The Book of Old Houses

by Sarah Graves

  “Why?” Ellie asked. “I mean, Bert’s a whole lot older than you. I wouldn’t think the two of you had very much in common at all. So why are you such good friends with him?”

  And what does Bert want with you? I added silently. It would have been Bob Arnold’s question, too, when he’d questioned Jason. But Bob had been looking for only one specific variety of slime-toad behavior.

  And I already had a feeling we’d need to dredge the whole scummy pond, to come up with Merkle’s motivation for this strange friendship. Jason shrugged, picked up his cup again.

  As more of the sweet drink glugged down the boy’s gullet, it suddenly struck me that like the first one it was a real Slurpee, a forty-ouncer in the trademark gigantic plastic cup with a domed top. And the nearest 7-Eleven store, home of the authentic beverage, was a three-hour drive from here, in Augusta.

  I knew because it was one of the things Sam complained about when we’d moved to Eastport, the absence of the equivalent of a pantryful of junk food on every corner. Jason’s mom must’ve stocked up on them, maybe even kept a freezer full for him.

  “Jason?” Ellie prodded him. “I asked why you and Bert are friends.”

  Again he shrugged in reply—at least his shoulders got regular workouts, I thought meanly, but gosh, his sullenness was exasperating—then angled his head at the bookshelves.

  A chessboard was set up on one of them, with a book of chess problems lying open alongside it. “Bert gives me books to read. Plays chess, too.”

  I nodded at Ellie; that much at least sounded right. Even my dad had played the game fairly regularly with Merkle for a while. He’d given it up only when Merkle started trying to pick his brain on the topic of high explosives.

  “Bert talks to me like I’m smart. He treats me like a human being. Which is more,” Jason added with a further touch of hostility, “than most people do.”

  He eyed me. “And before you get started, there’s no weird crap going on. That’s what that cop wanted to know. But Bert’s no Chester the Molester, so don’t get all panicky about that.”

  I nodded again. “Right. That’s what Bob Arnold told me, too.”

  But that only deepened the question of why Bert Merkle was interested in the youth, who seemed a deeply unrewarding sort of pal for a past-middle-age man.

  Or for anyone, really. But maybe I was being too hard on him. Several major-league baseball caps that hung on hooks on the back of his bedroom door said he had at least one fresh-air interest.

  Or maybe he just needed something to keep the sun off that shaved head. “Okay,” I said, “you and Bert talk about books and you play chess. But if he ever needed help, you’d help him, right?”

  Jason’s flat expression didn’t change. “I would if he asked. But he never has. Bert’s never wanted a single thing from me. He doesn’t need my help.”

  “Oh, come on, Jason,” Ellie put in. “He asked you to keep those clippings for him, didn’t he? Put them all up on that cork-board, there? That’s help.”

  The boy scowled, whether at the contradiction or something else I couldn’t tell.

  “So Bert didn’t ask you to get something from Mr. Robotham, in Orono?” I persisted. “An old book, maybe? He didn’t ask you to go down there and . . .”

  Slow shake of the gleaming head. “Don’t go to Orono. Go to Augusta. Drive my mom there every couple of weeks to her doctors’ appointments.”

  And to buy mass quantities of strawberry Slurpees, no doubt. He finished the second one; too bad they didn’t deliver the stuff in tanker trucks.

  “So we drive to the doctor’s, I wait, we eat lunch and go to the mall,” he recited in a near monotone.

  As he spoke he was playing the game once more, spattering the extremely realistic-appearing insides of red-eyed goblins all over the walls of a tunnel lit by torches.

  “Then we come home,” he added. Goblins died en masse. Their tinny shrieks echoed from the computer’s speakers. Only now he wasn’t shooting them.

  He’d switched weapons. He was clubbing them to death. The sound effects weren’t pleasant; with a keyboard click he made the noises louder, then louder still.

  “Jason,” I tried, raising my voice to be heard over the din. “If I ask your mother whether or not you were here on the night Mr.

  Robotham was attacked, what will she say?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing.” His rudeness was deliberate, I realized. There was more in that hairless head of his than he wanted to let on, I could tell by the books and the chessboard.

