The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  Plus, a couple of hours on the target range can make nearly any problem look manageable, since if worse comes to worst you can always just blast the daylights out of it.

  I wasn’t hands-on familiar with Dave’s gun but unloading a revolver is no big brainteaser and I’d accomplished it without embarrassing myself, swinging the cylinder out and dumping its contents into my pocket. I’d have gone on to tell Dave that the Beretta 87 would’ve been a lot better choice for him than the ghastly little item he carried. For one thing, the Beretta’s extended barrel made sighting easier for a beginner. But he’d already lost interest.

  “This cellar’s amazing,” he murmured, gazing at the hand-adzed beams, worn granite foundation, and the arched brickwork in the doorways to the small side-rooms where in the old days they hung meat.

  Not to mention bushels of potatoes, rows of quart jars full of fruit, jams, relishes, and pickled eggs, boxes of salt pork and dried fish, sacks of pebble-hard peas, beans, and corn kernels . . . “Cellars got a lot of serious use in the 1800s,” I replied. “In those days, they weren’t just catch-alls.”

  Like this one now: bottles, cans, newspapers for recycling, Sam’s snow skis and his snowmobile-riding gear, cans of paint and plastic buckets of plaster-patching compound . . . overall, the place looked like a hurricane had washed a lot of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam into my basement.

  But the big iron hooks remained bolted to the walls and ceiling beams; tufts of deer hide, grayish with age and nailed to doorframes, still testified to the success of long-ago hunting trips.

  “That’s where the book came out of the wall.” I pointed to the corner behind the furnace where a forgotten water main had burst, flooding the place. The hole it had created was now filled with new concrete blocks and mortar, courtesy of my father.

  Dave peered at the spot. “Nice repair. So the book was in the wall? Or in the soil on the other side of it?”

  “Unclear. My dad took out the stones to get at the pipe, saw a wooden box that the book turned out to be in, and grabbed it before the water got at it. But as for how far in it was . . .”

  Dave nodded with slow thoughtfulness. “And the foundation was built when? Eighteen twenty-three?”

  So he and Horace Robotham had discussed more than the book’s mere existence. Either that, or DiMaio had done some old-house research on his own. Again, I wondered what he was really doing here.

  “Yes. The foundation’s original. So we think the box went in when the granite did,” I answered.

  “Huh. That would make the book itself nearly two centuries old,” he mused. “Interesting.”

  No kidding, especially since my own name was written in it, along with those of every other previous owner of the house since it was built, all 185 years’ worth of us. And how had that happened?

  The mystery had been what made me send the volume to Horace Robotham in the first place. That and the fact that to my untutored eye, it looked as if the names were written in . . .

  I put the lockbox back on its shelf. “Dave, did Horace give you any idea what he thought? I mean about how my name got in the book, or . . .”

  Dave jerked back from wherever he’d been woolgathering. “Horace had theories. So did I. But let’s go outside, shall we?”

  He followed me upstairs. “I’ll still need to find a place to stay and get settled,” he said.

  The dogs had gone to sleep, all fantasies of a walk abandoned when we’d left them to lock away Dave’s gun. I let them lie. “I thought I’d stick around a few days,” Dave added casually as we reached the front sidewalk.

  Stick around? With a weapon? Oh, fantastic. “I see. Well then,” I told him, “I’m sorry I can’t invite you to—”

  “Stay with you? Oh, no, that’s very kind of you, but . . .”

  On the street he paused to snug his tie back up under his collar and check his tie pin, silver in the shape of a quill pen with a tiny drop of ink at the tip.

  Or I assumed it was ink. Then he turned to regard my old house, a big white clapboard Federal with three full stories, a two-story ell, three tall red-brick chimneys, and forty-eight old double-hung windows each equipped with a pair of forest-green shutters.

  “It must have taken a lot of servants to keep this place running back in the nineteenth century,” he remarked, changing the subject. “Wood for all the fireplaces, hauling the ashes, maintaining all the candles and lamps. And then the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, of course.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Hired help. Young ones, a lot of them. I’ve been told they needed so many, they sometimes imported girls from cities in the Canadian Maritimes. Halifax, and even abroad.”

