The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  Enjoyable, he repeated to himself as he collected his bag from the Saab’s backseat.

  Maybe not, he thought as he opened the door to a large, bright room with two king-sized beds, a tidy kitchenette, and a million-dollar view of the bay.

  Satisfying, though. He put his bag down on one of the big beds.

  Yes. Definitely that.

  “Jacobia!” said a female voice very sharply, inches from my ear. Hearing it, I wished intensely that I’d gone straight home instead of stopping at the IGA.

  Or that I’d simply stayed outdoors. As soon as she dropped Lee off at her play date, Ellie had returned to my house, meaning to dive at once into heavy-duty party preparations. But when she saw my state of mind she’d taken me on an expedition, instead.

  Moose Island still held wild areas where in summer brambly treasure-troves of blackberries grew, hidden by old apple trees and thickets of beach roses. In a secret one that only Ellie knew, we filled the quart-sized baskets her husband, George, wove out of ash strips as a hobby during the winter.

  “The gun was Dave’s, he wanted it back, and he took it,” she said of my empty-lockbox discovery, having lured me out with the promise of berry cobbler for dessert.

  “Rude, sneaky, and technically illegal.” All of which, her tone said clearly, confirmed her original opinion of him.

  “But look at it this way, Jake. Now that he has it, he has no reason to come back. I mean,” she added, “since it seems you’ve decided to wash your hands of him.”

  Her look said she still thought I might be sorry about that later, but she didn’t push it. “As for the party, you’re being silly. The ladies like you. They’ll be delighted by anything you do,” she reassured me again.

  Right, the way all audiences are delighted by banana-peel pratfalls and grins dripping whipped-cream pie. My inability to entertain properly in Eastport—ladies! teacups! face powder!—was exceeded only by my growing terror of trying and failing at it.

  But there were still those berries and that cobbler, so after we filled the baskets, Ellie had returned home and I’d come here to the IGA to get butter, flour, and Maine’s superior answer to traditional baking powder: Bakewell Cream.

  And it was while I was standing in the produce aisle trying to decide whether or not also to buy a particularly good-looking avocado—Bella loved them, and I thought it might help cheer her up—that I learned just how tricky and difficult a problem Dave DiMaio might actually turn out to be, gun or no gun.

  “Jacobia,” Merrie Fargeorge repeated briskly. “Look alive!”

  I dropped the avocado. Crouching quickly, Merrie popped nimbly up again and gave it to me.

  “Standing there woolgathering,” she tut-tutted.

  People glanced at us, hiding smiles; they’d been students of Merrie’s, most of them. Under her gaze I felt like a schoolchild, too, being scolded in front of the class.

  And I didn’t like it; still, you had to hand it to her. For a person of her age and build—late sixties, round as a cookie jar, wearing a white shirt and denim jumper over white stockings and blue leather clogs—the woman was astonishingly fast and flexible.

  “Jacobia,” the retired educator went on to admonish me, “you have to do something about him.”

  “Who?” I asked, trying to take refuge in the thought of all the other things I should probably pick up while I was here, and that I wouldn’t remember until I got home. Or I could just start living on pastries from the new bakery downtown—Mimi’s, it was called—and dwelling under a rock.

  That way maybe Merrie wouldn’t be able to find me. “Your new guest, that’s who,” she replied tartly.

  Her hair was pure white, thick and springing from her head in a natural wave like wire coils erupting out of a box; any minute she was going to demand that I conjugate a verb.

  “But he’s not,” I protested, looking around hopelessly as she went on frowning in clear disapproval at me.

  Because that was the thing about Merrie, and the real reason I was so worried about her party. Her friends liked me, as Ellie had said. But Merrie didn’t, and I couldn’t make her; I didn’t amuse her, and there was nothing she wanted or needed from me.

  Or from anyone, actually. Because in Eastport, Merrie Fargeorge was the real deal, the owner of the most valuable thing a person around here could possibly have: two centuries of Eastport ancestry, traceable all the way back to a fellow who arrived here with an axe, a mule, and a dream sometime way back in the late 1700s. And that, in downeast Maine, was the very definition of royalty.

