by Sarah Graves
On the other hand, it could also have been that Dave didn’t drink. Not that I’d ask him about that. I’d decided not to ask him about the gun, either, at least for the time being.
Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to is a piece of advice that works badly when applied to old-house repair. But I thought it might be handy for dealing with mysterious strangers. And since his gun wasn’t loaded—by now, the bullets I’d taken from it reposed in my top dresser drawer—I figured I had time.
“The best way,” he replied at last, “is laser spectrometry.”
He ate some curried crab on rice, pantomimed fainting in gastronomic delight, and continued.
“You pass a laser light through whatever you’re testing. The light turns color. Each substance has its own color.”
He thought again. “So if you see a certain color, you know what substance is producing it. Doing it’s not quite so simple as that, of course,” he added. “For one thing, you need a laser.”
He ate more casserole, drank some faux wine, dabbed with his napkin. Outside the dining-room windows long shafts of golden light slanted onto the flower beds Ellie had planted earlier that year, turning the zinnia blooms to blazing red gems.
“But the result is simple,” he went on. “Dating an old book, though,” he said, shaking his head. “Finding out its age, that’s—”
“A corpse of a different color,” said Sam, mangling his metaphors as usual. As a child his speech and even his thoughts were all so bass-ackwards, as he’d have put it, that for a long time he thought we were supposed to pray to dogs.
Dave shot him a wry smile and I remembered he’d said he was a university professor somewhere. His look at Sam made me think he was probably good at it.
“Exactly,” he agreed kindly. Then, to the rest of us: “Books are made of many different substances; even so, it’s possible to learn what they are. But what if they’re all different ages?”
My father listened carefully. “Old paper, new binding. Or some such combination?”
Dave nodded. “Forgers go to great lengths to make their own creations appear genuine.”
Which I didn’t like at all; it was the first time anyone had even hinted that my old book might not be the real thing.
“Like the Greenland map,” said Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, unexpectedly. He was a compactly built man with dark hair, milky-white skin, and a bluish five o’clock shadow always present on his stubborn jaw.
“Yes,” Dave said, again looking gratified.
Around here, George was your man if you needed a trench dug, a skunk trapped, a chimney repaired, or crows discouraged from having a noisy confab outside your bedroom window at the crack of dawn every morning.
But nothing about his looks suggested that he might also be interested in antique manuscripts; I glanced at him, surprised.
“The Greenland map,” Dave explained for the benefit of the rest of us, “purported to demonstrate that the Vikings reached our shores from Europe, decades before Columbus.”
“They did,” said George, his jaw jutting out stubbornly. “A whole settlement of ’em. In Newfoundland.”
“Indeed,” replied Dave energetically. His enthusiasm was clearly rising now that he’d identified a fellow history buff. “But that doesn’t authenticate the map. In fact . . .”
While the two argued amiably I stole looks at Sam, still eating his dinner. He wanted a drink, I could tell by his face, which wore the expression of a man crossing a river by creeping along an extremely slippery log. He caught me watching and in reply gave me the first fully adult look of comprehension I’d ever seen on him.
“. . . so that in the end, the Greenland map did indeed turn out to be ancient parchment,” Dave DiMaio was saying.
He, too, was watching Sam. “But with a modern surface put on it,” he continued, casually meeting my own gaze.
“Someone had acquired parchment from Viking times. You can’t buy it on eBay , but it’s not that hard to get hold of if you know how to look for it,” he added. “They took off the old surface. You don’t write directly on parchment, you see. And they put a fake map onto a new surface. Not a particularly difficult trick, either, if you know how.”
George looked reluctantly convinced; facts trump feelings, he always maintained, which was why he believed that not only my old bathroom but also the whole inside of my house ought to be torn out and Sheetrocked, and all the windows replaced. But it made him a fine handyman, that lack of sentimentality.
