The Dark House

by John Sedgwick

  The Nissan hummed smoothly along in the middle lane, but Rollins had the sensation he disliked most in life—of being intruded upon, of being physically disturbed. What’s more, he was filled with foreboding that his private pursuit was now about to go public. By now, the TV news vans would have swarmed the tree-lined Elmhurst street by number 29. Blow-dried reporters would be addressing TV cameras before the house’s smoldering embers for their eleven o’clock report.

  Yet as he drove east on 62, he heard no sirens, and, as he scanned the moonlit horizon, he could see no smoke rising over the trees and the smattering of colonial houses that dotted the narrow highway. As he wound through sleepy North Reading and turned in on Elmhurst, he saw no sign of a fire at all. Number 29 still stood, the faux medieval door intact, the metal siding gleaming dully just as before. The only difference was that a FOR SALE sign from Sloane Realty now adorned the front yard.

  He was still gazing in astonishment at 29 from across the street when he heard a rap on the passenger-side window. He snapped his head around. It was Marj. She gestured for him to roll down the window, which he did. But, annoyed, he didn’t pop the door lock, just straightened up on his side of the car, his arms folded across his chest. From there, he could see her thin hand, with its silver bracelets, several rings, and bright yellow fingernails, slither over the glass to pluck the lock button. She climbed in beside him, then quietly pulled the door shut behind her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Not much of a fire.” Rollins looked back at the house.

  “Maybe I exaggerated a little.”

  Rollins turned toward her again, so that their eyes met.

  “It gets lonely watching a house all by yourself,” Marj continued. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Couple hours.”

  Rollins felt his eyebrows flicker involuntarily, the way they did when a driver he’d been following took a sudden, illegal U-turn on the highway, losing him. The girl was a mystery. By now, he thought he was a decent student of human nature, but clearly some things were beyond him.

  “The whole thing was starting to bug me, all right?” She rubbed her hands together between her knees, as if she were cold. She had on a denim jacket and a tight skirt that revealed a lot of leg. Not what he’d have recommended for a pursuit. Her reddish hair flopped down over her forehead. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said.

  “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know. It’s your house—at least I think of it that way. I don’t want to, like, barge in.”

  “What about Sloane?” he asked. “Weren’t you afraid he’d see you here?”

  “I brought something for that putz.” She pulled a small silver canister out of the pocket of her jacket. “Mace.” She pushed it to Rollins’ face, close enough to make him pull his head back. “If he comes near me. Pshhhhh.”

  “Careful with that.”

  “Oh, relax. The safety cap’s still on. See?” She waved that in front of his face, too.

  Rollins shifted in his seat.

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Marj asked.

  “You did lie.”

  “Oh, poor baby.” Marj slid over near him and pressed an open palm against Rollins’ cheek. Her hand felt damp and cool—a misery after the sight of her long, lean thighs on his passenger seat.

  “Please don’t.” His brother used to press his hands on him, just to be annoying.

  “Okay, okay.” Marj withdrew her hand. “Sorry.”

  Seeing her pull back, he was sorry, too; he shouldn’t have said anything.

  He looked at her, then out the window at 29 Elmhurst, then at Marj again. She had lured him back here. Not for the second time either, but a third. This violated a precept almost as inviolable as his Garbo rule: no repeats. He followed a car for one night, and that was it. Any more than that and he risked getting involved. He might leave a bit of himself in that car, that house, that life. Instead of him owning it, it might own him. He might become a part of the scene he’d meant only to witness.

  “So, how’d you get here?” he asked.

  “I brought my car.” She gestured across the street, maybe five car lengths down from number 29. “Over there.”

  “You parked with your back to the house?”

  “I used the rearview. I figured it’d be less conspicuous.”

  The girl could think.

  “You see anything?” Rollins asked.

  “Zip.” Marj scratched her forehead with her yellow fingernails.

  Rollins wondered if Marj was wearing perfume. He couldn’t smell any, but perhaps that was because he’d gotten used to it. He tried to remember what the perfume had smelled like when he’d first ridden with her. Was it fruity or flowery? He closed his eyes for a second, thinking. With his eyes shut, he couldn’t sense her presence, and that was strange, too. Normally, he could feel when people were close by. Perhaps she was becoming too familiar to him.

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw her looking at him. “Headache?” she asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  She sighed. “Pretty weird out here the other night.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “All the pretending, I mean.”

  “I wasn’t about to tell that man my real name,” Rollins said defensively.

  “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  Rollins looked at her from a different angle.

  “I meant me.” Marj smoothed out her skirt, then fumbled with the hem. “I didn’t tell you the full story about my dad. Remember how I told you he died in an accident?”

  Rollins did remember. That and how envious he’d felt when she’d told him her father had died. Not that he wished his own father dead. Heavens. No, he simply wanted the relationship resolved. Two marriages later, was his father still his father? Or more exactly, was that all he was—not friend, mentor, fan? It was all the more confusing now that he lived somewhere on the opposite coast, and was virtually incommunicado. For all Rollins knew, his father could have had more children by now. For that matter, he could be dead.