  “His car was in your driveway,” she pointed out. “Everyone saw it.”

  The morning after the first night my then-not-yet-husband Wade Sorenson’s pickup truck spent in my driveway, four different neighbors happened to stop by for a visit, eager for details and their feelings a little wounded, I could tell, when I refused to share.

  “Oh,” I said now. “But, Merrie, he was only—”

  “Never mind.” She brushed off my objection crisply. “He’s all over town prying. Nose a mile long, that one has, and he’s sticking it everywhere. Heavens, I would think a friend of yours would have better manners.”

  Obviously she didn’t think so. “But Merrie, he’s not a—”

  Her ice-blue eyes flashed annoyance as she ignored my attempt at a comment. For one thing, of course, I hadn’t raised my hand.

  “How old’s your house? Who lived in it before you? Where’d the folks who built it come from? And what did they do?” Merrie went on with an affronted sniff.

  “People don’t care to put their whole family history out on display for some stranger with no local connections, you know, Jacobia,” she said.

  But DiMaio was asking them to do so and it was obviously my fault. Meanwhile, suddenly I understood the real reason why I’d said I’d host the party at all.

  And that it was hopeless. Oh, I’d still do it; I’d promised Ellie, whose own house was too small, while the church halls and other usable gathering-rooms in Eastport were already booked at this time of the year, months or even years in advance.

  But as for gaining Merrie’s approval, I could entertain at the White House and not get that. Decades of confronting rowdy schoolchildren had made her about as personally vulnerable as a cargo freighter, and about as likely to change course easily.

  And she’d already formed her opinion of me. Which on the plus side meant that now I knew just what to say to her, too.

  “Merrie, I can’t help you. As I told you, I don’t know Dave DiMaio personally, and I have no reason to pursue an acquaintance with him.”

  Other than the old book, I remembered, but I had little expectation he’d be able to come up with that. I met Merrie’s gaze.

  “So if you’ve got something to say to him, you’re just going to have to find him and tell him about it, yourself,” I added, offering a polite if not particularly friendly smile as an olive branch. Whether she took it or not was her affair.

  She didn’t. “Oh, yes, you can do something,” she retorted, not backing down. “And you should. When you’re as old as I am, Jacobia, you’ll realize it’s much better to be proactive about these things.”

  Punctuating this with a look that could’ve sizzled all the paint off my old woodwork, she gave her grocery cart a shove and hurried away from me.

  Criminy, I thought with a sinking heart, watching her go; never mind his dratted gun. Dave DiMaio was apparently quite capable of wreaking havoc just with his mouth.

  “Why do people even care?” I wondered aloud when I got home.

  “Because their past is all they’ve got, some of them,” Bella replied.

  True enough; nowadays ownership of a big old house was more likely to mean you were poor than the opposite, what with taxes, heat, insurance, and—a huge, echoing crash came from the bathroom above, followed by a string of curses—maintenance. “Or the history they do have isn’t what they want on display for the world to see,” Bella added.

  Also true;
Eastport’s past was so full of spies, smugglers, traitors, pirates, and—more recently—clients of the federal government’s witness-protection program, it was a wonder any of the locals ever spoke to anyone outside their immediate families.

  Which some didn’t. “Anyway, Merrie is the closest thing Eastport has to an opinion-maker,” my housekeeper added. “If she says he’s causing you trouble around town, then he is.”

  She stopped scrubbing the oven just long enough to accept the biscuit ingredients I’d brought home. The grim set of her jaw as she put them away in the cupboard suggested she’d had yet another talk with my father, and that it hadn’t gone well.

  Just then he came downstairs, covered with plaster dust. “I got the tub loosened up off the floor,” he reported, wiping his face on the blue paisley bandanna he kept stuffed in his overalls pocket.

  Bella stuck her head in the oven. From her scowl I gathered she wished it were full of gas.

