No Doors, No Windows

by Joe Schreiber

  Outside, the world lay buried under six inches of snow. The parking lot of First Methodist had been freshly plowed and was nearly empty. They crept into the sanctuary and sat in the back row amid old people in black suits and archaic clothing from unfamiliar epochs, dresses and jackets that seemed to have emerged from steamer trunks and mothballed closets. None of them recognized Scott, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. The boy sang the familiar hymns from memory and doodled through the sermon, airplanes and bubble creatures. Scott kept his phone on vibrate. When he didn’t hear from Owen by noon, he put the boy in the backseat of his rental car and drove into town to the library, figuring that his nephew could occupy himself in the children’s section for an hour. Henry followed along with a reluctance that wasn’t like him.

  “Don’t you like the library?” Scott asked.

  “We never come here.”

  “When I was a kid, I’d go here just to walk around and pick out books. They’ve got everything here.”

  They walked in, and Scott stopped in the entryway, startled enough to wonder if he’d somehow gone into the wrong building. It was even emptier than the church, and cold enough that he could see his breath. Most of the shelves were vacant, stripped to the walls, and the remaining books sloped against one another like rows of sloppy drunks. Even the drinking fountain had been removed, leaving a dripping yellow pipe sticking out of the wall with a bucket underneath. Boxes and crates of books stood in unsteady piles with no discernible sense of organization.

  “Hello.” He looked up and saw a pretty librarian, close to his own age, holding a stack of newspapers. She had gray eyes and a small, sweet smile with a brown birthmark immediately off to one side. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for some historical records.”

  “Oh.” The librarian nibbled the cushion of her lip. “Well, there’s not much left here, I’m afraid. We’re closing down.”

  “Permanently?”

  She smiled sadly. “Budget cuts.”

  “You’re kidding.” Scott looked around, seeing the place with new eyes. He’d actually downplayed his affection for the place as a kid. For years, he’d fantasized about having a key to the library so he could come in at any hour of night and peruse the holdings by flashlight.

  The librarian was still nibbling her lip. “You needed some historical records?”

  “I’m wondering if there was ever a girl in this town named Rosemary Carver.” Saying the name out loud didn’t lend his cause the legitimacy that Scott had hoped. If anything, he felt more foolish than ever, hoping to find historical evidence of a character that his father had probably just made up for his novel. “How far back do your local newspapers go?”

  “Our holdings don’t go much further back than the 1940s, and most of that has already been packed up. Of course, you’re welcome to browse. I can’t vouch for our inventory.” She hesitated, glancing over at Henry, and added in a lower voice, “Be careful, though. There are rats.”

  He looked at her, sure that he’d either misheard her or that she was kidding.

  “They’ve been breeding in the basement. I think the move must have riled them up.”

  Scott held the boy’s hand while they walked through what was left of the stacks, Henry whispering rats, rats, rats to himself as they walked, trailing his fingers along the dusty metal shelves. In the corners, beneath the fixtures, Scott began to notice the traps, lethal-looking spring-loaded contraptions complete with big chunks of stale cheese or rancid salami on their triggers. He could tell that Henry saw them too, but the boy said nothing.

  After twenty minutes of searching, he found what was left of the local history section, just a few dusty tomes of names dating back to the 1850s. The last book on the shelf looked as if it had been left behind purely because of its size—it was as big as a tea tray and oddly grimy; no doubt its cloth covers had absorbed decades of dust and the gaze of a thousand disinterested local scholars. Hoisting it from its place, Scott opened the book and found more names, pages and columns of birth and death dates, organized by decade, by township, alphabetically by name. There were plenty of Masts, distant cousins and relatives, and when he flipped forward to the C’s, sliding his index finger down the page, he found only one Carver, dating from 1883—first name Rosemary.

  “Any more like these?” he walked over and asked the librarian, pointing to the name. “This is the girl I’m trying to find out about.”

  The woman shook her head. “We had more volumes on this shelf,” she said. “It used to be full. They just packed them up a few days ago.”

  “Where are the books going?”

  “Anywhere and everywhere. The rats will have the whole place to themselves soon.” She seemed more comfortable talking about rodents than books. “You didn’t see any, did you?”

  “Any what?”

  “Rats.”

  Scott shook his head. “No.”

  “Oh,” she said, sounding only slightly disappointed. And then, almost as an afterthought: “Don’t I know you from somewhere? Scott Mast, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew it. You were best friends with Sonia Graham. I’m Dawn Wheeler. I was friends with Marcia O’Donohue?” She looked almost pleading. “We did yearbook together senior year.”

  “Dawn,” he said. “Sure.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t remember. That whole yearbook experience was so embarrassing. I had the biggest crush on Adam White, and I remember all I wanted to do was a full-page layout about him jumping off the diving board. Remember that break-dancing exhibition he did at the talent show?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, if you want to find those books, you might want to head over to the McGuire farm. Some workmen took about sixty boxes of them over there last week.”

  “Colette McGuire?”