  Not for the first time I imagined the feelings of a young girl arriving here, friendless and alone, carrying only a small bag of her belongings and possibly a Bible.

  On the other hand, she wouldn’t have had to deal with antique shutters. Mine needed repainting again—scraper, sander, paint, paint sprayer, I thought—and the flashing around one of the chimneys looked as if another coat of tar wouldn’t hurt it.

  Probably that was why a stain shaped like Brazil had appeared on one of the bedroom walls. Ladder, I listed mentally. Tar brush and tar bucket.

  Plus someone to climb the ladder while carrying the tar brush and tar bucket. The whole place needed new screens and storm windows, too, to replace the cheap, flimsy aluminum ones someone had installed years ago.

  “Anyway, on trips like this I generally need plenty of time alone,” Dave DiMaio told me. “So I’ll be staying at a motel.”

  Trips like this? But before I could ask him how many friends of his died while researching strange old books, he spoke again.

  “That place is lovely.” He pointed down Key Street to a Queen Anne Victorian with an ornate porch, bay windows, and multiple gables opening like wooden sails.

  Too bad the mansion across from it wasn’t kept up equally well. Boarded-up windows and nailed-shut doors scarred its battered, mansard-roofed facade. Generations of pigeons nested behind its fascia, staining its clapboards, and its carved trim sagged sadly to mingle with its wooden gutters in a hodgepodge of rot.

  We walked on toward Passamaquoddy Bay, blue and breezily whitecapped on this day of abundant sun. The old houses lining this part of Key Street were smaller than mine but just as venerable. Their white-painted picket fences enclosed gardens overflowing with green hydrangeas, dahlias with blooms the size of saucers, and masses of black-eyed Susans.

  At the corner, a crew of tree cutters in goggles and ear protectors were cutting and hauling the remains of an ancient elm. “So do you know a lot about old houses?” Dave asked me.

  “Probably not the way you mean. I haven’t studied them or anything.” Isolated on the island, the trees had escaped Dutch elm disease until recently, but now every year there were fewer of the old behemoths canopying the streets.

  “But I am slowly rehabilitating my own place, and when you fix something, often you have to start by taking it apart,” I told him. “So yes, I’ve learned a bit about the inner workings of old houses.”

  With a snarl, the tree-workers’ industrial-sized chipper began devouring branches. By tomorrow there’d be only a scattering of sawdust to show that the elm had been here at all.

  And it really didn’t take long to get used to their absence, I’d discovered by noticing the suddenly denuded yards of other people. The human eye adjusted quickly.

  But watching them go still wasn’t pleasant. “It must take patience,” said Dave. “Working on such old materials.”

  I smiled. “Yes. And a lot of help from my friends.” Many of whom I’d begun hiring professionally, since small- or medium-sized repairs were one thing, but you don’t just fall off the turnip truck and start doing the really big rehab projects successfully.

  Moments earlier, for example, while surveying the shutters I’d noticed that one of those chimneys needed not just reflashing, but also rebuilding. It would take the extra-long ladders of a roofin
g or painting crew to get the shutters down, and when the chimney got rebuilt I supposed I ought also to have it relined.

  And an aluminum downspout had come loose from its rivets by the front gable. So besides the plumber and electrician I’d be needing to help me redo the bath, before winter there’d be people crawling over the place like ants.

  “Why did you bring a gun?” I asked.

  “Oh, just predawn jitters. When I left home early this morning things looked awfully dark to me,” Dave replied casually.

  His eyes widened as more of the harbor came into view. At this time of year, yawls and ketches, motorized pleasure cruisers, and fishing vessels of all sizes from two-man dories to fifty-foot diesel work boats bobbed in the boat basin.

  “But now,” he added, taking in the flags snapping briskly at the Coast Guard station and the tourists with their hands full of cameras and souvenirs, “now, not so much.”

