The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  Except in the Moose Island General Store, that is. Once Dave had the answers from there that he was looking for, he’d floated his cover story everywhere else, hoping it was the one that would get remembered instead of the real one.

  And then he’d invaded my cellar. The sudden impulse to march downstairs and confront DiMaio seized me. I could demand to know just exactly what he thought he was doing here in Eastport.

  And why. But for one thing it would’ve meant admitting I’d been listening in on Sam’s private conversation, which I didn’t want to do. Issues of trust were the tiniest bit tricky between us, at the moment.

  Besides, I was beginning to believe even more strongly that any fact I knew—and that DiMaio didn’t know I possessed—might come in handy sooner or later.

  And there seemed to be precious few of them so I decided for the moment to hang on to the ones I had. On the porch a lawn chair creaked as someone got up.

  “G’night,” Sam said. The screen door squeaked as he came in; footsteps descended the porch steps. I moved closer to the window, trying to catch a glimpse of DiMaio .

  At first he was an indistinct shape in the gloom. But as he reached the street and stepped into the glow of the streetlight, he raised a hand in farewell, not looking back.

  Not to Sam, who’d already come inside, the back door closing and locking sturdily with a recognizable clunk-click.

  But to me, as if Dave DiMaio had known all along that I was standing there listening.

  Dave DiMaio walked away down Key Street into the silence of an Eastport night. The dinner had been excellent, the company pleasant, and the walk afterward refreshing.

  Sam Tiptree, especially, seemed decent. Dave hoped the kid made it through the early post-rehab stage, which Dave knew could be bumpy. He wished he’d had some advice to offer, not the least because the kid’s mother seemed worried about him; she must not know, he thought, how that porch roof amplified the sound of footsteps overhead.

  But Horace was always the one with good advice. Had been the one. Dave walked on. Overhead, bright celestial objects formed a glimmering net anchored here and there by the moon, the planets, and some of the larger stars.

  On Water Street he spied a large feral cat loping along atop the granite riprap by the fishing pier, then another and another. That wasn’t unusual; wild cats often infested seaside districts on account of all the rats.

  But seeing them reminded Dave of a story Horace had told once, about a Maine island town many miles from the mainland and long before the time of air travel or instant communication.

  The town had experienced a single freakishly high tide just before the onset of winter, Horace had said. Next came a blizzard and after that three months of fierce Atlantic storms, and by the time anyone got out from the mainland to check on the inhabitants of the island they found all were dead of what turned out to be bubonic plague.

  All the rats were dead, too; thousands of them, more than could be explained. But no cats, though they found food bowls labeled Fluffy or Muffy, cat food in the household pantries, all the trappings of feline-keeping.

  Just—no cats. And as far as Dave knew no one had ever been able to explain that, either.

  Brushing aside a mental picture of cats fleeing en masse into the sea, he reached the Motel East.

  He climbed the open stairs to the second floor, unlocked the door. Switching on the light inside, he paused out of habit in case he got some sense that anyone else had been in here in his absence.

  But it seemed no one had been. Crossing the room he pulled the heavy curtains aside, opened the sliding-glass door a crack. Salt air gushed through. But walking away from the window he felt the curtain billowing behind him, and that made him feel uneasy, so he returned to the window and closed it, then took his shoes off and lay down on the bed.

  He liked motel rooms, their bland imprintlessness and the light, unencumbered feeling that came from not owning anything in them. Sometimes when he was in one, he turned on the television and watched the late-night shows, a pastime he never indulged at school, where he didn’t even own a set.

  At school, he was content with faded drapes and shabby furniture inherited from some previous inhabitant. He took most meals in Commons; an amazing luxury, he’d thought when he’d first arrived there as a student, and his opinion hadn’t changed.

  In those days he’d never even been in a motel. But then he began traveling with Horace, first as a porter, later secretary and transcriptionist; Horace’s notes were so hen-scratchingly cryptic that they had to be copied within hours of his writing them or he might forget what they meant.