  “Coupla’ days, I can gather up enough help to haul it out of there,” my father said, ignoring her.

  “Fine,” I said resignedly. “In the meantime Wade can take his shower at the terminal building before he comes home, and—”

  “Hey, Mom!” Sam interrupted, bursting in through the back door. “Mom, do we have somebody staying here who’s an FBI guy? Or homeland security? Because I was just downtown and I heard . . .”

  The dogs jumped up to greet him. “No, we don’t have anyone staying here,” I said. “As of now, we don’t even have a working bathroom, so I don’t see how we could have anyone—”

  My father went out, the screen door slamming hard. Bella straightened and shot a look after him; my heart fell at the sight of it.

  Then the phone rang and it was Nina from Wadsworth’s hardware store calling to say my houseguest was quite the conversationalist, wasn’t he, and did I know just how inquisitive he was being? Since sometimes people got off on the wrong foot in Eastport, she said gently.

  As if I didn’t know. When I first got here I’d tried paying a bird-hunting neighbor who brought me a brace of partridges, their breast feathers darkly bloodstained and heads lolling helplessly. Surely I could give him something for the birds, I’d said, pulling money from my wallet while attempting unsuccessfully to conceal my revulsion, and it took weeks to recover my credibility with that one guy alone, never mind all the other people he told about it.

  After Nina’s call the phone rang again several times more, and it was the volunteer in the historical-society gift shop, the clerk at the soda shop, the billing-department lady at the water company, and somebody from the pizza place.

  Finally I heard from the guy at the Mobil station who always took good care of me when I went in there, asking if I wanted him to go ahead and service the red Saab that Dave DiMaio had driven into town—it needed a new tail light—or should the service-station fellow just let all the air out of the tires? The latter, he confided, was his inclination.

  “Man’s a worse snoop than you,” the gas-station guy added.

  Ignoring this, I thanked him, and requested that he please not harm Dave DiMaio’s car in any way, since Dave might be a pain but I saw no reason to take it out on an innocent vehicle. Besides, he’d need the car to get out of town, I pointed out.

  When I hung up, Sam had finished heaping the laundry basket with, apparently, every clothing item he owned, and was rummaging the kitchen cabinets for, apparently, every food item I owned.

  “See ya,” he called, carrying a plate piled high with Oreos, gingersnaps, cake slices, sweet pickles, a bottle of apple juice, and a bag of grapes into the parlor, where I heard the television go on.

  His evening shift at the fish-packing plant started soon—being a drunk had ruined his other job opportunities in Eastport—and since eight hours per night of fish-innards removal (not counting those mackerel) was enough to spoil even his appetite, he needed to eat early.

  I didn’t think the heavy-on-the-sugar part of my son’s diet was necessarily a good sign, but at least it wasn’t heavy on bourbon. Bella, meanwhile, had finished returning the oven to a state that was cleaner than new and begun on the kitchen woodwork, which was already so spotless, it glowed in the dark.

  “Togetherness,” she muttered while she rubbed it. “Highly overrated, if you ask me. Which of course no one has.”

  And I understood perfectly, because it suddenly occurred to me that no one had asked me, either: I mean, whether I wanted a mysterious gun-stealing visitor, an obsessive-compulsive housekeeper trying to repel a persistent suitor who happened to be my father, a newly recovering (I hoped) alcoholic son with a sugar addiction, a demolished bathroom that wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t taken such a wild notion, or an imminent party for a highly esteemed Eastport lady who apparently enjoyed my company almost as thoroughly as I did hers.

  That is, not. So while Bella washed woodwork with a sponge soaked in bleach-water and Sam devoured Oreos while watching a ball game and the dogs snored beside him on the best chairs in the parlor, I called Ellie. I told her that if she cared about my welfare even a little bit she’d stop whatever she was doing and come right back over here again, pronto.

  And she arrived in about three minutes; I met her out on the porch.

