after the chaos at Highwood. They had eaten another of Elaine's incredible dishes, a mouthwatering kielbasa stew served to the strains of Debussy string quartets on the stereo. After drinking half a bottle of rich Barolo, Dempsey seemed to have recovered from his earlier depressed mood, and he launched into a narrative about one of the odd characters who used to live in the region.
"He lived in the woods," Dempsey said. "They called him the Leather Man because he wore a suit he'd made out of leather scraps he'd salvaged. He had a range about the size of a puma's, all over northern Westchester and southern Putnam Counties. You'd see him walking, sometimes along the road, sometimes crossing it as he headed overland." He gestured with a hunk of bread.
Elaine laughed. "Dempsey talks as if he'd seen him. The Leather Man died before you were born, dear."
"What did he do?" Lia asked. "How did he survive?"
"Aha," Dempsey continued. "He scavenged food some, or lived off the land like a bear. He was big as a bear too—with a heavy, evil-looking face. Parents would tell children the Leather Man would get them if they didn't behave. Paradoxically, he was considered slightly magical, strange enough that to get a visit from him was considered a good omen. There's a universal human trait: We revere the strange."
The old man went on, elaborating. Ordinarily Paul would have been fascinated, but the day's events, and the prospect of asking Dempsey what he was looking for in the library, made it hard for him to concentrate.
Paul waited until Lia and Elaine took off on a conversational tangent, then turned to Dempsey. "How're those Linnell chairs of yours doing?"
Dempsey's eyes caught his briefly. "Haven't had as much time, with the Highwood windows, but I've got all the new parts in place. Want to see 'em?"
In the workshop Dempsey hit the light switch, and the overhead fluorescents blinked and came on. "Okay," he said. "This isn't a casual visit to the shop. What's up?"
"I want to know what's going on at Highwood."
"How would I know? Kids, crackheads, somebody mad at Vivien—?"
"I mean, what's going on for you there?" Paul's heart was hammering, his body was seething with tics. "You've been trying to find something in Vivien's papers. I want to know if it's anything I should know about."
Dempsey turned away, walked half the length of the workshop, then turned back. "It's nothing that bears on you or the damage to the house."
"I also hate the thought that Dempsey Corrigan is keeping anything from me."
"Look, Paulie." Dempsey threw his hands wide, a gesture of exasperation. "I'm a little drunk right now. It feels good, but it doesn't help me think straight at this moment. Part of me says, 'Hey, Paulie, it's my business, leave it be, let an old guy have his private life.'"
"So what's the other part say?"
"It reminds me that your father was my best friend, and that I've always cared about your family. And yeah, I never had kids, there's a father-and-son thing between you and me, and I don't want anything to come in the way of it. Not even my old regrets, though I'm goddamned well fully entitled to them."
Paul flicked his mustache with both hands as the two men listened to the buzz of the lights for a moment. "Do me a favor, Dempsey. Let me know what's going on. I've got my own stuff to unravel. Maybe what you tell me will help."
Dempsey rubbed his chin, then appeared to make a decision. "Okay, fine. Fine. It's not flattering to me, but what the hell. I'd always suspected Vivien kept everything, and seeing that heap of papers proved it. I was looking for some correspondence." He coughed, cleared his throat. "Letters from me to Vivien."
"Why not just ask Lia and me to keep an eye peeled for them? We'll turn them up eventually."
"That's exactly why I wanted to find them. So that you wouldn't."
It was Paul's turn to walk away, swinging his arms, trying to dispel some of the tension. "Jesus. You and Vivien?"
"Yeah. Like I said—a long time ago."
"So what's the big deal? People do that kind of thing. I mean, she was divorced, you—"
"I was married to Elaine at the time. And I'd as soon my dear wife didn't find out. I lost my head, I wrote stupid letters, I'd prefer you and Lia didn't read them. Vivien was a good-looking woman, I was full of juice. Remember, this was after she'd spent ten miserable years waiting for Hoffmann to come back to her. Not to make me sound chivalrous, but after Hoffmann, that woman was really hurting." He waited expectantly, but Paul had nothing to say. "Now you know. So let's go open another bottle of wine and forget it."
"Jesus. You've been worrying about that? I don't care. People of my generat
ion aren't so easily scandalized by extramarital affairs, Dempsey.
Christ, we all grew up watching it on the tube, reading about the illicit affairs of prominent people—"
"You might surprise yourself someday," Dempsey said gruffly.
Paul followed him to the workshop door. "But what do you want me to do? Lia and I have to get the papers cleaned up. Lia's looking over every piece—she's playing detective. Also, Vivien says there are more letters from Ben up there. I'm really wanting to read them."
"Of course." Dempsey stopped with his hand on the doorknob. "I just think you're going to have to figure out how to show some regard for Vivien's privacy, and mine. If it looks like a personal letter, don't read it. Lia will respect that, won't she?"
"There're a lot of letters. Were yours handwritten? Typed?"
"I don't remember. Thirty-five goddamned years ago." Dempsey opened the door and they stepped into the chill night air. The light over the workshop door cut a circle of brightness around them as Dempsey replaced the padlock on its hasp. "So it's a deal then, Paulie? You'll relay my request to Lia?"
"Of course," Paul said. "Look, I'm glad you told me about this. You've seemed awfully tense up there. I hope you can relax about it now."
"Sure." Dempsey flipped the light switch and the late autumn darkness came around them, but not before Paul caught a glimpse of the old man's face, his lips a tight straight line, eyes distant. Anything but relaxed.
34
THEY CAME OVER THE CREST and again the headlights panned the demolished garden and the dark lodge, its wet-looking window plastic bulging and going slack again in a slight breeze, as if the house were breathing. When Paul cut the lights, the blinding darkness seemed to suck into the cab. They both sat in the dark, unwilling to leave the warmth of the car.