  Horace had asked Dave once if he minded the menial nature of the work. Horace always mapped out their objectives and plans for achieving them, never Dave.

  But Dave had replied honestly that he preferred it. Putting his hand to a simple task, especially a dumb, repetitive one like carrying bags or copying notes, felt to Dave like what little he understood of the act of praying.

  Thinking this he got up from the bed, slipped his feet back into his shoes, and pulled on his jacket. Outside, he walked away from the downtown area, then turned downhill toward a tidal inlet that was filled in now, but must once have been bridged. Old foundations jutting from the earth above the current street level told him that the bridge had been replaced with a road set on truckloads of hauled-in earth. The bay was as black as onyx and the tide had turned, water rushing in with a trickling sound.

  The air smelled of fish and roses, creosote and salt. Ice-cold salt; the water here even in summer was only about fifty-five degrees, he’d read in one of the motel’s flyers. Dave wondered how long it would take a body to decompose in the frigid water.

  Too long, probably. Striding briskly, he started uphill again until he was looking south over a 180-degree view of night sky, starlit water, and small islands humped like dark animals.

  Nothing moved. Dave resumed walking and soon saw the trash-strewn yard and a tiny trailer hunkered at its rear amid heaps of junk. Flattened cans, old wooden pallets, a satellite dish with odd metal projections soldered clumsily to it . . .

  Merkle’s place, he thought, as darkly chaotic as the man himself. A dim yellowish light burned behind ancient venetian blinds in the tiny window.

  Walk away. Horace’s voice spoke calmly inside Dave’s head. Just turn your back, the other cheek, a new leaf.

  Get out of here.

  While you still can.

  Only Merkle hadn’t let Horace Robotham turn his back, had he? Instead he’d gotten wind somehow of an old book, realized what it might be, and learned that Horace had it.

  And then he’d murdered Horace, making it look as if a mugging had gone wrong, and then—

  Then Merkle had stolen the book. It was the kind of thing Merkle had always collected.

  Grimoires, mostly; books of spells, many of which he’d tried using. Or so rumor had it; back in their college days, terrible aromas and odd sounds had emanated from Merkle’s rooms late at night, rooms to which he’d admitted no one.

  Spellbooks weren’t all Merkle wanted, though. Most were filled with nonsense. Once in a blue moon one might contain some scrap of usable lore; even then, the trick was not so much in following as in deciphering it. But the Tiptree woman’s book was different.

  If genuine, the thing was not an instruction manual. This book didn’t purport to provide tools—the recipes, spells, or god forbid, incantations—of what naive devotees called the magickal arts. Instead it held a list that, if authentic, could only have been compiled by means of magic.

  In other words, it was proof. And for that, Merkle would have murdered a hundred Horaces, or a thousand.

  The rank smell of kerosene burning in a badly vented stove stank up the neighborhood around Merkle’s grim little dwelling. Horace had always said you needed to take plenty of time, not only for planning, but so that you felt confident, when your plan went into action.

  Or in case your plan changed, as Dave’s was already
doing. He’d come to avenge his friend, but so much talk about the old book had reminded him of what Horace would’ve wanted, in-stead: The book itself. Dave imagined it lurking somewhere, a patch of darkness swallowing up the light.

  Not so bad on its own, maybe. But when you put one patch of darkness with another, and then another . . .

  Standing there, unwilling to leave what he already thought of as the scene of the crime, Dave let his mind drift back yet again to the adobe hut in New Mexico. It had turned out to house only a wizened, half-blind old woman, brewing up useless potions over a smoke-hole mesquite fire and muttering obscenities in Spanish.

  The few vile oaths she remembered would never harm anyone, and the book she’d been said to possess didn’t exist. But Dave and Horace had returned to Albuquerque afterward, and with Horace in the lead had walked straight out into the desert behind the motel, half a mile or so until Horace said they should stop.

