Lance’s unfocused eyes fell on Denny. “I can see him,” he said, “and I hate him.”
SIX
A GIANT HAND MUST HAVE REACHED DOWN FROM ABOVE AND set the house and barn atop the snowy plateau. How else to explain the toy-like ensemble, highlighted by a sunbeam, so factory-fresh and shiny with promise? As he gazed up the hill from the bottom of the long driveway, Denny installed himself up there. He fancied himself at a window, wondering why that big-faced man down in the car was ogling his homestead.
“Plowed within the hour,” Lance observed as the car climbed.
Nick said, “Rose must have done it.”
Denny looked around for his neighbors, but not a house was within sight. For his whole life he had lived in apartments or row houses, with neighbors no more than twelve inches away.
“It’s so quiet,” Nick said. “This place is really jumping in the summertime.”
Lance grunted.
The driveway swept to the left, taking them away from the house before it swung back toward it—an approach, Denny saw, that preserved the expanse of unblemished snow in front. They topped the hill, and Nick stopped in front of the house. A covered porch welcomed Denny, with five identical arches looping from post to post at the front edge of the roof. The house was clad in white-painted clapboard and trimmed in red at its windows and vertical corner boards. The massive barn to the right was its color complement: red with white-trimmed windows. But he suddenly worried about the barn. Its long axis, instead of being at a right angle to that of the house, was off by about ten degrees. And didn’t it sit too close to the house? He wanted it about twice its present distance from the house.
Apart from that, the siting was good. The buildings sat atop ground that sloped away so gradually as to be nearly flat. But then, after a ways, the land fell sharply on all sides and yielded to woods. The pines in front were rooted well below the hilltop, and even the tallest ones did not block the view to the distant mountain ranges. The fog was blowing off, and the vista seemed to expand before their eyes. It drew the gaze of all three men. Denny found it hard to tell what was connected to what, which ridges were near, far, and very far.
“You’re paying the new view tax for sure, Homer,” Nick said. “Probably a Camel’s Hump tax, too.”
“That’s next,” Lance grunted.
Denny had business to take care of. Dramatic business. He needed to appear overwhelmed. After all, he was a man who had been dangerously ill, and he was returning to his beloved family farm, or whatever. He was overcome, sure, but he was also the son of a farmer, or whoever, so he was a manly man. He got out and positioned himself in front of the car. He beheld the panorama and stretched forth a hand in reverence. He also passed a large quantity of gas that had built up during the ride. He would ordinarily have let it out in the car, but he guessed Homer wouldn’t do such a thing.
Everything was falling into place. What was acting but an extended lie, and what better liar was there than Dennis Braintree? Only once had he been caught in a lie, a little over a year ago. He had been at the zoo, and a small bird had flown low right at his face and then veered away at the last minute. Denny’s mouth had been open at the time because he was imitating the face a chimp had just made at him, and it occurred to him that the bird could easily have flown into his mouth. That thought became the account he delivered later, at a meeting of the church mission committee: “A bird flew into my mouth at the zoo.” The ladies responded with a mix of surprise and disgust. They made faces, and one made spitting sounds to eject the bird. But afterward, privately, one of them said to him, “That didn’t really happen, did it?” As an experiment, he said, “No, it didn’t.” She said, “You’re involved in the church because it’s a welcoming institution, correct?” Again he agreed. “There are limits,” she said.
No one would catch him in this lie, he vowed. No one. He smacked himself once on the belly and turned and walked to the house. Nick and Lance, having given the returnee his moment, got out of the car. On the porch, Denny made a show of patting his pockets and then throwing his arms out to express the frustration of a mortal who has packed his house key in a suitcase from which he is presently separated. He felt along the top of the door molding for the spare key that one might keep there.
“It’s probably unlocked, Homer,” Nick said as he stepped onto the porch.
Denny hid his surprise and opened the door. He entered a central hall—stairs straight ahead, living room to the left, dining room to the right.