Meanwhile my husband, Wade Sorenson, put his fork down, murmuring thanks to Bella for filling his coffee cup. He was a tall, solidly built man with blue eyes in a square-jawed face, brush-cut blond hair, and the kind of easy smile that when I first saw it, I thought I couldn’t possibly be so lucky.
But I had been. We’d been married for a couple of years, now.
“How’d you know Horace Robotham didn’t have Jake’s old book anymore?” Wade asked.
A shadow crossed Dave’s face. “Well, it’s like this. When I got home last night, there was a call on my machine. I’d been out of touch for a couple of weeks after the summer term,” he added with another glance at Sam, whose answering look was unreadable.
Bella filled the rest of the cups and brought out the cobbler. She was wearing a flowered housedress, a frilly apron, and an enormous amount of natural dignity, her usual ensemble when we had guests.
“Lovely,” I whispered to her, and her lips twitched in a tiny smile of domestic pride. But the smile vanished as her gaze fell on my father, who studied his hands.
“The call was from Horace’s longtime partner, Lang Cabell,” Dave DiMaio explained. “Lang’s in Minnesota now, caring for some elderly aunts of his. He and Horace had been extremely close to them for years—it’s all the family either of them had.”
“So Lang Cabell told you the book had been stolen?” Ellie asked.
Sam excused himself and took his plate to the kitchen, where I heard him bantering with Bella. But I hadn’t missed his wordless glance at DiMaio as he went.
Later, it said, and DiMaio had nodded in reply. I turned back to what he was saying now.
“. . . not clear the book was stolen. Lang says he thinks it was in the house the night Horace died. But in the confusion, the police and so many other people going in and out . . .”
DiMaio spread his hands helplessly. “Or maybe it wasn’t. I know Horace had letters from someone, asking to see the book, and he’d refused. I wish he’d kept them.”
Ellie’s eyes met mine: Who? I moved my shoulders minutely: No idea.
“The book was your property,” Dave told me, “so Horace didn’t think it was right to show it nonprofessionally. But if he sent it out to another laboratory or some other consultant before he died, I’m not aware of it. And Horace usually kept me up-to-date on things like that.”
He looked around the table. “You see, in our younger days Horace and I were old-book-hunters together.”
The candles flickered briefly. “But not just any old books,” Dave added. “We were after the bad ones, ones that shouldn’t be out contaminating decent literature.”
Uh-oh. Our new pal was about to reveal himself as an even worse crackpot than Bert Merkle. A gun-carrying crackpot . . .
Dave glanced at me and seemed to read my thought, or part of it. “Oh, no,” he assured me. “Not that kind of book. I’m no fan of book-banning. We were looking for ones that are hundreds of years old, most of them. Or older; books of evil spells, recipes for magical potions, incantations to summon the devil . . . or worse.”
He actually sounded serious. I had a moment to consider simply demanding that he give me the gun back. Or telephoning Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, to come and do it for me.
But then my father spoke. “I’ve seen books like that. Ones I’ve run into were usually for bomb-making. Nine times out of ten a guy tries following the recipe, blows himself up. Sometimes,” he added with a look at me, “right along
with the whole neighborhood.”
It was what had happened to my mother all those years ago.
“Correct,” Dave said, nodding. “Just enough information to be dangerous,” he added, and seemed about to say more.
By now the candles had burned to nubbins, though; George and Ellie got up reluctantly. They’d managed to get Leonora settled with a nonparent babysitter long enough to come out for dinner.
But a second cup of coffee was pushing it. “I’m not sure what all that has to do with Jake’s book,” said Ellie.
Carrying plates and cups, George went on out to join Sam and Bella in the kitchen. His opinion of magic was that it was all well and good for sitting around scaring yourself with, late in the evening. But if you really wanted to know whether or not something worked, try cleaning a sewer pipe with it.
“Probably nothing,” DiMaio said in answer to Ellie’s question. “Because I’m sorry to have to say that most likely your old volume is a forgery of some kind, Jake,” he went on, turning to me. “Not a deliberate hoax, maybe, but like the Greenland map the result of coincidences that ended up producing the same effect.”