  A few round stones peeking up through the sand turned out to be the top of a cairn; under it lay old papers that Horace barely glanced at before burning them. He wouldn’t even tell Dave what was on them, nor what the old woman had said about them.

  Dave still remembered the care with which Horace had touched the match to those yellowed pages, the relief they’d both felt when each page was turned to ash and the ashes scattered.

  And now it was Dave’s turn. With a last glance for the tiny, repulsive trailer in which Bert Merkle hunkered, Dave headed back to his room for the night.

  He’d never asked Horace if those hidden papers actually belonged to the old woman. By then, he’d known what Horace would answer:

  That papers like the ones they’d destroyed didn’t belong to anyone. People belonged to them.

  So when the time came he still intended to avenge his old friend’s murder. But first he meant to locate Jacobia Tiptree’s book and find out if, like the papers in the desert long ago, it might have the potential to join with other small, widely scattered fragments—

  —a howl here, a smothered shriek there . . .

  Enough darkness, finally, to swallow up all the light.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  I woke way too early the next morning with thoughts of Merrie Fargeorge’s party rattling in my skull like skeletons trying to fight their way out of a closet.

  Today. The party was today.

  So even though it was an hour before dawn I slid out of bed, grabbed up some clothes, and slipped downstairs where I started the coffee, dressed hastily in the early-morning chill, then took the dogs out for a quick walk.

  Eastport in the darkness before sunrise was damp and chilly, silent except for the pigeons muttering sleepily in the eaves of the old houses. As we came back around the block, the sky changed from black to gray. Trees and roofs appeared suddenly against it like a photograph developing.

  A breeze sprang up. A blue jay called raucously. A car went by, its windshield still half-fogged and headlights on. The dogs climbed the porch steps sedately, signaling their intention to go back to bed.

  Inside, Cat Dancing was still asleep, but she twitched her tail at me from her throne atop the refrigerator just to show me that even while snoozing she could make a snarky remark.

  No Bella yet. While the dogs settled I filled a thermos and carried it with me up to the third floor, stepping carefully to avoid the squeaky tread—finishing nails, I thought; hammer and white glue— at the fifth step from the top.

  In the workroom, mindful of Wade still sleeping below, I took my shoes off. I padded silently across the tarp-covered plank floor in my stocking feet. Paint flakes, sawdust, and wood splinters littered the tarp.

  There was a time in my life when I’d have thought a room like this all to myself was heaven, another during which I’d have regarded that bare light bulb with horror; what, no chandelier?

  I wouldn’t have realized the meaning of stove-thimbles set into the chimneys: that in the iron-cold Maine winters the young women who worked here heated their rooms with tiny wood-burners, carefully parceling out their meager allowances of fuel and budgeting their candles.

  Because to a shivering young servant girl in those days, a candle was like gold.

  The windows brightened, looking out onto a scene like a watercolor painting: pale-blue sky with the light pouring upward into it, pearlescent bay with swirling current-lines hinting at the turbulence below, trees with their upper boughs sunny and trunks still heavily shadowed.

  After a moment of luxuriating in it I turned away, knowing I shouldn’t be here at all. With so much to do, if I started this minute I still wouldn’t be ready for the party in time.

  And of course if I weren’t working on it I should at least be planning for it. But I so much didn’t want to; Merrie Fargeorge’s belief that she could scold me as if I were a young student had made me feel as fractious as one.

  Rebellious, too; the idea of a teacher loved for strictness was one I’d always found more convincing in fiction than in fact.

  So instead of getting out the dusty teacups to begin washing them, I crouched by the window sash laid on the milk crates, reopened the glazing-compound container, and dug a chunk the size of a Ping-Pong ball out of it with the putty knife.

  I only had to insert fifteen more eight-by-eleven-inch pieces of glass, pin them with the sharp steel triangles called glazing pins, and smooth on the glazing compound without injuring the glass or—glazing pins being wicked sharp, as are glass windowpanes, whether broken or unbroken—myself.