“Chilly chilly,” said Nick. “It’s funny how a house that you expect to be warm can feel colder than it is outside, even when it’s not.” Denny noticed that Nick had kicked off his shoes and left them outside the door.
Lance called from below the porch, “Nick, we should be off.”
But Nick padded across the floor in his socks and disappeared around a corner into the living room. Denny ambled the other way, moving slowly through the dining room into the kitchen. A restaurant-style booth sat under a side window. He opened the refrigerator: empty and dark. He dialed it on, and it purred back in response. A window over the sink faced the barn, and he saw another outbuilding between the house and the barn that he hadn’t noticed because it was set back from the other buildings. Its roof had an odd shape, with a short front slope and a longer back slope. He strolled on through the kitchen to a room that had been a back porch but was now enclosed by windows. Through these he saw a woodshed near the house and the empty frame of a metal swing set some distance away. Snow reached to the crossbars of its legs.
The enclosed porch wrapped around to the rear of the living room, where an upright piano stood. Denny, completing the circuit, found Nick on his knees stuffing crumpled newspaper into a black stove set near a central chimney. Lance, at the front end of the room, his arms folded across his chest, watched Nick without expression—or perhaps with hatred. It was hard to tell. Lance was in his socks as well. If entering a house shoeless was the local custom, it struck Denny as a strange one.
A phone rang on a small desk behind Lance. Denny, after displaying the hesitation of a man still recovering from a close brush with death, etc., walked the length of the room to answer it. Lance was in the way and moved to the side, but not enough, and Denny brushed him lightly with his body as he passed.
Well before the receiver reached Denny’s ear, a boisterous voice exploded: “Ha! So the rabble is right, for once. Homer is indeed emerged from his hibernacula. Don’t pretend you don’t know why I’m calling. Don’t you do that.”
“Um—”
“The brass isn’t the same without you, Homer. It doesn’t sing. I want the man who always warms up with ‘Caravan.’ Waaaaaaa. Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa waaaaaaa.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m prepared to offer the Dorsey hymn—that’s right, ‘I’m Gettin’ Sentimental.’ Worried about the D-flat? I can offer it topping out at a B, but if I know my Homer, and I believe I do. . . . Hang on, I’ve got a blasted call coming in. If it’s Hutchins, I’ve got a serious problem with his reeds. But that will change now that my Homer’s back.” He hung up.
Lance was staring at Denny, as he had been through the entire conversation. Nick expressed his own curiosity by sitting back on his heels in front of the stove and raising his eyebrows.
“You don’t want to know,” Denny said as he hung up the phone.
Lance turned back to Nick. “We need to talk to Marge’s sister.”
Nick took some small logs from a metal bucket and laid them in the stove. “Ash,” he said of one log. “Nice.” Then, in a different tone, “You got her number?”
“No, but I’ve got her name. Hagenbeck.” Lance turned to Denny. After a moment he said impatiently, “Phone book?”
Denny roused himself and scanned the desk, then began to rummage through the drawers. The phone, inches from him, made him jump when it rang again. He grabbed it.
“Homer?” a scratchy male voice said.
“Yeah?”
“Hap.”
“Who?”
“Hap.”
“Hap?”
“Is that Hap?” Nick said. He had lit the newspaper and was closing the stove door. He hurried to Denny, grinning and reaching for the phone.
“Hang on, Hap,” said Denny, interrupting speech that had already begun to make no sense to him. He handed Nick the phone. Meanwhile, Lance had found a phone book in a bookcase next to the desk and was searching through it.
Nick, grinning broadly, said into the phone, “You old pelter.” After a pause, he roared with laughter.