  And from the look in his eyes. I mean, it’s pretty obvious when nobody’s home in there, usually. And Jason’s mental rooms seemed fully furnished and inhabited to me; just not with anyone you’d want to meet on a dark street late at night.

  “Come on, Jason, her chair’s right by the front door. Are you trying to tell me she doesn’t see you going in or out?”

  Even Ann Talbert with her hysterical ambitions and her wild expectation that everyone else would just march to her drummer wasn’t actually...well, creepy was the only word for Jason. Still, his ex-teacher Merrie Fargeorge must’ve seen something worthwhile in him. Hadn’t Bob Arnold reported she’d spent time trying to help him?

  See, I was trying to like him; I really was. After all, he was just a kid, and without knowing any details I could tell his home situation was unfortunate. So I was trying to cut him some slack.

  But he didn’t make it easy. “Correct,” he replied flatly. The question seemed to amuse him somehow, provoking a smirky, I know something you don’t know expression.

  Frustrated, I went to the only window, needing relief from the dark, depressing atmosphere and the sweet reek of gloppy pink syrup.

  Toward the back of the house was a rickety old wooden shed about the size of a one-car garage, built of gray, rotten wood and ancient, disintegrating wooden shingles with a few new boards peeking whitely through the gaps between the old ones.

  Just enough to keep the whole structure from falling down entirely, I supposed. “Okay, I’ll bite,” I said finally.

  I turned to him again. “You say your mom wouldn’t notice, I’ll believe you. Hey, you know her better than I do. But like I said, I’ve got a son your age, too, and I would notice. So why wouldn’t she?”

  “She just wouldn’t, that’s all.”

  He stared at the screen, his thumbs moving fast on the game controller. It was obvious he’d come to the end of his attention span as far as we were concerned.

  The only reason he’d let us up here at all, I realized, was that it was the path of least resistance. Somebody knocks, you open the door. Wants to talk, you let them talk. Wait them out, sooner or later they’ll go away.

  I got a feeling that path was a very familiar one to Jason Riverton. And that someone, possibly Merkle, had taken advantage of it. But I still didn’t know how. And something about Jason’s manner still bugged me, like he had a secret he wasn’t telling.

  But finally after a few more insolent, one-syllable answers from the skinny teenager we left.

  “ ’Bye, Jason.” No answer. In the living room his mother’s fingers moved on whatever she was knitting, as relentlessly as her son’s did on his game device.

  On the TV screen, Bob Barker was reminding everyone to have their pets spayed and neutered. Something was strange about that, too, though, it seemed to me, and then I remembered.

  It was the same thing he’d been saying when we came in.

  “Mrs. Riverton?” I stepped into the room. With the shades pulled down and no lights turned on, it was cavelike but for the TV’s garish glow.

  “Yes, dear?” But her gaze didn’t shift when I moved in front of her. And the show on the TV screen wasn’t being broadcast.

  It was recorded on a VCR tape. The same show, over and over. “Ellie and I are leaving now, Mrs. Riverton.”

  “Fine, dear.” Like a statue, except for the fingers. A bad thought struck me. In the gloom I peered closely at her hands, pale in the screen’s li
ght.

  Fingers moving. Knitting needles in the fingers. But no yarn on the needles. On the TV screen a hysterically happy woman flung her arms around a white-haired Bob Barker.

  But Mrs. Riverton didn’t see it. Her milky-blue eyes stared sightlessly at the screen. Something wrong with her, I realized.

  I mean, besides the fact that she was blind.

  “Whew,” Ellie breathed when we got outside. “That was weird. But Jake—if he’d done it, wouldn’t someone have seen him?”

  Two minds with but a single thought, again: the idea that Jason’s gratitude for Merkle’s friendship might have led the boy to do something awful.

  “So tall, the black clothes and shaved head,” Ellie went on.

  So recognizable, she meant. “It was dark,” I pointed out. “He could have hunched down to look shorter, worn one of those ball caps on his head.”

  Besides, Horace Robotham had already been dead awhile when he was found by a late-night dog-walker, sprawled across the sidewalk on the quiet Orono street where he’d lived.

  Ahead, Merrie Fargeorge’s picturesque saltwater farm lay on a long, gentle slope of sandy grassland overlooking Passamaquoddy Bay, at the very end of Dog Island.