  I kicked through a small pile of the last leaves that old elm would ever unfurl, remembering bees massed and buzzing in its branches earlier that summer. With an ear-splitting roar the tree-crew’s grinder started up.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, unconvinced. Not that it wasn’t lovely; salt air, sparkling waves, gulls wheeling overhead. It’s paradise here if you can manage to forget February. But I really couldn’t remember the last time a nice day had persuaded me out of needing a deadly weapon.

  I was so sure he was lying to me, in fact, that as we passed the town bandstand, still draped in bright bunting from the Fourth of July, I decided not to let him get his hands on the thing again.

  First of all it was so shoddily made, it would probably explode if he tried firing it. And second, I’d have bet any money that he’d never actually used a gun in his life.

  I would hide the thing more thoroughly when I got home, I decided.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  At the foot of Key Street I turned with Dave DiMaio onto Water Street, past Eastport’s Peavey Memorial Library. It was a massive old heap of rust-colored brick with a green-painted cupola, copper weathervane, arched windows, and an elderly cannon with wooden-spoked iron wheels bolted to a concrete pad on the front lawn.

  Once upon a time that cannon’s job had been to help protect Eastport from British invasion, a task it never even got a shot at when British men-of-war poured menacingly into Passamaquoddy Bay one terrible morning two years into the War of 1812.

  Faced with enough firepower to reduce the whole city to rubble in minutes, the 75 soldiers at Fort Sullivan put down their weapons. Soon thereafter, British officers began garrisoning men and setting up headquarters in the best houses in town, which is why a few old Eastporters still call the bags of manure they use for garden fertilizer “English tea.”

  Today the library environs were more peaceful, if you can call a dozen romping, stomping two- to four-year-olds peaceful. Among them was my friend Ellie White, collecting her daughter, Leonora, from the story hour the librarians put on in summer.

  “Hi!” Ellie rose with her usual lithe grace from the blanket she’d spread near the cannon.

  Across the street an orange dump truck pulled up with a load of gravel for a pothole. The truck raised its bed with a loud grinding sound and the gravel began flowing; it was a deep hole.

  Dave stared at Ellie. With a long, lean body, a face that would’ve looked just right on a storybook princess, and a lively, unthreatening manner, she could pretty much charm the argyles off any man within hailing distance, anytime she liked.

  The truck finished dumping gravel. As the bed lowered, its tailgate fell shut with a bang!

  Dave didn’t even flinch. “Hello,” he said shyly to Ellie.

  “Hello, yourself.” She met his gaze frankly, sizing him up the way a child might.

  Today she was wearing a pink smock with red cherries printed on it over a green long-sleeved T-shirt, orange leggings, and leather sandals. Her auburn hair had sprinkles of glitter in it, her earrings were purple beach-glass pieces, and her toenails were painted the same vivid lime green as the wing on a tropical parrot.

  None of which was any surprise to me; walking around looking like an explosion at the Crayola factory had long been her habit. But DiMaio was taking his time absorbing it.

  “So what time should we start tomorrow?” Ellie asked me.

  “Start . . . ?” I searched my mind. Nothing occurred to me. But she was looking at me as if the answer ought to be obvious.

  “The anniversary party,” she prodded gently. “Getting ready for it. Cake. Punch. And . . .”

  The light dawned, hideously. “Ohhh,” I breathed, horrified.

  The party was for Merrie Fargeorge, an elderly lady of great Eastport renown, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that worthy person’s entry into the teaching profession. Such was her fame and the affection ex-Eastport schoolchildren still felt for her that the planned gala stood to rival the one for Queen Elizabeth on her fiftieth.

  And in a moment of madness—some say more than a moment—I’d agreed to have the celebration at my house.

  And that’s what I’d forgotten. “B-but . . .” I managed.

  Ellie looked hard at me. Twinkles of suspicion glinted in her remarkable eyes. Fortunately, the suspicion was as usual mingled with mirth.

  “What?” she inquired gently. “What’s wrong?”

  Because with me, it could be anything from a collapsed foundation to an absent roof. “Well,” I began evenly, “just this morning when I went upstairs to look at that bathtub—”

  “Yes?” she said encouragingly.

  I felt a flush creeping up my neck. “Well. It suddenly came over me, I mean, really, how much better it would be if only . . .”