  This for a single glass piece does not sound very difficult, and it wasn’t: one pane, zip-zip, zop-zop. Fifteen of them is a chore, though. Finally I sat back on my heels and opened the thermos, to assess what I’d done so far. But as soon as I wasn’t actively working on the window, other thoughts flooded in.

  Bella, my father, Sam, the old bathtub, the party, and Dave DiMaio all began capering in my head once more, the latter most troublingly. Dave and his dratted missing gun and what was I going to do about them?

  Because I could still say it was none of my business. But that’s never stopped you before, a little voice in my head remarked snidely.

  On top of which, now that I’d come up with a theory about just which act he might be thinking of committing with his gun and specifically upon whom, his having the thing at all seemed a lot more worrisome to me.

  By now it was full day outside, gulls sailing serenely past the windows and cars moving down in the street. A faucet went on and then off suddenly in the kitchen, triggering a bout of water-hammering that shook every pipe in the house.

  Pipe wrench, I thought, shaking the glazing pins from their small cardboard carton into my palm. Then I laid in another old windowpane and began pushing the pins’ sharp points in with the putty knife, pinning the pane down snugly.

  If he hurts someone, and you could’ve stopped him . . .

  Now came the hardest part: the actual glazing. I’d watched experts do this so fast you could hardly see their hands move, but my way was a little different. After warming and softening another ball of glazing compound, I laid a thickish strand of it along a pane’s edge. Next, I drew the knife’s angled blade firmly all the way around the pane, pressing the compound in tight and smoothing its top surface, trying not to stop or even slow down around inside corners and maintaining even knife-pressure.

  Which no matter how many times I did it was always either (a) mind-bogglingly easy or (b) like patting yourself on the head while chewing gum, walking a tightrope, and whistling “Dixie” all at the same time.

  This time it was (b); you have to press hard on the putty knife, and my second try was a mess, too, because if you press too hard, the glass breaks. But by the third attempt I began achieving something like the swift, satisfying efficiency that is implied by the phrase zip, zop.

  Light poured convincingly through the windows as I snapped the top back onto the compound’s container, wiped the knife, and dropped the leftover pins into their box. When I finally straigh
tened, I still didn’t know what to do about a lot of things. But as for DiMaio, his weapon, and my suspicion that his presence here was related to a murder and to the old book we’d found in my cellar . . .

  Making my way downstairs to the smell of fresh coffee and the clickety-click of dog toenails as they danced around the door urging Wade to let them out again—

  “G’morning,” my husband said, planting a kiss on my neck.

  “G’morning, yourself,” I replied, planting one back.

  —as for that situation, I now had a plan.

  “Something for you in the dining room,” said Wade. “Found a present for you, forgot to tell you about it last night.”

  “For me? Well, aren’t you a wonderful man.”

  He was, too, if recent memory served. Sipping my hot coffee I went in where he pointed and found a small box. In it, reposing on a bed of cotton batting, was a new pair of pliers.

  A soft-jawed pair of pliers. “Wade, these are great,” I told him, returning to the kitchen to wrap my arms around him.

  “Glad you like ’em.” He was already dressed, ready to leave: white cobblecloth long-underwear shirt, navy hooded sweatshirt, heavy khaki pants, and a pair of Carhartt boots. He was going out this morning to fix a bell buoy in the channel, and with the breeze still rising it was going to be cold out there on the water.

  “See, with these pliers,” I told Bella, “you can fix—oh, let’s say a faucet, without putting a lot of ugly marks on it. Because of the plastic instead of metal, you see, in the gripping parts.”

  “Good,” said Bella. “You can start with that one.” She pointed at the kitchen sink. “Water company flushed the mains, put so much grit in the system that the faucet screen’s clogged up,” she added.

  So I did, and with the new pliers I made quick work of it. Off with the metal collar at the end of the faucet spout, then a fast finger poke to get the wire screen out of the collar, taking care not to lose the washer and putting it in right-side-up again when I’d finished.