  “Are you sure this is such a good idea?” I asked Ellie as we headed toward it. Leaving the Rivertons’ house I’d expected to be returning home.

  But Ellie had other plans, and I had to admit that after the dim, depressing situation we’d just escaped I was glad not to be hurrying back indoors anywhere. Brisk salt air and a high, head-clearing blue sky were just what the doctor ordered after that experience.

  “At least she has someone to drive her places,” said Ellie, meaning Mrs. Riverton. “And yes,” she added, “I’m sure.”

  We walked on; at length Ellie mused, “If Bert Merkle somehow got Jason to commit—”

  Murder. Simple as that. “Yeah. If he did, the both of them are pretty much getting away with it,” I agreed. “They’re each other’s alibi, not that anyone’s asked either of them for one.”

  We walked fast, trying to shake off the atmosphere of the Rivertons’ house. “On top of which,” I went on, “if Bert can just finger people and Jason will do his bidding—”

  “Uh-huh. Then who’s next? Bob Arnold for hassling Bert about his yard? A city-council member for directing Bob to do it?”

  Or—me, for some reason that made sense only in his tinfoil-capped head? And why would Merkle be so interested in my old book, anyway?

  Its oh-so-coincidental disappearance right around the time of Robotham’s death apparently hadn’t meant much to the cops. But to me it had begun seeming more and more like the motive for Robotham’s murder.

  Still, I reminded myself firmly, we didn’t really know Jason Riverton or Bert Merkle had done anything wrong at all.

  “I checked on him, too, by the way,” said Ellie. “DiMaio, that is. I got on the computer at home and Googled him nine ways from Sunday,” she told me.

  Besides her many other good qualities, she was the suspicious type; gosh, I just loved that about her. “And?”

  “And as far as I can tell, DiMaio’s what he says he is. College professor. Small school in Providence, funny old buildings. From the pictures and course listings it seems pretty old-fashioned. Greek and Latin and so on. Scholarly. But it’s for real. I called the number on the website and a person answered, said Professor DiMaio’s on leave until the autumn session.”

  She turned her face into the late-morning sunshine. Merrie Fargeorge’s farm grew steadily nearer.

  “Anyway, we might just as well get this over with,” she added, meaning an interview with the old educator. “Maybe a talk with you now will take the edge off her mood later. Make the party a little less awkward.”

  Oof, the party. At her words the full misery of the prospect crashed over me again.

  Bad enough to have only the tiny quarter-bath downstairs for guests’ use; an old tub lurking on the stairwell was guaranteed to scandalize an Eastport lady of Merrie’s refinement, even aside from her annoyance about DiMaio. And the sight of her ancestral home place, as prettily composed and beautifully balanced as a Currier & Ives print, didn’t make me feel any better:

  House, barn, garden, shed, all laid out on the sunwashed, grassy slope like a model of eighteenth-century domestic economy. “How does she do it?” I wondered aloud.

  Because it wasn’t just lovely to look at; this was a working New England saltwater farm, with emphasis on the working. The raspberry bushes and asparagus bed bore bountifully, I saw as we entered the rail-fenced drive, and the sweet peas colorfully and muscularly climbing a trellis by her back door made mine look like runts.

  Beehives clustered at one edge of the garden; beans thatched the curved-bamboo-pole tipis at the other. But most amazing of all was an excavation—a pit, really—that spread about twenty feet square in the soil beyond the garden plot.

  Terraced in a series of steps, it was about eight feet deep, its walls horizontally ribboned with the layers of earth—black, brown, moss green, and the pale tan of the surface sand—that had been dug through to create it.

  Merrie Fargeorge stood in the middle of it, leaning on her spade, wearing boots, coveralls, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Holding a trowel in one gloved hand and a small, soft-bristled brush in the other, she looked up at our approach.

  “Hello, Merrie,” called Ellie. The ex-teacher put her tools down on a tarp as her little dog, a bright, bouncy mutt with a cocked ear and a black-ringed left eye, danced out to greet us. Caspar, the tag on his collar read.

  “Hi, Caspar. How’re you doing, buddy?” I said. At least the dog didn’t bite.