  She waited patiently. “If only it weren’t there,” I said. “So I tried a sledgehammer, and when that didn’t work . . .”

  “Oh,” said Ellie. She eyed me judiciously. “That’s sink in your hair, isn’t it? Busted-up sink bits and . . . plaster dust. Oh, Jake. You didn’t.”

  I nodded miserably. “Right through the old walls. And if I’d had a pry bar handy, I’d have taken the floor up, too.”

  Oh, what an idiot I felt like. If I’d thought about Merrie’s bash before I started in with the bashing—but I hadn’t. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I know how important the party is, but I completely . . .”

  Luckily, Ellie was the most forgiving friend this side of a Bible story. She sighed. “All right, Jake.”

  I swear if it weren’t for her I’d have probably thrown myself off my own roof a hundred times by now, just out of dismay at my own stupidity.

  “I mean, they’re not going to want to bathe,” she went on pragmatically, then added, “You didn’t smash the flush, too, did you?”

  The little bathroom downstairs, she meant. “No,” I said, thinking, guest towels. Lots of them. “You’re right, it’ll all still be okay.”

  Assuming that we could also find a place downstairs to put the ladies’ summer wraps, flowered hats, and beaded, embroidered, or otherwise elaborately decorated formal gloves. Because as Ellie and I both knew, the big event would be attended by many female personages who were nearly as locally eminent and well-respected as Merrie herself, and they all wore their dressy garments with great flair and considerable dignity right along with their rouge and face powder.

  And they were going to be at my house in . . . oh, dear. Less than thirty-six hours.

  Unfortunately there were no accessible rooftops handy, but there was an impatient toddler standing eagerly by to rescue me from thoughts of airborne-ness.

  “Blah blah black sheets,” insisted two-year-old Leonora. Ellie’s daughter gazed up urgently at me. “Heddlepenny bull?”

  She was a sturdy child dressed in a red shirt, denim overalls, and tiny sneakers. Barrettes shaped like sailboats held back her strawberry-blonde hair; in one hand she clutched a purse with a lot of pink sequins sewn onto it.

  “Jack an’ Jill !” she shouted, tugging at my sleeve.

 
; “We’ve been reading nursery rhymes,” Ellie explained to Dave and me, “but so far she likes the sound better than the sense.”

  Dave laughed. “Just as well. Some of those things in nursery rhymes are pretty gruesome.” Introducing himself, he stuck his hand out a little shyly.

  Ellie took it. Her confidential manner was so natural and friendly that in the getting-drenched-with-her-charm department, it was like standing in front of a firehose.

  “They’ve all got some horrible event in them,” she agreed with mock seriousness, as her daughter toddled off, singing to herself. “The characters getting thrown downstairs, or having their skulls cracked open.”

  Silence greeted this comment. “Oh,” said Ellie into the awkward pause, looking from Dave’s abruptly closed face to my stricken one. “I’ve said something wrong, haven’t I?”

  “Dave is Horace Robotham’s friend,” I explained. Ellie knew about the old book and how I’d asked Horace to look into it.

  “Was,” Dave corrected without emphasis. The stillness around him was so sudden and complete it was as if a glass bell had been dropped over him.

  Still and purposeful. He was humoring me, I realized all at once. This walk, his apparent interest in old houses . . .

  “That’s all right,” Dave told Ellie. “It’s just that I only found out about Horace yesterday. And it came as a shock.”

  “Of course it did,” said Ellie. “My sympathies on your loss. Good heavens,” she added, sprinting away suddenly.

  Leonora had scrambled onto the old cannon and was attempting to ride it like a horsie, increasing by one the number of cracked skulls we were likely to have around here any minute. Ellie snatched the child in mid-giddyap and carried her back to the blanket where she began gathering up the various toys and snack items required for even the shortest of Lee’s outings.

  “I think it’s time for all of us cowpokes to head on home for our naps and—”

  “Dave has a gun,” I interrupted. “He drove all the way here from Rhode Island this morning. He thinks there’s a connection between that old book my father found in the cellar and Horace’s death.”