“We looked in all the rooms, actually,” he said. “Her's was just the one that you caught us in.”
“And what, pray tell, where you looking for?” he asked, his eyes charring over us angrily.
Jack hesitated for just a moment.
“Information.”
I shut my eyes just as Mr. Perenna's mouth thinned into a flat, rigid line. Even if I hadn't have had a good answer for him, I was certain that it would have been better than Jack's.
Mr. Perenna unfolded his hands and reached for his phone.
“Very well. You can sit down now boys – I'm calling the police.”
Ch. 6
“Fuck,” Jack mouthed over at me, his dark eyes widening just slightly, and I shook my head at him in return. Mr. Perenna punched in the number with short, jerky movements of his fingers and stared at us as he held the phone to his ear.
“Yes? Hello, Martin – it's Jim. I have two young men here who I found sneaking around my house.” He waited as the other man responded, his eyes still poised on the two of us. “Ten minutes? Yes, that would be perfect.”
He replaced the phone on the dial and folded his hands back together, eyeing us with the same discerning expression that his face seemed all-too accustomed to. As his eyes traveled over my appearance and then over to Jack's, his jaw untightened just slightly to allow him to speak.
“You're the boy from the church, are you?” he said, asking the question despite already knowing the answer. There was a row of binders lining the bookshelf behind him, each neatly labeled like the ledgers of an accountant's would be, though I got the impression that his were filled with notes about the town and details about its inhabitants. As Jack nodded, he turned to me. “And you? Are you another of Father Taggart's … projects?”
I glanced warily at Jack.
“No,” I said.
“No? Who are you, then?”
“I … I'm a friend of Jack's.”
“And do you have a name?”
“Enim. Lund.”
“Eh-nim Looned,” he repeated, testing the name out to decide whether or not he liked the sound of it. “And what are you doing in Kipling, Mr. Lund?”
“I'm just visiting,” I said.
“From?”
“Connecticut.”
“Connecticut,” Mr. Perenna echoed, nodding in a way that suggested he had guessed the answer before I had given it. “Hartford?”
“Around there.”
He hummed to himself and reached for a binder. Opening it, he retrieved a file and flipped it open to make a note on one of the pages. I glanced again at Jack, who had shifted his gaze to meet my eyes, but apart from a slight raise of his brow, he gave me no indication of what he was thinking.
“I've never been to Connecticut before,” Mr. Perenna said. Now that I was looking straight at him, the thinness of his features was more apparent. His eyes were small and constantly squinted in order to read his fine-print-like handwriting, and his nose was so narrow that it looked as though it could break at any moment. As his mouth turned down into another frown, the lips disappeared beneath the wrinkles that had formed around them. “It's a big place, though, is it?”
I put my hands behind my back as I considered my answer, unsettled by the seemingly polite conversation.
“I … I guess so,” I said. “Comparatively.”
“Mm, I imagine.” His eyes locked with mine. “And, I wonder – do they have rules in Connecticut, Mr. Lund?”
I bit the tip of my tongue.
“I … yes, they – they do,” I said.
“Yes, I thought that they might,” he continued, making another note in his chart. “Most places do, after all – rules, laws, social practices. Did you know that, Mr. Lund?”
“I – I did, sir.”
“You did?”
I glanced at Jack again, wondering if I had somehow misheard the question.
“I knew that most places have rules, yes,” I reiterated.
“Well, that's good to hear. I thought so, you see – you seem like a smart enough young man, after all,” he said, pulling off his thinly-wired glasses and tossing them atop the file. “Because we have rules here in Kipling, too, Mr. Lund. Did you know that?”
“I … I assumed as much, Mr. Perenna.”
“You assumed.”
“I … I did, yes.”
“So you assumed when you decided to break into my house and take a look around that it might be – how should I put it? – unethical? Illegal, even?”
Jack cleared his throat.
“We were just bringing the food up for Mrs. Coffey,” he said. “I was the one who –”
“I'm having a conversation with Mr. Lund right now, Mr. Hadler,” Mr. Perenna said curtly. “Don't worry: I'll get to you in a moment.”
He turned back to me with the same sharpness in his eyes.
“Mr. Lund, did you know that it was against the rules to go into someone's house without asking?”
“I – I did, sir.”
“And yet you did it anyway?”
He was staring at me with such rigidness that my own neck felt stiff just from trying to keep my eyes level with his own. As I tried to find a response that would be remotely near a proper explanation, I found myself wishing once again that Karl was there to take care of the situation for me.
“I – I did, sir.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask, then, why you thought that it was a good idea to go ahead and do it anyhow?” he said, his voice taking on the air of someone feigning polite confusion.
I hesitated.
“Do you have some sort of disability?” Mr. Perenna suggested. “Some sort of slowness or mental delay that prevents you from remembering social formalities?”
I bit the insides of my mouth.
“I'm schizophrenic,” I said shortly.
Mr. Perenna frowned.
“Excuse me?”