Denny went into the entry hall and up the stairs as if to reconnect with his environment but really to flee the scene. The stairs turned at a landing and issued into a long hallway that ran the length of the house from back to front. Photographs lined one wall—an astounding number, thirty or so. Denny studied them in search of Homer. He was eager for a moment of sharp recognition. But the wall of photos showed no image of anyone like himself in the embrace of a strange family—no father with a hand on his shoulder, no brother yukking it up with him, no sister straightening his tie. Their Homerlessness, he realized, lay in the age of the photos. Judging from the clothes and hairstyles, nothing on the wall had been snapped before the 1950s. He saw no facial resemblance between himself and anyone pictured. Not only that, but all of the subjects were lean, some even starved in appearance.
“Homer?” Nick called from below. “Hap wants to interview you for the Monthly. The prodigal son and all that.”
Denny was absorbed in a photo of a waif proudly displaying a whole pie in each hand. She stood on a muddy road, balancing the pie pans on her palms, but they were tilted and seemed about to fall. If she dropped those pies, she would die of hunger, he was sure of it. “Tell him next month,” Denny called down.
“Gotcha.” Nick returned to the phone. Denny didn’t go back downstairs until he heard him hang up.
Lance had stepped onto the porch, but now he was returning and snapping his cell phone shut. He said, “She’ll meet us at the Wayside in twenty.”
Nick, still standing at the front desk near the house phone, nodded, then reached into his pocket for his cell phone, which had begun to ring. Denny threw Lance a friendly look of surprise at all of the telephonic activity in the house. Lance stared back at him coldly. This made Denny glad about what he had done in the car after their stop at the accident scene: he had bumped Lance’s seat with his knees every few minutes as he shifted position. He was so fat, you see, so big and fat, that he couldn’t fit properly in the back seat. With each bump, Lance had jiggled like a bobble head.
While Nick stepped into the dining room with his call, Denny walked over to warm himself by the wood stove. A glass panel in the door exposed the leaping flames, which Denny found unsettling. It was as if Nick had lit a campfire on the living room rug. But it all seemed safely contained. The heat created a glow of warmth around the black iron box, and Denny began a slow rotation of his body. He looked at Lance.
“I feel like a big chicken turning on a spit, dripping hot fat.”
Lance stared. Then he turned to Nick, who was coming back from the dining room, his phone call over. Nick shook his head and chuckled softly. “Kind of a mess at the airport. The planes started flying again, but not for long. Our guy checked a bag but didn’t show for the boarding call, so they had to evacuate the plane. They’ve shut down everything until they look at his bag.”
“That’s tremendous news,” Lance said. “Now we’ve got cause.”
“To search the bag? They’re doing that.”
Lance shook his head. “To search for his location. Betsy said he bought a cell phone yesterday. He’s hiding out in Vermont, or thinks he is. The oinker’s too stupid to know he’s walking around with a GPS chip in his phone. We’ll get the specs from the phone store and pass them on to the Feds—they’ll want to jump in now because of the security violation—and they can home in within a couple of meters of the chip. A slab of bacon that size shouldn’t be hard to find within those parameters. I’ll get Susan going on the warrant.” He opened his cell phone and looked at Nick for the go-ahead.
“Doesn’t the phone have to be on for that to work?” Nick said.
“Some models, not all. And he’s bound to turn it on sooner or later.”
Nick bounced his eyebrows a couple of times. “Let’s give it a shot.”
Denny’s mind was more than ordinarily active. GPS chip? In his cell phone? Oinker? Slab of bacon?
The house phone rang again. Denny headed for the desk to answer it.
“We’ll leave you to your many fans,” Nick said. “Welcome home, guy.” He clapped Denny on the shoulder. Lance was already on his way out, his own phone pressed to his ear.
When the door closed and Denny turned back to the desk, he saw for the first time that Homer’s phone had a caller ID window. There he read “Ethan Allen Hotel.” His hand froze on the receiver. The caller was almost certainly Betsy, searching for Homer, and she would expect to hear his voice, not Denny’s. He pulled his hand away. When the answering machine clicked on, Denny waited eagerly for Homer’s greeting—what was the pitch of his voice, how fast did he talk? But the rather tentative speaker identified himself as Chip—the tenant who had fled the premises after the break-in.