I must’ve looked puzzled; he went on. “Scholars now think the map was created by a European monk, for his own amusement. In World War II the Nazis looted his monastery, stole anything that looked valuable.”
“The Greenland map would’ve been a big prize,” said George, looking in from the doorway.
“Exactly. To the Nazis,” Dave said, “it seemed to show that their ancestors—they fancied they were descended from Vikings, remember—well. The map said they’d been the first Europeans to reach the Americas. That gave them the perfect excuse to claim Canada, the U.S., all the way to the Pacific—for themselves.”
He went on, “You see, it had been at the monastery a long time by then. And that’s one of the things experts look for when beginning to assess a volume’s possible authenticity.”
“Like mine was,” I said. “In the cellar for two centuries.”
“Yes,” he replied. “If in fact it was there all that time.”
As we got up from the table the candles guttered out, leaving only the fire’s red glow until Wade reached over to turn on the sideboard lamps. In that instant of darkness it was on the tip of my tongue again to ask about the weapon. Only the memory of the many times I’d learned more by keeping my mouth shut than by opening it restrained me.
When the light returned, DiMaio stood just inches from me. I drew in a startled breath; something about his story, finished by leaping firelight in a two-hundred-year-old room, had unexpectedly unnerved me.
That and what he hadn’t said. “But if it was? If it’s not a forgery?” I asked quietly as the others went on into the kitchen.
“My old book,” I said to DiMaio . “What if it’s not a fake? What if it’s as old as the house, and written in—”
I stopped, swallowing hard. Somehow in the dim-lit old room with the fire glowing red and the candles dead stubs, the idea seemed much worse than it had in the daylight.
Worse, and more possible. “Written in blood?” Dave DiMaio finished for me.
He continued. “Horace had already sent it out to several places. As I said, a laser spectrometer isn’t the kind of tool he kept in his own old-book-and-manuscript shop.”
What about guns, I wanted to ask, did he keep those?
But before I could, Dave was speaking again. “Horace had reports on the ink, paper, and the threads used for sewing the pages. The ink,” he told me gently, “was indeed blood.”
He was looking levelly at me, the low light throwing his eyes into shadow and the fire’s flames reflecting in them. “Human blood,” he added tactfully as if informing me of a disease I’d unfortunately gotten.
“Oh.” My mouth went dry. “And what about the binding? Oh, please tell me it’s not . . .”
As I spoke I could practically feel the book’s smooth old leather cover under my fingers. Too smooth, as if . . .
A book written in blood, I thought. Why shouldn’t it also be covered in—
“No,” he said firmly, and I let my breath out. “Ordinary cowhide. Very fine, but nothing else.”
Nothing worse, he meant, and that knowledge should have been a comfort. But his face said more.
His face expressed doubt, as if perhaps he weren’t quite as sure as he’d sounded about the thing being a forgery. And if it wasn’t a forgery—
If it wasn’t, Dave DiMaio ’s expression said clearly, then even without human skin for a cover the old book was bad enough.
Later that night, upstairs with Wade in our big bed in the dark: “Of course it’s fake,” I declared, wide awake. “How could it not be?”
Wade nodded in silent assent.
“A book of names, listing all the people who would live in this house,” I said. “How could it be anything but a trick of some kind?”
“Uh-huh. Speaking of tricks, why didn’t you ask him about his?” Wade inquired.
The gun, he meant. But before I could answer he drew me down and wrapped his arms around me, smelling like toothpaste, fresh air, and harsh soap from his shower at the freighter terminal.
His breath when he spoke again was warm in my ear. “Jake?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I guess because it’s his. I don’t like the way he went about it one bit, and I still intend to call him on that, once I’ve found out a little more about what’s going on. But much as I wish it were, it’s not up to me to decide who gets to have a gun at all.”
I went up on one elbow. “Did you see the fuss Prill made over him, though?”