  “So all I’m saying is, whatever DiMaio’s doing, maybe we should try getting out in front of it, that’s all. Don’t you agree? And afterward we don’t have to—”

  Ellie tactfully refrained from remarking that this was exactly what she’d suggested only a few hours ago. “Why do you suppose he wants to know about Eastport history?” she wondered. “People’s families, houses, and ancestors and so on.”

  Because what could that have to do with Horace Robotham’s death? “Well, the history stuff could be book-related somehow,” I guessed. “But if that’s why he’s here—”

  “Precisely.” Her green eyes narrowed. “If it’s the book and not the death that interests him, why bring a gun?”

  From the maple tree in the yard a single leaf twirled down innocently onto the lawn; the first of many. Soon we wouldn’t only be wanting to take showers; we’d be wanting hot showers.

  “On the other hand, if you go somewhere meaning to use a gun, why advertise that you’ve got one?” she went on. “That whole business of him wanting you to lock it up . . .”

  “Maybe it was just his way of letting me know he had it,” I mused aloud. “Some kind of warning, maybe. But in that case why give it to me? He was the one who suggested . . .”

  Sam spoke suddenly from the other side of the screen door. “I used to put cherry brandy in bottles of cherry Coke.”

  “As a cover-up,” Ellie said instantly, turning to him. She was quick on the uptake.

  “Uh-huh. Funny thing was,” Sam said, “it didn’t fool anyone else. But it did me. I actually got so I could pretend there wasn’t any booze in it at all.”

  “Your point being?” I asked, bewildered.

  Don’t coddle him, all the counselors at the rehab place had instructed me. Don’t condescend.

  He squinted through the screen at us. “My point is, when I drank it, it was like I really didn’t know what I was doing.”

  He took a breath. “So maybe this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, either. Maybe the one he’s really trying to fool is . . .”

  “Himself,” concluded Ellie. “Half the time he does want to do something with the gun, and the other half . . .”

  “Thanks, Sam,” I said as he went back to deal with more of his laundry. Since coming home he added detergent with the studious care of someone measuring out substances in a chemistry laboratory.

  “What do you think?” I asked Ellie when he was gone. “If Dave DiMaio just found out about his friend’s death last night, he might still be too upset to think clearly.”

  “Mmm, so Sam could be right about a confusion factor. Maybe even DiMaio doesn’t know for sure what he’s doing, yet. Maybe he just got in the car and . . .”

  “And bringing the gun along could
be a part of that,” I said.

  But I didn’t really think so. Our visitor’s mild-mannered, absent-minded-professor act was convincing for the most part. Still, something about him reminded me of another guy I’d known, back in the city. The way, for instance, that Dave DiMaio hadn’t flinched when that dump-truck tailgate banged shut.

  The guy I’d known hadn’t flinched, either, at dump trucks or anything else. Whistler, everyone who knew him called him, and mostly he was the nicest fellow you’d ever want to meet: polite, well-spoken, and punctual.

  Especially if you owed him money, and even then he’d give you thirty days to pay up. But on day thirty-one he’d shoot you, cut your body into manageable pieces, and wrap the pieces in butcher paper for storage in the walk-in freezer in his basement.

  Whistling while he worked. And if Dave DiMaio was feeling like that even half the time, we were in trouble.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  So tell me, Dave, how do you know for sure if an old book’s really written in blood?” Ellie asked at dinner that night after we’d all had our plates filled with curried crab.

  There were seven of us at the table: me, Wade, my father, Ellie and George, Dave, and Sam, whose shift at the fish plant had been canceled due to a fellow with more seniority showing up for work unexpectedly.

  Such was life when you’d spent a couple of years viewing the world through the bottom of a glass. I hadn’t been sure Dave DiMaio would agree to come, either, but when I’d called him at the Motel East he accepted without hesitation.

  Now he thought over his reply with apparent seriousness while he passed a china platter of fresh sliced garden tomatoes across the table to my father.

  “Well,” he began, pausing again for a sip of the really quite lovely nonalcoholic wine he’d brought; I gathered mine was one of the many Eastport families he’d learned a lot about on his fact-finding mission along Water Street.