Betsy left a message: “Homer? They say you’re back. Oh, I pray that you are. You’re a dear boy. Someday you’ll know just how dear you are. I was worried that you . . . I just worry about you. Please call me.” She paused. “All right then.” She hung up.
“Homer!” Denny shouted at the answering machine. “You’re a dear boy!”
Encouraged by the family photographs in the upstairs hall, Denny made another sweep of the first floor and then examined the rooms upstairs. The main bedroom dominated the side near the barn, with a small computer room connecting at its front end and a bathroom at the rear. The other side of the second floor consisted of a guest bedroom, a sterile office of some kind, and a long music room along the side connecting them, full of sheet music, books, and music stands. Denny didn’t find any more family photos—just cheap art prints and some pictures of ancient-looking musical instruments. He would search the house later for scrap-books. There had to be a likeness of Homer somewhere.
First things first. He didn’t want Lance the Tiger tracking down his cell phone, which presently nestled in his front pants pocket, right next to what remained of the M&M peanuts, rolled up in their shiny yellow bag. He took some out and began to munch on them. How to dispose of the phone? Could he smash it with a hammer, or was the chip indestructibly small? Better to take the phone somewhere and throw it away. Or, better still, leave it as if forgotten. Leave it somewhere where he wasn’t, to lay down a false scent. Burlington was his last known location. Let the search for Dennis Braintree remain in Burlington.
He would need a car to get back there. He hadn’t seen one outside, but one of the two outbuildings might house one. He found a down jacket in the hall closet and a pair of insulated slip-on boots in the enclosed back porch. From there he went out the back door onto a small exposed porch. His first step from there onto the snow-covered stairs was his last. His feet shot out from under him and he bumped assily down the short flight. The fall was so violent that he lay on his back in the snow for a while, enjoying the blue sky as he tongued chocolate peanuts from his molars. He raised his head and glared at the stairs that had tricked him. A snow shovel hung from a wooden peg on the porch wall. He had never shoveled snow before. Didn’t the exertion kill people, especially chubby ones?
He rolled onto his stomach and groaned to his feet. He worked his way along the back of the house, sinking the full length of his legs with every step. How did people walk in this stuff? Luckily, a wire mesh fence paralleled his path from the corner of the house to the near outbuilding, and he clutched it for support all the way there.
The unlocked door at its rear led Denny not to a car but to a discovery of what Nick had meant by Homer’s “shop.�
�� Homer repaired musical instruments. Denny did not know this from the hundreds of quirky, specialized tools tidily arranged above the wooden workbench. He knew it from a work in progress—a trumpet lying on a felt pad with its interior parts spread out—and from a rate chart posted on one wall. Denny found the chart fascinating. Homer charged different hourly rates for different instruments. He saw the logic: Homer was probably more experienced with certain classes of instruments than with others. With brass instruments, for example, his labor was more efficient and therefore worth more. For work on clarinets and saxophones he charged less per hour. Under “Strings,” the chart read “$ .01 / hour.” This told customers that he didn’t work on stringed instruments. Homer humor.
A door on the side of the workshop away from the house led to a small open area and, beyond it, the barn. Denny struggled through the short stretch of snow, this time without a fence to clutch. He more or less fell against the side door of the barn, and he braced himself for something unpleasant—moldy hay, piles of manure, dead beasts. Instead he found himself in a well-appointed recital hall. To one side, a raised stage; to the other, generous banked seating with fixed, upholstered chairs. He walked the length of one aisle to the rearmost row of seats, where he turned and took in the hall. It was splendid. The construction costs must have been staggering. Had Sarah done this? Homer? Homer’s family?
Denny continued on into the foyer at the front of the building. In a corner, behind a portable partition, he found what one wouldn’t ordinarily find in a recital hall: a car. Was this where Homer always parked? More likely, he had put it here for storage during his absence.
From Away Page 6