  “Mm.” Dawn hesitated and lowered her voice, seeming to taste something bad that had come up from her throat. “Now there’s someone who hasn’t changed very much. Of course, why would she, when she was already Miss Smell So Sweet the first time around, right? Things aren’t so perfect for her these days, though, from what I hear, ever since she married that football player.”

  Scott looked up. “What?”

  “Red Fontana.” She looked at him. “You didn’t know? Colette married Red in New York and brought him back here. She did it to shame her parents, and it worked. They were dead a year after the wedding—matching heart attacks. Of course, from what I hear, Red’s already lost interest in her. They say he’s been spending his time down at Fusco’s with …”

  Dawn realized what she was saying, and her voice trailed off, a red rash spreading across her face. Suddenly Scott remembered her from the yearbook office, a blushing, venomous, unhappy girl whose mouth had run away from her even then.

  Behind him, from somewhere deep in the empty library stacks, came a sharp metallic crack.

  WITH CHARACTERISTIC BLUNTNESS, Scott’s father had always said that the only thing that ever actually grew on the McGuires’ so-called farm was “dirty money,” a phrase that boyhood Scott had imagined as a particularly noxious strain of weed, its leaves and stems stamped with the faces of scowling presidents. Rumor had it that Conrad McGuire had been an old-school war profiteer, a bootlegger who had run Canadian whiskey during Prohibition, not above shooting a man in the kneecaps to solidify his market share. Some of the old-timers still held that his wife had been a failed actress and nymphomaniac with a weakness for farmhands, strapping young northerners whom her husband recruited for her while he stood inside the closet and watched with a bottle of whiskey and a belt around his neck. They were all long since dead, granted legitimacy in death that they’d never had in life. Their home was a fabulously appointed Georgian mansion in the foothills to the west of town, removed but not so much that it couldn’t be seen by those below; an inspiration and a warning to anyone who might similarly aspire to such heights, it simply stated, This space taken.

  Scott hadn’t been
out here in eighteen years, not since the day before his senior prom, when his mother had sent him up here with Colette McGuire’s prom dress, which she’d spent a week altering at the behest of Colette’s mother, Vonda. He remembered unzipping the garment bag on the way over and peeking in at it, stroking the satiny fabric with his fingertip and imagining her flesh beneath it until he was queasy with arousal and self-loathing.

  Now Henry sat quietly in the backseat, gazing out at the snow-covered scenery. The boy had been talking about the rats in the library but had fallen quiet when the white hills had soared up around them.

  “If you kidnapped me,” Henry said, “I wouldn’t turn you in.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “We could go to Mexico.”

  “What’s in Mexico?”

  “Chalupas.” Henry pointed to the McGuire farm as it emerged from the trees in front of them. “Why are we going to this house?”

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “More books?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About what?”

  “Somebody who lived a long time ago.”

  He pulled into the circular drive in front of the main house and saw a red convertible parked crookedly in the driveway. A groundskeeper in a grubby orange sweatshirt was shoveling the walkway, a pair of earphones jammed up under his black knit cap. He didn’t glance up as Scott and Henry got out of the car and walked past him to the front door to ring the bell. They waited for a moment, and Scott rang it again; when no one answered, he walked back over to the man with the shovel and tapped on his shoulder.

  “Is Colette home?”

  The man turned to reveal a face the color of a boiled potato. Up close, Scott could hear the tinny squawk of whatever music he was listening to, heavy metal cranked up loud enough that there was no way he could have heard the question. Scott started to repeat it, and the man squinted at him and shook his head before falling back to work. Scott was about to walk up and try the doorbell again when Colette came around the side of the house. She was wearing jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket and stopped and took off her sunglasses, looking at him for a long time as if he might have been a hallucination, the end product of an inadvisable pharmacological dalliance.

  “Scott Mast,” she said. “Now I’ve seen it all.”

  “Hi, Colette.” Up close, everything about her looked slightly more magnified than he remembered—breasts, lips, cheekbones—the result of subtle but comprehensive plastic surgery done to enlarge every salient feature while the rest slid back into obscurity. She looked like an overinflated sex toy. “How have you been?”

  “Well, what can I say?” She spread her arms, and the jacket’s buckles jangled in the cold air. “I’m here. The one place on earth I swore I’d never end up, and here I am.” She flicked something off one sleeve, and Scott caught a glimpse of a puckered scar on the inside of her wrist, like a sloppy soldering job, as her wedding ring caught the light.

  “You’re married.”

  “I’m a lot of things. You?”

  Scott held up his left hand, his ring finger bare.

  “Crazy,” Colette said. “I always pictured you and Sonia together.” He couldn’t tell how serious she was. “But you didn’t even make it to the prom that night, did you? Word is she stood you up.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  A crow landed in the thin crust of snow, blinking at them, flustered its wings, and flew away.

  “So,” Colette said, “what brings you sniffing around my little empire of shit?”

  “I’m doing some research on my family. With the library closing, I heard you’ve got a lot of the old town records and articles here.”

  “Yeah,” Colette said, “it’s really sad about the library. Breaks your heart.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was kidding or not. It was beginning to make him uneasy. Despite the temperature and the wind, a shimmer of sweat had formed over his skin, and he was sure she’d noticed it.