  That crumpled postcard announcing Father’s remarriage. Just a few words on the back, scrawled in a lazy diagonal. Signed: Your father. No Love, no Fondly. Just Your father.

  Marj looked over at him. “You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You get so quiet sometimes.” She waited a moment. “My dad didn’t have an accident. I guess I like to think he did. I didn’t want you to have the wrong idea about me.” She turned away.

  “So what did happen?”

  ”He just never came back. I guess he couldn’t quite face up to the idea that he was a dad. My dad. So he just stayed over there, even after his time in the army was up. He’s still there, far as I know.”

  “You never saw him?”

  “Nope.”

  Rollins stared over at her. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I just didn’t want you to think that you were the only person who was looking. I look all the time.”

  Rollins shifted uneasily in his seat. He did not take easily to change. He never rearranged the furniture in his apartment. He revised his list of favorite restaurants only when one closed. For almost a decade, he had taken the same vacations—a week in a small hotel called the Harborside in Florida’s Pigeon Key in mid-February, and another at a tiny rented cottage on Sober Island, off Nova Scotia, in early August, now barely a fortnight away—and always alone. He belonged to no clubs, subscribed only to National Geographic; and, as for movies, he attended only the revivals of his adored classic black and whites at the Brattle in Harvard Square. Now, with Marj in the seat beside him, her hands tucked under her armpits, he feared that all of this was in danger.

  Rollins stroked his chin with the tip of his right index finger, then turned away from her toward number 29. It was an unprepossessing house, but it was, at least temporarily, a fixed point in his universe. He started to trace the lines of t
he down spout up to the gutter. Then he caught himself and put the car in gear. “We shouldn’t stay here.”

  “But my car—”

  “We’ll come back for it, don’t worry.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I think I saw that gaunt man again.”

  “What gaunt man?”

  “The guy in the Audi who led me here in the first place.”

  “Oh, shit. That guy? Where?” She looked around.

  Rollins gave her the details of the possible sighting that evening. “I can’t be sure,” he wound up, “but we better get moving.”

  Marj fell silent for a moment, her brow tight, her head slightly cocked. “Wait—so you think he might be following you?”

  “It’s possible, yes.” Rollins moved the car ahead slowly, in low gear, while he checked the rearview.

  “Oh, shit,” Marj said. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” She struck him lightly on the shoulder. “I knew this would get scary. I just knew it.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure it was him. I didn’t get a clear look at him.”

  “Did he run off at the sight of you?”

  Rollins hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

  “It was him,” Marj said coldly, her eyes ahead. “I can feel it.”

  Rollins glanced over at her. “How?”

  “I just can. After everything else, Rolo, it just makes sense.” Marj rapped her open palm on her bare thigh. “I bet he’s paid to watch you. I bet it’s his job.”

  “Oh, come on. I followed him, remember?” Rollins had had about enough of Marj’s melodramatic theorizing.

  Marj lifted her arms in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. It’s crazy. All right?”

  Rollins softened, his eyes on the road ahead as he moved along. “Who’d pay him?”

  She turned to him. “That’s what I keep wondering about, Rolo. That’s the part I don’t get. Okay, you tell me you just happened to follow this guy home. I think: ‘All right, that’s kinda weird.’” She threw out a hand as if to dismiss it. “But we all have our little things. Maybe it’s cool. I don’t know. I try not to be prejudiced, okay? But then this other guy, this Sloane, I see him look at you like he knows you. And you go, ‘Wow, I didn’t even notice!’ And then you tell me somebody dropped off a secret number, like, a couple of weeks ago. And you say, ‘Gee, I can’t imagine what this is. Did you send it?’ And I go, ‘Noooooo.’ And now you say that this skinny guy is, like, staking out your apartment. It’s a bit much, wouldn’t you say? So what is it, Rolo? You dealing, or what?”

  Rollins eyed her for a second, startled by her directness. “For goodness’ sake.”

  “Well, what then? There’s more here, Rolo. That’s what I’ve been thinking about for the last two hours. There’s got to be something more. Because what we have here, with the house and Sloane and the crazy number and everything—it doesn’t make any sense.”

  By now, Rollins had passed the right turn that led back to 62, and had instead gone left and pulled over. But it wasn’t until he pulled the hand brake that Marj suddenly sounded panicky. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to see if we are being followed.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said again, but the word had a new quality to it, a hint of thrill. She swung around to look behind her. “What if we are?”

  “We leave.”

  Marj swung back to him, fear on her face. “But suppose we can’t? Suppose he and Sloane come at us, like, from both ends of the street?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “Well, how do you know what they’d do?”

  “Look, all I know is, if we are being followed—and I’m not sure we are—we are being followed very discreetly. Do you know what that means?” Rollins felt a need right then to lord it over her, to demonstrate that he was fully a decade older, and he didn’t wait for an answer. “It means that they won’t come at us like some German panzer division.”

  Marj squirmed again in her seat. She fell silent for a while, but Rollins could sense the wheels spinning in her head.

  “You still didn’t answer my question,” she said finally.

  “Which one?”