“I'm schizophrenic,” I repeated. It was hardly an excuse at all, and certainly not one that I would have ever used in previous years, but something about saying it aloud had always had a certain effect that made people withdraw from me, and if there was anything that I wanted the man at the desk to do, it was put as much distance between us as he would allow.
“You're … schizophrenic?” he said. He glanced at Jack and then donned his glasses again to make another, quite lengthier, note in his chart. “So you hear voices?”
“Among other things.”
“I see,” he said, though after the initial shock had worn off, he seemed no more off-put after the statement than he had been beforehand. “How interesting. So did voices tell you to break into my house?”
It was clear that he knew as well as I did why I had made the declaration, and unlike Jack, who seemed to be fighting the urge to cackle, he was not at all amused.
“I did, sir,” I said. My tone was rather genuine despite my inability to tell a convincing lie, though it was only because the statement was – in a way – true: a voice had told me to snoop around his house. Unfortunately, the voice belonged to Jack.
Mr. Perenna raised his eyebrows, but his eyes shifted over to Jack.
“And what about you, Mr. Hadler? Do you hear voices?”
“Can't say that I do,” Jack responded.
“So your excuse for breaking into my house would be … what, exactly?”
Jack licked his lips.
“Just wanted a look around, I suppose.”
“A look around,” Mr. Perenna repeated crisply. “And what did you hope that you would find? Money? Jewelry? I would have thought that Father Taggart had impressed upon you the difference between right and wrong by now.”
“I wasn't going to steal anything,” Jack said, his voice taking on an edge. “I just wanted to look.”
“To look at what, precisely? My daughter's room? Her personal belongings? You're one of those types, are you?”
“What? No – definitely not.”
/> “She's underage,” Mr. Perenna said. “Was. She was underage.”
Jack was still looking at him with a horrified expression at the suggestion and took no notice of the somber note that had entered the older man's voice.
“I wasn't looking at her stuff,” he said irritably.
“No? You were just lost, were you?” Mr. Perenna said, his tone rivaling Jack's again. “You thought that you'd take a look at her room to tell the town that you had? Thought it might get you some recognition – some power around here?”
“No, I was just looking around,” Jack said again. “And if you really want to know why, it's because I don't really think that your daughter committed suicide, Mr. Perenna.”
My shoulders dropped and I briefly shut my eyes, wishing that he had said anything else. Mr. Perenna was staring at him with an unreadable expression, and for once stayed silent for a long stretch of time.
“You don't think what, Mr. Hadler?” he said lowly.
“I don't think that she killed herself,” Jack repeated.
Mr. Perenna's eyes sunk farther back into his skull.
“And what would possess you to say something like that?”
I threw Jack a warning glance that he purposefully ignored.
“I just … it doesn't seem to fit, Mr. Perenna.”
He was as adamant to explain himself as he had been with me, though in this case, especially, it was an overly lost cause. Mr. Perenna continued to stare at him for several moments, perhaps thinking that Jack was pulling something similar to what I had by telling him about my diagnosis, though Jack's expression was so serious that he seemed to change his mind.
“Well, it fits just fine from where I'm sitting,” he said at last. “Unless, of course, you know something about my daughter that I didn't.”
Jack chewed his cheeks unhappily.
“Not – not quite,” he admitted. “But … I mean, Father Taggart says she was religious and all, and suicide's a sin, isn't it?”
“It is. And if you've come to tell me that my daughter will spend all of eternity in Hell, then I will remove you from this house right now.”
“No, I just – that's not what I'm saying.” He gave Mr. Perenna a look that bordered on pleading, though he ought to have known by now that no one – least of all anyone by the likes of James Perenna – would have thought to believe him. “I just don't think Anna would have killed herself, sir.”
The man bowed his head, but his expression was intolerant and his mouth had formed a bladed line that cut along the lower half of his face.
“Well, I thank you for thinking so highly of her,” he said, though his tone suggested otherwise. “Anna was a … special girl. A good girl. She had a bright future, I always thought.”
“But if you think that, then why do you think she would have killed herself?”
Mr. Perenna let out a low laugh, and the humorlessness in it seemed to suck the air from the room.
“I think many things, Mr. Hadler, trust me. And I've been angry, and I've bargained with the devil, it seems, to try to understand why, but this is one thing that I can't. Anna was upset over her brother's death – it was something that she couldn't seem to get over.”
His tone was formal again, and the disparaging suggestion that she had been supposed to get over the event and move on was far too similar to my own father's viewpoint to find arguable, and I found my compassion for him lessening even more.
“I loved my daughter, Mr. Hadler,” Mr. Perenna said, “but she was lost.”
He showed us from the study and instructed us to wait by the back door for the police to arrive. As we exited the room, the unkempt form of the youngest Perenna child came into view. He seemed to have been lurking outside the door in order to overhear the conversation, and between his pointed expression and back funeral clothes, he looked like a gutter rat.
“Thanks for helping us bring the food up, Eliot,” Jack said as we passed him. “Maybe you should tell your father that we wouldn't've been up here at all if you'd bothered to help Mrs. Coffey like you were supposed to.”