  “Can I have a look at what you’ve got?” he asked.

  “You want to check my stacks?” Now the smile looked as though it were held in place by deep surgical staples, an extension of cosmetic surgery by other means. “Sure, come on back.”

  She led Scott and Henry across the landscaped yard—“over hill and dale” was the children’s book phrase that popped into Scott’s mind—as they followed the mansion’s outer wall past a marble fountain and a vast, dying plot of snow-buried wildflowers. He felt better now that they were walking. At the outer edge of the lawn, he saw a long building rising up against the thickets of trees that encompassed the property.

  “What’s that?”

  “The granary. My great-grandfather used to stash his booze here. Word is he castrated one of his competitors here too, sent his balls home in a beer bottle. Cold-blooded old times, right?” The granary’s door stood on rusty metal hinges that looked as if they were dripping with tetanus, and Colette gripped the handle with both hands, yanking it open with exaggerated difficulty. “Help yourself.”

  It took a moment for Scott’s eyes to adjust; at first, he registered only the smell of decayed paper and cardboard, damp mildew, and, faintly, the smell of old liquor and stale urine. He thought abstractly of pulp and the Frenchman who had invented it, inspired by wasps and the way they mixed spit and wood to create cheap paper. Split-open boxes, spilled books, and old documents flourished everywhere in four-and five-foot drifts. Some of the boxes were crawling with weevils. Others buzzed with lazy, half-dead flies that didn’t realize their season had long since passed.

  “What is all this?”

  “The town history,” she said. “Sometimes I wander out and think about burning it all to the ground. Of course, I couldn’t, without losing my inheritance—Daddy’s lawyers made sure of that, just like they made sure I have to live here the worst six months of the year. But I do come down and kick it around from time to time when I’m piss-ass drunk enough. Speaking of which …” She gestured back at the house. “Too early for you?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Oh, come on. The sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the Western world, as my father used to say.”

  He shook his head. “We may stay out here and poke around if you don’t mind.”

  “Poke all you want. I’m up in the house if you get thirsty.” She bent down and smiled into Henry’s face. “Got some cookies for the little guy too—yummy chocolate chip.”

  Henry stood watching her go. “She’s scary,” he whispered.

  “Tell me about it.” After holding back a moment until he was sure she had returned to the house, Scott waded into the depths, venturing between the stacks of paper, books, and split-open binders, fat accordion file folders spewing yellow clippings and handwritten records. Something scurried over the back of his neck, and he flicked it off without looking at it.

  “What do you want me to do?” Henry asked behind him.

  “Nothing. Don’t touch anything.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A name.”

  “Rosemary Carver?” Scott glanced up, startled.

  “I heard you talking to that library lady,” Henry said, “the one with the spot on her face. She lived a long time ago, right?”

  “Back in the 1800s,” Scott said, and his foot crunched on something, glass breaking and grating against the floor. “Oh shit.” Bending down, he saw it was a broken picture frame leaning against a damp box with the handwritten label, one word, block letters: OBITS. Scott opened the soggy flaps and peered in, reluctant to stick his hands into the mess. It was a warren of newspaper obituaries. Some of them went back to the Depression and even further, though the oldest were so faded that he could make out only the headlines. Scott dug his hands into the paper, felt it crumbling between his fingers. Every so often, he’d grab a swatch of paper and look at a name or a photo. He’d never heard of any of these people, though he assumed they were all townies. Then, after ten mi
nutes, toward the bottom of the stack, he found one for Hubert Gosnold Mast, from the local paper, dated 1952.

  Scott picked it up and studied it in the thin early-winter light.

  According to the article, H. G. Mast had been a painter, educated at Boston College and abroad, and had spent years traveling in Europe before landing at a small prep school in Vermont. His teaching years were described in loving detail, focusing on the dedication he brought to the job; it was here that he’d met his future wife, Laura, and had their only son, Butch. That would have been Scott’s great-uncle, the missionary whose movie would eventually become synonymous with the Bijou fire, meaning Hubert Mast had been Scott’s great-grandfather. The obituary went on to mention that after the war, Mast had divorced his wife and left her and young Butch to return to Paris, where he had rented a loft on the Left Bank. He tried to resume painting and struggled through a string of unpaid debts, failing health, and “moral degradation,” a phrase the obituary writer seemed to use as an implication of wanton homosexuality, venereal disease, or both. Toward the end, he’d made some halfhearted plans to return to the States and the wife and son whom he’d left behind, but it was too late. One afternoon in May of 1952, his French landlady had come upstairs for the rent and discovered that he’d hanged himself.

  “Scott?”

  He flinched around and saw Colette back in the doorway of the granary, her blouse zipped up in her leather jacket.

  “It’s getting dark,” she said, a little unsteadily. “Are you sure you don’t want to come inside, stay for dinner?”

  “We should be going.”

  “Find what you came for?”

  “Not really.”

  “What a shame,” she said. “Maybe you’re not looking in the right places.” Her lips, tongue, and teeth were stained pink as if she’d been drinking cherry Kool-Aid mixed with cough syrup. “We can’t have that now, can we?”