  “About what you’re hiding from me.”

  “Nothing.” Rollins realized an amendment was in order. “Well, nothing pertinent.”

  “So you don’t deal?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  “You in debt?”

  “Hardly.” Rollins balanced all his accounts on the first of the month. If it weren’t for his rule against discussing money, he would have pointed this out to her, gleefully. He’d have added that, thanks to various trusts that had come down to him on his mother’s side of the family, he was personally worth, according to the most recent quarterly summary, over $1.75 million. Money was a private topic, but not an unhappy one.

  “You’re not screwing a mafioso’s wife.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  Marj’s eyes swerved around toward his. “Or somebody’s husband.”

  That did not even merit a response. Rollins merely eyed her coolly in return, his jaw tight with irritation.

  Both Marj’s hands flew into the air. “Look, I don’t know what you’re about, okay? You could do it with dogs as far as I know.” That was hurtful, as Marj must have instantly recognized. “Okay, I’m sorry. The thing is: I’m just trying to figure why all these people seem to be so hooked on you right now.”

  “I don’t know.” And Rollins truly did not. With his night work, he was a vacancy, a being without substance or history, drifting through other people’s lives. He was nothing to the people he watched. He didn’t have to worry about what they might think of him, because they would never think anything of him.

  “Maybe they blame you for losing money at Johnson.”

  “But I don’t have anything to do with the investment side. You know that. I just keep track of the numbers.”

  “Maybe they think you do something more.”

  “They can’t be that stupid.”

  That quieted her, and the two sat silently in the dark together, while the crickets throbbed outside the car. Occasionally, a light would come on or go off in one of the houses around them, all of them, modest, low-slung affairs like the one around the corner at 29 Elmhurst. There was an occasional voice, or a burst of laughter from a TV, through an open window. But otherwise, the neighborhood was quiet and still. Rollins became conscious of Marj’s breathing. He imagined the whole car filling up with her breath and his breath, mixed. If he had been a different sort of man, he might have slid a hand over onto her knee.

  But Marj had thoughts of her own. “What about before Johnson? Somebody told me you used to be a journalist.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, it was just some gossip in the ladies’ room.”

  “About me?” Rollins didn’t like the sound of this. He glanced in the rearview again, checking one more time for a sign of the Audi or the Land Cruiser. Then he let out a sigh. “All right, yes, I worked for a tabloid in Boston called the Beacon. It went out of business a few years ago. I had a great beat. I covered commercial real estate transactions downtown—high-rise office buildings, hotels, that kind of thing.”

  “But you quit?”

  “I was fired.”

  “Well, whaddya know. I thought I was the only one at Johnson who’d ever been fired.”

  “It’s a long story.” Rollins could still see the balding Grant Bowser gesturing angrily toward him in the glassed-in managing editor’s office, while outside in the newsroom all the staffers continued to work away at their desks, pretending not to notice. “The short of it is, I wasn’t much of a reporter.”

  “And the long version?”

  “I wasn’t much of a writer, either.”

  Marj smiled. “Well, I guess you did have a problem.”

  Rollins was glad that she could see the humor of the situation. “It was more than reporting and writing, actually. It had to do with what I reported, and wh
at I wrote. I’d have been fine if I’d stuck to my real estate column. But I tried to branch out, and I got into some trouble.”

  She stared at him a moment. “Am I supposed to beg you to tell me about it? Is that what I do now?”

  Rollins took a breath and began. “It was about a woman who disappeared six, seven years ago,” he began. “She’d been living in Londonderry, New Hampshire, and then, well, and then she wasn’t anywhere. She hasn’t been seen since.” He explained that he hadn’t gotten on to the story until she’d been gone for almost two years. He spent months on it. He could have written a book. He turned in something like 125 pages, which at a paper like the Beacon was ridiculous. He might have dropped an encyclopedia on his editor’s desk. That was Grant Bowser, a slender, bespectacled gentleman with possibly too great a fondness for bright bow ties. Bowser didn’t know what to do with the story. He hacked most of it away, rewrote much of the rest himself, and buried the piece deep inside the next issue. Rollins wanted to go back to it for an update three months later, but Grant said he never wanted to hear of the story again. Telling Marj now, he was seized again with the massive feeling of frustration that had consumed him at the time. He had killed himself to do that story, worked himself absolutely to the bone. It had come to mean everything to him.

  “But how did you get fired?”

  “I guess I made a scene.”

  “What did you do?”

  Rollins supposed that he had to tell her, even though it had not been his best moment. “I yelled a little and knocked some things off his desk.”

  “Oh yeah?” She looked over at him, flashing that same feral look he’d seen at Georgio’s. “You?”

  Rollins nodded.

  “I wish I’d been there.”

  “I was younger. Anyway, he told me I’d gotten too close to the story. I said, ‘Damn right I have,’ and threatened to quit.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah. Big mistake. He said, ‘Fine, go clean out your desk then,’ and that was it.”

  “No more journalism for you?”

  “Nope.” Rollins looked out the window, toward the houses lining the street. “I suppose it was good practice, though.”