  “Good morning, ladies,” Merrie trilled, removing her spectacles to peer at us. Close up, the excavation looked even bigger. “To what do I owe the honor of your visit today?”

  “Why, the pleasure of your company, Miss Fargeorge,” Ellie replied gallantly. “May I help you?” she added, reaching out a hand as the older woman got to the excavation’s crumbly top step.

  Miss Fargeorge twinkled at Ellie’s flattery, but she didn’t look the least bit fooled—I got the feeling that the last time she’d been fooled was about fifty years earlier—and she didn’t want any assistance, either.

  Instead, she took the final step up to ground level as easily as the half-dozen before. “Oh,” she said, her tone cooling noticeably as she caught clear sight of me. “Hello, Jacobia.”

  Clearly I was still in the doghouse, and not a nice one like Caspar’s with clean straw and a fresh bowl of water.

  “Merrie,” I began placatingly, “I do think there’s been a minor misunderstanding . . .”

  Set out on the tarp at the bottom of the excavation were her other tools: a shovel, a small pickaxe, a large pickaxe, and a long, hollow, tubelike device with a stout wooden handle at one end and wickedly pointed serrations cut into the heavy steel at the other.

  “It’s a sampling tool,” she said, seeing my curiosity. “You push it into the earth by turning the handle, to capture a core sample.

  Then you pull the tool out and the sample comes with it. From it you may learn whether it is worthwhile digging farther,” she added in a lecturing tone.

  Her smile had ice in it, as if I’d neglected to hand in my homework and was now attempting to distract her from that criminal failure.

  “And there’s no misunderstanding,” she added. “None at all, minor or otherwise.”

  Spryly striding away from us over the uneven ground, she started toward the house, the navy-blue ribbon on her straw hat streaming behind her and her dog at her heels.

  “But come along, both of you,” she called back at us as she went. “Caspar needs his biscuit and it’s time for my cup of tea.”

  Step into my parlor, I thought, feeling like the fly. But after a glance at Ellie, who’d already started along down the grassy path, I followed Merrie, too.

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  With Caspar frolicking behind,
we let Merrie Fargeorge lead us on a grassy path beaten down by many passages of her booted feet. Past a dusty, well-used-looking Honda Civic in the drive we proceeded to the screened porch where our hostess took her boots off, exchanging them for soft moosehide slippers. Caspar darted in ahead of us, skidded around a corner, and vanished, his cheerful yaps echoing.

  “Little devil,” Merrie remarked. “Can you believe that he’s terrified of thunderstorms? Otherwise, he’s utterly fearless.”

  Inside, the house was cool and clean, as neat and airy as a well-kept museum. As full of relics, too; glass cases displayed clay pipes, antique marbles, fine-featured dolls’ heads, tools, and dozens of other items that Merrie had dug from her excavation site, which for decades had been the family trash heap.

  She explained this as we admired the artifacts and she made tea in her kitchen, where the slow ticking of an antique banjo clock emphasized the otherwise silent orderliness of the place.

  Bella would’ve loved it, but around so much delicate and probably valuable stuff, I felt like the bull in the china shop.

  And not a very popular bull, either; Merrie’s coolness to me continued as she bustled about the kitchen.

  Trying to ignore it—why had Ellie thought this would be a good idea, anyway? I examined the calendar posted on the front of the refrigerator. From it, I gathered why the car in the driveway looked so heavily used:

  Merrie Fargeorge was not just a retired schoolteacher with a historical hobby. She was a recognized expert on downeast history and practical archeology, with meetings, talks, and seminars scheduled at historical societies all over the state, at least three days a week and often more.

  Also, she was a gourmet cook. Perusing the calendar I suddenly became aware of the delicious fragrance wafting from the stove. Meat and onions, pungent spices, garlic and bay leaf . . .

  “Beef bourguignon,” Merrie said, seeing me sniffing with appreciation. Soon the citrusy scent of Constant Comment tea joined the other delightful aromas.

  “It’s a pet peeve of mine,” she continued briskly, “these portions-for-one frozen foods. Hideous stuff, all of it. Singles, and especially seniors, should enjoy life too, don’t you feel?”