In the end I’d had to shoo both dogs from underfoot. Even Cat Dancing, wonder of all wonders, had let DiMaio reach up to smooth two fingers between her ears without taking advantage of the tender wrist-flesh he exposed by doing so.
“And it’s empty,” I added. “I unloaded it when I had it.”
This, however, didn’t convince my husband. “You bring a gun, you’re not going to bring extra ammunition?” he asked.
Of course I would. Which didn’t guarantee that Dave had, but the possibility meant maybe I’d better rethink this whole washing-my-hands-of-the-matter idea yet again.
Across the room, the curtains shone white in the moonlight. On August nights in Eastport it was warm enough to keep the bedroom windows wide open, cool enough to snuggle together under blankets.
Wade pulled me back down beside him, tucked ours in snugly around my shoulder, and wrapped the other side around himself.
“I didn’t want him to know I knew he took it,” I persisted. “He might let on more about what he’s up to, if he doesn’t realize I think he’s . . .”
He’s what? I wasn’t sure. “Maybe he thinks Bert Merkle killed Robotham?” I fretted. “Maybe he’s here to do something about that? And about . . . I don’t know. Other things.”
“Other things?” Wade’s lips grazed the side of my face, his whiskers prickling pleasantly on my neck. I let my eyes close.
“Mm-hmm. Like maybe even get the book back. Because you know, I didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t know where it . . . oh.”
I bit my lip hard. “Don’t move,” Wade whispered.
So I didn’t, nor make a sound, either, even when at last I turned joyfully into my husband’s embrace.
An hour later Wade slept peacefully. But I was awake again, standing by the window-opening in the ruined bathroom, wondering what in the world had possessed me to smash it apart.
Certainly there were times when fixing up an old house meant eliminating what had gone before. But this . . .
Gleams of streetlight peeked between the maple leaves whose faint rustling was the only sound. A skunk in no particular hurry made his bumbling way from one patch of shadow to the next.
Somebody’s wind chimes tinkled. A bird chirped sleepily and fell silent. I turned to go back to bed. But then:
“So where were you?” It was Sam’s voice, coming up from the back por
ch through the window opening.
“What do you mean?” Dave DiMaio asked.
Sam had been waiting for a chance to talk to DiMaio . Now I guessed they must have encountered each other somewhere—since coming home, Sam had become a regular late-night walker—and had ended up back here.
“Come on,” Sam said. “I’m just out of the hospital myself, so don’t try to kid me. I know the look.”
I went on standing there; eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help it.
They’d told me to let go, let Sam make his mistakes, fall if he had to. They’d told me I wasn’t alone in it anymore, that there would be others ready to help him if he slipped. But when it’s your kid who’s in trouble, that’s far easier said than done.
Small chuckle from DiMaio . “Silver Hill. Needed a tune-up.”
“Fancy,” Sam remarked.
Silver Hill was a private facility in Connecticut, very expensive and good. Sam had gone to an upstate New York place, cheaper.
The mother in me was glad somebody’s son had the resources. But another side of me wondered who’d paid for Silver Hill. Not the pocketbook of an obscure English professor, surely. And insurance companies didn’t choose luxury treatment facilities for their policyholders, if they paid for rehab at all.
“Did the job,” DiMaio answered. “I just picked a bad time for it. As if there’s ever a good time.”
A wry note of resignation crept into his voice. I stood processing the information that Dave DiMaio was a recovering substance abuser, too, sober again only a few weeks.
“Your friend died while you were gone?” Sam asked.
“Yup.” A world of grief and guilt hung in the syllable. Horace and I were old-book-hunters together.
“Listen, do you know anything about a fellow who lives in Eastport, name of Bert Merkle? You don’t,” DiMaio added, “have to tell anyone I asked.”
Sam’s reply was inaudible, but the alarm bells ringing in my head weren’t. Suddenly Dave’s curiosity about old Eastport houses and families made more sense. So did his attempts up and down Water Street to make people think that was the reason for his visit.