“I was helping my mother,” he said. His voice was as low and scraggly as his appearance; he had evidently been inhaling the paint fumes for far too long. “I'm the only one she's got left now.”
“Poor her.”
We made our way to the back porch just as a police officer was coming up the steps. He shook his head as he saw us and waved us out through the screen door.
“Don't you boys have any respect?” he asked, indicating for us to follow him down to his car. “It's their daughter's funeral today.”
“Not going to cuff us?” Jack said rather than responding.
The officer shook his head.
“Nope – not today. Jim said I should take you back to the church. Father Taggart will do more good than I will.”
Jack rolled his eyes at me and leaned in to speak into my ear.
“That means they've already got someone locked up in the cell. They've only got one.”
He didn't say anything else in the short ride back through the town, and despite not liking the looks of interest that were being thrown our way by the people filing towards the Perennas' house as they headed to the after party, I wasn't sorry that we didn't have to walk back to the church in the cold.
He let us out just outside the gates to the cemetery, and we slipped through the opening and headed towards the churchyard. As we walked, Jack reached into his pocket for his lighter and lit a cigarette. As he let out a breath of smoke, it was indistinguishable in the air from my own frozen ones.
“You shouldn't have told him that you're schizophrenic,” he said unexpectedly, not looking at me as he spoke. He took another drag and stared off across the tombstones, his shoes slipping beneath the snow as we walked. “It's a small town – they won't like it.”
“No one 'likes' it,” I replied. “Least of all me.”
Jack shrugged indifferently.
“I'm just warning you,” he said. “Be prepared for prejudice and whatnot – people here aren't shy about telling you exactly how they feel.”
I shook my head at him in annoyance, though his own was still turned and he didn't see me do so.
“You shouldn't have told him that you think Anna was murdered,” I countered. “That's just asking for trouble – and you're the one who always told me that no one would believe us. Remember what happened on Bardom Island?”
“Course I remember,” he snapped. “But I don't think Jim Perenna murdered his own daughter.”
“He might've.” I had long since given up the notion that I could trust anyone, and if Albertson could have done what he did to Miss Mercier and those girls, than Mr. Perenna was capable of anything. “He reminds me of Barker, what with the way he runs the town and all. And it's not like he's winning the father-of-the-year award or anything.”
“He might be – not that there's much competition. I'd vote for him over either of our own fathers.”
I bit down on my tongue; the cold teeth sunk into it sharply.
“And just because he reminds you of Barker doesn't mean anything,” Jack continued. “In case you've forgotten, Barker wasn't the killer on Bardom Island, anyhow.”
“No, he wasn't.”
He took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled off to his side, but the wind whipped it back to hit me in the face.
“Maybe you should give that up,” I said, coughing as the smoke entered my lungs. “It's not the greatest habit.”
“Yeah?” Jack put the cigarette back to his mouth and sucked in another breath. “Fearing for my mortality, are you, Nim?”
I shook my head, put off by his lack of concern.
“No, just thought you might be.”
“I've got at least forty years before I have to start worrying about that. And if I make it to sixty, I don't think I'll be complaining.”
Given his disparaging tone, it was clear that he thought that I was referring to what had happened with Albertson. And
while I would have given anything to have had the chance to change what had happened to him – or to at least alter it enough so that the cancer had never spread to his brain to affect him in the way that it had – it wasn't him that I was thinking of. My father would be sixty in June. Or, I reminded myself, would have been. He had given up smoking when I was just old enough to remember him doing so, switching to drinking coffee in replacement instead, and though it had undoubtedly been the gastroesophageal reflux that had caused the cancer, it hardly seemed to matter.
“You might be,” I said.
“Well, if I am, then I give you full permission to mock me on my deathbed.”
He finished his cigarette and threw it off to his side. It sank into the snow and gave one last flicker of red embers before going out.
We had left Mea in the room upstairs for far too long, and upon opening the door we were met with the sight of Jack's destroyed mattress, newly-strewn clothing, and the distinct smell of something foul. I ran my hand through my hair upon realizing that I should have taken her out before we had headed out before and threw an apologetic look at Jack, but something in seeing her sitting in the middle of the floor with her bright eyes and wagging tail seemed to dissipate some of Jack's bad mood.
“It's alright – she doesn't know any better,” he said, bending down to scoop her up. “And I was probably due to do my laundry, anyhow.”
“I'll do it,” I said.
“Just like old times, yeah?” he said, giving a slight grin as he reference how I had done his laundry at Bickerby, too.
“Yeah.”
He moved to sit down on his bed, carefully eyeing the hole in the mattress where the filling had been pulled out, and smoothed back the fur on Mea's head as she continued to flop her tail back and forth on his lap. As I stooped down to cautiously begin collecting his clothes, a light knock sounded on the door.
“Jack?”
Father Taggart gently opened the door. His eyes swept over the room once before finding Jack seated on the bed with the dog, and he offered a small smile.
“You can come in, Father,” Jack said, hurriedly putting Mea down and stepping across the room towards him.
When I Am Laid in Earth (Damnatio Memoriae Book 3) Page 8